Society

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Unalloyed joy

Every so often a film comes from the left field and plays a complete blinder and The Artist is such a film. It is also glorious, delicious and an unalloyed joy and if you don’t go see it you are a bigger fool than I thought you were, which is going some. It’s a film about silent films but not just a film about silent films because this is a silent film about silent films, and so beguiling and touching and funny and tender and clever without being cute it’ll warm the cockles of your heart. I loved it, adored it, delighted in every frame of it, would run off

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Rather a cold fish

Published first novel (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) at the age of 59, Richard and Judy choice, won Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; spent his whole career in industry; lives in Northumberland, wears tweed cap, likes fishing…These are the facts you read about Paul Torday time and again, and he must be getting tired of them.    That first book really was good: the kind of novel you wish you’d written yourself, all done in emails, extracts from diaries and letters, snatches of Hansard, articles in newspapers, transcripts of interrogation sessions. It was a charming satire, about politicians, entrepreneurs and fish. His late career-change and success gave hope

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Jura Days

I’m Hogmanaying on Jura so posting is likely to remain as unreliable as the electricity suppply presently is in these parts. When the lights came back on yesterday it was as though we leapt from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. (Actually: the north end of the island was only attached to the grid in, I think, 1953. That was the legacy of the Attlee government’s promise to complete electrification.) Anyway, a Happy New Year to you all. May it prove as fun and spectacular as you might or could wish it to be.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Person of the year: The Islamist?

Last week, Time Magazine named ‘The Protestor’ as its Person of the Year. Myself, I’d be tempted to bestow the honorific upon ‘The Islamist’. For, in the spirit of the Time award, it is the Islamists, rather than the revolutionaries, who are now in the ascendancy in the Middle East. Governments in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are all now partly ruled by democratically-elected, if relatively moderate, Islamists. Next year will be about how they manage their newfound power. It will be not about ‘political Islam’, but ‘governmental Islam’. Many wonder if there is such a thing as moderate Islam, and whether all Islamist governments tend towards theocratic rule. Now

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A minimum price for alcohol will have a high political cost

The Telegraph reports today that the Prime Minister has asked for work to be done across Whitehall on how a minimum price for alcohol could be set. As the paper’s leader column makes clear, this will not be a politically easy thing to do. When I interviewed the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley for the Christmas issue of The Spectator a few weeks back, he was clear about why he didn’t like the concept of a minimum price: ‘I don’t like a minimum price, we are acting against below cost selling. My problem with a minimum price, well I have two problems. One is it’s regressive, so there are perfectly normal

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

What didn’t happen in 2011

In the run-up to every New Year, newspapers and the blogosphere are full of articles about what happened in the year just gone. 2011 was a particularly eventful year so there will be much to pick from. But what about the things that did not happen, though they were widely expected? Here are five things that did not take place — though, as the year unfolded, many people would have bet on their occurrence: 1) Algeria’s revolution. As one North African dictator after another fell to pro-democracy protesters, everyone expected Algeria to be next. But it wasn’t. there are many reasons for this, as Hakeem Debouche and Susi Denison argue

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, Boxing Day – 1 January

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’, which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write — so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game, from political stories in your local paper, to

Sunday

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The true meaning of Christmas

Christmas is all about enjoying the look on the face of a loved one as he or she opens something which you know will fill them with great emotion. And so Christmas day came a couple of days early for me as I watched my wife open the Oftsed report on our daughter’s school and shriek with fury to see that it had been downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘satisfactory’ (or, as the word is better understood, ‘utter sh*t’). The accompanying letter from the headmistress was one of the most disingenuous and dishonest pieces of literature I have ever read. The rest of the day was spent watching the missus text

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: The Christmas truce

Christmas is but a day away, and with it a chance to remember when British and German troops clambered out of the trenches to declare impromptu ceasefires in December 1914. CoffeeHousers are no doubt familiar with the specifics: how the Germans started by singing carols, and finished off (according to some letters from the time) by beating our soldiers 3-2 in a game of football. But I thought you still might care to see how The Spectator wrote it up a week later. So here is the brief report that appeared in the ‘News of the Week’ section of our 2 January issue, 1915: ‘The news from the western theatre

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Happy Christmas | 23 December 2011

A brief post to let CoffeeHousers know that the blog will be going a bit quieter over the next few days. We hope you have a very happy and peaceful Christmas. Coffee House won’t fall completely silent, though. Tune in over the weekend for the occasional post and selections from The Spectator archives. And there’s our ongoing Christmas competition here. We’ll be back, proper, early next week.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

We can’t ignore the persecution of Christians in the Middle East

William Hague has transformed the Foreign Office in his 18 months in charge. He inherited a system hardwired with the dynsfunctionality of the Labour years, and it’s almost fixed. But not quite. It has not yet woken up to the wave of what can only be called ‘religious cleansing’ in the Middle East, which I look at in my Telegraph column today. Here’s a rundown of my main points. 1) The killing has begun, and could get worse. In Iraq, about two thirds of its 1.4 million Christians have now fled — being firebombed by the jihadis. Last year, gunmen entered a Baghdad church and killed 58 parishioners. To go

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

The rising cost of Christmas dinner

While we’re talking Christmas, how about this release from the Office for National Statistics today? It reveals how the cost of certain ‘Christmas shopping basket’ items has risen over the past year. We’ve put them into a table below — but let’s just say, you might want to start stocking up on carrots.

Jonathan Jones

Christmas by numbers

Keen-sighted Spectator readers may have noticed that there was no ‘Barometer’ column in our Christmas double issue. The weekly column, which features topical, little observations and statistics, had to be pulled because of space restrictions. But no such restrictions on the Internet, of course — so we thought CoffeeHousers might care to see some of the festive factoids we had poised to print. Among them were the poll findings shown in the chart above: only 12 per cent of people regard the religious significance of Christmas as its most important component. And here are more for you to mull over, collected from various YouGov surveys: This Christmas, 31 per cent

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Say what you will about North Korea, at least they’re authentically Korean

Drivel, of course, and the kind of thing you’d expect to find in the Guardian. One expects rather more from the Times but, nay, here is a piece of Simon Winchester’s column (£) today: The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please. India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Should Lady Thatcher Receive a State Funeral?

Unseemly to talk about this while the old Lady still breathes. Unseemly but necessary. Peter Oborne considers the argument in the Telegraph today: I believe it would be wrong to give Lady Thatcher a state funeral, even though I accept that she was a very great woman, one of the six or seven most important and admirable prime ministers to occupy Downing Street in the almost 300 years since the office was invented. The problem is that talk of a state funeral for Lady Thatcher reflects a troubling failure to understand what such events are about. They are so very rarely awarded because they have been designed for a category

Peter Hoskin

Tim Loughton versus the adoption bureaucracy

Parliament has decamped for midwinter, but the business of government goes on. Today’s announcement, by the children’s minister Tim Loughton, is contained within a Times article here. ‘An expert panel,’ it reveals, will be tasked with designing a new system for assessing prospective adoptive parents by March next year. That new system, making it easier for suitable folk to adopt, should then be in place by the end of 2012. In many respects, adoption is perfect Cameroonian territory; being, as it is, at the intersection of social responsibility, family, deregulation, etc, etc. But politics isn’t what should concern us here. A lot of unmitigated good can be done in fixing

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

MPs Need Longer Holidays

Good sense from Dan Hannan: The House of Commons rises today, prompting traditional seasonal whinges. ‘MPs have already awarded themselves a number of bonus holidays this year so they risk looking out of touch by sloping off early at Christmas,’ says the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Hang on a minute. Isn’t the TPA forever complaining that we have too many laws and too much government? Why, then, does it want parliamentarians to linger over their law-making? Surely the TPA, of all organisations, should resist the view that legislating is the only ‘real’ work an MP does. Because the TaxPayers’ Alliance, for all that their heart may often be sound, is also an

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Vaclav Havel & a Politics of Doubt

I’ve been away and then laid low by some bug, so am late to writing anything about the sad news of Vaclav Havel’s death. Pete has already noted his 1990 New Year speech, but I’d also recommend reading David Remnick’s profile of Havel, published by the New Yorker in 2003. There’s plenty of good stuff there, including this: Havel allowed that he felt “strangely paralyzed, empty inside,” fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. “At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed

Jonathan Jones

A sliver of Christmas comfort for George Osborne

There’s some rare good news for the government in today’s public finance statistics. Public sector net borrowing in November is estimated at £18.1 billion, down from £20.4 billion last year. This means that total borrowing for the first eight months of this financial year is £88.3 billion, down 11 per cent on last year. That’s lower than expected, and puts us on target to undershoot the OBR’s forecast of £127 billion in 2011-12. That’d be a relief for the coalition, after Labour hit them hard when the OBR upped their borrowing forecasts last month. But this deficit reduction cannot be put down to spending restraint in Whitehall. In fact, central