Society

Saturday

22 Oct 2011

Real life | 22 October 2011

Sanity is subjective. It depends very much on where you are. I know this because I spend half my time in south London and the other half in the country. Talking to strangers in the supermarket is fine in Surrey, for instance. In Waitrose, Cobham everyone talks to you. The check-out lady there told me her innermost doubts about the nature of existence the other day, and I had only popped in for a romaine lettuce. She scanned the lettuce in five seconds and then, totally unprompted, spent ten minutes telling me how she sometimes wondered what it was all about. If you try to engage a stranger in an

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 22 October 2011

That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon Under Water on Christmas Eve, that singing, George assures us, is always ‘decorous’. He’ll be the lanky one in the public bar, no doubt, buying stamps and sipping stout out of his own china mug. My ideal pub is the Black Lion in Plaistow, East London. It’s the pub we go to before the match.

Taki

High life | 22 October 2011

New York The morning routine is now a pleasure. Up early, stretch and bend the creaky limbs, hit the coffee and off to judo and karate. All last week I managed to get drunk only twice, hence there were five such mornings. And what mornings they were: stolen from summer without the oppressive heat. One crosses the park from east to west, the sun flooding the paths with light, creating long shadows to go along with the tall maples and oaks. It’s early, the noise level is nil and one can hear the birds. The leaves reveal autumn’s first golden blush, and I cross over ponds, small hills, groves and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 22 October 2011

Home After the resignation of Liam Fox as Defence Secretary, a report by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, found that there had been a ‘clear breach’ of the ministerial code in his working relationship with Adam Werritty, who had accompanied him on 18 foreign trips. Dr Fox, he said, had been warned about Mr Werritty’s role, although Dr Fox had not benefited financially and Mr Werritty was not a lobbyist, he found. Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, replaced Dr Fox and Justine Greening replaced Mr Hammond. Canon Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, requested police on its steps confronting anti-capitalist demonstrators to leave; about 150 tents

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 22 October 2011

On Sunday I went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival to bang the drum for free schools. I was expecting a warm reception. The local MP is a Lib Dem, but the county council is Conservative. This wouldn’t be like my trip to Manchester last month. Almost as soon as I stepped off the train I was recognised by an anti-government protestor who greeted me with a cry of ‘Fuck off back to London you Tory tosser.’ The first event was a discussion chaired by Marcus Brigstocke in which Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza and I had been asked to read three books we wouldn’t normally read. Natalie chose Who Moved My

Philip Delves-Broughton

Diary – 22 October 2011

I arrived at the Occupy Wall Street protests on Monday morning, their one month anniversary, at 7 a.m. raring to go. That’s when the subway stations of Lower Manhattan are spewing out their banking spawn, when the streets are full of capitalist pillagers swarming off to suck what blood is left in the western economies. I was looking forward to a confrontation, some fist-shaking, at least some graphic shouting and argy-bargy. But at Zuccotti Park, I found everyone huddled beneath blue tarpaulin, fast asleep. Four weeks in, the radicals are exhausted. Surrounding the park, half the size of a football pitch and dotted with honey locust trees, stood groups of

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: your problems solved | 22 October 2011

Q. My wife and I both work from home. We happen to have three friends called Sue, all of whom ring up on a regular basis. On the telephone they all sound identical, and so when one of them rings to speak to my wife I struggle to find a tactful way of identifying which one it is without making her feel she is not important enough to allow me to recognise her voice immediately. —N.A., Glos A. You can sidestep the natural offence that a perception of interchangeability might cause in the Sues. Simply reply to their inevitable query how are you with ‘Hmm. How was I when we

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Money games

In the ancient world, the sole sources of wealth were agricultural and mineral (no ‘industry’), and minted coin the sole monetary instrument, whose value was related to its weight and the purity of its metal content (no paper money). There were no lending banks as we know them, let alone financial mechanisms for raising credit. So are there no lessons we can learn from the ancient world about our current financial plight? Au contraire. Financial problems were nothing new. Take the second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. By 216 bc, as a result of Hannibal’s ferocious assault on Italy two years earlier, Rome had run out of money. So

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 October 2011

• Lord Wolfson the Younger (both father and son are life peers) is public-spiritedly offering £250,000 for anyone who, in 25,000 words, can answer the question ‘If it becomes necessary for one or more member states to leave the euro, what is the best way for this to be arranged?’ At dinner with Simon Wolfson on the same night as the cheapskate Booker Prize (worth only a fifth of the Wolfson), some complained that the notice period of three months for completion of the essay was too short. Being a hack, I argued that the incentive of £10 per word if successful should overcome that problem. It is the framing

The Spectator

Letters | 22 October 2011

• Gone with the wind Sir: Your recent campaign against wind farms is brought, perhaps, to a conclusion by Matt Ridley’s splendid article on shale gas (‘Shale of the century’, 15 October). Yet at no time have you referred to that other blot on the domestic landscape, the solar panel. I wonder why. As with the wind farm, they are weather dependent, their installation is beyond the means of the majority, they are judged to be an eyesore, and they are subsidised by the taxpayer. That’s four similarities. But what can seriously be done about either? John Weaver Derbyshire Sir: Can anything be done to force the government to reassess

Fraser Nelson

Reigning for dummies

What is the Queen’s secret? She seems to defy political gravity. Right now, an English monarch is in Australia being feted by her subjects, who seem delighted by this very un-modern constitutional arrangement. Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister of Australia, recounts in The Times today the time he advised the monarch to let go. “I told the Queen as politely and gently as I could that I believed that majority of Australians felt the monarchy was now an anachronism; that it had gently drifted into obsolescence.” This was 18 years ago. There is no such sign of this now, with just 34 per cent of Australians being in favour of

Rod Liddle

The King strikes back

Good to see Jonathan King winning his battle with the Stalinist BBC. The corporation had edited him out of a rerun of a 1970s Top of the Pops show, as if he had never existed. As those of us of a certain age know all too well, Mr King was an extremely regular performer on the show during that time, either as himself or under a number of disagreeable disguises: the Piglets and Sakkarin to name but two. Indeed, when King was sentenced to seven years in prison for sex crimes I wrote to him sympathising with the harshness of the tariff and the unfairness of the court case, but

Ben Rayner

Right to reply: How we beat the Beeb

A slight change to the normal rules of engagement for this latest post in our ‘Right to reply’ series. Whereas these posts normally take issue with what your Coffee House baristas have written, this one takes issue with the post by the BBC’s Jon Williams that we put up yesterday. It’s by Al Jazeera’s Ben Rayner: In wars reputations of whole news organizations can be made or broken very quickly. And the spin on the result is almost as important as the reality. Undoubtedly the BBC took a fearful kicking in the press over its coverage of the fall of Tripoli in August. To the British papers, Sky’s Alex Crawford

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: A protest against the last time the Stock Exchange was invaded – by bankers in 1986

As mass expressions of anti-capitalist rage go, ‘Occupy London Stock Exchange’ has been a bit of a damp squib. What was meant to be an assault on the epicentre of evil dealing, co-ordinated with similar eruptions in New York and elsewhere, swiftly turned into an extended coffee morning on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Perhaps the genteel protesters did not realise that their target was ill-chosen anyway because the Stock Exchange building in heavily defended Paternoster Square (owned by the Mitsubishi Estate company of Japan — there’s globalisation for you) houses only the market’s bureaucrats, while the evil dealing itself takes place in cyberspace above. What I’m sure they

Hugo Rifkind

I’m too busy to set up schools and regulate industries. Isn’t that what governments are for? | 22 October 2011

How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been why. Racing home, for another thrilling evening of comparing the damn meerkat. The spectre of rising energy prices is one of those bleak and terrible things that you know will have horrible consequences, but with which you cannot quite grapple until the bill comes. The spectre of the Energy Secretary and Prime Minister trilling on

Hugo Rifkind

I’m too busy to set up schools and regulate industries. Isn’t that what governments are for?

Rian Malan

Algerian Notebook

• This is surely a mistake, I thought, stooping to kiss the hand of Algeria’s minister of culture. Madame la Ministre Toumi Khalida is throwing a party to mark the start of Algeria’s annual book fair, the Salon International du Livre. This year’s line-up includes a contingent of South Africans led by Breyten Breytenbach, the dashing poet and former revolutionary, now resident mostly in Paris. My inclusion is a complete mystery, given the event’s broadly anti-imperialist tenor. Clearly, Algerians do not read The Spectator. But one doesn’t turn down a busman’s, so here I am, helping myself to a drink off a passing tray. The drink is green, sickly sweet

Ross Clark

The free market in danger

Young people say capitalism has failed them. They’re right. We must change the system to save it It would be easy to attack the London spin-off of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which manifested itself in the form of a 300-tent encampment outside St Paul’s last weekend. Their political agenda? The same, meaningless, Dave Spartesque gobbledegook which has been a feature of anti-capitalist demos for the past decade and a half, such as the demand for ‘Structural change towards authentic global equality’ and ‘an end to the activities of those causing oppression’. Look for leadership and what do you see? The usual old suspects: Billy Bragg, Julian Assange and assorted

Theodore Dalrymple

A case in point

You can tell that the economy of East Anglia is more flourishing than that of the West Midlands because the fine for drunken vomiting in the back of the taxis of Peterborough is £50, whereas it is only £40 for doing so in the back of the taxis of Wolverhampton. The other difference between the taxis of the two cities (as I discovered on making the journey between them recently) is that the former are driven entirely by Muslims, the latter by Sikhs. How this arrangement came to pass — if, indeed, it is an arrangement — I do not know, but I am glad to report that both lots

Robert Gorelangton

Playing Churchill

Where would gentleman actors be without Churchill? No prime minister has given as much work to the profession as Winston (though Blair comes a close second), patron saint of jowly thespians of a certain age. Churchill now features in a new stage play called Three Days in May, about the British war cabinet in May 1940. The great man is played by Warren Clarke, whose fleshy fizzog is well known to fans of the 12 series of the BBC’s Dalziel and Pascoe — he plays Detective Superintendent Dalziel. A splendidly robust actor, he has roughly the same baby-fed-on-whisky looks as Churchill. In this he doesn’t wear rompers, instead you get

Get a free copy of Douglas Murray’s new book

Saturday