Society

Saturday

14 Jan 2012

Status Anxiety | 14 January 2012

Since turning 48 last October I’ve begun to obsess about getting old. In 21 months I’ll be 50 and by any definition that’s middle aged. For a man, turning 50 is a bit like turning 40 for a woman. It’s an unwelcome milestone. Adjustments have to be made, humiliations prepared for. One form this obsession takes is incessantly monitoring myself for signs of ageing. For instance, there are the multiplying symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s — or, as I prefer to think of them, ‘senior moments’. Sometimes these are quite endearing, such as when I find myself making two cups of tea even though I’m the only person in the

Alan Judd

Motoring: Value for money

The concept of cheap and cheerful appeals for the obvious reasons: the prospect of something-for-(nearly)-nothing; the assumption that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the lack of pretentiousness — suggesting that its owner is also virtuously free of that forgivable vice — and the freedom from burdensome excess. However, the assumption that cheap and cheerful go naturally together is about as accurate as the identification of poverty with virtue: occasionally yes, often no. It’s different with cars — at least, it is now. Hitherto cheap cars were often shoddily assembled from poor materials by workers who didn’t care and managers who failed to manage all but their

Melissa Kite

Real life | 14 January 2012

Is it too much to ask for the machines in my life to stop ordering me about? Am I reaching for the stars in wanting to be loosely in control of my car, my phone and my laptop, rather than me being at their beck and call? I’m not talking about the odd message telling me a battery is low or the petrol is running out. I’m talking about them treating me like a despised underling. The other day the laptop decided to kick ten bells out of me for no reason whatsoever. I did everything it asked from the second I switched it on. There was, as usual, a

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 January 2012

I was woken by my phone ringing. My boy. ‘What time is it?’ I said. ‘Ten past one,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’ This was said with a very obvious and unkind touch of schadenfreude. ‘Terrible,’ I said. I felt as though I might be dying, and the sooner the better. ‘Where are you?’ he said. That I did know. ‘I’m in the bar manager of the Merry Fiddler’s bed,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes?’ he said, pretending heightened interest. Feebly, I checked under the duvet. ‘But she’s not here,’ I said. ‘And I’m still wearing my suit and overcoat.’ He rang off and I sank back into oblivion. When

Taki

High life | 14 January 2012

Gstaad By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners or mild racist remarks. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health, and definitely a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad — we’ve had more snow than there’s cocaine in South America — a new monster has reared its hideous face: envy. Yes, envy is one of the seven deadly sins, although I recognise only two as mortal ones, that and avarice. Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath and sloth, I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first

The Spectator

Letters | 14 January 2012

Pick your battle Sir: In your leading article ‘Save the Union’ (7 January), you allude to Alex Salmond’s plan to hold a referendum on Scottish independence shortly after the 700th anniversary of the battle on Bannockburn. I suggest a referendum on the 500th anniversary of the battle of Flodden Field (September 2013) when we English comprehensively scotched the ambitions of our northern neighbour. Voting should be for Scots both north and south of the border. (If voting included the English, the Scots would certainly be bundled off.) Alan Naismith-Binder Speldhurst, Kent War elephants Sir: Patrick Allitt (‘Elephant trap’, 7 January) nicely pegs some of the difficulties that the Republican candidates

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Philanthropic pride

Sir Paul Ruddock has revealed that he received his knighthood for none but philanthropic reasons. Every ancient would have cheered him to the roof and wondered why bankers like Sir Paul do not front up more about their beneficence. Those who go round a classical site or museum will find themselves regularly bumping into inscriptions on statue bases, with or without statue, publicly proclaiming the benefits which the person so celebrated has bestowed on the town. Such a mark of honour was, as Aristotle said, ‘what we assign to the gods as their due and is desired by the eminent and awarded as their prize’. Greeks and Romans alike were

The Spectator

Barometer | 14 January 2012

War horses Steven Spielberg’s film War Horse was released this week. How many horses were killed in British Army service during the first world war? — According to the Official History of the War Veterinary Services, it was 484,143. — Michael Morpurgo, on the other hand, says he asked the Imperial War Museum before writing War Horse in 1982, and was told ‘at least a million’. — And on the German side? 9,586,000, according to the dedication of a German history of the war published in 1929. Sick buildings Hammersmith Flyover has been closed because it has a form of corrosion known as ‘concrete cancer’. Some other victims: — Royal

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 January 2012

Home The High Speed 2 rail link between London and Birmingham is to go ahead, Justine Greening, the Secretary of State for Transport, announced. The stretch to Birmingham would be completed by 2026, but a connection to Heathrow not until 2033, when the extensions to Manchester and Leeds would be finished. The cost of the project would be £32.7 billion. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in a separate initiative that shareholders would be empowered to limit the pay of company executives. Bob Holness, one of the first presenters on Radio 2 from 1967 and later the presenter of the television game Blockbusters, died, aged 83. ••• Mr Cameron said

Sam Leith

Diary – 14 January 2012

To Moscow! To Moscow! Recently I was in Russia as a guest of the British Council. My friend Damian Barr hosts a regular literary salon in London, and the idea was to put one on here, with the poet and essayist Linor Goralik, the novelist Alexander Ilichevsky, the publisher Dan Franklin and me. Extraliterary considerations: long johns. I asked my Russian friend Natasha, who’s from the Perm region, how cold I could expect Moscow to be in December. She made a hum-haw noise. ‘Actually you can’t know. Sometimes it can be pretty warm. It may even get up to minus five.’ She wasn’t trying to be funny. The great refrain

James Forsyth

Simon Hughes speaks out against the benefit cap

In the Cameroon effort to redefine the politics of fairness, the benefit cap of £26,000 a year is key. When George Osborne announced it in his 2010 conference speech, he explained it – rightly – as a matter of fairness that ‘no family on out-of-work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work’. The Tories were also aware of just how potent a wedge issue it would be. If Labour opposed the cap, they would be in favour of some households in which no one is working receiving more from the state than the average salary people achieve by working. This is, to

The Spectator

Cameron’s best weapon

When Ed Miliband stands up in the House of Commons, he might be surprised to hear the loudest cheers coming from the wrong side of the chamber. He is becoming an unlikely Tory champion, the man who’ll do more than anyone else to ensure that David Cameron wins an outright majority at the next general election. Labour MPs grumble, but loyalty is hardwired into their collective DNA. As Gordon Brown knew, the word ‘unity’ has a near-hypnotic effect on his party. Labour has never ejected a bad leader. Unlike the Tories, they have not mastered the art of political regicide. So Labour seems to be stuck with a leader whom

William Astor

Signal failure

Rail privatisation by the Major government heralded the largest growth in passenger numbers in decades. This was down to improvements in service and a timetable to suit passengers, coupled with some attractive fare offers. But future growth of rail travel is unlikely to be at the same high rate and there we have the nub of the arguments around High Speed 2. The Department for Transport has been less successful in forecasting passenger growth than Gordon Brown was at forecasting economic growth — and that is saying something. Britain needs an integrated transport policy that includes road, rail and air, and it needs to address the so-called north-south divide. But

Toby Young

Free the press!

The Leveson inquiry has put fear into the feral beasts of the tabloids – and that’s not in the public interest Listening to Kelvin MacKenzie give evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Monday, the most striking thing was not his admission that he’d never given much thought to journalistic ethics nor even his impersonation of John Major, good though it was. Rather, it was his claim that News International should have been fined for lying to the PCC about the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. ‘In the end newspapers are commercial animals,’ he said. ‘I would be in favour of fines — and heavy fines for

Rory Sutherland

Even dogs prefer democracy

Recent research has shown a robust and positive correlation between the amount of democracy we enjoy and how happy we are. This is true for the Swiss, at any rate, for it was among the cantons of Switzerland that the research was conducted. If you believe the Swiss are a peculiarly unrepresentative group, you may be interested to know that the same rule holds true not only for melted-cheese-eating neutrality monkeys, but also for dogs. Dogs prefer democracy? How can we possibly know? I’m not suggesting here that dogs have sophisticated political views — though Rod Liddle has written that ‘all dogs are notoriously right-of-centre creatures: loyal, patriotic, implacably pro-hunting … wedded

Carol Sarler

Worse than hacks

OK, we get it. We’re scum. Lowest of the low. If nothing else comes from the Leveson inquiry, at least the British public may be assured that its views of the press were right all along: as poll after poll has shown, I and my comrades in ink enjoy a social standing somewhere south of traffic wardens, tax collectors and dumpers of cats into wheelie bins. We have lived with it for so long that, frankly, a few intercepted phone messages will not make much difference. So be it. Nevertheless, I would embrace my stigma a little more readily without the hypocrisy of that same British public, so widely in

Freddy Gray

Time for his close-up

What’s the matter with Ralph Nathaniel Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes? In pictures, he looks so self-conscious and morose. Maybe it’s just his acting face. In the flesh, though, he’s different. He is friendly. Midway through what must be an exhausting press junket at the Soho Hotel, he remains remarkably enthusiastic, and eager to discuss Coriolanus, his new film, of which he is both director and leading man. ‘It’s Shakespeare at his bleakest,’ he says, excitedly. ‘He’s not offering us, as he does in the comedies and in some of the histories, a sense that the future is full of hope. He is exposing the continual dysfunction of us humans as political or

Matthew Parris

No one regrets a railway once it’s built

Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight. Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their lives’ work to something called infrastructure, they’d probably have become tinkers or tailors instead. No, in their minds it was the great glories of 18th- and 19th-century Britain that they were to build and have the honour of being forever associated with their names: roads, canals, bridges, fountains, gardens, towns, tunnels and railways. Ferdinand de

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Sing a song…

In Competition No. 2729 you were invited to recast a well-known nursery rhyme, filtering it through the lens of a recent news story. Josh Ekroy was on fine form: ‘Liam had a little friend/ his suit was white as snow/ and everywhere that Liam went/ his friend was sure to go.’ In a strong entry, honourable mentions also go to Mae Scanlan, Katie Mallett and Noel Petty. The winners get £20 each. The extra fiver is Mike Morrison’s. Mary, Mary, ordinary In décolletage, Thought, ‘Such tedium being medium, Why not plump for large?’ M, no cynic, called a clinic; Fired by vanity She told them straight, ‘I just can’t wait

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Coach party

Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round match’. No, we didn’t take to Lendl because he didn’t smile much and was as undemonstrative as you could get, the perfect bad guy to put in front of lovable showmen like Boris Becker, Pat Cash and Henri Leconte. Lendl was the last chip off the old Communist Bloc. If Rocky IV had been made