Society

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 12 November 2011

I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the Economist’s end-of-summer party last month. Within seconds of arriving, I was buttonholed by Venetia Butterfield, publishing director of Viking. Two years ago I signed a contract with Viking to write a book about class and education, but I got sidetracked by the West London Free School. The due date came and went and I’ve been dodging Venetia ever since. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the book you owe me,’ she said, jabbing me in the chest. ‘But I’ve thought of a way you can make amends. Penguin are publishing a series of short e-books this Christmas and I wondered if you’d like

Robin Oakley

The turf: Cheltenham jinx

Here is one for the experts at pub-quiz racing nights: which well-known jumps trainer has scored twice at Royal Ascot without yet registering training a winner at the Cheltenham Festival? Answer: Paul Webber. His glorious Cropredy Lawn yard near Banbury turns out a stream of decent hurdlers and chasers most winters — think of Flying Instructor, De Soto and Imperial Cup winner Carlo Brigante — but never seems to have much luck at the Festival. Meanwhile, from his comparatively rare forays on the Flat Paul can point to Royal Ascot victories on the Flat both with Ulundi (who also won a Scottish Champion Hurdle) and Full House. In March this

Melissa Kite

Real life | 12 November 2011

What I know about mountaineering you could write on the front of a postage stamp. But I’m willing to bet Sir Edmund Hillary did not have bright pink, ergonomic insoles in his boots called ‘Superfeet’. I have. I was sold them along with vast amounts of other gear I’m fairly sure must be extraneous by the people at the intrepid outdoorsy store where I went to kit myself out for Kilimanjaro. I’m afraid of intrepid outdoorsy stores. They are full of long-haired, weather-beaten extreme para-snow boarders called Brad who look as if they would quite happily lop a finger off if it was frostbitten or just for a laugh to

Taki

High life | 12 November 2011

New York God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as the Israeli ‘existential threat’. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, and Big Bagel papers present the Iran problem as 1939 and the Nazis having the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in a report by the IMF, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy and the statuesque Merkel did? They did to it what I’d like to do to The Spectator’s deputy editor, squashed it and shoved it into a very dark room where no one could find it. Instead of pricking the boil

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 November 2011

The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in dispatches as well for the lovely Katrina from Paisley, a competition winner, who selflessly assisted when the first casualty came in. This was Sharon. Later I heard reports that the editor had surprised her getting to grips with one of the competition winners on the deputy editor’s desk. I don’t believe it. She was far

The Spectator

Letters | 12 November 2011

• Democracy in Zambia Sir: There are undoubtedly dubious countries in Africa but Daniel Kalder (‘Mr Blair goes to Kazakhstan’, 5 November) is wide of the mark in including Zambia among them. It may not be perfect but its record in terms of human rights and relative freedom from corruption is one of the best on the continent. Zambian presidents since independence have respected the will of the majority when their time was up. The recent election that led to a change of government is a shining example of the country’s political maturity, one which Mr Blair might usefully point to in his conversations with his more authoritarian clients. Brian

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Putting the rich to work

It seems most odd to become so agitated about the (very few) filthy rich when the (large numbers) of very poor should be the centre of the welfare state’s concerns. But if one wants to fleece the rich, a quid pro quo always helps, as the ancient Greeks knew. Every year in Athens, the richest 300 citizens could be instructed to carry out a leitourgia, lit. ‘work for the people’, i.e. a personal obligation in service of the state (origin of our ‘liturgy’). The wealth in property that qualified a man for such a duty was 3-4 talents (18-24,000 drachmas). This duty could involve anything from equipping a trireme for

The Spectator

Barometer | 12 November 2011

Another world Six cosmonauts have completed an experiment in which they were isolated inside a container for 520 days to simulate a voyage to Mars. A similar experiment, the Lunar-Mars Life Support Test Project between 1995-97 isolated crews for 91 days at a time. These were some of the findings: — Without natural daylight, the astronauts found themselves gravitating towards days of 28 to 30 hours, of which they would work nearly 20. — After emerging from the chamber it took hours for astronauts’ eyes to recover vision at distances greater than six metres. — Many reported having trouble adjusting to the variable noise levels outside the chamber, the noise

Tony Hall

Diary – 12 November 2011

‘He’s the reason I’m working in opera,’ one of the stage managers told me in the middle of the 12-minute standing ovation for Plácido Domingo, ‘he’s the most generous artist there is.’ As she spoke, Plácido was pushed yet again to the front of the stage to acknowledge the applause on his own. His reluctance was genuine. He picked up some of the flowers raining down on him and threw them back, to the orchestra, to the audience. Backstage, he greeted everyone, literally everyone, but not in a rush — with real interest. A programme from his very first performance at Covent Garden — as Cavaradossi in Tosca in December

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 November 2011

Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, blamed Brodie Clark, the head of the UK Border and Immigration Agency’s ‘border force’, for ‘relaxation of border controls without ministerial sanction’. Mr Clark left the agency, declaring that what Mrs May had said in parliament was wrong. An online petition urging ministers to reduce immigration gained more than 100,000 signatures, making it eligible for a Commons debate. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to live in the apartment at Kensington palace once occupied by Princess Margaret. A road-cleaning crew found a pot of gold jewellery in a drain in Slough. ••• The News of the World was found to have hired private

Jonathan Jones

Maude lends the unions a hand

Francis Maude presents himself as a man trying to help the unions out in today’s Financial Times. Some unions say they have to go ahead with strikes on November 30 – even though negotiations on pension changes are still going on – or else they’d lose their mandate for any future strikes and have to conduct a whole new ballot. Wagging an almost parental finger, Maude tells the unions: ‘You shouldn’t have got yourself into this mess but we’re willing to help you out because we want to protect the public. I can’t imagine any employer in the public sector would say if you have a token strike of a

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Keeping up with Liz Jones

Liz Jones, the roving fashion editor of the Daily Mail, is a hate figure on Twitter and beyond. Recently, in one of her periodic confessional pieces, she wrote that she had stolen her boyfriend’s used condom and tried to impregnate herself with it. It was owed to her, she wrote, because she had bought him so many ready meals from Marks & Spencer but, as with many of Jones’s romantic misadventures, it failed — there will be no Baby Jones. Twitter, which has no sense of humour (mobs never do), read, retched, and excitably screamed for justice. The hypocrisy is enchanting. Twitter users may despise the Daily Mail but give

Harry Mount

Remembering well

Extraordinary how potent cheap drama is. The latest season of Downton Abbey, which ended on Sunday, pulled off a rare double in its interpretation of the first world war — making you laugh one second at the wooden acting and the clunky script; the next second, making you cry at the suffering and tragedy. But Downton tears are comforting, almost pleasurable: the tears you cry for Brief Encounter or Love Story. They’re not the agonising tears cried by mourners in Royal Wootton Bassett, their bodies contorted with acute physical grief. There are different degrees of sadness over death in battle. The grief we feel on this Remembrance Sunday for the

James Hughesonslow

The sunshine solution

The late unlamented premier of Queensland Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen had an easy way with journalists, most of whom he perceived to be rabid pinkos. ‘Don’t you worry about that, my friend,’ he would say, when confronted with a hostile question. ‘You just leave it to me.’ In fact, he bequeathed Queenslanders quite a lot to worry about and nearly ended up in jail on charges of bribery and corruption. But his greatest legacy was a brilliant piece of gerrymandering which is still with us today, having been widely adopted by other states in Australia. I believe it could be of some use to whoever, by the time you read this,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why, as the Great War recedes further into the past, does it loom larger?

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’ And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval. As each succeeding generation gets its recent history into what we like

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: Bond markets are telling Italy that the comedy is well and truly over

What are bond markets saying about Italy? With my usual proviso that markets are best understood as shoals of piranhas, communicating moods of panic, indifference, bloodlust and satiety rather than coherent ideas, the relatively clear message earlier this week was that Italian government bond yields were perilously close to the threshold of panic. That threshold is widely deemed to be 7 per cent, more than 4 per cent above benchmark yields for German, French and Dutch debt. Let me try to put this in perspective. The incremental interest cost to the Italian treasury is about €2 billion per percentage point per year, which doesn’t sound too terrifying. Italy has more

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Take six

In Competition No. 2721 you were invited to supply a short story incorporating the following: ‘rebarbative’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘lapidary’, ‘consequential’, ‘plangent’, ‘gibbous’. It was an impressive postbag with only the occasional stilted moment — you displayed considerable ingenuity in weaving the given words into a plausible and entertaining narrative. I was sorry to have to disqualify Adrian Fry’s amusing portrait of a village literary festival on account of a technical slip. Commendations, too, to Max Ross, Susan Therkelsen and John Plowman. The winners get £25; the bonus fiver is Brian Murdoch’s. Suddenly made redundant, James was one very angry lexicographer — he was furious, enraged, livid, wild, SEE: mad. Solipsistic as

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Stars and asterisks

Parental advisory: what follows contains asterisks that some may find upsetting. It is clear that Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and John Terry, the hopefully soon-to-be-former captain of England, are not particularly nice men. In fact they are assholes, to use one of Williams’s favourite words. So when Williams was asked what he would do with his joke caddying award at a blokey evening in Shanghai recently he said he wanted to shove it up Woods’s ‘bl**k asshole’. Now, had he just said ‘asshole’, nobody would have given it a moment’s thought beyond observing that, my oh my, Steve Williams is just the sort of guy you want to

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 11 November 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson says that we ought to remember the living too, and questions whether Britain really is a safe haven. James Forsyth asks why Chris Huhne is still shunning shale, and observes the Italian domino effect.  Peter Hoskin reports on the eurozone’s cash-flow problems, and wonders where David Cameron now stands on the 50p tax. Daniel Korski sets out the new German Question. Jonathan Jones gives his take on that Rick Perry gaffe. Nick Cohen argues that history is moving against Alex Salmond and his bid for independence. Rod Liddle reckons that Theresa May’s a goner. Alex

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Remember the living | 11 November 2011

Every time a politician suggests a introducing a flag-waving British national day, the idea falls flat. We already have one: 11 November, Remembrance Day, where we remember our war dead and resolve to help the living. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I talk about how the government can better serve the tens of thousands who have come back from active service in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Britain is, for the first time since the post-war years, a nation with a large veteran community. And we’re still not quite sure how to handle it. The Americans are: they had Vietnam, and learnt the hard way about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)