Society

Saturday

Matthew Sinclair

Executive pay: don’t believe the headlines

Open yesterday’s or this morning’s papers, and you’ll find plenty of reports about the snouts of FTSE100 chief execs being in the trough again, while the rest of us suffer. Their pay is up 49 per cent, we read. Most people’s first and only response to these accounts of the Incomes Data Services’ (IDS) latest findings will be anger — and understandably so. But much of this anger and reportage is based on a mis-reading of the actual report. The BBC’s influence is huge. Its original report compared the rise in base salaries (which wasn’t 49 per cent, but a much less impressive 3.2 per cent) with a median rise

Camilla Stoddart

Morocco: Sugar and Spice

Is it still possible to love Moroccan cookery if you can’t stand fruit in savoury dishes? Yes, discovers Camilla Stoddart I love Morocco. Everything about it is exotic and visually pleasing — the landscape, the interiors, the souks, the carpets, the slippers — but there is a major hurdle lying between me and full Moroccophile status. This hurdle is fruit. Or more specifically fruit combined with meat. I don’t have many personal food rules but not mixing fruit with meat is one of them. And Moroccans don’t just flout this rule, they beat it to a pulp with a tenderising hammer and then scatter prunes, dates, apricots and pomegranate seeds

Jeremy Clarke

Marrakesh: Moroccan style

Jeremy Clarke on lust, literature and luxury at one of Churchill’s favourite hotels A retired Egyptian army officer, comfortably married, two grown-up children, is relaxing with friends by the pool at his club in the smart Maadi district of Cairo. A lifelong heterosexual, Captain Ni’mat is surprised to find his idle gaze drawn for the first time in his life towards the youthful male bodies on display around him. That night he is assailed by a powerful homo­erotic dream, and the next day he finds himself casting lustful glances at his Nubian valet, Islam. During his daily massage, he asks Islam to also massage his buttocks. Islam does so, and

The Spectator

Your nominations: Spectator Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards

The hands of Big Ben are approaching the designated hour, and the bells are about to toll for our Readers’ Representative Award. Only a few days remain for you to vote for your favourite parliamentarian. Dwindling time is not the same as no time, of course. New runners can emerge and overtake old favourites in an instant — and that is what has happened this week. Thanks to the brouhaha over an EU referendum, names such as David Nuttall, Douglas Carswell, Jon Cruddas and Kate Hoey have started appearing in our postbag more frequently. One reader, Edward Bartlett, says of Mr Nuttall that ‘in fighting for an In/Out referendum, he

Peter Hitchens

Hour of surrender

The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support. It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and arrived in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon in time for lunch. This was and remains confusing, though it offers disproof of the old cliché that you cannot put the clock back. Though I have been to North Korea and Bhutan, I still count it among the most startling journeys I have ever taken. It lasted

Peter Jones

Shelf hatred

On Newcastle University library’s horrible ‘makeover’ Though I retired early from Newcastle University in 1997, I have access to the university library as an associate member and use it fairly regularly. The staff and porters are excellent, and the classical section still serves my humble purposes well enough. But for how much longer? It was over Christmas 2007 that the culture began to change, and the library to go the way of the rest of the university. Management ‘rebranded’ it, and in January 2008 one walked in to find something called ‘YourSpace’, which offered students places where they could (i) work in comfort, (ii) work with friends, or (iii) chat.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A lesson from the Premier League in what’s truly offensive

What is the appropriate sort of language, do you suppose, for the captain of the England football team to use in respect of his colleagues? This is an important issue and I, for one, will not sleep until a sort of resolution — a closure, if you will — has been arrived at. Because we have a dispute on our hands and at the heart of it is a moral issue. Needless to say, the police are investigating. It is alleged that the present England captain, Mr John Terry, of Chelsea FC, addressed his opponent, Mr Anton Ferdinand, of Queens Park Rangers, with the wholly unacceptable words ‘you f***ing black

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Revving up

The C of E’s pioneer women priests are waiting anxiously for their first female bishop Diocese by diocese, the Church of England is voting in favour of women becoming bishops. Last week Truro, Norwich, Blackburn, Rochester, St Albans, Wakefield and Winchester gave their ‘yes’ vote to the draft legislation, bringing the total to 29 dioceses out of 44 in favour, well over the 50 per cent mark needed to allow it to go back to the General Synod for final approval next year. So far only two dioceses have voted against: Chichester and London. And even London (a notoriously prickly diocese on this issue) very nearly voted in favour. House

Anne Wareham

The emperor’s new weeds

Even a dreadful garden will receive warm praise if you open it to the public – as Sir Roy Strong has proved There is no garden in Britain so awful that someone won’t describe it as ‘lovely’. Especially if it is associated with a celebrity. I recently listened to Sir Roy Strong on the radio oozing complacency as he discussed his garden at the Laskett and why it should be saved for the nation. He made a virtue out of its disorder: ‘If a giant thistle seeds itself in the middle of the kitchen garden my head gardener just lets it grow there… and people love that.’ Oh no they don’t.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What is the point of the storytelling bore?

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’ I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m trying to block out the suppurating vileness of Twitter

‘Great God, Twitter is an awful place!’ I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It’s quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle. The reason Rod doesn’t do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness. He’s right, of course, as I’m reminded almost daily by

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Telling tales

In Competition No. 2719 you were invited to imagine that a well-known literary character of your choice had spilled the beans to a tabloid and to supply the resulting front-page story, including headline. I liked Virginia Price Evans’s paternity shocker: ‘I was Scrooge’s love child’, says Tiny Tim. Una McMorran, John Samson and Mike Morrison were also unlucky losers. The winners get £25 each; G.M. Davis takes the extra fiver. M Pimped Me, Claims Ex-spy ‘Call me a patriotic whore.’ This startling confession came from a man who has looked death in the eye for his country many times. According to former ace secret agent James Bond, he was forced

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Winning dirty down under

So the All Blacks deserved it, didn’t they? Yes, yes and thrice yes. But after a brilliant World Cup, and a superb final, the best and the lowest scoring in the tournament’s history, just a few thoughts. The All Blacks stretched the rules just this side of breaking point: one more high tackle or offside, and there would have been an almighty twang and the whole edifice of Eden Park would have been brought crashing down. The amount of tackling off the ball was extraordinary and the gap for the Kiwi try was created by the French jumper at the line-out being thrown out of the way. When Piri Weepu

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: The protesters have a point – but they should pack their tents and move on

Deep in autumnal France, it’s eerily quiet except for a flock of magpies in the trees — an omen of ‘death and hard times ahead’, or so I read on a website for druids which is as informative as any of the more mainstream sources about the chances of successful resolution of the euro crisis. ‘Le plan sera decidé mercredi’ declares the most mainstream, Le Figaro, in the de haut en bas tone of a paid-up member of the Euro-establishment. But my neighbours here are more agitated by the second story, ‘Rugby: la defaite avec panache’, and at least mildly interested in the third: ‘Carla et Giulia sortent de la

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The Golden Hour by William Nicholson

He’s got a winning formula, this writer, and he’s sticking to it. Set the action over seven days, in and around the Sussex town of Lewes, with occasional day trips to London; write about what you know (Sussex, script-writing, being 54, long marriages, worrying about your post-university children as well as your aged parents with Alzheimer’s, career anxiety, dinner-party anxiety); keep the chapters short (never more than ten pages) and avoid slabs of prose, so the pages are broken up into highly readable short paragraphs and dialogue; write in the present tense; and, within each chapter, keep a strict observance of the Unity of Person, so that the reader steps

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The welfare trap

John Humphrys last night presented a documentary on welfare, the single most important topic in Britain. It was excellent, and I’d recommend CoffeeHousers watch the whole thing (on iPlayer here). Humphrys is a great presenter, himself the product of the now-forgotten days of social mobility when a kid from a working-class district (Splott in Cardiff) could end up presenting the 9 O’Clock News in his 30s. “In those days, everybody was expected to work,” he said of his childhood. “We knew only one family where the father did not work, and he was a pariah…. Today, one in three of working-age people is on out-of-work benefits.” This is what the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The government goes cuckoo

The government has, this morning, confirmed The Spectator’s cover story: that it is considering supporting Rebecca Harris’s bill to move Britain onto Central European Time. As we argue in the magazine, such a move would be a huge mistake both practically and politically. Under the new regime, anyone living north of Manchester would have to endure two months of the year when it was dark when they started work at 9am. Any government that supported this move would look like a government of southerners, by southerners for southerners. The consequences for the Union could be horrendous too. Just imagine what a propaganda gift the new time would be for Alex

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

All aboard the Herman Cain train

Herman Cain – the former CEO of Godfather’s pizza – has gone from virtual unknown to frontrunner in a matter of months. In both of the national polls realeased this week, he leads Mitt Romney by four points. Gallup’s favourability ratings are a good way of tracking the popularity of the candidates. The chart below provides a pretty good illustration of the race so far. It shows Perry’s quick rise when he entered the race in August, and his even quicker fall following his first debates in September. You can also see Cain’s gradual rise after that strong debate performance in May, and his much steeper rise in the past month.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Health & Safety: What Would Jesus Do? Weep, Obviously.

I hold no particular brief for the people “occupying” the London Stock Exchange but whatever one may think of their aims it’s evident that in closing the cathedral this week the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and his colleagues have behaved like total ninnies. Then again, this is the Church of England so a certain measure of hand-wringing may be part of the job description at St Paul’s. Who knows? What we do know, thanks in large part to this splendid, exhaustive, post by David Allen Green is that the so-called “health and safety” concerns are so feeble they could almost be a parody of CoE hopelessness. Among the “possible”

Michael Henderson

Let’s hear it for elitism | 26 October 2011

The latest issue of The Spectator is out tomorrow, but we thought that arts blog readers might appreciate a very special preview of one of its articles. It’s by Michael Henderson, and takes umbrage with Katherine Jenkins’ recent comments about opera and elitism: Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame Janet Baker read a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was some send-off.