Society

Kelvin MacKenzie: I was hacked too

Kelvin MacKenzie reveals in tomorrow’s Spectator that he was interviewed as a potential victim of the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Here’s his story: It was the kind of building George Smiley would have been happy to call home.Anonymous and bleak, it’s the home of Operation Weeting, where 60 officers flog themselves to death every day in the biggest Scotland Yard inquiry in anyone’s memory. I am here by appointment. A charming woman detective has called me a couple of times — when you are a former tabloid editor that’s worrying in itself  — and asked me to drop by ‘at my convenience’ to look at the fact

Alex Massie

Tweet of the Day

Courtesy of an Anglo-Italian historian in lovely New Hampshire. She tweets here and blogs about New England history here: [Via Oliver Burkeman]

Russia’s Kudrin quits – but how will he return?

The dramatic – some would say theatrical – exit of Alexei Kudrin as Russia’s finance minister couldn’t have come at a worst time. The world economy is incredibly fragile and oil prices are in flux. But is Kudrin, highly respected for his fiscal policies and a member of Putin’s inner circle, merely pushing for promotion? With the ruble slumping to a 28-month low yesterday, there are signs the market is worried over the loss of a finance minister who prudently curbed Russia’s budgetary excesses and far-sightedly built up its oil wealth funds. “Kudrin’s resignation will be a big blow for the Russian economy – experts are already forecasting a new wave

Alex Massie

Ivan Lewis’s Comedy Act

So the shadow Culture Secretary thinks journalists should be licensed (by whom?) and rotten hacks guilty of “serious misconduct” (how is that to be defined?) should be “struck-off”. Well, that’s a proposal guaranteed to go down well with the press corps! Ignore the fact that it’s unworkable in the internet age and that it’s perhaps only meant as a signal to the party faithful that Mr Lewis doesn’t like that nasty brute Murdoch any more than the rest of them. Nevertheless signal matter, not least since they often reveal what a politiican or a party really believes. This is one such instance: the answer to any problem, however trivial it

Ed’s “something for something” society

Fraser’s already commented on the welfare angle of Ed Miliband’s keynote speech to the Labour party; the welfare proposals are part of a broad analytical sweep that can be reduced to the catchphrase, ‘the something for something society’. Miliband’s vision of society will reward those who work and abide by the rules at the expense of those who do not – those who loot, who fiddle expenses, those who pursue short-termism in business. According to the Guardian, he will also emphasise the importance of social mobility and equality. To that end, he will encourage universities to take more people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Society and government should stand up for those

Balls’ Brownies

In his speech today, Ed Balls proved himself worthy of the “Son of Brown” tag, slipping in more than a few “Brownies”. I thought CoffeeHousers would be interested in some of the figures behind his claims… Balls claimed that “we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997”. That is flatly untrue. Public sector net debt when Labour took over was £350 billion. In 2006-07 it was £500 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, Brown and Balls had added £62.8 billion in today’s money to the national debt they “inherited” by the time the crisis started: Balls’ defenders will say that he meant “debt ratio” – and, to

Euro-zonked

Well, so much for that. The FTSE 100 fell as much as 1.7 per cent this morning, while overnight the euro and Asian stock markets tumbled, after Europe’s leaders announced their grand 2-trillion-euro plan over the weekend to drag the Eurozone out of the mire. It appears the markets are well past the point of believing that political leaders can get us out of this mess. The consensus is that the plan is not concrete enough. Of course, equities may recover a bit later, as they have been prone to do in past days. But the whipsawing itself is the worst sign of all; stock investors and retail-end funds are

Welfare worries

Away from Liverpool, the big stories of the day are the markets’ reaction to the putative Eurozone deal, which has been mixed so far, and the Telegraph’s splash about the progress of the Universal Credit, the coalition’s flagship welfare reform. The scheme is designed to simplify the benefits system and save circa £5 billion a year by reducing the scope for claims to be duplicated and errors made; it is a crucial cog in the coalition’s plan to make work pay. James Kirkup reports that the Treasury has apparently put the credit at the top of its “to watch” list of government projects that are at risk of running over

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 26 September – 30 September 2011

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

Fraser Nelson

Miliband: cuts are okay now

I’ve just caught up with Ed Miliband on Marr this morning (transcript here) and his aim seemed to be burying Ed Balls’ complaint about cuts being too fast and too deep. In its place, he called for more growth. Here’s my take on his interview: 1) He doesn’t complain about cuts.  “The basic message is this: we’ve got to cut the deficit, but the best and most important way of doing that is to grow our economy… A year ago there was a contested argument whether the government strategy should work. It’s not working.” You don’t hear him talk about Ed Balls’ “too hard, too fast” cuts, just a reference

‘England’s most closely guarded secret’

Dennis Creffield is admired by artists but little known to the wider public. Andrew Lambirth meets this octogenarian artist as his new show on the theme of William Blake and Jerusalem opens ‘I’m a peripatetic architectural draughtsman,’ says Dennis Creffield, best known for his magnificent series of charcoal drawings of the medieval English cathedrals, commissioned in 1987 by the Arts Council. He has indeed travelled the country, drawing not only cathedrals but also Welsh and English castles, the pagodas of Orford Ness in Suffolk (laboratories that were used for testing the trigger mechanisms of atomic bombs), the stately pile of Petworth House in Sussex, and many aspects of London. He

Letters | 24 September 2011

Euro bonds Sir: In your leading article, ‘A new deal with Europe’ (17 September), you argue that as Brussels will not agree to radical reform and massive deregulation, the only remaining options are to renegotiate our membership of the European Union or ‘pull out entirely’. However, we must be clear that unilateral withdrawal is out of the question. Over half the UK’s manufactured exports to the EU would face zero tariffs whether we were in or out of the EU. But if the UK left the EU without any new preferential trade agreement the remainder would face an average EU tariff of over 5 per cent, a decisive handicap in

Barometer | 24 September 2011

Objects in space — The six tonne US Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite was due to fall to Earth, with Nasa calculating that it has a one in 3,200 risk of striking a human. It poses less of a risk, however, than the 75 tonne Skylab did when it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 1979. In the event, it fell on an uninhabited region of Western Australia. — There is plenty more potential danger from space junk, with an estimated 19,000 pieces of man-made material greater than 100mm across orbiting the Earth, including a glove and a camera dropped by astronauts. Most will burn up in space when they re-enter, but

Portrait of the week | 24 September 2011

Home The International Monetary Fund reduced its growth forecast for Britain this year from 1.5 per cent to 1.1 per cent and for next year from 2.3 to 1.6 per cent. A debate rumbled on in government about whether to spend more money on public infrastructure works as dark financial clouds loomed. ‘What I will not do is provide cover for ideological descendants of those who sent children up chimneys,’ Vince Cable, the Business Secretary told the Liberal Democrat conference in Birmingham, in a speech warning of ‘difficult times ahead’ for Britain’s finances. Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the conference that the better off should pay

Dear Mary | 24 September 2011

Q. My first book comes out next month and the publishers are launching it with a drinks party in a London bookshop between 6.30 and 8 p.m. I can count at least 20 old friends and family, to say nothing of my editor and publicist, who will naturally expect me to have dinner with them afterwards. We don’t have a London flat any more. My husband would love to take ten people out to dinner but not 20 — not because of the expense, but because of the noise and the chaos. How do I choose without upsetting people? —Name withheld, Warwickshire A. You could be certain of hurting no

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: My wife is a tough cookie

As winter approaches, with snow forecast for next month, I’m anticipating a massive row with my wife. The problem is that Caroline refuses to switch the central heating on before the first day of winter, which falls on 22 December. It doesn’t matter if temperatures plummet to below zero in the interim. ‘Put on an extra jumper,’ is her standard response. As far as she’s concerned, anyone who turns the central heating on before winter has officially arrived is a big girl’s blouse. I sometimes wonder if this is the legacy of having gone to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. As Evelyn Waugh pointed out, anyone who has been to a British

Motoring | 24 September 2011

The imminence of paying for a 17-year-old to learn to drive brings with it the unwelcome question of insurance. Rather more welcome is recent publicity about insurance revealing yet another conspiracy against the consumer. Some premiums have jumped by up to 40 per cent. The reason usually given — uninsured drivers for whom we all end up paying — is only part of the story, and not the major one. That honour goes to the automotive ambulance-chasers, the scam whereby accident management companies and credit hire operators are in league with insurance brokers — all three sometimes owned by the same private equity company. They take over the processing of

Real life | 24 September 2011

You know you’ve officially become a slob when you look down at a puppy chewing a pair of £350 Manolos and think, ‘Oh, thank heavens, she’s gone quiet.’ I started this spaniel-raising business with a million good intentions about being firm and using every difficult moment as an opportunity to teach and improve. ‘No, Cydney, leave,’ I said endlessly for the first 72 hours. ‘Cydney, Cydney, leave, leave, Cydney, leave…No, no…’ On and on it went. ‘Leave it, leave it, leave it, leave the rabbit, Cydney! Leave it! CYDNEY! Not the phone, NO! Leave the BlackBerry! Leave, leave it…’ After a few days, I was whimpering, ‘Oh, god, please, Cydney,