Society

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 10 October – 16 October 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

Jonathan Jones

Crunch time for Fox

“I don’t believe that wrongdoing did occur”, said Liam Fox in his apology yesterday. With today’s front pages dripping with accusations, Fox has some work to do to substatiate that claim. The Guardian reveals that “Political lobbyists were paid thousands of pounds to help a Dubai-based businessman arrange a secretive meeting with Liam Fox”: “an invoice, seen by the Guardian, shows that Boulter enlisted the services of a lobbying firm to help him skip layers of bureaucracy and meet Fox for an urgent meeting on the 41st floor of the hotel. The invoice shows Boulter paid Tetra Strategy £10,000 for “project fees”. It is understood that the fees covered fixing

Sunday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Here’s to Des

A slightly belated happy birthday to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was 80 years old on Friday. I can’t think of many prominent figures from Africa to whom one would gladly wish a long and peaceful life, but Tutu is surely one. It is a moot point as to whether he is more of an irritant to the ruling ANC party in South Africa than he was to the apartheid regime. His latest howl of anguish came when the corrupt and morally bankrupt ANC connived with the Chinese to stop the Dalai Lama coming to Des’s 80th bash. But he has been slinging arrows in their direction for most of the

Daniel Korski

Fox would lead anti-coalition Tories

So far, the Prime Minister seems to be playing down any potential fallout from the crisis dogging Liam Fox. No 10 seems to be saying “if the Defence Secretary goes, it won’t be such a big issue”. Much remains to be seen about the Defence Secretary’s career – and he may survive the crisis that is currently engulfing him. But it looks increasingly hard for him. Evidence is emerging daily that Adam Werritty was somehow a member of the Defence Secretary’s team, closer to Fox even than junior ministers. And there may be more trips to be uncovered and more meetings that he joined. He was, for example, spotted at

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 8 October 2011

Q. I have been building a small business, so far single-handedly, with a tiny bit of input from my parents. We live in a tight-knit rural community and a couple of unemployed graduate friends, still living at home like me, on hearing that I may be expanding soon, have asked me to employ them. They are far too intelligent to do the only sort of work I would need them for — packing up parcels part-time — but they have suggested they do it anyway and I give them equity in my company as a compensation for paying the minimum wage. I don’t want to do this, and my parents,

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Nothing to write about

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester and I must say it’s nice to be among friends. I mean the drunken hacks at the bar, obviously. This is a conference where we can drink with impunity because, let’s face it, there isn’t much for us to write about. The big story at all the party conferences is ‘splits’ and the reason both this conference and the Lib Dem conference have been so dull is because the split is between the two parties, not within them. This is one of the ancillary benefits of the coalition: the poles around which the government’s internal politics revolve are located in

Dot Wordsworth

Predatory

Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are. Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean what their etymological forebears meant. In the reign of Elizabeth I, someone made a punning reference to Caesar as a tyrant, ‘no pretor but predator’. It was not until 1908 that natural historians began to speak of carnivores as predators. So Ed Miliband’s categorisation of businessmen like Sir Fred Godwin as predatory might seem to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 October 2011

Manchester ‘Beer-battered sustainable fish’, said the menu in the Palace Hotel: this great city tries to combine its incontestable northernness with its growing, but still insecure modernity. Everything has to be ‘sustainable’ now of course, which will prove difficult if the present European banking system cannot be sustained. The government’s new ideas about planning are based on ‘sustainable development’. Even though I find the phrase irritating and almost otiose (it is like saying one is in favour of ‘edible food’), I speak at the Daily Telegraph fringe meeting in favour of the new policy. Only in Britain — only, actually, in England — do people believe they are doing country

Clarissa Tan

Diary – 8 October 2011

This is not the best time to move from East to West. The thought occurs to me as I sit in a British bank, at its Westminster branch no less, waiting to open my first UK account. The procedure takes two hours, stretched across two appointments over two days. In the same period of time, a bank in Singapore — my home for the past 20 years — would not only have set up an account, but offered the customer five credit cards and a housing loan. When international investors like Jim Rogers say Asia is the future because things just move faster there, there’s some truth in it. •••

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 October 2011

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Conservative party conference in Manchester that the Treasury would spend billions buying bonds from small and medium-sized businesses in an exercise called ‘credit easing’. He announced a freeze on council tax for a second year, saving householders an average of £72. He also remarked: ‘We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business.’ David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the nation to pay off its credit card bills. He also said: ‘As eurozone countries move to co-ordinate more, as I believe they should, those outside the eurozone will need certain safeguards’; Treasury officials were studying

The Spectator

Letters | 8 October 2011

Boris and the Johnsons Sir: Toby Young speaks of ‘the (Johnson) family’s roots as Turkish immigrants’ (‘Plan B’, 1 October). Though I’m always amused by what Toby writes, I have to point out that he is not always accurate. These are the facts. My paternal grandfather, Ali Kemal, was married to my grandmother, Winifred Blum. Winifred’s mother Margaret was English (née Johnson), while her father was Swiss. While Ali Kemal’s political and other commitments required him to remain behind in Constantinople, Winifred — already several months pregnant — came to England to visit her mother, and to have the baby in more tranquil surroundings. My father was born in Bournemouth on

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 October 2011

Melissa Kite’s Real Life I’m prepared to do almost anything rather than apply to Lambeth Council for a bulk waste collection. Every human being has their limits of endurance, a line of suffering beyond which they begin to contemplate committing terrible atrocities themselves in order to make the pain stop. It’s just that most people never get pushed to those limits. I’m sorry if that is a deeply cynical world view, but I have come to believe, through bitter personal experience, that we all have the capacity for evil if only we are pushed to a place where we are forced to deploy it. If I lived in Wandsworth or

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 October 2011

On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace, former home of a prime minister with 52 wives, didn’t catch the name, now the home of a small colony of feral cats. And we’d strolled between the baked mud walls of the old quarter, where Khalila had pointed out the old synagogue, now closed. And it was about here, in front of this synagogue,

Taki

High life | 8 October 2011

New York An English prof. made an earthshattering discovery about ten years ago — that there is a strong link between having money fall upon you and being happy. No, he didn’t win a Nobel for it, nor for the conclusion to his findings, which was that money buys autonomy and independence. The prof. should have won a Nobel Prize for excessive stupidity instead, especially for his last neologism, that ‘to turn a really unhappy person into a very happy person using money alone would take about £1 million’. I ain’t so sure about the last one. I gave a member of my family much more than one million quid

Daniel Korski

The problem with using soldiers to advance women’s rights

Mariella Frostrup, fresh from interviewing Nick Clegg in Cheltenham, writes about women’s rights in Afghanistan in The Times (£). Her pithily-titled piece — “Women’s rights in, before troops out” — makes the case that British forces cannot withdraw from, and the government should give no development assistance to, a country where the plight of women is so terrible and declining. It is hard not to sympathise with Frostrup’s point. During my own time in Kabul I witnessed plenty of examples of female subjugation, and was glad the West was present to help address some of these problems. Western policymakers were, at the time, eager to portray the entire mission as

Peter Hoskin

Fox hunt

This is one Fox who doesn’t have the benefit of a hole to bolt into. He is on open ground, and exposed even more this morning by fresh revelations surrounding his relationship with Andrew Werritty. A business card and a self-aggradising title, that certainly smelt of impropriety. But now we’re talking about sensitive business meetings arranged by Werritty, and attended by both him and Fox. It’s a whole different level of concern. And it leaves Fox in a most difficult position. The FT has the full story, but basically Werritty arranged for Fox to meet a group of businessmen in Dubai looking to transfer “communications technology” to the Libyan rebels.

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Cliffhanger

In Competition No. 2716 you were invited to supply the gripping final 150 words of the first instalment of a serial thriller. Charles Reade, now mostly forgotten but ranked with Dickens in his day, summed up  the art of the cliffhanger thus: ‘Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait — exactly in that order.’ The best of a magnificently overwrought entry that elicited the odd wry smile though no tears from this flinty-hearted judge are printed below and earn their authors £25 each. Alan Millard pockets the bonus fiver. Assured of a handsome income despite the dubious outcome, I relished the Franco Deutsch challenge to salvage the foundering

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 8 October 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life Israel Jerusalem was once a very sad place for me and I feared returning. I was mad with grief when I was last here in the 1990s. I remember my friend Julian tried to cheer me up by taking me to a gun shop where a South African who had made aliyah gave us M16s and boxes of ammo that we took down to a range to blast away at images of terrorists. It didn’t do any good. I came down with malaria, a parasite hung over from years of reporting African wars. ‘Africa?’ said the Israeli doctor. ‘We’ll run an HIV test. You might have

Faisal Islam

Bailout country

In a theatre in central Athens, over a thousand tax inspectors have gathered to shout crossly about the latest cuts to their pay and pensions. Eventually the argument, between the government-affiliated union leader and his members, spills out on to the street. The rank-and-file feel betrayed: they were persuaded to accept the first wave of pay cuts earlier this year, and now they are being asked to take even more. This does not feel to them as if they’re being bailed out by kindly neighbours. It feels to these tax inspectors, and to Greeks in general, like humiliation. They feel trapped in an inescapable relationship with sadistic Germany. As the

Sophie Heath

Be my baby

Like the original Madonna and child, the young woman on the Tube has her beloved draped around her, his head nestling on her shoulder. As he snoozes, she texts idly with one hand, while the other absentmindedly strokes his arm, ­soothingly, maternally. But this is no serene scene of mother and son — this is a couple. A couple of adults. If you are forced to use public transport, you see them all the time. Soppy young blokes in skinny jeans, hair ­artfully arranged to mimic a guinea pig in a hurricane, being mollycoddled by a domineering, post-Spice Girls vixen who, if figures released last week are correct, also earns