Society

Saturday

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

Leo McKinstry

In praise of the police

Outside London, at least, there are still officers who have their priorities right – as I discovered when my home was burgled The moment we stepped through the front door we knew that something was wrong. There was a bitter coldness in the hallway, accompanied by a faint sighing of the wind. On walking into the dining room, my wife and I found the cause of the chill. The main back window had been broken and opened, and shattered glass left across the floor. Immediately, we made a quick search of the rest of the house, which only confirmed our fears: we had been burgled. Almost every room showed signs

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

How to fix orphanages

Kigali, Rwanda Madame B has dressed up for our visit. She’s sitting on a bench with her back to the orphanage wall, talking about just how much she loves each child, but it’s her get-up that’s most impressive: black silk dress, hair done, make-up just so; finger and toenails painted hot pink, each with an elegant white scalloped edge. Everything else here, at the Mpore Pefa home for children, is muted: grey walls, grey kids, blurred by dirt. Those toes are an anomaly. ‘My husband and I started this home after the war,’ Madame B is saying. ‘Since he died, it is so difficult.’ Her eyes slide from left to

Victoria Lane

A life in letters

Diana Athill, now nearly 94, lives in what must be the nicest retirement home in London, a large red brick house at the top of Highgate village, run by a charitable trust and populated by former writers and doctors and psychiatrists. On this unseasonably warm day she has on a flowing Kenyan kaftan — the residents’ summer clothes get packed away in autumn to make space, and she is worried about what to wear if the heatwave continues. A strong, boxer’s face, direct blue eyes. She aims a hearing aid at her ear, it whistles briefly, and away we go. Her latest book (see review, p. 38) is a kind

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Champagne Conservatism

Puritanism is like sea water. When it meets resistance at one point, it promptly finds another route. I came to that conclusion during the Tory conference in Manchester. If you passed a couple of Tory representatives, they might well be discussing community. Every ‘community’, every diversity, that you could think of was in view, plus the ones which the Cameroons have invented. These days, the Tory tribe looks like the entrance queue to the Coliseum, under a late and decadent emperor. Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, it does not signify the universal prevalence of permissiveness. Over the weekend, a photographer snatched a shot of the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Evolution and the airline seat

How can something as complicated as a human eye possibly arise through a process of natural selection — through trial and error? Most people will have asked themselves this question at some point in their lives, but without bothering to find out the answer. A pity, since the stage-by-stage explanation of how the eye might have evolved is fascinating. The story begins when organisms develop cells that are sensitive to sunlight. In time, these may develop to a level of sensitivity where they can detect movement. The next stage is for these cells to form themselves into a convex or concave shape to add an extra degree of directional information

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The leprechaun factor

Riots at theatres, commonplace before the Great War, have mysteriously gone out of fashion. J.M. Synge’s classic, The Playboy of the Western World, was disrupted many times during its opening week in 1907 by Dubliners who objected to its portrayal of the rural poor in the west of Ireland. Strange that, feigning outrage on behalf of an alien caste. It’s like insider trading with an ethical twist. You borrow someone else’s moral identity and sell it at a value which has been inflated by your act of adoption. Even today this peculiar mechanism keeps the grievance industry going. The protesters in Dublin, many belonging to Sinn Fein, gave up when

Friday

Peter Robins

Local interest | 7 October 2011

A former postman has stripped naked and superglued himself to a desk at the Job Centre in Bridlington, in protest at being refused disability benefit. (Yorkshire Post) Police stations in Leicestershire have been ordered to take down their flagpoles as a cost-saving measure. They will share a single mobile flagpole instead. (Leicester Mercury) A curry house in St Leonards Street, Edinburgh, was reprimanded over its “world’s hottest chilli” competition by the Scottish Ambulance Service after two participants had to be taken to hospital. One – the eventual runner-up – was taken to hospital twice. The restaurant plans to hold an eating contest again next year, but with kormas. (Edinburgh Evening

Daniel Korski

Commercial quandary

Britain’s diplomacy needs to help British business. The Prime Minister made this clear soon after the coalition was formed and William Hague has followed up, reorganising the Foreign Office and putting commercial diplomacy at the top of the agenda. To some, this risked making diplomats into salesmen and there was even dark talk of “mercantilism”. Both criticisms were far off the mark – there is nothing mercantilist in trying to help British businesses. A year in, however, the policy is facing a number of other, more fundamental challenges. First, the government’s main vehicle for this policy – well-publicised, prime minister-led trade delegations – has faced criticism from a number of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Case for Compromising

My friend Will Wilkinson, mischievous and provocative as ever, reacts to the Steve Jobs mania in a typically interesting way: Ever since Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO, the video of his 2005 graduation address at Stanford has been in wide circulation and has been unavoidable since yesterday. It’s a nice enough sermon. It’s the usual litany of American banalities about being yourself and chasing your dreams and never ever ever settling for anything less than a universe bent and hammered into the shape dictated by your utterly unique authentic will. It’s more or less the message the lithesome young contestants of “So You Think You Can Dance?” weekly impart

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Where Form Met Function

Aesthetics matter. Form matters. Form matters even more when it enables function. In this respect Apple and Steve Jobs really did help create modern computing. Nevertheless, as Kevin Drum explains here there were very good reasons why PCs trounced Apple in the computer business (I write this as someone who loves my Mac). In time, however, we’ll probably look back on the development of personal computing as a messy, collaborative affair in which many companies played important roles. They all helped “change the world”. As Tim Berners Lee puts it, Jobs’ most important insight was: [T]o insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating! Steve was a champion

Thursday

The Spectator

We need your vote | 6 October 2011

It’s that time of the year again. The nights are drawing in and the Spectator is choosing its parliamentarian of the year. As in previous years, we’re asking you to vote for a readers’ representative. So, which politician has excelled in the noble art of politics in the last twelve months? Think carefully, there must be someone who has dazzled with a moment’s oratory, campaigned fearlessly on a matter of principle or merely just represented their local interest with absolute fidelity. To make your nomination, click here and justify your choice in no more than 200 words. We’ll publish a selection of entries in the magazine in the coming weeks, and