Society

Saturday

Toby Young 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

Alan Judd

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

Melissa Kite

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,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 24 September 2011

Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked hare that was bigger than either of these. Normally, I would have stopped and taken the fox’s brush as a present for my grandson, but there was a car up my arse. I stayed with my uncle and aunt on their smallholding and was given my usual bed in a spare room that doubles as

Taki

High life | 24 September 2011

Gstaad One of the safest countries on earth is in trouble. Good old Helvetia, a country more upside-down than sideways, according to Papa, could end up on its head. Its industrial base might melt as its currency is much too strong for its own good, and deflation might set in as the Swiss National Bank is printing good money to tie its fortune to the euro. Lashing the franc to the euro seems a suicidal thing to do, but such are the joys of global finance. Mind you, I don’t understand a thing and am on my way down to see some bankers who will explain things, not that I

Clarissa Tan

Obama’s new best buddy – Warren Buffett

The politics of ‘get the rich’ is going global and even the rich are joining in. While few countries have adopted the equivalent of Britain’s 50p tax, many are baring their teeth at the very well-off. In America, this is now being done by an unlikely alliance between Barack Obama and Warren Buffet. The billionaire investor is allowing his name to be appended to Barack Obama’s new tax-the-rich-more policy, which apparently follows the ‘Buffett Rule’. The Buffett Rule, which draws its basic principle from an op-ed Buffett wrote for the New York Times, is this: people making more than $1 million a year should pay a tax rate that’s at

David Blackburn

Medvedev clears the way for Putin

President Dmitri Medvedev has named his successor: one Vladimir Putin. Reports from Moscow say that Medvedev will step aside and support the man he succeeded in elections next March. This turn of events is not particularly surprising and Putin is a certain victor: as Pavel Stroilov revealed on Coffee House last week, Putin has been practicing that singularly Russian art of eliminating the opposition. Stroilov also warned Western governments against falling into Putin’s embrace. Russia is forecast to grow very quickly in the next 30-odd years, retaining its spot in the G7 according to PwC’s recent research paper, The World in 2050. Developed countries will covet those burgeoning resources; but,

Frances Weaver

The great euro swindle

Finally, the Eurosceptics have been vindicated. But will their dishonest opponents ever be held to account? Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse. Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The last Blairite

Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his early years ‘sleeping in a drawer’, he says, in a one-bedroom house containing four generations of his family. But there’s no self-pity or faux-nostalgia in his reminiscing. What defines Murphy and his politics is not his family’s poverty, but their determination. When his father lost his job, he simply got on a bus and travelled

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 24 September 2011

In Competition No. 2714 you were invited to supply a poem that begins ‘’Twas brillig…’ and continue, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, using your own neologisms. ‘Jabberwocky’ has, of course, spawned countless parodies and been translated into many tongues. Frank L. Warrin’s frabjous French version, ‘Le Jaseroque’, appeared in the New Yorker in 1931. Here are the first couple of stanzas: Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave. Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux Et le mômerade horsgrave. Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils! La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend! Garde-toi de l’oiseau Jube, évite Le frumieux Band-à-prend! The germ there of a future assignment,

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Days of wine and unions

At Tory party conferences circa 1980, there would usually be a day when the Daily Telegraph team looked glum. One would enquire why. ‘Dunno why I’m bothering to write this. Word from London is that we won’t have a paper tomorrow. The inkies’ll stop the presses.’ In those days, the print workers’ unions would always use the Tory conference to remind the world who really ran Fleet Street. Then came Rupert Murdoch. His record may not be wholly angelic, but the victor of Wapping is entitled to the nation’s gratitude. Even when I joined the Sunday Telegraph in 1986, a few pre-Wapping vestiges survived. The canteen, a necessary source of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rugby players are thick middle-class upstarts – at least footballers know their place

Apparently, England recently beat Georgia in something rather ambitiously called the Rugby World Cup. The word ‘world’ is used here in much the same way as the Americans deploy it in relation to other vanishingly unpopular sports such as baseball or American football, i.e. sports which nobody else in the world plays except for the Americans and their satrapies. Only 27 people in Georgia have even heard of rugby, and only 15 of those are under the age of 127. (They are very long lived in Georgia: the oldest people in the world come from that region of the Caucasus, which has led many scientists to study their diets extremely

Carol Sarler

Institutionalised brutality

Lord Winston must have known he placed a puss among the pigeons when he aired his view, a couple of weeks ago, that nurses from Eastern Europe are putting NHS patients in danger. Citing Romanians in particular, he remarked upon their limited communication skills and told the House of Lords that they had been trained ‘in a completely different way’ from British nurses. Predictably, since then, there has been a flurry of concern about his first point; it is obviously troubling if medical professionals cannot speak adequate English, and it will continue to be troubling as long as the difference between a microgram and a milligram is a coffin. Nevertheless,

Barry Humphries

Slovenia Notebook

Last week I headed to Maribor in Slovenia for a music festival featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of maestro Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist. I even briefly performed a couple of Edith Sitwell poems to music by William Walton, but my efforts were at the beginning and end of a long programme featuring the New York avant-garde of the Sixties, including a work by John Cage which contained a long movement of complete silence disturbed only by the sound of the audience leaving. I think I once read that Cage believed there to be three different kinds of silence required by his music: the silence of expectation,

William Beharrell

In praise of the shura

The West has much to learn from Afghanistan’s community courts Kabul, Afghanistan I was invited to take part in a shura this week. One of our masons had been hit around the head with an iron bar by a local mechanic. Shura describes a traditional Islamic approach towards sociopolitical organisation and comes from an Arabic word meaning ‘consultation’. An elderly alim (religious scholar) sat next to a younger mullah at the head of the room. The mullah’s name was Qari Abdul Ahad. He is a well-known local figure and happens to be the mason’s brother. I took my place beside the alim having greeted the other 15 reesh safedan (‘white-beards’)

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Private passions | 24 September 2011

Do you paint yourself? Or…sing in a choir maybe? John Studzinski looks at me anxiously from the other side of a conference table, in a sleek little office belonging to his firm, Blackstone, the American private equity giant. He’s normally a confident man; outspoken on the subject of leadership, networking and England’s art scene (which he generously props up). But getting him to answer a personal question is like trying to flip a cat on to its back. Every time I think he’s about to reveal the underbelly of a personal life, a hobby or habit, he swivels in the air and lands on safe ground again, discussing the nature

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 24 September 2011

UBS: the bank that lost the formula to turn Mr Hyde back into Dr Jekyll ‘Thank you, UBS,’ writes the FT columnist Martin Wolf, who as a member of the Vickers commission on banking reform was one of its strongest proponents of the ‘ring-fencing’ of retail banks to protect them from the casino follies of securities trading. There could hardly have been ‘a better illustration of the unregulatable risks to which investment banks are exposed’. Indeed, the management failure that allowed Kweku Adoboli to rack up $2.3 billion of trading losses over a three-year period offers such vivid evidence for the ‘casino’ label that only the owners of real casinos

Tom Stacey

African Adventure

Every day in Kensington Gardens I jog round the bleak granite obelisk inscribed IN MEMORY OF SPEKE. VICTORIA NYANZA AND THE NILE 1864, which my family calls ‘Speke’s Spike’. That river is known to me a bit: I have stood on the glaciers of Ruwenzori at 16,000 feet, which feed it via Lake Albert. I was the first (with two others) to descend for 100 miles the water of the Blue Nile from its Ethiopian source. I have waded the Sudd with Anuak guerrillas.   Tim Jeal’s gripping book pulls the whole astonishing story together. Many a red-blooded Spectator reader will relish it, and buy it, since it’s as intricate

William Leith

Chaos and the tidy mind

In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives on the ground floor of a house on Jesus Green; below him, in the basement flat, is Simon Norton, who owns the building. Norton’s flat is so incredibly untidy, so absolutely revoltingly messy, that I can’t go into it now; I’ll spend a couple of paragraphs on it in due course. More importantly, Norton is one of the cleverest mathematicians in the world. Possibly the cleverest. So Masters decides to write his biography. Stuart, who lived his life backwards, had

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Telegraph reports that Wallis was paid for stories by the News of the World while working for Scotland Yard

The Daily Telegraph is tonight alleging that Neil Wallis was paid by the News of the World to provide crime exclusives while working as a consultant for the Metropolitan police. The paper claims that the News of the World paid Wallis £25,000 for information including the details of Scotland Yard operations during this period. According to the Telegraph, £10,000 of the £25,000 was for a single story. This revelation will increase the pressure on the police to reveal fully the extent of contacts between it and News International. But with Paul Stephenson already having resigned over the hiring of Wallis as a consultant, further resignations are unlikely. The other hack-gate