Society

Sunday

18 Sep 2011

Backward people

Oh dear: looks like poor ol’ Boris has got to do one of his famous apologies again. The not terribly good American singer Kelis claimed she was racially abused at Heathrow Airport, when, in the manner of primped up little divas, she jumped a queue. Someone in the queue called her a “slave”, allegedly, and “kunte kinte” (although she may have misheard this, I suppose). Nobody stood up for her and an immigration official merely smiled and shook his head, she complained – and added that Britain was an incredibly backward country. The Mayor of London, doing a passable imitation of an albino Martin Luther King, said he was appalled

Saturday

17 Sep 2011

The Spectator

Letters | 17 September 2011

In denial about abortion Sir: Mary Wakefield (‘Who cares about abortion?’, 10 September) bravely argues that Britain needs a rational and reasoned debate about our abortion laws. Since 1967 there have been seven million abortions in Great Britain: in the past 12 months there were 189,574, with 48,348 women having had one before and, according to a parliamentary reply, some as many as eight during their lifetime. Lord Steel, the author of the 1967 Act, has rightly described this as ‘horrific’ and has said there are ‘too many’. About that, at least, we should all agree. A more profound debate would consider the status of the unborn child. An unborn

Dot Wordsworth

O

Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still retains a lively existence. We may be condescending to former centuries for inconsistent spelling, but our spelling of O, which looks simple enough, has slipped in the past 100 years. In 1902, the Oxford English Dictionary commented that, as an interjection, the spelling Oh ‘is now usual only when the exclamation is quite detached from

Tanya Gold

Food: Mothers’ pride

Oslo Court is the Jewish mother birthday party venue, or lunch if the Jewish mother must be home in time to be medicated — a convention, a summit, a trough for Jewish mothers. And so, when you telephone for a reservation, they will ask you, having as yet no idea who you are — do you need a cake? You should always say yes. Because who doesn’t need a cake? It inhabits the ground floor of an expensive but ugly apartment block in St John’s Wood. But that just adds to its lustre in Jewish mother circles. It is a restaurant that has been disguised as the home of your

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 September 2011

Q. I gave a drinks party at which I introduced two men who should have got on well. Instead one, who had had a bit too much to drink, became verbally aggressive, using a disagreement over architecture as the pretext for attacking the other. Despite my knowing the aggressor so well, and despite the passivity of his target, I was powerless to calm things down and it almost ended in (one-sided) fisticuffs. How could I have defused the tension? —M.W., London SW3 A. To distract an aggressor at a party, raise your hand in a general stop sign, tap your glass and call for general silence. Announce that a large

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Sophie Dahl is a saint – leave her alone

Poor Sophie Dahl. After appearing on the Today programme to make an appeal for charitable donations to the Roald Dahl Museum, she has become an object of ridicule. This was partly prompted by the amount of money she was asking for and the use for which it was intended: £500,000 does seem like rather a lot to fund the relocation of Dahl’s writing shed from the bottom of her grandmother’s garden to the nearby museum in Great Missenden. A couple of years ago I erected a ‘writing shed’ at the bottom of my garden — at least, that’s how I described it to my wife — and the total cost

Robin Oakley

The turf: Man with a system

It is not only the Arabs who have an intimate, almost mystical involvement with the horse. In Istanbul for the Topkapi Trophy, sitting beside the largest kebab I have ever seen (and, I kid you not, it was more than 12 feet long), I was reminded by my genial host Mehmet Kurt that the horse was special to the Ottomans, too. Their warriors, he insisted, were unbeatable. They never changed horses and their equine partners often saved their lives with their uncanny ability to anticipate and counter the enemy’s moves. There was perfect synchronisation of thought and movement between horse and warrior. Mehmet Kurt’s own orange and white colours have

Melissa Kite

Real life | 17 September 2011

My local cab firm has gone global. Its drivers are now so fantastically cosmopolitan they no longer speak any English or know anything at all about Britain. The situation reached crisis point the other night. ‘Royal Opera House,’ I kept saying, very slowly. ‘Royal …Opera …House.’ ‘Roya’ Oppa How?’ said the minicab driver. ‘No. Listen. Ro …yal …Op …er …a House. It’s a big building with opera inside it.’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Raya Open Horse?’ ‘Fine, just drive, we’ll work it out when we get near.’ ‘Poss Cod,’ he said, looking panic-stricken. ‘WC2,’ I said. He put WC2 into his sat nav but of course that only narrowed it

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 17 September 2011

The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word ‘Peroni’ at the young lad behind the bar as though he and I were involved in a dangerous conspiracy. The speaker, a woman aged around 50, was speaking articulately and authoritatively about something called the blood/brain barrier. To sustain it, she said, we need to maintain adequate levels of fatty acids, vitamin D and particularly

Taki

High life | 17 September 2011

Gstaad This is the worst news I’ve had since the surrender at Stalingrad. The Spectator’s deputy editor has become engaged to a former adviser to my favourite minister, Iain Duncan Smith. But how can this be when the deputy editor is already engaged to me? If true, what does it make her — words fail me — a bigatrothed? All I know is that I’m flying to London in order to investigate. If the worst comes to the worst I am going to hit my rival so hard he’s going to have to look up to tie his shoelaces. Enough said. I could also sue, but it ain’t my style.

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern: Too big not to fail

Commentators bang on endlessly about the desirability of a ‘global world’, with every economy linked seamlessly to every other. But when it goes wrong, as it has done in the last three years, the painful consequences are equally global. Ask the Romans. The Roman empire stretched from Britain to Iraq and from the Rhine-Danube to the northern edges of the Sahara desert. At its largest extent (c. ad 117) it probably comprised about 50 to 60 million people and covered 2.5 million square miles. When Rome took over a province, the local elites continued to run the show, as they had always done, but now under the ultimate jurisdiction of Rome’s governor and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 17 September 2011

Home The Independent Commission on Banking, headed by Sir John Vickers, recommended that there should be insulation of high street banking from investment banking. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, accepted the commission’s call for its recommendations to be introduced by 2019. The report received cross-party support, although it would cost banking £7 billion a year, and some said it would make lending scarcer and lead to banks leaving Britain. The annual rate of inflation (by CPI) rose to 4.5 per cent, from 4.4 in the previous month; and (by RPI) to 5.2 from 5 per cent. Unemployment rose by 80,000 to 2.51 million. A shopping centre with 300 shops

The Spectator

Barometer | 17 September 2011

The comedian David Walliams performed the impressive feat of swimming 140 miles of the River Thames from Lechlade to Westminster. That is still a long way short of the swims undertaken by Martin Strel, a 56-year-old Slovenian. — After swimming the length of the Danube (1,866 miles), the Mississippi (2,360 miles) and the Yangtze (2,487 miles),Strel was challenged to swim the Nile but dismissed it as ‘not challenging enough’. — He swam instead 3,272 miles down the Amazon, employing a support team to pour buckets of rancid blood into the water in order to distract the piranhas. — His next project is the Colorado, which is shorter but has faster

David Blackburn

Hughes implies that the 50p rate could be dropped

The 50p rate is dominating the media backdrop to the Lib Dem conference. Simon Hughes has made the latest intervention, telling Sky News that the wealthy could and should be taxed in other ways if the 50p rate was “not very tax efficient”. He emphasised the importance of fairness by adding that you “don’t start (tax cuts) by taking the tax away from those who have the broadest shoulders.” Hughes’ position mirrors that of Clegg, as detailed in an interview with the Independent. This episode is a further indication that the economic arguments against the 50p rate are beginning to hold sway. Ed Miliband’s insistence that the rate be retained

Alex Massie

Foreign Policy Hogwash

As a general rule any time you read an article asking that foreign policy be recalibrated to take greater account of the “national interest” you can be sure that you’re dealing with blather and hokum and platitudes and a deliberate misrepresentation of whatever the other mob got up to when they were in power. Sadly Dominic Raab’s contribution to a new book, presumptiously titled After the Coalition, proves all this all too well. I say sadly because Raab, a freshman Tory MP, is sound on a good number of issues I care about, civil liberties most especially. Nevertheless, his piece, reprinted by the Telegraph, is rotten. Let’s count the ways.

Alex Massie

The Bleak Business of the Black Diamonds

The death of the four trapped miners in West Wales is obviously a desperate business. Desperate enough that some cads will try and use it to make political points, regardless of the nonsense of that.Anyway, here’s Richard Burton on mining and, in some sense, on a Britain we’d mainly thought had mainly vanished until these recent events reminded us that is lingers on yet. The voice and the presence, even late in his day, are still quite something:

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Allegory on the Nile

This was an enjoyable comp to judge: I have some sympathy with the actress Celia Imrie’s (who played Mrs M) view that, given the current trend towards the use of dull and overused verbal short cuts, the much-mocked Malaprop’s attempts to improve herself by expanding her vocabulary are actually rather creditable. Printed below are the best of an entry brimming with novelty and hilarity. They earn their authors £25 each; Chris O’Carroll gets £30. Amsterdam is crisscrossed by so many canards that it has become known as ‘the Venison of the North’. No visit to the city is complicit without a cruise on its Pinteresque waterways. The Anatole France house

Julia Stephenson

The world’s worst flirts

Why can’t British men show a natural, healthy appreciation of women? Last week, on the Paris Métro, I had a marvellous boost. I’d been feeling wretched after a flaming row with my boyfriend on the station platform, when a charming man winked at me and offered me his seat. I gratefully accepted. My eyes sparkled and my pulse quickened. Suddenly the day seemed so much brighter. I can’t remember the last time I saw this happen on the London Tube. Naturally timid British men have now become so terrified of causing offence that they’ve given up on flirting altogether — even that casual meeting of eyes that used to

James Forsyth

Politics: Nick Clegg is in better political shape than anyone would have guessed

It is too early to call him the comeback kid of British politics, but Nick Clegg enters the party conference season in better shape than anyone expected him to be four months ago. Back then, his party did not dare put his face on its campaign leaflets. Even Liberal Democrat ministers didn’t expect Clegg to lead the party into the next election. This is beginning to change. Clegg looks happier than he has in months: the hunted look has gone from his face. Last week, watching him walk through the corridors of the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the way to a party for one of his aides, I was

Rod Liddle

Snorting coke and whoring? It’s all part of the new, non-toxic Tory brand

It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a black whore on his lap and three kilos of gak up his left nostril, allegedly. At a stroke, the popularly held image of the Conservative party was suddenly dispelled. No longer could Labour claim that this was a party out of touch with the mainstream, a convocation of desiccated backwoodsmen who thought hip-hop was simply