Society

Saturday

3 Sep 2011

Dear Mary | 3 September 2011

Q. We have friends who we would like to see much more of but when they come to dinner they always stay until 1 a.m. — often a full three hours after we have got down. This even when all other guests have left, saying they have to be up early and they know we do too. This couple (who were brought up in another country) show absolutely no qualms about keeping us up. Although we like them enormously, they are a rather grand and formal couple, and we are not yet on the sort of terms where we could speak plainly and just ask them to go home. They

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: The Etonian difference

Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Not only is The Spectator my longest-standing employer and my spiritual home — I’ve been a columnist for 13 years — but many of the ideas that have informed the set-up of the school were first rehearsed in these pages. It’s also appropriate in another respect, because it was encountering Boris at Oxford that

Robin Oakley

The turf: Winning women

The lovely thing about Hayley Turner is the girl-next-door quality which she retains despite having become Britain’s highest-profile woman jockey. But while she still sounds genuinely surprised about her achievements her steady gaze reflects the inner confidence she has always needed to mix it with the boys. Most stables in the country would have to shut down if they lost their female staff overnight, and this column has banged on for years about giving women riders the opportunities they deserve. Now Hayley has added a second Group One, the Nunthorpe on Margot Did, to her breakthrough July Cup victory earlier this season. Cathy Gannon, too, has already matched her 60

Melissa Kite

Real life | 3 September 2011

‘What are you doing on Sunday evening?’ asked my friend Colin. ‘The usual,’ I said. ‘Feed the horses, drive back into town, have a bath, make cheese on toast, go to bed.’ I’m all about the glamour. ‘Well, come over for dinner. It’s just a few friends hanging out. I’m cooking chilli.’ My friend is a clever man. He managed to make it all sound so innocuous. But as soon as I got to his neat, suburban house I knew I was about to be roped into something. A collection of very fit, very selfless-looking people were sitting in his living room. I could tell from one look at them

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 September 2011

I took my grandson, Oscar, 20 months old, down to the regatta on the bus, a double-decker, his first experience of one, and we sat upstairs at the front. The bus was far too big for the narrow country lanes and the overhanging branches of trees thrashed against the upstairs windows. We alighted at a bus stop in the middle of the festivities, beside a funfair in full swing. The tipsy bank holiday crowd, the flags, the bunting, the lines of orange police cones, and the bright yellow fixed-penalty notice stuck on the side window of almost every visible parked car, made for a colourful scene. We hadn’t been there

Taki

High life | 3 September 2011

Gstaad It’s been very sunny and hot, with the bluest of blue skies above and the greenest of green mountains around me; in fact, it does not get any better than this. The farmers have cut their grass and packed it for the winter’s feed, soon the cows will be coming down from the hills, and the Swiss franc will continue going through the roof. Life is now so expensive in Switzerland that even the rich are starting to complain. Forty pounds for a grilled cheese on the terrace of a top hotel is a bit steep, unless one has access to the Gaddafi sovereign wealth fund, which some Swiss

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 3 September 2011

If the Libyans really do want to move from 42 years of tyranny to a western-style ‘democracy’, i.e. an elective oligarchy, they will need a friendly tyrant to help them make the transition. In his Politics, Aristotle offers some top tips on the subject. Aristotle distinguished two sorts of turannos: one who, knowing that the people hated him, rendered them incapable of moving against him (Gaddafi), and the other who manoeuvred to make the people unwilling to move against him. The former protected his rule by three main strategies: (i) stamping out anyone with any independence of mind or spirit, (ii) ensuring no one had any trust or confidence in

The Spectator

Barometer | 3 September 2011

The taxes of sin Bonn has introduced a flat-rate tax of €6 a night for prostitutes working in the city, payable at a ticket machine. Attempts to tax prostitution have been made since at least Roman times: a receipt from Roman Egypt suggested that a male prostitute paid four drachmas in tax for a two-month period. — Sweden has taxed prostitutes since 1982 at the normal rate; workers qualify for sick leave pay and a pension. — The Netherlands imposes a sales tax of 19 per cent on each act. — Nevada has proposed a tax at a flat rate of $5 for every sex act. Whether the

Joan Collins

Diary – 3 September 2011

Saint Tropez is as bawdy as ever, so we spend most of our time tucked away in the hills. But even our monk-like existence sometimes requires some amusement and when we recently ventured out to one of the most exclusive yet bacchanalian nightclubs, I queued up in the ladies’ room, watching the young amazons fighting for mirror space in their towering heels and tiny skirts. We were all waiting, for what felt like an age, for one of the stall doors to open. Finally, after repeated banging on the painted plywood, two people staggered out, much the worse for wear. One was a man, who sauntered out wiping some white

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 September 2011

Home In London more than 2,000 had so far been arrested in connection with the August riots, of whom 1,135 had been charged. Nationally, 70 per cent of those who appeared in court were remanded in custody for trial. In more than half of Britain’s postcode areas, the Royal Mail failed to meet its aim of delivering 91.5 per cent of first-class letters the next day, between March and June. BT was given planning permission to remove disused dish-shaped aerials from high up on the BT Tower before they fell off. Scratched depictions of reindeer made more than 12,000 years ago were found in a cave in the Gower peninsula.

The Spectator

Leading article: Ten years on

Historical eras rarely start or finish smoothly. But the tenth anniversary of September 11th next week presents a useful opportunity to reflect on the decade since those attacks — what we have won and where we have lost. Historical eras rarely start or finish smoothly. But the tenth anniversary of September 11th next week presents a useful opportunity to reflect on the decade since those attacks — what we have won and where we have lost. In the immediate aftermath, and facing the prospect of further attacks, Britain and America acted decisively. The first phase of the war in Afghanistan, designed to remove al-Qa’eda training camps, was swift and successful.

Fraser Nelson

Your Coffee House

At Coffee House, we do our best to serve up robust debate and solid ammo alongside it. So I’m delighted that Matt Cavanagh and Jonathan Portes were able to post their critiques of my posts on immigration. It is, we hope, the first of many high-calibre, well-argued and fact-rich outside replies we will run. Coffee House is, of course, here for the benefit of our customers, so we’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. We promise not to do this too much, and we’ll keep up our mix of breaking views, behind-the-scenes political insight and meaty policy analysis. But are we getting the mix right? Is there anything

James Forsyth

There’ll be no u-turn on planning

This government has developed rather a reputation for u-turning. But I would be extremely surprised if it did one over its planning reforms. When you talk to ministers and advisers one is struck by how up for this fight they are. They’re convinced that it is only by taking on these vested interests that they’ll get their message across to the public. And unlike on forests or the NHS, Number 10 and the Treasury are fully on board. There are those who claim that these reforms are profoundly un-conservative. But, in fact, the opposite is the case as Charles Moore argues with his typical eloquence in today’s Telegraph. As Charles

Untangling the 50p knot

The 50p tax rate is seen by some as a way of tackling the “undeserving rich” discussed in this week’s Spectator. For others, it is a counterproductive imposition driven by envy. The primary practical justification for allowing wealthy people to retain their earnings is that it empowers them to invest in productive enterprises. Over 80 per cent of the funding for business start-ups comes from personal savings or loans from family and friends. And just now we need to give the maximum encouragement to people with the determination to start new businesses. Opponents of a tax cut will no doubt say that wealthy people will not invest in enterprise but

Sophia Martelli

Top buttons

What does the uniform say about a school – and its pupils? Sophia Martelli investigates Every parent at some stage has to ask themselves: ‘Which school will suit my child?’ It’s a serious matter and no one — surely? — would consider it on the basis of the fetchingness (or not) of the school’s uniform. But it might be rather entertaining if one did. So which of the UK’s independent schools get top marks for style, and which are bottom of the class? It is, of course, a matter of taste, and some schools’ uniforms are wackier than others; whether these teach pupils fashion exuberance in later life is open

Will Heaven

Vocal support

When I last watched the Heaven family home videos, a striking trend emerged. In every clip from the early 1990s, one of my siblings or I was being encouraged to sing. We babies were bounced on daddy’s knee, and he sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ over and over again until — looking goggle-eyed and faintly hypnotised — we joined in. Little did we know it was the start of a cunning plan: my parents moulded us into mini-musicians, then sent us to be cathedral choristers, and finally to audition for music scholarships at our various secondary schools. It worked beautifully: ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ saved an absolute fortune in school

Ian Buruma

A flame lit at Rugby

Pierre, Baron de Coubertin (1863-1937) was a very odd cove. Inspired as much by a rural fête in Shropshire known as the Much Wenlock Olympics as by ancient Greece, he invented the modern Olympic Games. The original spur for his sporting endeavour was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which ended in a terrible French defeat. Coubertin, scion of a minor aristocratic family, became obsessed with French weakness. His aim was to, as he put it, ‘rebronze’ the male population, to bolster French virility through regular exercise and sports. When we think of sports now, we think mainly of athletics (derived from ancient Greece) and team sports (derived from England). In

Will Gore

Oedipus wrecked

Structural worries have put a stop to Bradfield College’s tradition of outdoor Greek theatre. Will Gore implores the gods (and benefactors) to be kind Bradfield College is one of the most attractive boarding schools in the country, and the jewel in its crown is — or was — its open-air Greek theatre. Greeker, as it is known, was built in 1890. For more than a hundred years, pupils performed plays on its stage. The most admired of these productions were the Greek plays, latterly presented every three years in the original texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. These performances have given the school an identity and a good reputation among

Rachael Stirling

Early stages

School was the perfect place to catch the acting bug, says Rachael Stirling — even if her family had to sit through some awful nonsense I have misgivings about boarding schools, but this much I know is good: in an effort to engage easily bored young minds outside the academic syllabus, there is nothing my own alma mater — Wycombe Abbey — wouldn’t do. There were concerts put on, plays staged, musicals sung, art trips to Florence and Duke of Edinburgh trips to China, or Stokenchurch, and of course there were lacrosse teams to join if you were that way inclined. (I was not, I might add; it is muddy

Philip Delves-Broughton

Indolence and experience

School holidays for the children of the affluent used to be about doing nothing in particular. Tagging along to a sun-baked villa, perhaps, or slouching around Verbier in search of familiar Harrys and Rosies. For the unlucky facing an exam year, there might be a week or two of cramming. But otherwise, these were the weeks of indolence and precious irresponsibility, the time to charge the batteries for the looming decades of early mornings in the City. Not any more. The battle for jobs is starting ever earlier, creeping grimly into these teenage years in the form of the ‘internship’. This is no summer job in a pub or a