Society

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Wouter Weylandt’s Cortege

There was no racing in the Giro d’Italia yesterday. Instead the peloton rode at a funereal pace to honour Wouter Weylandt, the Belgian sprinter killed in a crash on Monday. Then Weylandt’s Leopard-Trek team-mates came to the front to lead the field into Leghorn. With them was Garmin-Cervelo’s Tyler Farrar, Weylandt’s best friend in the peloton. Watch from the 25 minute mark if you like: Dignified. Emotional. Perfect. And something you never want to see again. As I said on Monday, however, it’s amazing how rare these deaths are (and Weylandt, the pathologist reported, almost certainly died instantly). By my back-of-an-envelope calculations* the peloton completes about a million miles of

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Today’s lesson for David Willetts

What a knotty problem David Willetts has created for himself today. Speaking to the Guardian this morning, he floated an idea to help the universities make a bit of cash: they could, he suggested, sell extra places to students who were prepared to pay exaggerated fees up front. This isn’t yet government policy, and the students needn’t do the paying themselves (they could be sponsored by charities or employers, for instance), but the Guardian pounced nevertheless. “Extra places at university for rich students,” blared its front page headline. Not a good look for the coalition, at a time when access to university is such a general concern. Not a good

David Blackburn

Cameron in new war with his backbenchers

The House is united in loathing of IPSA, which explains why Tory MP Adam Afriyie’s amendment to the Parliamentary Standards Bill 2009 is proving so popular. Afriyie’s aim is ‘to simplify the way in which expenses and salary payments to Members of Parliament are made’ and attempt to limit IPSA’s costs.   The government, however, is wary of Arfiyie’s reform – sensing, perhaps, that the public might not stomach changes to the expenses system so soon after the recent scandal.   The bill’s second reading will take place this Friday and it is now understood that enough Labour backbenchers will support the motion to allow it to pass. It is

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Newt 2012

Having flirted with the idea on several previous occasions, Newt Gingrich has decided this is the moment America has been waiting for. So he’s running for the Presidency. Alex Knapp supplies the only slogan – coming to a t-shirt near you soon, I hope – and commentary his opponents need: GINGRICH 2012: HE WILL ALWAYS LOVE AMERICA. UNLESS IT GETS CANCER See here for previous on this. As David Frum said, anyone can dump one sick wife. It takes a special man to dump two. UPDATE: Newt’s daughter says the commonly-believed story about Newt ditching his first, cancer-stricken wife is not true. The legend, however, outstrips reality every time.   

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Size of Things to Come & Unionism Needs a New Story

Recalling the collapse of RBS, Tyler Cowen suggests that Scottish independence might not be such a nifty notion: The conceptual point is simple.  If you think that the world is now more prone to financial crises (and I do), the optimal size for a nation-state has gone up.  Risk-sharing really matters. That’s a pretty widely-held view and it is not, I think, wholly coincidental that Alex Salmond discovered* the apparently unlimited potential of renewable energy at roughly the same time banking began to seem a less useful foundation for future prosperity.   Risk-sharing**, however, is at the heart of it. It was the main reason why the SNP became a

Monday

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 9 May — 15 May

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

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Tories’ intellectual dishonesty over the NHS

Why should Cameron ditch the Lib Dems? Coalition has made his party more radical, more electorally successful – and the worst ideas in the Cabinet come from men with blue lapels. Take Andrew Lansley. His press release today would have been shocking had it come from a Lib Dem, and denounced as dangerous leftist nonsense that renders the government’s overall message incoherent. Ed Balls’ arguments against cuts have routinely been challenged in Coffee House. So we can hardly be expected to applaud when his arguments are plagiarised by a Tory. The hapless Lansley, whose needless and complex heath reform bill has stalled, is today trying to win back the initiative

Betty Herbert

Thrill Seekers

One summer holiday, bored and 11 years old, I embarked on a trawl through the wardrobes in my Grandparents’ spare bedroom. Most of the discoveries were unpromising: an old coat, a great quantity of pillowslips, and my mother’s teenage collection of Elvis 45s, which at that time were below my condescension. But then, in the middle drawer, I found a small stash of books buried beneath an ageing electric blanket – my Grandma’s Jackie Collins collection. Jackpot. I spent a happy afternoon riding the giddy waves of such an illicit oeuvre, without ever once wondering whether they took Gran on a similar journey. In any case, within a few weeks

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Clegg will get his way on NHS reform

On Andrew Marr this morning, Nick Clegg made clear that changes to the NHS bill are his new priority. He said that there would be ‘substantial’ changes to it and declared that ‘no bill is better than a bad bill.’ I suspect that Clegg will get what he wants on the NHS bill. When I spoke to one senior Clegg ally after the AV vote, I was told that Number 10 is ‘conceding everything to us in that area.’ My source went on to say that because of the Tories’ traditional weakness on the the NHS, the Tories ‘are mortally afraid of a row over the NHS with us on

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 May 2011

The Queen and I Sir: I did not expect Andrew Roberts (‘The meaning of a marriage’, 23/30 April), to agree with my New York Review of Books article on the royal family but, since he quoted from it, I would have thought he might have read it all the way through. True, the piece begins by setting out the reasons why one might have assumed these to be ‘anxious times for the House of Windsor’, from austerity to the Duke of York’s travails. But the bulk of the essay is dedicated to explaining why ‘the appeal of the royals remains resilient’, citing the Queen’s near-perfect performance as head of state,

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: The unmovable and the irresistible

Until now, I thought David Cameron’s best week in politics was the one that began with the inconclusive result of the general election and ended with him standing beside Nick Clegg in the Downing Street rose garden. The skill with which he outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown reminded me of a comment made by Oliver van Oss, a former beak at Eton, about the Wall Game in Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris Johnson. ‘It provides the perfect training for later work on boards, committees, royal commissions and governing bodies,’ he said. ‘The unmovable and the irresistible are poised in perfect balance. Nothing is happening and it seems unlikely that anything ever will.

Melissa Kite

Real life | 7 May 2011

As if by magic, a letter arrived with answers to all my composting questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had received warning from the council that I might be in a food waste recycling area. Nothing was definite about it. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the form-shoveller pursuivants that they might be the only people who knew the answer. Despite having invented the rules, they seemed determined to persist with the notion that they could not be held responsible for knowing whether they were applying them to my street or not. I tried ringing the council’s recycling line but it was permanently busy. Apparently they are

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 7 May 2011

We’ve ridden African elephants and done the evening game drive. In between I’ve had the full-body Swedish massage from a Zulu woman who used the point of her elbow and the side of her knee and was panting slightly throughout. Now we are six of us around a dinner table in a replica Zulu meeting hut. The waiters are Pedi. With each course a different wine is poured. My neighbour vulgarly asks the cost of the first, a silky red, and is told that it isn’t on the wine list. However, a bottle from the same vineyard, of an inferior vintage, can be had for the equivalent of £400. I’m

Taki

High life | 7 May 2011

Mme Nhu, who died two days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. Her maternal grandmother was a Vietnamese princess of impeccable credentials, yet when she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie, yet the Western press named her the Dragon Lady, a nickname she didn’t deserve but one that stuck. She was a nationalist par excellence, but in the gathering storm of the Vietnam war the press had to have a villain (the commies were the good guys) and she played her role to the hilt. When

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 7 May 2011

Romans would have been disgusted by the death of bin Laden. They expected better of their enemies, even if mass murderers, than to be supinely dispatched, cowering behind his wife, without a fight or heroic gesture. Mithradates, king of Pontus in Asia Minor (northern Turkey), plotted against Rome for nearly 30 years. In 89 BC he launched his first assault against the Romans there, engineering the slaughter of 80,000 Roman residents on one night of the ‘Asiatic Vespers’. He was finally betrayed by his son in 63 BC while planning an assault on Italy. Having inoculated himself against poison, he ordered a slave to run him through, commenting that he had not guarded

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 May 2011

Rules of engagement The strike on bin Laden has been widely celebrated in the US, even though there are strong grounds to regard it as illegal. — Section 5(g) of Executive Order 11905 signed by Gerald Ford in 1976 states ‘No employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination’. — The order was reiterated by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, although the latter bombed Gaddafi’s compound in 1986. — US special forces could have been justified, however, if their intention had been to arrest bin Laden and then were forced to fire in self-defence. Money migrations The National Institute for Economic and

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectactor’s Notes

The Americans committed an extra-judicial killing this week, violating the sovereign territory of a friendly power, and reaching bin Laden’s lair because of information obtained outside legal process at Guantanamo Bay. The Americans committed an extra-judicial killing this week, violating the sovereign territory of a friendly power, and reaching bin Laden’s lair because of information obtained outside legal process at Guantanamo Bay. And a good thing too, in the circumstances. But it is fascinating how little protest there has been from the people who are usually noisiest about any infringements of international law, and of human rights as currently interpreted. This must be because the perpetrator is Barack Obama. He

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 May 2011

Home Prince William was created Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathhearn and Baron Carrickfergus on the morning of his wedding to Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The Duchess’s dress was designed by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen. It did not rain and a million or so people cheered in the streets, with 25 million in Britain watching on television. During the wedding a Union flag was burnt by republicans in Chetwynd Court in King’s College Cambridge. The Duke and Duchess returned two days later to their house on Anglesey. April was found to have been the warmest for 350 years. Wildfires broke out on heathland in England and Scotland, sweeping

The Spectator

Lead article: Disunited kingdom

David Cameron visited Scotland only once during the battle for its parliament’s elections. David Cameron visited Scotland only once during the battle for its parliament’s elections. Hadrian’s Wall is becoming a forbidding obstacle for the Conservatives: a boundary with an unfamiliar, inhospitable land redeemed only by opportunities for deer stalking and trout fishing. Ed Miliband ventured north a fortnight ago, in an attempt to save Labour’s Scottish campaign — but as The Spectator went to press it seemed that this, too, had proved fruitless. The Scottish Nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, has found to his delight that his opposition has crumbled. It is understandable that Cameron and Miliband have little interest

Martin Bright

The saddest politician in England

Nick Clegg’s time as the country’s darling was always likely to be fleeting. But poor Vince Cable was consistently feted as the man who got it right on the economy. But he has looked miserable from the moment he entered government. Why is this? I can’t be the only politico to have heard Vince say before 2010 that he would never enter government with the Tories. Oddly enough, he was far more polite about them than he has been on the radio this morning. The whole point about two-party politics is that it is tribal and ruthless, although anyone who has crossed sword with the Lib Dems at a local