Society Archives

Saturday

3 Sep 2011

Victim’s victory

On this Friday 50 years ago, at 1.30 p.m., the house lights at the Odeon Leicester Square dimmed for the first public screening of a British movie called Victim. It carried an ‘X’ certificate, which to the fans of its star, Dirk Bogarde, seemed decidedly odd. His reputation as the idol, not just of the Rank Organisation’s flagship cinema but of all the country’s Odeons, had been based largely on performances as Dr Simon Sparrow and Sydney Carton, and in other undemanding fare. The film’s release turned out to be a defining moment in the career of a great screen actor and a landmark in British cinema. For some, though,

Helen Schulman

New York Notebook

When the earth began to move, I was on lying on my bed with my cats in my lap. My son was in his room across the hall. The bed began to shake and I thought, inexplicably: is my little brother doing this? And then I thought, ‘Oh no, are we under attack again?’ (having 9/11 on the brain the way I and many other New Yorkers do). The cats lifted their heads at me looking for answers as the building swayed and the door to my bedroom opened and closed. When it was over, I called out to my son, asking if he’d felt anything, but he, an almost

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: The game in Spain

So the blink-and-you-miss-it summer break is over and football is back with an all-consuming vengeance. Despite the new season hardly having had time to clear its throat, it is already spewing headlines like a TV newsbar gone postal. And that is just in England. If anything can induce a breakdown among the north London chatterers, it is Arsenal being on the wrong end of an 8-2 scoreline at Old Trafford, and Manchester United’s wasn’t even the best performance of the day. That was the preserve of Manchester City, who popped down to the capital and put five past Tottenham. Fortunately that rout didn’t produce a riot, though Arsène Wenger will

Anne Applebaum

Is Nato finished?

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed. The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in

Sarfraz Manzoor

Fifteen minutes later

Pauline Pearce did not know she was being filmed when she spoke out against the rioters running amok in her Hackney neighbourhood. Standing in the darkness, on a debris-strewn pavement in front of graffiti that read ‘Fuck Cameroon’, she seemed a lone voice of conscience amid the carnage. ‘Get real black people. Get real!’ she shouted, waving her walking stick. ‘You lot piss me the fuck off! I’m shamed to be a Hackney person. Because we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Foot Locker and thiefin’ shoes.’ Within hours, the video clip had hundreds of thousands of views online: Pearce learned

James Delingpole

When you really, really need the state, will it still be able to save you?

At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. Otherwise, it’s best avoided. Even the 40 seconds or so it takes to get

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 3 September 2011

Steve Jobs: the perfectionist who raised industrial design to the level of high art I’m no techie but I have long been an admirer of Steve Jobs, whose declining health has forced him to step down as chief executive of Apple, the Californian technology giant he co-founded 35 years ago. Many tributes have been paid, the Sunday Times even asking whether he is ‘the greatest businessman of all time’. That would be too big a claim: Henry Ford might feel the title is still his. In Jobs’s own field of consumer gadgetry, however, I’d say his only peers were Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who founded Sony in a workshop

James Delingpole

On His Majesty’s Silent Service

Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Of all the Allied fighting service branches in which you wouldn’t have wanted to spend the second world war, probably the grimmest was submarines. Sure, their losses weren’t quite as bad as the German U-boat fleet, where your chances of being killed were four in five. But in the course of the war about one third of British submariners lost their lives; and in the earlier years your chances of coming back from a mission alive were no more than 50/50. Bomber crews, of course, had

Mark Mason

Music, moonlight and dahlias

The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read this book were from Paul Simon’s song ‘Train in the Distance’: ‘the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains’. The words that echoed constantly in the back of my mind as I read this book were from Paul Simon’s song ‘Train in the Distance’: ‘the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains’. Paul Hollander’s thesis is that modern America’s ultra-individualism has led its citizens to expect perfection in every aspect of life, relationships included. Which means that Uncle Sam and

Friday

2 Sep 2011

The Spectator

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James Forsyth

Lagarde sets about the Eurozone

When Christine Lagarde took over the IMF top job, it was widely assumed that she would simply continue her predecessor’s policy of almost unconditional support for Eurozone bailouts. But Ken Rogoff, the IMF’s former chief economist, has detected a hardening in the IMF’s approach. He thinks that Lagarde’s call for, as he puts it, “forced recapitalization of Europe’s bankrupt banking system” signals a new, tougher approach towards the euro-zone. As Rogoff says, the IMF’s previous approach to the euro-zone simply wasn’t credible. The idea that Spain was really at no more risk of a default than Germany was risible. But, as Rogoff argues, there won’t be a full restoration of

Fraser Nelson

The Swedish case for school profits

Should state schools be able to make a profit? We asked this of you on our Coffee House poll this week. 71 per cent of you said yes, and with good reason. Profit-seeking companies expand when demand is strong: that’s what you want good schools to do. But successful schools not seeking profit have no incentive to expand: it’s an easier life just to let the waiting list grow and jack up the fees. This month, 24 new ‘free schools’ will open – eventually able to educate 10,000 pupils. But to keep pace with the boom in primary school pupils, we’d need an extra 400 primaries alone. Will the ‘free

David Blackburn

From the archives: “The bugger’s bugle”

Today marks 50 years since the release of Victim, a ground-breaking film about homosexuality that was granted an X-certificate. Writing in the latest issue of the Spectator (subscribers click here), John Coldstream explains the significance of this frank and truthful film and its contribution to the national debate about decriminalising homosexuality. It was made four years after the publication of Sir John Wolfenden’s report into ‘Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’, which recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should be decriminalised. This contentious reform was not secured until 1967. When Wolfenden’s views were first unveiled, the Spectator defied the prevailing consensus in Fleet Street by arguing that homosexuality should

Peter Robins

Local interest | 2 September 2011

Exeter Cathedral is to mark the tenth anniversary of 11 September 2001 by having John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ played on its bells. (Exeter Express and Echo) A man has appeared before magistrates in Lincoln charged with shoplifting dresses worth a total of about £1,200 from Peacocks and Marks & Spencer. He attended court in knee-length boots, tartan tights and a black mini-skirt. (Lincolnshire Echo) Paignton Zoo is attempting to raise money through an auction of paintings by its gorillas. (Herald Express, Torquay) An 82-year-old woman from Workington has donated an early home-made television set to the National Media Museum in Bradford. She inherited the set from her uncle, who built it

The Spectator

The week that was | 2 September 2011

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. Fraser Nelson explains the dangers of home ownership. James Forsyth reveals that Cameron and Osborne are wary of Vickers’ banking reforms, and evaluates Whitehall’s leaks. Peter Hoskin spots Vince being Vince, and reports on Alistair Darling’s memoirs. David Blackburn relates a day in NATO’s war, and watched Ed Miliband re-open hostilities with the same old weapons. Daniel Korski asks where Gaddafi should be brought to justice. Alex Massie has a look at the latest events in Scottish politics. The Arts Blog tells you how to interview Ozzy Osbourne. The Books Blog says the death of books has

David Blackburn

More banking worries

George Osborne wrote a strident article for the Observer last weekend, in which he called rich tax evaders “leeches”. As James Forsyth reveals in the cover story of this week’s magazine, Osborne is not alone among Tories in hounding the ‘undeserving rich’ at present. James goes on to argue that the Tories are ‘becoming particularly worried’ about the callous rich because the Vickers commission is poised to bring the emotive issue of banks back to the ‘political frontline’. The Vickers report has already irritated the coalition’s sore points, with disagreement allegedly rife between George Osborne and Vince Cable. Today’s FT offers a fresh angle. Osborne and Cable are in fact remarkably close

Freddy Gray

Gripped by ‘Dominion’

What on earth is ‘Dominionism’? Lots of Americans who first heard the word just a few weeks ago are suddenly feeling very angry about it. Liberals say that the US constitution is facing a ‘Dominionist threat’ in the form of Michele Bachman and Rick Perry, two Republicans running for president in 2012. Christian conservatives, meanwhile, cry prejudice: they accuse a secularist elite of conducting a witch-hunt against Christians in politics. What’s the fuss? Dominionism is, we are told, a school of evangelical thought that aims to impose Biblical law over secular government. It is to nutty Evangelicals what Shariah Law is to Islamists, a way of achieving theocracy on earth.

Thursday

1 Sep 2011

James Forsyth

Getting tough on discipline

A fortnight ago, The Spectator asked if Cameron was fit to fight? We wondered if he had the gumption to use the political moment created by the riots to push through the radical reforms the country needs. So, it’s only fair to note that the government has today actually done something—as opposed to just talking about—the excesses of the human rights culture. The Department for Education has stopped the implementation of new regulations that would require teachers to log every incident in which they ‘use force’ with children. These new rules would have made teachers record every time they had pulled apart two kids in a corridor or intervened to

James Forsyth

The undeserving rich

Ever since the Elizabethan poor laws — if not before — society has tended to divide the poor into the deserving and the undeserving. But, as I write in this week’s magazine, our politicians are now taking aim at a new category, the undeserving rich. Who you consider to be the undeserving rich depends on your ideological leanings. Russian oligarchs or the families of Middle Eastern despots are, perhaps, the most obvious examples. They have acquired huge wealth but often by illegitimate means. Then come those who evade, to use a favourite phrase of both David Cameron and Ed Miliband, “their responsibilities”. This includes those who dodge their taxes or

Alex Massie

Scoop of the Year

One for Coffee House’s weekly Local Interest feature: congratulations to the editor and staff of the Folkestone Herald for having the courage to splash on this… Can your local paper beat this? [Hat-tip: Ciaran Byrne]