Society

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

A word for Mitch

In the magazine’s cover piece this week (read it here or subscribe from just £1/issue), Richard Littlejohn described the rather feeble assortment of Republican contenders for next year’s presidential elections. But he left out Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana, who seems to be emerging as a favourite among American conservatives.   Daniels hasn’t yet declared his candidacy, and at first glance he comes across as a dweeb. But it would be foolish to underrate him. In 2008, against a tide of Obama-mania, Daniels won the Indiana governorship with ease. He got more votes, in fact, than any candidate in the state’s history. The secret of Daniels’s success is his

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight

There’s a moment in Moonlight, Harold Pinter’s last full-length play, when Andy, a petty patriarch on a drab deathbed, accuses his wife of monopolising the love of his estranged sons. ‘They always loved their loving mother’, he rails, Lear-like. ‘They helped her with the washing-up!’

 Uttered with poisonous invective here by David Bradley, it’s a reminder of Pinter’s knack for locating fraught family dynamics in the most ordinary of domestic details, then presenting them with biting, bitter comedy. But although Bijan Sheibani’s production is peppered with such great moments, there’s plenty of stodge to sit through between them. 

Moonlight has always been an elliptical text. It is a play about

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The battle over universal benefits continues on the local front

Here’s a question for you: should free school meals (FSM) be given to all pupils, regardless of their parents’ income? I ask because this is precisely what the Labour-led council of Southwark is proposing for its primary schools. As the Evening Standard reports, the councilmen’s thinking is that by giving “healthy” FSMs to every pupil, every day, they might help “reduce childhood obesity.” Oh, and the measure will cost some £4 million a year. Even if we put aside the question of whether the local praetorians should — or even could — tackle obesity on behalf of middle-class parents, this is still needling stuff. Southwark council has to find savings

Daniel Korski

Hague’s return

William Hague has had a good war. He began poorly, as the FCO struggled to evacuate Britons from Libya. But since then, the Foreign Secretary has showed deft diplomatic skill and leadership. The FCO has been focused on Libya and every able-bodied person has been drafted into duty, with diplomats now running the operation in No 10, and the Cabinet Office. On the Today programme, the Foreign Secretary batted away the idea, much loved by realists and pessimists, that because Britain did not know, with forensic detail, how exactly the intervention would end, it should not have become involved. There are many mountains still to climb. European governments need to

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You Cannot Hope to Bribe, or Twist, the British Journalist…

Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints: Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police. Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: 50 years of human spaceflight

Here at Coffee House, we normally exhume a piece from The Spectator archives on Fridays. But we thought we’d make an exception, today, for the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. The piece below is actually the only one that the magazine ran at the time, and is by the politician/journalist/author Desmond Donnelly. If you can get past the dubious generalities about “less sophisticated peoples” and “magic carpets” — which themselves say something about the shift in what public figures may and may not commit to print — there are some thought-provoking and quite prescient points to be found within it:   The Magic Carpet, Desmond Donnelly MP,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Raising the Income Tax Threshold is an Important Symbol, Not a Sop

The most obvious or high-profile Liberal Democrat contribution to the coalition’s programme for government is the commitment to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 over the course of this parliament. John Rentoul is not impressed by it. He says it is a “sop” that “sounds great” but fails to survive “contact with the reality-based community”. He explains his argument thus: Raising the income-tax threshold is the only policy that can definitely be attributed to the Lib Dems, and it’s an inefficient way to make the tax system fairer. Raising the threshold benefits higher-rate taxpayers more than the rest, which means that other taxes on the rich have to go up

Peter Hoskin

Panic over? Perhaps not…

Is the inflation panic over? After rising for five consecutive months, CPI inflation went down by a 0.4 percentage points in March, to 4.0 per cent, taking the City by surprise. RPI inflation also went down, by 0.2 percentage points. The numbercrunchers at the Office for National Statistics put it down, largely, to a fall in food and drink prices. The cost of fruit is 2.7 per cent down on last March. The cost of bread and cereals, 2.6 per cent. Yet we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. While this will certainly reduce the short-term pressure on the Bank to increase rates — as well as on the nation’s pocketbooks

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Russian Red-Headed League?

The Daily Mail reports: The plot of a Sherlock Holmes story was behind a jewellery raid in Russia, police believe. Thieves paid a 74-year-old woman in St Petersburg to stay out of their flat – and broke through her walls to get in to a jeweller’s shop next door. Although a burglar alarm went off twice security guards thought it was a false alarm because the doors were locked and the windows remained intact. […] The bizarre theft mirrors almost exactly the outlandish heist in the 120-year-old short story The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the story, shop owner Jabez Wilson is kept away from his premises

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This internet thing is never going to catch on.

A classic, via Norm, from Sir Simon Jenkins. Apparently, “The Internet will strut an hour upon the stage, and then take its place in the ranks of lesser media“. Also: So great is the commercial hyperbole surrounding the Internet that common sense is obliterated by dazzle. It has proved a boon for pornographers and lawyers and for the sort of up market pen pals who used to rave about Citizens’ Band radio. For companies and interest groups, the “interment” is a more efficient version of the fax. E-mail has done wonders for the ancient art of letter-writing. I can see that being able to download the entire British Library on

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the Vickers Review won’t harm the City’s global competitiveness

The headline measure in the Vickers Review—the need for a ring fence between retail and investment banking—should not harm the City’s global competitiveness as it only applies to banks with a UK retail operation. For everyone else, Vickers would leave London as a relatively good place to do business: far more certain than Hong Kong and less restrictive than New York once the new Dodd-Frank regulations are in place. In Conservatives circles tonight, there is a quiet confidence that the government will be able to accept the Vickers Review in full when it reports in the autumn. Given that the bill to scrap the disastrous tripartite regulatory system is currently

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Blame the schools system, not Oxford

The most extraordinary row has broken out after the Prime Minister appeared to suggest that Oxford University has a racist admissions policy. He today said that, “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful.” But the university has since hit back, pointing out that, “the figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading — it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds.” Laura Kuenssberg tweets that No10 is nevertheless sticking to

Peter Hoskin

What was Brown’s biggest mistake?

“I have to accept my responsibility.” Who would have thought that Gordon Brown would ever breathe those words, let alone breathe them to a conference in America over the weekend? Our former PM has, it’s true, suggested that his regulatory system was inadequate to the financial crash before now. But here he was much more explicit: “We set up the Financial Services Authority believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake. We didn’t understand just how entangled things were.” And that’s event before he got onto the “responsibility” bit. I’ll repeat it, just in case it didn’t sink in the first

Peter Hoskin

Cameron takes it to the councils

Ignore what your council is telling you. So says no less a personage than the Prime Minister of our country, speaking at one of his freewheelin’ roadshow events this afternoon. Cameron may have been referring specifically to the red tape being wrapped around Royal Wedding street parties, but it’s still a pretty pugnacious point for a PM to make. Here’s the full quotation, courtesy of the superb PoliticsHome: “I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don’t listen to people who say ‘it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 11 April – 17 April

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

Peter Hoskin

Beyond the frontline

Labour’s cartography department has been hard at work all weekend to produce this. It is, lest you haven’t heard Yvette Cooper today, an “interactive web-map” of the job losses announced by police forces so far, all across the country. You can interact with it in ways that include clicking to view a larger version. So far as web campaigning goes, this is probably fertile ground for the Opposition. No one likes the idea of more crime — and “more crime” is often conflated with “fewer bobbies” in the public debate. Yet Labour’s point is diluted, somewhat, by one simple fact: that their former Home Secretary refused to guarantee that police

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Meanwhile, in America…

We really oughtn’t let the weekend pass without some mention of political events across the Atlantic. As you’ve probably heard, a US government shutdown was avoided on Friday evening, and all thanks to a budget compromise which saw Barack Obama slash a cool $38 billion from his spending plans. Although the debate over who has credited or discredited themselves is still ongoing, it’s striking that the Republicans — urged on by the Tea Party corps — achieved around two-thirds of the cuts that they demanded. Yet disaster, or at least the prospect of it, has still not been averted. The Tea Party has already claimed several fiscal scalps along the

Peter Hoskin

Lamb volunteers for the slaughter

We’ll try to get the video later, but, for now, a transcript of Norman Lamb’s appearance on the Politics Show will have to do (UPDATE: video added above). Here we had a very unusual political moment: an assistant whip, and adviser to Nick Clegg, not only calling for changes to government policy, but also threatening to resign should they not happen. His main argument was that the NHS reforms should be dealt with more slowly: “I think it would be a crying shame if that really important principle [giving GPs more power and responsibility] was lost because we rushed the reform process and got it wrong. My real concern is

Will Mount

Spotify Sunday: The Stones in the Sixties

The Rolling Stones have a credibility problem. It’s nothing to do with their longevity or their wealth. It’s to do with their lead singer. Granted, he is a great frontman with a distinctive voice — but his strutting persona and his dancing-by-numbers gives the impression of a politician going through the gears in a speech to the party conference.   According to no less an authority than Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair was so star-struck by Mick Jagger at their first  meeting that he blurted out, ‘I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me’. That Tony Blair now looks like he could be Mick Jagger’s dad doesn’t change the

Peter Hoskin

Lansley fights back, sorta

Pause, listen, engage and … push back. That just about sums up Andrew Lansley’s article for the Sunday Express today, as well as the government’s general effort to reconstruct and repackage its shaky NHS reforms. Which is to say, the Health Secretary makes sure to mix reassurance (“There is no more important institution in this country than the NHS”) with resolve (“The NHS is not some kind of museum”) for his Sunday sermon. He dwells on the failures of the Labour years, particularly the proliferation of bureaucrats ahead of doctors and nurses. And he even suggests — although one should always be wary of this sort of numerical soothsaying —