Society

Saturday

9 Jul 2011

Mind your language | 9 July 2011

Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial activity,’ declared the revolutionary Tom Mann in 1909, ‘forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.’ It was another 62 years before the national press of Britain announced that newspapers would not be published the next day ‘because of industrial action’. The word industrial came into the language in the 16th century, then slept until the end

Tanya Gold

Food: Blood and guts

Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a painting of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia, with pointy breasts. From a distance, it looks as if she is topless. The customers are the sort of people who like to watch powerful women topless. That is, they are powerful men, in groups or, quite often, alone. Rules has single booths for these lonely creatures — well,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 July 2011

Q. Is plate-swapping in restaurants now acceptable behaviour? When dining out, a not-so-young Dutch couple I know, both smart and rich, are in the habit of blithely exchanging plates midway through each course so that they may taste one another’s choice of food. However, in one fashionable restaurant recently, a handwritten note accompanied their bill which said ‘in this establishment, plate-swapping is not encouraged. In future please refrain from indulging in this practice.’ Was the indignation of the Dutch justified? — T.D., Majorca A. There is no legal reason why the two should not swap plates. Yet although the Dutch couple were paying for a service, by choosing to eat

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: A word in defence of tabloid journalism

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety Forgive me if I don’t join in the orgy of sanctimony surrounding the News of the World. If any evidence is uncovered that proves a member of the paper’s staff hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and deleted her voicemail messages, then, yes, he or she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But to describe such behaviour as ‘shocking’ is to reveal an astonishing ignorance about the tabloid profession. It’s a bit like claiming to be ‘shocked’ when a celebrity is caught cheating on his wife or a politician is caught lying through his teeth. The reason phone-hacking was, until recently,

Robin Oakley

The turf: A yard on the up

Lambourn trainer Sylvester Kirk retains the distinctive tones of his native Donegal/Tyrone. There was just one moment during his eight years as assistant to Richard Hannon, a period which coincided with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when he wondered if the accent was going to leave him alive. Deputed to drive the Hannons to Windsor for lunch with the Queen, Sylvester became confused driving out of the castle premises. Suddenly he was brought abruptly to a halt, the stable-spattered car surrounded by armed men with weapons cocked which definitely weren’t loaded for pheasant. ‘At that point,’ he says, demonstrating an impressively anodyne mumble, ‘I feared I might get shot simply

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 July 2011

One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since. My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will dissuade them from the notion that tatty old bare boards are fantastically chic and fancy and that they have an inalienable human right to walk upon said boards, making an unholy racket. I simply cannot understand it. When I was growing up, bare floorboards were a matter of shame. A family’s prosperity was measured by

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 July 2011

I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway. However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it

Taki

High life | 9 July 2011

Exactly 50 years ago last Friday night going into Saturday morning — 1 July into the 2nd — in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Mary to sing an Italian song, ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda’, everyone calls me blondie. After they had both gone up to bed he silently padded down the stairs, stepping softly so as to make no sound, went to the basement storage room, took out a double-barrelled shotgun, inserted two shells, went back up to the hall, leaned against the hard steel with his forehead and pulled the trigger. The newspapers reported it as an accident. I read about it the next day in my

The Spectator

Letters | 9 July 2011

Back at Black Sir: With one exception, Conrad Black’s article (‘I’ll be back’, 2 July) is a succession of inaccuracies and outright lies. Among the most blatant is his assertion that he received a payment of $6 million in compensation for libel from Richard Breeden and the Special Committee which investigated and reported the frauds which Black perpetuated and for which a Chicago jury found him guilty. Not only did Black not receive any apology or payment from Breeden, but Breeden and his committee issued a statement last week stating they adhere to their original conclusions. Indeed, all the American courts, including the Supreme court, upheld the jury’s verdict that

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 9 July 2011

What to do about the old? In the ancient world, the welfare state did not exist, and few people lived to be old in the first place (perhaps only 5 per cent could expect to make 60). They still had strong views on the matter. One of the most touching passages in Homer’s Iliad is spoken by Phoenix, the man who raised Achilles. Childless himself, he describes how he ‘always had to take you on my knees and feed you, cutting up your meat for you and holding the wine to your lips. You would often soak the front of my tunic, dribbling wine all down it — just like a baby! I

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 July 2011

Victory celebrations Novak Djokovic celebrated winning the men’s singles at Wimbledon by eating grass on the Centre Court. While not doing a lot to boost the image of his native Serbia as a modern country, the act joins a litany of bizarre victory celebrations. — After winning a 100 metres race in 2004, Maurice Greene started leaping about in apparent pain before taking off his boots and having an official spray them with a fire extinguisher. — The Barcelona football team celebrated winning this year’s Champions League final at Wembley by cutting the net from one of the goalposts. — after winning the gold medal, the Canadian women’s ice-hockey team

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 July 2011

Here are two things to bear in mind when reading about the News of the World phone-message hacking. The first is that all tabloid papers are even more disgusting in their methods than people realise. They act like a privatised secret police. To them, there is nothing more thrilling than a pretty, underage, murdered girl, and they would have no scruples about any means of getting information about her. But the other thing to remember is that the persecutors of the News of the World are not themselves disinterested seekers after truth. The BBC believes that its power depends on beating off Rupert Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB, so when the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 9 July 2011

Home A private investigator working for the News of the World allegedly hacked into the voicemail of the murdered girl Milly Dowler while she was missing, deleting messages when the box was full to make room for new messages; this might have given the impression that the girl was still alive. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said he found it was ‘quite shocking — that someone could do this’. An emergency debate was held on the matter in the Commons. There were questions about hacking into the telephones of the families of the girls murdered at Soham in 2002, and those killed in the bombings of 7 July 2005. A

The Spectator

Leading article: Our sovereign debt

If the government were to grant an award to the public servant who has made the greatest effort over the past year to manage expenditure, Her Majesty the Queen would be a strong contender. The royal public finances, published this week, reveal that the cost of running the royal household has fallen over the past year by 5.3 per cent to £32.1 million. Proportionally, the Queen has made more cuts in one year than George Osborne intends to do over five. The royal household is now costing the taxpayer less in absolute terms than it was in 2007. If the government were to grant an award to the public servant

Nick Cohen

Diary – 9 July 2011

I looked at it and was astonished. It was not that he disliked my ideas — he was entitled to disagree — but that he had attacked a book I had not written. He pretended that I believed the West had been right to support Saddam Hussein while he was gassing the Kurds when I had said the opposite. He made up stories about my parents, good people he had never met, to show me in a bad light. Every second paragraph contained a howler. Well, I thought, get a book wrong and the text will confound you. I typed out the passages that proved that he was at best

Daniel Korski

The military’s ECHR concerns

Earlier this week, there was a European Court of Human Rights ruling that is worth dwelling on. To summarise: the Court held that the UK’s human rights obligations apply to its acts in Iraq, and that the UK had violated the European Convention on Human Rights in its failure to adequately investigate the killing of five Iraqi civilians by its forces there. The judgment overturns a House of Lords majority ruling four years ago that there was no UK human rights jurisdiction regarding the deaths. The obligation on soldiers to protect the vulnerable during military operations is not, of course, new. It underlies the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (as well

Peter Hoskin

Brooks stands firm

More fuel for the firestorm: this time, a letter by Rebekah Brooks, answering questions put to her by the Home Affairs select committee. It truth, it doesn’t say much that wasn’t either spelt out or suggested in Brooks’ earlier statement this week. But its three main assertions are still worth noting: Brooks had “no knowledge” about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone, she claims; likewise for “any other cases during [her] tenure”; and “the practice of phone hacking is not continuing at the News of the World.” In the meantime, Labour are keeping up the political pressure — asking, now, for a judge-led inquiry to convene sooner, sooner, sooner, in

Peter Hoskin

Roadblocked to death?

You may doubt that Downing Street is doing much politics beyond the phone hacking saga at the moment — but it is. The coming week will see the launch of the long-awaited, much-delayed public services White Paper, which is intended to set the framework for more or less every service we receive from the state. You may remember that Cameron heralded it with an article for the Telegraph back in February. Then, he suggested that private and charitable providers would be as privileged as state ones, writing both that, “we will create a new presumption that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a

James Forsyth

Who knows where this will all end for politics, the press and the police

Rarely has that old adage that week is a long time in politics seemed more appropriate. Seven days ago, few of us would have predicted that we would be in the middle of a crisis that could dramatically effect how politics is run, the press are regulated and the standing of the police. This morning is probably one of those days when, to borrow his joke from yesterday, David Cameron wants to shut down all the newspapers. The Mail and The Telegraph lay into him for his call to end self-regulation of the press. Indeed, their editorials on the matter speak to a broader anger in both papers that despite

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 9 July 2011

In Competition No. 2703 you were invited to submit a hymn entitled ‘All Things Dull and Ugly’. Long lines mean space is tight so I’ll keep it short. George Simmers nabs the bonus fiver; £25 each to his fellow winners. All things dull and ugly, all creatures gross and squat, All things vile or tedious, the Lord God made the lot. He made the sly hyena, the hookworm and the slug, Your moaning Auntie Margaret and pervy Uncle Doug. He made that dreary Welshman who so often reads the news, And he made us, the ragtag lot who worship at St Hugh’s. We’re far from