Society

Saturday

Taki

High life | 18 June 2011

On board S/Y Bushido I am writing this under extreme torture. I have been vomiting for hours due to food poisoning, am totally dehydrated, but even one gulp of water brings on more violent up-chucks. ‘You’ll just have to wait it out,’ says a doctor over the telephone. Easier said than done. And to think I was worried about girls and other such bagatelles. Without health no woman is worth a nickel. I suppose I overdid things in London, and then in the south of France. London was fun, what with Asprey’s throwing a bash for me, and then my own thank-you dinner at Bellamy’s following. People like Fraser Nelson

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 18 June 2011

Mr Brown’s writing In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility. I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that not very well. But his thick marker-pen marginalia have a rare indecipherability. Like Linear A, some may never be cracked. It is not only that his letters are ill-formed, though they are — so that two scribbled words look like long termum. The U, however, turns out to be I and S, both with much

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 June 2011

‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of the work.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, managed to refuse this choice and achieve both. ‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of the work.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, managed to refuse this choice and achieve both. He was what is now called a role model — a war hero, an intrepid traveller, a witty guest, a man with whom women fell in love, a Byronic romantic without Byron’s unkindness — but he

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 18 June 2011

Home The government accepted the recommendations of the NHS Future Forum, which had spent two months reviewing the government’s plans for reforming the National Health Service. The Health Secretary is to remain responsible for the service; private companies are to be prevented from cherry-picking; the regulator, Monitor, will not be required to promote competition; hospital doctors and nurses will be included in the task of commissioning and the 2013 deadline for GPs to form consortiums will be dropped. Southern Cross, the financially beleaguered company that runs homes for 31,000 old people, met the many landlords of the properties it leases in an attempt to carry on. After a summit in

The Spectator

Leading article: Strike back

In a way, it would be rude for the unions not to strike later this month. They are in the business of changing government policy by threatening strike action. They had planned to wait until next year, when the cuts would be biting hardest, to force David Cameron into a Heath-style U-turn — but it seems the Prime Minister’s resolve is running out faster than they expected. In a way, it would be rude for the unions not to strike later this month. They are in the business of changing government policy by threatening strike action. They had planned to wait until next year, when the cuts would be biting

Melissa Kite

Real life | 18 June 2011

A friend offers to take me to lunch to cheer me up. I tell him, ‘No, really, don’t. I’m a disaster area when I’m under the weather. You don’t want to get involved.’ I try to explain my theory of cross-catastrophe. I am one of those people for whom troubles come in multitudes. I don’t just get sick, I get sick and then my washing machine explodes and my roof starts leaking and my rabbit eats the Sky cables. I try to explain that if he really wants to help he will come over and hammer large pieces of crooked wood over my windows. But he won’t listen. He pitches

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The rise of the Mormons

Are Mormons going to inherit the earth? Or at least America? It is starting to look as though they might. The Mormon church is only 181 years old, and its followers make up just 2 per cent of the U.S. population. Yet they have an amazing number of the top jobs. It is well-known that two leading republicans, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, strong contenders for their party’s presidential nomination in 2012, are Latter-day Saints. It is less known that Mormons increasingly run corporate America. A new Bloomberg report offers an impressive list of Mormon business leaders here. Bloomberg’s Caroline Winter attributes the success of Mormons to the Missionary Training

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why enshrining the military covenant in law might not be such a good idea

Charles Moore’s column in the Telegraph today makes a very good case against enshrining the military covenant in law. As Charles argues, once the lawyers and the judges get their hands on it there could be a whole slew of unintended consequences. Judges could decide, for instance, that the court martial system does not offer soldiers ‘fair treatment’. Indeed, it is worth noting that the Major General, now retired, who drafted the covenant does not believe that it should be made law for precisely this reason. There’s no doubt that under the last government were expected to fight wars on peace time budgets and that spending on the military overall

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Osborne throws his weight behind education reform

Pete rightly points to Michael Gove’s interview in The Times this morning as the story of the day.  Some producer interests are objecting to Gove dismissing the exam system as ‘discredited’ and his plans to return A-Levels to being a proper preparation for undergraduate study. But there’ll be no backing down. A Gove spokesman tells me that ‘’The system is discredited and it needs fixing. The public know it and support change. If some don’t like hearing that, tough. They’ll find it much more unpleasant in ten years if we don’t fix the system and they’re working for Chinese billionaires who did maths at Harvard.’ But, perhaps, the most important

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 18 June 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2700 you were invited to submit an example of pretentious wine-writing. Peter Mayle’s account in the Observer of his first formal wine tasting, in London’s St James’s, gives a flavour of what I was looking for: ‘The first wine, so he [the wine merchant] informed us, was vigorous and well-constructed, even a little bosomy. The second was an iron fist in a velvet glove. The third was earthy, but generous. The fourth was a little young to be up so late.’ As the evening wears on, the comparisons become increasingly ludicrous: ‘oak, truffles, hyacinths, hay, wet leather, wet dogs, weasels, a

Harry Mount

England, their England

Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs, the “heat” waves, the cold spells — the only country where you can take a walk every day of the year.’ It used to be just eccentric Englishmen who acquired this peculiar taste for the changeable English summer. But no longer. Quietly, but decisively, the English summer and social calendar have been globalised and commercialised. The

John R. Bradley

Gay Damascus

A few years ago, I spent a month in Damascus. I arrived late in the evening but was so eager to see a city I’d long wished to visit — getting a visa had proved nightmarish — that I soon found myself in a little coffee shop round the corner from my budget hotel. I was well aware of Syrians’ reputation for being extraordinarily welcoming and friendly, even by Arab standards; but even I wasn’t quite prepared for the frank opening salvo from the handsome young guy sitting next to me. ‘Are you active or passive?’ he asked me. It turned out that the coffee shop — packed with men

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A warm May and a wet June don’t tell us anything about climate change

What do you suppose the chances are of this being the coldest June since records began, or maybe the dampest June since records began? My guess is that it will almost certainly be the most dramatic of some climatic variation since records began; paradoxically, every other month is. Every season is. Every year is. Every year is something. The weather is on a roll, it keeps breaking records, nothing can stop it. Why is this? The most obvious answer is climate change; we are seeing more extreme weather patterns both globally and locally. We know that the weather patterns are more extreme because we are told that they are, every

Patrick Leigh-Fermor

Transylvanian hay-day

An afternoon’s diversion on the way to Constantinople, 75 years ago One day when we were invited to luncheon by some neighbours, István said, ‘Let’s take the horse’ and we followed a roundabout uphill track to look at a remaining piece of forest. ‘Plenty of common oak, thank God,’ he said, turning back in the saddle as we climbed a path through the slanting sunbeams, ‘you can use it for everything.’ The next most plentiful was Turkey oak, very good firewood when dry, also for stable floors and barrel staves. Beech came next, ‘it leaves scarcely any embers’; then yoke elm and common elm, ‘useful for furniture and coffins’. There

Colin Thubron

Patrick Leigh Fermor remembered

When I was asked to select a passage from his work that encapsulated the spirit of Paddy Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday, a crowd of images leapt to mind, from his encounter with the grotesque burghers of Munich in A Time of Gifts to the eerie vespers of A Time to Keep Silence, to the gongs of Byzantium and the gambolling of dolphins in Mani. When I was asked to select a passage from his work that encapsulated the spirit of Paddy Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday, a crowd of images leapt to mind, from his encounter with the grotesque burghers of Munich in A Time of Gifts to the

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Engineering solutions

This is from a 2007 blog, listing the Chinese politburo: Hu Jintao, 62, President of the People’s Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, Department of Water Conservancy Engineering. This is from a 2007 blog, listing the Chinese politburo: Hu Jintao, 62, President of the People’s Republic of China, graduate of Tsinghua University, Beijing, Department of Water Conservancy Engineering. Huang Ju, 66, graduate of Tsinghua University, Department of Electrical Engineering. Jia Qinglin, 65, graduate of Hebei Engineering College, Department of Electric Power. Li Changchun, 61, graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology, Department of Electric Machinery. Luo Gan, 69, graduate of Freiberg University of Mining and Technology, Germany. Wen Jiabao,

Leah McLaren

Brush up your Shakespeare

‘William Shakespeare was the most influential person who ever lived,’ is the audacious opening line of Canadian writer Stephen Marche’s recently published book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. It’s the sort of bold claim that makes you immediately think of other contenders: Jesus? Muhammed? Newton? Freud? Oprah? And while we’re at it, how exactly should influence be measured? Is it counted in literary references and Google hits — or is it something less tangible, more magical than that? Marche suggests the latter but conveniently skips over the criteria for determining his thesis. As far as the author is concerned it’s obvious that all of history’s luminaries are pretty dull compared to

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 18 June 2011

Can capitalism care for the old and vulnerable? The collapse of the Southern Cross care homes group is a big story not just because 31,000 elderly residents are waiting to discover whether they still have anyone to look after them when it’s all over, but because it illuminates a pattern of financial engineering that prevailed in the boom years and could now unravel with very disruptive consequences. Southern Cross was bought in 2004 by the US private equity firm Blackstone, which tripled the number of homes, floated the company on the stock market and sold the last of its own shareholding in 2007, having made a 300 per cent return

Michael Tanner

Verdi without dignity

Simon Boccanegra is distinctive, among all Verdi’s operas, for its darkness of tone, and for abjuring the vitality which, in his other works, the characters display, despite or because of the desperate situations which they are in. Simon Boccanegra is distinctive, among all Verdi’s operas, for its darkness of tone, and for abjuring the vitality which, in his other works, the characters display, despite or because of the desperate situations which they are in. One comes away from this opera with the sound of baritones and basses in one’s head, no melodies — there are hardly any — and the sense that reconciliation between old foes can only be truly

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 17 June 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator over the past week: Peter Robins sifts through the local and regional newspapers for his first Local Interest post. You can follow The Spectator’s Local Interest feed on Twitter here. Fraser Nelson watches Ed Balls’ bloodlust get the better of him, and observes that Britain now has the worst inflation in Western Europe. James Forsyth explains why the battle of the bins matters, and sees Ed Miliband relieve the pressure on himself. Peter Hoskin says that Miliband borrowed from the Cameroons for his most substantial speech so far, and observes that Danny Alexander is not for turning. David Blackburn reports on