Society

Saturday

Robin Oakley

The turf: Not my week

Mrs Oakley hopes it will be a lesson to me after all the abandoned umbrellas, mislaid mobiles and washbags left in hotel-room bathrooms over the years. When changing planes at Mumbai Airport at one o’clock in the morning en route for Hong Kong, I failed to pick up my laptop after the security check. Retrieving it from Britain took seven weeks. The airline didn’t want to know and airport authorities would hand it only to a personal representative. It only ever came back thanks to old friends at CNN: thank God, I still work occasionally for an international organisation. ‘Never mind the £150 in airport fees and freight charges,’ I

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 28 May 2011

After the Cow Girl debacle, I went straight back online with another dating site. I was working on the same principle as those eager to get behind the wheel again as soon as possible after a serious accident to regain confidence. I signed on with a dating site designed for people wanting to have sex with as many people as possible and posted a photograph of myself with no clothes on, just my glasses, and smiling confidently and a little suavely at the camera, as though clothed or unclothed it was all the same to Lord Tangent, as I called myself. I also indicated, by ticking boxes beside diagrams of

Taki

High life | 28 May 2011

New York In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is turned on by an electrician’ is Times Square. She swoons. That, of course, was the good old days, when Runyonesque characters like Nathan Detroit, Nicely-Nicely, Harry the Horse, Big Jule from Chicago and Liver Lips Louis ruled Broadway and its environs. In that magical make-believe world, Nathan married Miss Adelaide (after a 14-year engagement) and

The Spectator

Letters | 28 May 2011

Clarity? New Labour? Sir: I read with growing disbelief your leader ‘Lost Labour’ (14 May), but I now realise that it must have been intended as joke. ‘The tragedy of the Labour years was that so many good ideas were mooted…’; ‘The New Labour years can now be regarded as… a moment of clarity…’ You can’t be serious. Blair did indeed talk fervently about welfare reform. He talked fervently about many things, such as fictitious WMDs capable of striking within 45 minutes or the elimination of poverty not only in this country but in Africa and indeed everywhere. One of his favourite fervent words was ‘reform’, which for him meant

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 28 May 2011

At dinner parties in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, or Southwark, according to Christina Patterson, the writer for the Independent, you hear people saying things about politics like ‘what we need is a clearer narrative’. I was delighted that she added: ‘I’m still not sure what narrative means.’ I do not go to parties in Haringey or Hackney (not invited), but the demand for narrative has reached even my well padded corner. In the Guardian Madeleine Bunting, from her own family supper table, wrote about the Scottish independence horror, remarking: ‘Scroll through comments on blogs, and what emerges is an unattractive narrative of the English being ignored.’ If narrative just meant ‘telling

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 28 May 2011

Abysmally incompetent as Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke was in attempting to describe some new thinking about the law of rape, it did not merit the outrage of those who argued that rape is rape is rape and that is the end of the question. But the law is all about distinctions. Murder is murder is murder too, but it still has to be defined accurately and culpability assessed before justice can be done. In 287 BC, the lêx Aquilia dealing with unlawful damage was passed in a Roman assembly. It was named after its proposer, the tribune Aquilius. Its opening chapter referred to the unlawful killing of a ‘four-footed beast

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 May 2011

Home President Barack Obama arrived in Britain for a state visit, having fled Ireland a day early lest the ash cloud from the Grimsvötn volcano in Iceland engulf his aeroplane. In Ireland he met his eighth cousin at Moneygall, where he drank a pint of Guinness, said ‘I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere’, and got his armour-plated car stuck on a bump in the road. In London he stayed at Buckingham Palace, attended a state banquet and addressed Parliament. In a joint newspaper article with David Cameron, the Prime Minister, he wrote: ‘Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship — for

The Spectator

Lead article: Water, water everywhere

Scottish readers may be puzzled to see so many newspaper headlines about drought. Parts of the country, notably the Borders and the western Highlands, have already received one and a half times their normal rainfall for May. On Monday — as the water companies proposed seasonal tariffs to discourage customers from watering their gardens and taking baths in dry summers — Rannoch Moor in the Highlands received two and a half inches of rain. Where the headlines were written, however, the drought is acute. In London, Kent and East Anglia, there has not been a full day’s rain for nearly three months. Rainfall in May over a wide band of

David Blackburn

Brennan comes to Balls’ aid

To present the government side in the Shoesmith case, former minister Kevin Brennan MP has written an extensive defence of Ed Balls’ decision to sack Sharon Shoesmith. Brennan’s argument is predicated on Ofsted’s report. Brennan writes: ‘Faced with such a report, the Secretary of State had to act decisively. Anyone who doubts for a moment the decision Ed Balls took should look again at that report and its implications for the leadership of child protection in that borough.’ Shoesmith has cast doubt on Ofsted’s report, asserting that its authors had been leant on after they had conducted their research and found her department to be under pressure but in good

David Blackburn

Meeting Christine Lagarde

The FT has been speaking to Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister tipped to become managing director of the IMF. A few salient points emerge from it. First, she has more than a dash of hard-nosed Gallic defiance. Responding to the charge of a lack of a qualification in economics, she reiterated the comments she made to the Today programme earlier in the years: “From what I know of the job, I think I can do it. One of the qualities that people recognise in me is my ability to reach out, to try to build a consensus, to bring people to the common interest while still being a very firm

David Blackburn

Shoesmith strikes at Balls and executive power

Sharon Shoesmith cut into Ed Balls on the Today programme this morning. She said: “Why don’t we ask Ed Balls why he acted on November 12, 2008 when he knew for 15 months that Peter Connelly had died and I was working with his officials, I was going to the government office, they were reading the draft reports. Haringey council knew all about it. We examined the conduct of our social workers, we found a disciplinary against them, but they weren’t sacked – all of that was open and clear and on the table and everyone knew everything about that. It wasn’t until the spat in the House of Commons

James Forsyth James Forsyth

You couldn’t make it up: Crook freed from jail to look after his five kids

Sometimes I wonder if the judiciary and the human rights culture are just trying to make Richard Littlejohn’s columns look understated. Today’s story in the Daily Mail about how a convicted criminal has been freed from prison because of the effect that his incarceration was having on his children is in real ‘you couldn’t make it up’ territory. Wayne Bishop, a father of five, had been sentenced to eight months behinds bars after pleading guilty to burglary and dangerous driving. But he has now been freed after judges worried about the effect of his imprisonment on his childcare arrangements given that he and his partner have split up and Bishop has

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 May 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2697 you were invited to take as your first line ‘How do I hate you? Let me count the ways’ and continue in verse for up to a further 15. Readers are no doubt familiar with the  given first line, which comes, with an impertinent tweak, from the penultimate sonnet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sequence of 44, ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. And, on the subject of tweaks, Gerard Benson tells me that if you look at EBB’s manuscript in the British Museum Reading Room you will see that line 12 of the poem originally read not, ‘I love thee with the

Angela Huth

How does it feel?

A couple of years ago I was walking across a ploughed field when I was struck by such a searing pain in my left foot that I fell to the ground, moaning in harmony with the rooks above me. After half an hour of massaging my toes I was able to hobble the half-mile home. As this seemed to be no ordinary pain, I went to the doctor, who had no exact explanation, but referred me to the hospital. ‘A damaged nerve,’ they said. ‘Needs to be scanned.’ But three appointments were cancelled, and the foot attacks came frequently, so with reluctance I went privately to an orthopaedic consultant in

Helen Wood

Diary of a call girl

It emerged today that Helen Wood is going to set to appear on the next series of Big Brother, which begins this evening. Here’s her Spectator Diary from 2011, in which she explains how the daughter of a university lecturer ended up as a call girl.  A few years ago I was offered £450,000 to tell the world that Wayne Rooney had paid to sleep with me, but I didn’t take it. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. Whatever impression Rooney and his sort give, escort girls are usually very discreet. A good reputation is invaluable. In my case, I knew that both my work and my home life would

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is there anything more sickening than the red-top press swathed in moral indignation?

At last we crusaders for truth can reveal exactly what happened when a famous footballer who is married met the former Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. I suppose you could guess what happened, but it’s better to know for sure, isn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ll use phrases like ‘asked her to perform a sex act’ rather than crudely spelling it out, so there’ll be nothing to disquiet the kiddies. It will probably involve us — the crusaders for truth — shelling out a few quid to do so, to pay off one or another source of information about how and where the ‘sex act’ was performed and whether it was

Michael Henderson

Philip Roth is a genius

Carmen Callil isn’t ‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up’. That, most sensible people will agree, is a proper response to the world’s follies. But when a gong is struck for outstanding work over a lifetime then there can be merit in it, which is why we should give three resounding cheers to the judges who last week awarded the Man International Booker Prize to Philip Roth. Those bent on mischief might go further, and offer an additional cheer to those judges who, by nominating Roth, outraged their fellow arbiter Carmen Callil. A self-appointed guardian of ‘international’ writing, Miss Callil stood down

Anonymous

Target men

I am a long-serving officer in the Metropolitan Police and my passion for the job is matched only by my frustration and anger at what I see going on around me. The Met is capable of, and frequently achieves, great things. But this happens in spite of the way it is run, not because of it. For years, I have watched as the service has been disfigured by the need to satisfy targets dictated from above, fundamentally changing the way police do their job. What follows is my attempt to bring to light what is happening inside the Met, and doubtless in constabularies throughout the land. The Metropolitan Police Service

James Delingpole James Delingpole

There will never be justice if we leave it to lawyers

The big question this week is: ‘Should Giles Coren be bound, gagged, shackled and sentenced to life imprisonment in the torture block of the sexual offenders’ wing of Black Beach maximum security prison in Equatorial Guinea, there to become the plaything of Mad “Mamba” Mbigawanga, the Man-Rapist Giant of Malabo?’ Well, obviously, when you put it like that, the answer’s obvious. The big question this week is: ‘Should Giles Coren be bound, gagged, shackled and sentenced to life imprisonment in the torture block of the sexual offenders’ wing of Black Beach maximum security prison in Equatorial Guinea, there to become the plaything of Mad “Mamba” Mbigawanga, the Man-Rapist Giant of

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: For the love of Barcelona

Fans of Robert Parker’s indispensable Spenser series of thrillers will be familiar with the character of Hawk. Fans of Robert Parker’s indispensable Spenser series of thrillers will be familiar with the character of Hawk. Big, bald, black, and always in shades, he is Spenser’s enforcer, an avenging angel of ineffable hardness. Now look at the wide angle shots of President Obama’s touring entourage and you will see Hawk made real in the shape of Reggie Love, the President’s go-to guy for a range of product from painkillers to iPod tunes to the best cheese for a burger. Love was a first-rate college basketball player who wanted to play pro football