Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 5 March 2011

Q. A talented young man helps me out as an intern. Sadly I can’t personally offer him full-time work but I have a close friend who will be recruiting shortly. This man tells me he will be looking for young people who are bilingual and super-bright — but that he prefers school leavers to graduates as he wants to ‘mould’ them. The work he is offering is interesting, but although my intern is bilingual and superbright, he is a 24-year-old graduate and, quite rightly, self-confident and fully aware of his own worth. Should I tell my intern to pretend to be humble and mouldable? Or should I let him emanate

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: They said we’d never get this far

One of the most important milestones in the course of setting up a taxpayer-funded school is the funding agreement. This is a contract between the Secretary of State for Education and the trustees of the school setting out the terms on which he agrees to finance the school. He can terminate the agreement in certain exceptional circumstances, but shutting down schools is never popular and he’s usually required to give seven years’ notice. For that reason, it’s not something he enters into lightly. He has to satisfy himself that the school can meet various educational standards, that it has found a suitable site and that there will be sufficient parental

Alan Judd

Motoring: Glamorous Ghost

The motor industry likes anniversaries because they help sell cars. This year is the centenary of Ford’s assembly plant at Trafford Park in Manchester — its first outside North America — which produced the Model T from kits. It’s also the 50th birthday of the E-Type Jaguar (how many times will we see the word ‘iconic’ alongside that this year?). My favourite, however, is the shapely Nelly Thornton, immortalised in 1911 as the Spirit of Ecstasy that has adorned most Rolls-Royces ever since. It’s not proven that Eleanor Thornton, mistress of Lord Montagu and secretly mother of his child, modelled for Charles Sykes, creator of the Spirit, but rumour becomes

Robin Oakley

The turf: Racing heart

Expensive research projects don’t always produce the results anticipated by those who commission them. Take the cosmetics company which launched a study into what perfume drove men wild and came back with the simple answer: bacon. It made me think of the millions of dollars America’s aeronautics industry spent on perfecting a ballpoint pen that would write upside-down in space. Meanwhile, the Soviet astronauts made their notes at any angle in pencil. I wasn’t surprised, though, to hear that recent medical research had revealed that horseracing — apart from being the most sociable sport of them all — is more exciting than football and rugby. So confident of the findings

Melissa Kite

Real life | 5 March 2011

As soon as I realised my lucky whip was missing I should have put the horse back in her stable. But my riding companion was tacked up and ready to go and so in a moment of madness I decided that it was time to stop this superstitious nonsense. I grabbed a spare whip with no known lucky qualities and mounted the mare. We set off for Effingham Common where all went well until we came to the stretch where the horses know they are going to gallop. They started to snort and jump up and down, my friend shouted out to ask if I was ready, I shouted back

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 5 March 2011

‘I’ve got some really nice MDMA. Really, really nice,’ he added in a gravelly, slightly sinister undertone. Unusual, this. It’s not often these days that Trev gives a ringing endorsement like that. Normally, he’s scathing about drugs. Not about the morality or the dangers but about the poor quality. He’s like our local consumer watchdog. Don’t get him started about the local coke, for example. It’s all rubbish, he says. Ask him does he know anybody that’s got any coke and Trev laughs at you. Offer him some and he’s dismissive. So for Trev to mention that there’s a drug doing the rounds that is ‘really nice’ is really surprising.

Taki

High life | 5 March 2011

Sitting in my study, whose windows are covered in icicles, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come, the horizons are totally white, clouds and snowy peaks intermingling in a rhapsody of white, green and blue, the last two provided by pine and sky. Some 35 years ago, I took a ski-plane up the Jungfrau, landed on an upward slope and skied down to Kleine Scheidegg, a vertiginous trip that had one of our fellow skiers being sick while small avalanches hissed past us. Two people quit halfway down and asked for a chopper to pick them

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 5 March 2011

In Jerusalem last week to interview the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, I noticed several changes since my last visit 15 years ago. The first is that Israel is now quite rich. It even has its own gas and shale oil, prompting Netanyahu to tell me that he is being forced to revise his view that Moses, for all his heroic virtues, had been a ‘bad navigator’ in finding the only place in the Middle East with no natural resources. Israel used to be socialist — democratic, of course, but almost Soviet in its collectivist austerity. Today, the annual growth rate is nearly 8 per cent, even the West Bank looks

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 5 March 2011

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said, with regard to the crisis in Libya, ‘It is right for us to look at plans for a no-fly zone.’ Earlier, during his tour of the Middle East, he had apologised for the slow evacuation of British citizens from Libya. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, on being asked if he was in charge during Mr Cameron’s absence, said, ‘Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that.’ He hurried back from a family skiing holiday. The British embassy in Tripoli was abandoned. HMS Cumberland, a British frigate on its way back to Britain to be scrapped, rescued 207 people from Tripoli and returned

The Spectator

Leader: Fostering liberty

Fostering liberty If David Cameron were looking for a couple to symbolise the spirit of his Big Society, Eunice and Owen Johns of Derby would be ideal. At an age when many are settling down to retirement, they want nothing more than to carry on fostering, taking in troubled and abandoned children in return for modest financial reward but a huge sense of fulfilment. Described in one assessment by Derby City Council as ‘kind and hospitable people who would always do their best to make a child welcome and comfortable’, they are perfect role models, it might be imagined, at a time when there is a national shortage of 10,000

Alex Morton

The politics of planning

The ruckus over sending a high-speed railway roaring through some of Southern England’s most prized back gardens might be dominating the headlines. But another, separate row over planning is brewing. Behind closed doors, ministers are straining to develop a coherent plan to build the new houses that Britain – especially the South East needs – in a way that is politically feasible. Whitehall is wrestling with how to reform a planning system that has led to more expensive housing and offices, developments that are often ugly and cramped, and soaring costs for everyone – the government included. Housing benefit costs more than the Home Office and Ministry of Justice combined.

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 5 March 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2686 you were invited to submit a love letter from one fictional character to another. An entertaining postbag included this endearingly cack-handed overture from Bridget Jones to Rochester: ‘the word is you are sex on legs, and I’ve been rather short in that department lately. Well, for a bloody long time. Ever get depressed and want to do tons of smoking, drinking and comfort eating?’ (Basil Ransome-Davies). And this touching attempt by Long John Silver to woo Miss Havisham: ‘Though ’tis true there be as many women as fish in the sea, there’s none matchin’ you, nor another as stirs up

Dan Jones

Enduring love

Just over two years ago, Barack Obama delivered a calculated insult to Britain. He returned the Epstein bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to America by the British government as a token of solidarity following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Churchill had pride of place in the Oval Office between 2001 and 2009, a symbol of the tight-knit transatlantic relationship that had flourished under Tony Blair and George W. Bush. The rejection of the greatest Anglo-American in modern history in favour of a bust of Abraham Lincoln therefore seemed to mark a profound moment. It signalled the intent of a new and iconoclastic American regime to loosen

Justin Marozzi

Killer clowns

For 20 years I have seen Colonel Gaddafi every morning. He greets me with a faraway look in his eyes as I step into my study. It is one of those vast propaganda portraits, 5ft by 3ft, beloved by serial kleptocrat dictators. Looking youthful, almost serene, he sports a bouffant hairdo and military uniform with enough gold thread on his epaulettes to embroider a WMD. Behind him is a desert panorama of rolling sand dunes, date palms, camels and a huge pipe with torrents of water gushing out to create fertile agricultural land, along with combine harvesters, a flock of sheep and the sort of Harvest Festival fruit basket most

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Tendulkar’s Indian summer

First an apology: in common with commentators, pundits and blowhards across the land this column may well have given the impression that it viewed the cricket World Cup as a preposterously overblown farrago of money-making and greed, built around a tired format and symptomatic of the corrupt and decadent way most major sports are run. About as appetising in fact as a John Galliano lecture on the Talmud. However, in retrospect, it seems clear that the tournament is in fact a canvas for some of the most exciting cricket ever played, allowing the world’s best players to showcase their talent at will, and in a vibrant, multi-layered format demanding exquisite

David Horspool

Best shot

I have learnt to be wary of proselytising about football. The last time I tried was the final of the World Cup in South Africa, Spain versus the Netherlands, two teams with a reputation for skilful, attacking play and thoughtful rather than hopeful passing. These two sides, I explained to people whom football fans like to call ‘neutrals’ (it means they’re not interested), would show how the game is meant to be played at its most refined — especially if your most recent encounter with football was watching England’s concrete-booted performances in that tournament, culminating in ignominious exit against an unusually exuberant Germany. I was half right. Spain played their

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What luck to spend the night on a Victorian coal steamer on Lake Titicaca

Dawn on Tuesday last week found me bobbing around in a small sailing boat in Sydney Harbour, yards from the wash of two of the world’s greatest liners: Cunard’s ocean liner Queen Mary 2, and the company’s enormous new cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth. Dawn on Tuesday last week found me bobbing around in a small sailing boat in Sydney Harbour, yards from the wash of two of the world’s greatest liners: Cunard’s ocean liner Queen Mary 2, and the company’s enormous new cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth. They were entering the harbour together, and we’d sailed under Sydney Harbour Bridge to watch what the local papers called the Royal

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Liking the cut of Rommel’s uniform doesn’t make you a Nazi

‘Oh Daddy, please can I have that Nazi eagle badge. ‘Oh Daddy, please can I have that Nazi eagle badge. Oh please, oh please.’ We’re standing in the gift shop of the Baugnez ’44 memorial museum outside Malmedy, Belgium — me, Grandpa (aka my dad) and Girl — and we’re peering longingly into the original second world war memorabilia display case like Tiny Tims at Christmas. There are so many things we’d like if only we had the money: original GI helmets (€400 for a good one, with decent leather strap), packets of vintage Camels, tins of delousing powder, camouflage sticks, Wehrmacht pay books and, yes, Nazi eagle badges of

Kate Chisholm

Heart and soul

Soul Music is already into its 11th series on Radio 4 (Tuesdays, after lunch), but it just gets better and better. On TV the idea behind it (to explore the great works of the classical repertoire as well as pop songs and their impact on us) would by now seem jaded, the graphics tired, the personalities being interviewed too self-conscious. But it’s as if in this new series (produced by Rosie Boulton) we’re only just getting to the heart of the matter. Don’t miss this week’s programme which looks at a very familiar work, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, but takes us on a quite different journey as we listen to fragments

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business? | 5 March 2011

Freezing tyrants’ assets is easy, but how much will we send back to Tripoli? ‘Queen freezes Gaddafi family assets’ says a headline. That’ll teach the unhinged Libyan dictator to compare himself to our blessed monarch, as he did in one of his recent rants. But for all the spin about an emergency Privy Council meeting at Windsor Castle on Sunday (I’m imagining the Duke of Edinburgh popping in to say, ‘Do hurry up, dear, Top Gear’s started’), I’ll be interested to see just how much loot is eventually liberated from London accounts and returned to whoever forms a legitimate new government in Tripoli. Precedents are not encouraging. Our bankers remain