Society

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cutting through the BS

If the Big Society were a horse, it would be shot. The wounds are too deep, the contamination too great, its legs are broken. And, worse, the Big Society is giving a good idea a bad name. David Cameron tried manfully today, but we only ever hear about the BS (as most Tory MPs call it) when he’s trying to relaunch it. No agenda can be sustained with such thin support. It has become hopelessly confused as an issue. Myths have crept in that volunteering relies on heavy state spending, so Cameron is talking out of his hat. It ain’t so — Jonathan Jones did the digging — but people

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Memo to Mr CTB esq. (Strictly confidential)

Dear Mr CTB, We often say that the best advice a solicitor can give a client is to tell them when to back off from a confrontation. The time has come to give it to you. You must know that your cause is hopeless, and our so-called privacy injunction a laughing stock. Your name is all over Twitter, Facebook and the Scottish press. Millions of people, including your team-mates and your wife, know about your affair with Imogen Thomas. Frankly, if we had broadcast your liaison in adverts on national television, we would have made a better job of protecting your secrets.      You think it cannot get any

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What the attorney general needs to do

I’m sure that all CoffeeHousers know who the footballer is with the super injunction preventing newspapers from publishing anything about his affair with the Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. But if you didn’t, the papers would have made pretty odd reading over the past few days because the press keeps making little in jokes that are only funny if you know the player’s identity. David Cameron this morning announced that he knew the identity of the player.  This highlights one of many ironies of the situation, which is that far more people are now aware of who the errant footballer is than would have been if the news had just

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 23 May – 29 May

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

Going big on the Big Society

You certainly can’t fault David Cameron for his perseverance. Six years after pushing the thinking behind the Big Society in his pitch for the Tory leadership, and three relaunches of the idea later, he is still at it in a speech today. He will, apparently, stress that the Big Society is not some nebulous nothingness — but, rather, “as gritty and as important as it gets”. And as if to underline the point, the PM will announce some solid new measures to bolster his grand projet, such as £40 million of extra funding for volunteering. Cameron is, I suspect, making this case for two main reasons: to counter criticism of

Sunday

Martin Bright

The Orwell Prize, DJ Taylor and the intern debate

On Tuesday, I presented the Orwell Prize for journalism to brave Jenni Russell, who used the occasion to go public on her battle against cancer. She had not been well enough to apply for the award herself, but her son had selected her best articles and she was a worthy winner. Here’s the official tribute to her work: “Jenni Russell was the stand-out journalist in an outstanding field. Her empathy for the world beyond Westminster gives her writing an extra dimension often lacking in political insiders. There is an overriding humanity to her work, whether she is covering the death-throes of the last Labour government or the birth-pangs of the

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 May 2011

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers? Three of my sons are revising for exams at the moment, all in the face of the usual sorts of distractions from social networking sites, cricket and football score alerts, to say nothing of emails pinging into their laptops. I was therefore delighted when they told me that an electronic opportunity to resist these temptations now exists. Two of my sons have installed it into their own MacBooks. Apparently you just go to Google and download ‘self-control app’. This application enables you to set a limit, say two hours, during which all access to time-wasting social networking sites and emails are

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Held captive by Captain Kidd

I think I may soon have enough material for another comic memoir, this one charting my increasingly accident-prone career as a political campaigner. I’m not talking about setting up the West London Free School, which is still going swimmingly, but the strange direction my career has taken as a consequence of the political platform the school has given me. In How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in Westminster, I would blunder from one disaster to another, giving Gordon Brown a run for his money as the Mr Bean of politics. Who knows, it could even become the basis for an amusing sitcom in which Simon Pegg reprises his role

Alan Judd

Motoring: Company man

There recently left these shores a benign and fecund angel of the automotive realm, Dr Franz Josef Paefgen, retiring chairman and CEO of Bentley. Benign because he was unfailingly polite and helpful and understood the Bentley tradition and the sort of people who buy into it. Indeed, he empathised with a wider tradition than that: he must have been the only Bentley (or any other?) CEO who would sometimes drive to work in his Morris Minor. Fecund because, despite his appreciation of tradition, he was thoroughly modern in his approach to engineering and product development. It would be an exaggeration to say that without Dr P, as he was known,

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 21 May 2011

‘Come on, man, wake up! What are you doing lying here like this, dressed like this?’ He was a young black man, confident, street-wise, and he sounded let-down, disappointed. I think it was the suit and tie. He didn’t like to see good clothes treated like that. The tie meant I was a conservative type with a comfortable home to go to, and I had no business making an exhibition of myself like this. I sat up. His minicab was right over there, he said. He could take me home. Or, better still, there was a cheap hotel just around the corner. He could walk me to the end of

Taki

High life | 21 May 2011

Orlando A neutron bomb hit this place just as I got off the aeroplane, killing all humans but leaving the buildings standing. It was a horrid, unpardonable crime, and for it I blame the scientists. But not for the reasons you think. They should have done it the other way round. Kill the buildings, save the humans, however brain-dead they are in Orlando. I knew we were in trouble the moment I deplaned. There were five of us, two competitors and three coaches. We were in Orlando for the US national judo championships, yours truly defending champion in the 70 and over class. The neutron-bomb landscape was the first thing

The Spectator

Letters | 21 May 2011

The full Scottish Sir: Iain Martin (‘How to save the Union’, 14 May) has an excellent appreciation of the issues, bar one: what Scotland seeks is a return to statehood such as other nations have. The lack is grievous. Scotland does not have representation in important international bodies. We lack a commissioner in the European Commission and both diplomatic and consular services worldwide. Fishing is not within our control. England, anticipating events, recently gerrymandered the sea boundaries, tilting them northeastward, to her advantage in oil and gas. There is more to independence than separation from England. Helen C. Bovey Edinburgh Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 14 May) claims that

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern: Philosophy rules

Most universities have decided to pitch their fees at the maximum allowable of £9,000 a year. One hopes this is one part of a Cunning Plan to ensure that Plato’s vision of a real education is realised. Most universities have decided to pitch their fees at the maximum allowable of £9,000 a year. One hopes this is one part of a Cunning Plan to ensure that Plato’s vision of a real education is realised. Plato was once invited by groupies to come to Sicily and try to turn the tyrant Dionysius into his ideal ruler. Plato gave it a go, but it did not quite work out first time round.

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 21 May 2011

‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. ‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. I had only asked why everyone was suddenly using the phrase hone in on instead of home in on. It was the

The Spectator

Barometer | 21 May 2011

Royal reception — The first visit to Ireland by a British monarch in 100 years has focused attention on the last, by George V on his coronation tour in July 1911. He remarked on the warmth of his reception, even though this was just five years before the Easter Rising. — One visit that went less well, at least behind the scenes, was that of Victoria in 1900. The Admiralty lost the royal yacht, believing it to be in Dublin when it was off the south coast of England. And a wooden pier at Kingstown Harbour was completed with minutes to spare, and was ‘most unsatisfactory’ according to the Ministry

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 May 2011

Home Police decided to investigate an allegation that Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, had persuaded someone else to take penalty points for speeding that he should have incurred. In parliament, Mr Huhne outlined plans for Britain to halve carbon emissions by 2027. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, outlined plans for a new House of Lords to contain 300 members, 80 per cent of them elected. Two teenagers were convicted of murder and three of manslaughter for the killing of Sofyen Belamouadden, aged 15, at Victoria Station in London last year. Mothercare announced the closure of a quarter of its shops. Catholics in England and Wales were told by their

The Spectator

Lead article: Charity, not waste

The British are a generous people. We donate more to humanitarian causes than anyone else in Europe, and by some margin. The average Brit gives twice as much as a Norwegian, three times more than a Belgian, six times more than a German and seven times more than a Frenchman. All told, British households send about £4 billion a year to overseas charities — more than any people in the world, in fact, apart from the Americans. So it is by no means clear why David Cameron believes that, in the middle of a fiscal crisis, he should extract a further £4 billion from us through the tax system and

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 21 May 2011

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2696 you were invited to submit a dialogue in verse between two body parts, composed on the occasion of a hangover. Kingsley Amis described the opening of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as the best literary representation of a hangover, though many might argue that the crown belongs to Amis himself for his hilarious account of Jim Dixon’s self-inflicted wretchedness. My favourite is Ogden Nash’s opening to ‘They Won’t Believe, on New Year’s Eve, That New Year’s Day Will Come What May’: ‘How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,/ And it is the result of a certain turbulence in

Carrie Fox

Welcome to the jungle

Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a political ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. For a few months, he ignored me as I busied away researching stats. Then, during what should have been a routine working lunch, the searchlight of his wandering eye settled on me and out of the blue he declared passionate love: ‘Say you love me too. I just can’t live without you.’ This was both flattering and confusing. Why now? Why me? This famous man had a devoted wife and a small daughter and

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The pathology of the politician

Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics? Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness