Society

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Rage, rage against the dying of the lightbulb

When I was young, all the traffic lights in central London had black iron flambeaux, about the size of your forearm, at the top of each pole. I doubt many people even noticed the decoration consciously, but it lent a faintly monumental touch to otherwise utilitarian ironwork – like those magnificent bronze fish wrapped around the streetlights along the Thames Embankment. In however small a way the flambeaux gave our metropolis the air of an imperial city. Ornamentation in the stone of buildings or the steel of street furniture does this: because, and precisely because, it serves no purpose but to beautify or dignify. Because it is (strictly speaking) useless

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Hats off to Berlusconi. It takes a lot of energy to misbehave so thoroughly

I don’t know how Silvio Berlusconi finds the time. I don’t know how Silvio Berlusconi finds the time. Me, I’m ragged. Get up, write a bit, wash, eat, feed the child, stagger to nursery, stumble to work, stay there, go home, eat again, fall asleep on sofa watching The Killing; that’s pretty much my lot. But him? If it’s all to be believed? Wake, kick voluptuous Tunisian out of bed, dye hair, eat enough to stay fat, meet dental hygienist, make her a weather girl, meet weather girl, make her equalities minister, run Italy, bribe someone, get bribed by someone, Skype Colonel Gaddafi and say one thing, Skype Nicolas Sarkozy

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 23 April 2011

Kenya Marriage can be hard for all of us. A friend of mine, we’ll call him Charles, works far away from home. One day he told me his wife had left him. ‘She has gone back to her mother. What’s worse, she left the children behind and there is nobody taking care of them.’ I felt terrible when he said they were having to cook, clean and get themselves to school. I asked, ‘How can I help?’ He asked me to mediate. I soon discovered the problem came down to the bride price. When Charles had married some years before, he had agreed to pay a dowry of three cows

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: The obsession with things

I’m off to California next week to visit relatives in Los Angeles, but we are flying into Phoenix first. I’m off to California next week to visit relatives in Los Angeles, but we are flying into Phoenix first. I love Phoenix for quite a few reasons, not least the Botanical Gardens and the Frank Lloyd Wright home at Taliesin West. But best of all is the sneaky right-wing thrill you get from driving into Scottsdale along a handsome road called Goldwater Boulevard, named after the libertarian Arizona senator and presidential candidate Barry. If you have libertarian inclinations (and I do), you’ll find yourself in good company online. Self-declared libertarians seem

Florence King

Reason vs romanticism

The American South? You don’t know the half of it Stand by. I am going to explain the American South, a subject that makes the quantum theory seem like child’s play. The first thing you must understand is that there is no South — there are two. One is the Upper South of horses, tobacco and Episcopalians; and the other is the Deep South of mules, cotton and Baptists. The second thing is that there is no mid-South. It’s a geographical term with no sociological undercurrents, used by climatologists and weather reporters to locate their own brand of undercurrents. The Upper South in its purest form consists of Maryland and

Koo Stark

Koo Stark’s Notebook

It was Ladies’ Day at the RAC yesterday, so I went with my friends and did a water aerobics class. It was Ladies’ Day at the RAC yesterday, so I went with my friends and did a water aerobics class. When I first started going to the RAC, ladies could only go as ‘the daughter of’ or ‘the wife of’. That all changed when some smart legally trained ‘daughter of’ brought a case against the club for sex discrimination. That’s what happens when you educate your daughters! Here’s a couple of questions for Spectator readers: would you rather your daughter brought home a first-class degree or a prince? Would you

Gerald Warner

‘We’re all doomed!’

Scotland is staring into a £4.5 billion black hole ‘Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering…’ That description of the Scots by Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, in the early 3rd century testifies to the consistency of the Scottish character over 1,800 years. Today the Scots are so democratic they have saddled themselves with three tiers of government, while their enduring taste for plunder has progressed from the crudity of border reiving to the sophistication of the Barnett Formula. Scotland has successfully reversed the fiscal arrangements that would have been familiar to Cassius Dio in the days when outlying nations

James Delingpole James Delingpole

If only I’d known when I was younger that my background was my greatest strength

One of the things I’ve belatedly realised now I’ve acquired the wisdom of age is that I’ve always been anti-establishment. One of the things I’ve belatedly realised now I’ve acquired the wisdom of age is that I’ve always been anti-establishment. If only I’d known this at school I would have had far more fun than I did because I wouldn’t have wasted any of my time trying to smarm and behave my way into pointless jobs like ‘library prefect’, ‘group leader’ and ‘head of house’. I could have got drunk and smoked fags and got to at least third base with the naughty girls, like all the cool kids did,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 23 April 2011

Glencore’s partners are not offering equityto you and me out of a sense of charity We’re all going to be investors in Glencore, whether we like it or not. If the flotation of this giant commodity and mining group goes ahead next month at the valuation currently indicated, it will leap straight into the upper reaches of the FTSE 100 — something that has not happened to any new share since the big privatisations of the 1980s. That means every major pension fund, and all those tracker funds and funds of funds that wealth managers love to stuff their clients into, will end up owning little bits of Glencore. The

A.N. Wilson

The man mountain of Fleet Street

A. N. Wilson has a queasy feeling that he won’t be re-reading the works of G. K. Chesterton for a while Yet another book on Chesterton! William Oddie is only half way through his immensely detailed two-volume biographical-cum-theological study of the man mountain of Fleet Street. Last year we had Aidan Nichols on Chesterton’s theology. And now Ian Ker comes with the familiar account of how the son of a Kensington estate agent, educated at St Paul’s and infected with the spirit of the Nineties, moved from being a Bedford Park aesthete-agnostic, through socialism and liberalism to distributism, and from unbelief to a broad, generous sympathy with the Anglo-Catholicism of

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: the Queen’s Birthday

It was, I’m sure CoffeeHousers noticed, the Queen’s 85th Birthday yesterday. So here, as a belated commemoration, is an item from the archives that is a even more archival than usual. You see, it’s an article that was written on the event of the Queen’s 80th Birthday in 2006 — and it looks back at the issue of The Spectator that was published when the Queen was actually born, in 1926. Mary Wakefield, our deputy editor, is the author: The week the Queen was born, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 8 April 2006 It was press day at The Spectator when Queen Elizabeth II was born. The printers had set the

The Spectator

The week that was | 22 April 2011

Here are some of the posts that were published on Spectator over the past week: Fraser Nelson makes an appeal for Easter reading suggestions. James Forsyth reveals that Ed Miliband will hire tails for the Royal Wedding, and says that there are more attacks on Clegg to come. Peter Hoskin watches the NHS furore rumble on, and notices Nick Clegg reaffirming the coalition’s wedding vows. Peter Hoskin and Jonathan Jones compare Osborne’s and Obama’s cuts. David Blackburn says that tuition fees are set to spoil the government’s summer, and reports on the latest EU budget row. Daniel Korski argues that the Libya intervention needs to be stepped up. Rod Liddle

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The Libyan intervention needs to be stepped up

The government is rightly proud of the Libya intervention. Not only did it save thousands of lives in Benghazi but it was conducted in way that learnt the lessons of the past. The Foreign Secretary took pains to get a UN resolution, making the mission legal, and kept the shape-shifting Arab League committed throughout. But unless the government is now  willing to unlearn the lessons of the past, and act both more unilaterally and even illegally, its multilateral, UN-sanctioned action may have been for nothing. For Misrata is now getting the punishment that had been planned for Benghazi. The town is being destroyed in a seige that looks like the

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

The NHS furore rumbles on

Another story to sour Andrew Lansley’s cornflakes this morning: the King’s Fund has released a “monitoring report” into the NHS which highlights, among other things, that hospital waiting times are at a 3-year high. The figures they have used are available on the Department of Health website — but unshackled from Excel files, and transcribed into graph form (see above, click for a larger version), they are now, it seems, a discussion point. The Today Programme tried to bait a couple of NHS chieftains on the matter earlier. The worst they could extract from either of them was that, “[waiting times] haven’t got massively longer now, but people are worried

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Billy Boys are Back in Town

Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, is not normally an especially sympathetic figure. But so what? Here’s the big news from Scotland today: Three prominent figures associated with Celtic Football Club have been sent potentially lethal home-made letter bombs. Celtic manager Neil Lennon, his QC Paul McBride and the politician Trish Godman, a Celtic supporter, were each sent a package containing improvised explosives with the power to kill or severely wound the recipient. Can we agree that this is getting out of hand? Assassination attempts – which is what this is – open a new front in football’s most depressing rivalry. At this point it’s customary to blame both sides and

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An appeal for reading suggestions

Inspired by Cameron, I’m off on an EasyJet holiday to Spain this week — and would like to make an appeal to CoffeeHousers for Easter reading suggestions. When I did likewise before, the suggestions were good enough to keep me in reading material for the rest of the year (especially The Sixty Minute Father, which I now keep close-to-hand in case I ever believe what it says is The Fundamental Lie: that “a quieter time is coming”). Anyway, I’m on a political (and digital) detox session, and I’ve read almost every Scandi crime book going — so suggestions outside of that would be appreciated. As it stands, I’ve already packed

David Blackburn

Councils can seriously damage your health

There’s a fantastic post by Nicholas Timmins at the FT’s Westminster blog. Using the example of Enfield Council, which has just blocked moves to close failing wards in a local hospital, Timmins argues that councils commissioning healthcare is a recipe for disaster: ‘The reason council commissioning of care is a not a good idea is that it mixes representation without taxation. Councillors have democratic legitimacy. But they don’t raise the money for the NHS. So over the long term, giving them responsibility for commissioning is simply a recipe for councils to say there is not enough money in the system and to blame central government for the NHS’s deficiencies, rather

Alex Massie Alex Massie

We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Mini-Van

Sure, the Scottish edition of the Sun splashes with Play It Again Salm as it endorses the SNP but its Irish sibling has a much better story:   River Beast’s Rampage and Farmer Attacked by Furbag are just extra, glorious, titillating teasers. But this is what happens when you forsake the Horse Outside for a van… [Thanks to my old friend Ciaran Byrne]

Monday

David Blackburn

Lansley needs to get his quiet friends talking

Is Andrew Lansley hearing rather than listening? Dame Barbara Hakin, one of the Department of Health’s national managing directors, has written a letter to some GPs that suggests the pace of health reform will not be affected by the ‘legislative pause’. Hakin writes: ‘Everyone within the Department of Health is very aware of the support shown by the GP community to date and we have been struck by the energy and enthusiasm demonstrated in pathfinders across the country. Therefore, although the Government has taken the opportunity of a natural break in the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, we are very keen that the momentum we have built

David Blackburn

Standard & Poor’s bombshell

A mute, almost disbelieving response (except on the Markets) has met Standard & Poor’s announcement that the US government’s fiscal profile may become ‘measurably weaker’. The credit rating agency has put a ‘negative outlook’ on the US’s AAA rating; the accompanying report said:    “We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policy makers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013. If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.” Robert Peston tweets, “S&P’s announcement that outlook