Society

Sunday

Will Mount

Spotify Sunday: The Stones in the Sixties

The Rolling Stones have a credibility problem. It’s nothing to do with their longevity or their wealth. It’s to do with their lead singer. Granted, he is a great frontman with a distinctive voice — but his strutting persona and his dancing-by-numbers gives the impression of a politician going through the gears in a speech to the party conference.   According to no less an authority than Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair was so star-struck by Mick Jagger at their first  meeting that he blurted out, ‘I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me’. That Tony Blair now looks like he could be Mick Jagger’s dad doesn’t change the

Peter Hoskin

Lansley fights back, sorta

Pause, listen, engage and … push back. That just about sums up Andrew Lansley’s article for the Sunday Express today, as well as the government’s general effort to reconstruct and repackage its shaky NHS reforms. Which is to say, the Health Secretary makes sure to mix reassurance (“There is no more important institution in this country than the NHS”) with resolve (“The NHS is not some kind of museum”) for his Sunday sermon. He dwells on the failures of the Labour years, particularly the proliferation of bureaucrats ahead of doctors and nurses. And he even suggests — although one should always be wary of this sort of numerical soothsaying —

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Even Goons Should Be Allowed to Burn Books

As a general rule if you’re minded to burn books you’re probably trotting along the road towards losing whatever argument you may be having. You also look a fool. That was true of the nutters who burned The Satanic Verses and it’s true of Terry Jones and true of this chap too: A senior member of the BNP who burned a copy of the Qur’an in his garden has been arrested following an investigation by the Observer. Footage of the burning shows Sion Owens, 40, from south Wales and a candidate for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly elections, soaking the Qur’an in kerosene and setting fire to it. A video clip

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Working-Class People Can Like Opera Too, You Know

Brother Korski is right to draw attention to Rachel Sylvester’s interview (£) with Unite’s Len McCluskey and right too to note that his defence of Castro’s island gulag* is indefensible. But there’s more that’s wrong with it than that and not all of that is McCluskey’s fault. Consider these lines: He would choose tea and scones at Fortnum and Mason over beer and sandwiches in a smoke-filled room. He is a fan of the romantic poets — “I love Byron, Keats and Shelley, I’m a romantic at heart” — and takes a feminist interpretation of Christina Rossetti. He is a theatre aficionado — “I do like Shakespeare, I’ve probably seen

Saturday

Charlotte Metcalf

Heavenly simplicity

Borgo Egnazia in Puglia opened last year and immediately gained a reputation as one of Europe’s most spectacular holiday resorts, not least thanks to its cookery school under the tutelage of the resort’s executive chef, Mario Musoni. Until recently Musoni had his own Michelin-starred restaurant outside Milan. When I asked why he didn’t seem unhappy to be uprooted from his hometown relatively late in life, he grinned and replied: ‘This is where the best food is. Milan’s vegetables come from down here. Puglia is the garden of Italy.’ Indeed, Borgo Egnazia is surrounded by orchards, olive groves and vegetables thrusting up from rich soil. There is also a daily supply

The Spectator

Letters | 9 April 2011

Expensive manners Sir: Ivor Roberts says that Oxford University is ‘taking the very best, whatever their background’ — and is not to blame if state schools no longer produce the very best (‘Oxford under siege’, 2 April). And yet studies have found that state-school pupils perform better at Oxford than their privately educated peers, relative to GCSE results. When his university is admitting as many state-school duds as private ones, we’ll know that its admissions tutors are no longer swayed by expensive manners at interview. For now, that remains open to doubt. Benjamin Rockbird London SE15 Cuts tactics Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 2 April) quotes the late, great Auberon Waugh

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 9 April 2011

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things. How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 April 2011

Q. We normally drive guests departing our house in France to our nearest station for trains connecting them to Eurostar. One departing guest, an attractive divorcee, had half an hour to kill, so I suggested a croissant and coffee, which meant lugging her very heavy case over to the café and back again to the station where, as I sank exhaustedly onto the bench with the case between us, my elbow activated a battery-driven item in the suitcase. Toothbrush? — I wondered — or something of a more intimate nature? Was it polite to ignore the buzzing, and feign deafness? Or should I have mentioned it, risking some embarrassed scrabbling

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Reading between the lines

On Tuesday I received an invitation from the Women’s Institute asking me if I’d be prepared to participate in a debate at their annual general meeting in Liverpool on 8 June. They want me to speak ‘in opposition to a motion urging central government to maintain support for local libraries’. You have to take your hat off to the Labour party spin machine. It has successfully propagated the myth that the government is directly responsible for the closure of local libraries. In my reply to the WI, I said I’d be delighted to speak in its debate but pointed out it was a bit nonsensical to urge the government to

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 April 2011

Nothing makes me want to move to Cobham more than a letter from Lambeth Council that begins like this: ‘Dear householder: We have made changes to our recycling and refuse services. These changes are the result of a waste strategy that we have been developing over the last two years with your help.’ I hadn’t realised that I had been helping Lambeth Council with anything, least of all a waste strategy. In fact, I would go so far as to say I had been under the impression that I had been very deliberately trying not to help Lambeth Council with anything, especially its waste strategy. But apparently this is not

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 April 2011

After Cow Girl abruptly terminated our relationship, there was a long radio silence between us, during which time I was fairly demoralised. I’d thought I was lovable. If anyone could be bothered to look hard enough, or dig deep enough, I’d always thought, they’d find gold. But Cow Girl had struck no pay dirt, knew with an old sixty-niner’s instinct that it wasn’t worth looking any further, and she had got out with an almost indecent haste. The characters in Sex and the City had a handy mathematical formula for calculating how long it takes to recover from a broken relationship. Work out how long the relationship lasted, they said,

Taki

High life | 9 April 2011

New York I went to see a revival of Arcadia in the beautiful Ethel Barrymore Theatre last Saturday night, and it made my day. Tom Stoppard is our greatest playwright, and I think Arcadia is his best play, although a couple of other gems of his come close. I was with Marine Major Michael Warring and Marine Major Chris Meyers (retd) and their girls. Both officers saw action in Iraq, both are extremely well educated and well read, and both think that Tom Stoppard is the greatest thing since the Marine Corps. There’s nothing like Sir Tom’s intelligent wordplay and mind-boggling knowledge to put one in a great mood, until

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 April 2011

Intern affairs — Nick Clegg called for internships to be made available to students from poor backgrounds, although it was then revealed that the young Clegg was himself parachuted into an internship at a bank thanks to a phone call from his dad. — The word ‘internship’ first entered public consciousness in Britain after the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998: she was a White House intern who ended up in unexpectedly close contact with the president, Bill Clinton. — Internships can be first traced to the US in 1879. But the concept is French: the word is derived from ‘interne’, an assistant doctor. The world behind bars The number of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 9 April 2011

Home Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, told the Commons that the government was delaying plans to reform the National Health Service that would give GPs responsibility for commissioning health services. ‘It is not just a question of presentation,’ said Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister. ‘This is also a question of making substantive changes to the legislation.’ After announcing government policy on social mobility, Clegg mentioned that informal internships for young people in Whitehall would be banned because it should not be a matter of ‘someone who’s met somebody at the tennis club or the golf club’, even though he had once benefited from a intern placement. The government announced

The Spectator

Leader: Schools out – for ever

Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove. Anyone who has recently bought a house next to a good school — they typically command a £20,000 premium — has good reason to loathe Michael Gove. The Education Secretary may well be about to bring the whole catchment area game to an end. Quietly, but at a surprising rate, schools are fleeing the control of local councils and becoming academies: independent, but within the state sector. What was a trickle under the Labour years is turning into a flood. This time last

Dan Jellinek

Apéritif

It’s been a long cold winter, but here we are at last in the blossom-laden, golden days of spring. It’s been a long cold winter, but here we are at last in the blossom-laden, golden days of spring. There’s plenty of seasonal produce for food and wine lovers to enjoy within our pages, much to excite and inspire, and maybe even one or two things to annoy — if you run a supermarket. You may take sides with the inimitable Jason Yapp as he rails against the iniquities of the ways we are sold wine by our retailing giants, in which case Dave Waddell’s ‘How to… liven up the supermarket

Hattie Ellis

An A-Z of Scoff

Q IS FOR QUANTITY The problem with food and health can now be summed up in one phrase: ‘too much’. More than six out of 10 men and five out of 10 women in the UK are overweight or obese. Talk to medics such as cancer experts and they say it’s especially important not to put on weight around your middle — the dreaded middle-age spread. How to lose it? ‘Eat less’ is obvious — but too simple. Increasingly, obesity experts think the environmental aspect of overeating also needs to be addressed. In the 1990s, the phrase ‘obesogenic society’ — in which we in the West live — was coined.

Jason Yapp

Rage against the tagine: Supermarket swipe

Wine is one of life’s great joys – so why, asks Jason Yapp, do major retailers do such a dismal job of flogging it? I have several items to declare: bags of prejudice, a heap of self-interest, a smidgen of latent snobbery and chips on both shoulders. But even accounting for all of the above it can’t just be me who finds buying wine in a supermarket a joyless, soulless and utterly dispiriting experience. Wine is one of nature’s most precious gifts, and its acquisition should be a joy, not an ordeal. Most of the major multiples employ a smattering of Masters of Wine (of whom there are only 288

Frank Armstrong

Mountain miracles

Lamb is a foodstuff intimately connected with Wales. Long subjected to cheap humour, Welsh farmers are now enjoying the last laugh: since 2006, the European Union has conferred on Wales the distinction of a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), making it the equal of products such as Parma ham. So when the opportunity arose for me to learn about different aspects of its production, it was too good to miss: and first, I decided to acquaint myself with its terroir by climbing Mount Snowdon. A blustery Friday morning seemed an unlucky day to climb one of the highest mountains in Britain, but I trusted in a favourable weather forecast which, for

Dan Jellinek

Pie in the Sky

Airline food does not enjoy the best of reputations, but with a new breed of on-board cooking and menu selection systems now emerging, its future could be a journey back to basics – with boiled egg and soldiers. Dan Jellinek reports Airline food has long had a poor reputation — odd-tasting, odd-sized and arriving at odd times. In recent years, however, innovations in preparation and ingredients have seen huge improvements, not only towards the front of planes, but in the cheap seats where most of us travel as well. To understand the challenges faced by airlines in serving any halfway decent food at all to passengers, you have to grasp the logistics. British Airways serves