Society

Saturday

11 Dec 2010

The turf: Irish hopes

Life certainly had its moments at Newbury’s Hennessy meeting. Emma Lavelle’s Tocca Ferro had impressed many on his seasonal return at Ascot and looks set for a rewarding future after his victory in the sportingbet.com intermediate hurdle showed an increasing professionalism. Then there was the double with Sarde and Regal Approach for Kim Bailey, who has remained amiable through some cruel dips in fortune since his Cheltenham Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle winning days and who is now at last back in the form of old… Sarde was handled ably by stable amateur Charlie Greene, but Regal Approach was given a true professional’s ride by Sean Quinlan whose 19 winners

Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 December 2010

Insurance is a mug’s game. It begins with a sensible attempt to guard against catastrophe and escalates into risk hysteria. With the onset of the cold weather, I only wanted to take out some simple cover on my radiators, but I ended up in a frantic scramble to insure myself against everything bad or even just mildly annoying that could possibly happen to a human being, ever. Last winter, my boiler broke down so I made sure it was heavily insured this year. Naturally, therefore, my boiler did not break down this year. My radiators leaked. Or rather one of them leaked and fell off the wall for good measure.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 11 December 2010

My driver for the week had winkled me out of a crowded platform at Gangapur City railway station in Rajasthan and manhandled my heavy suitcase out to his spotless Toyota. I’d liked him immediately. He was stick-thin under his uniform, not very tall, and he had a spivvy little moustache and sideburns and neatly barbered jet-black hair. But it was the smile that first arrested me. It had a shriven, fatalistic quality that made him seem vulnerable yet supremely at peace with himself and the world. ‘I am simple man, sir,’ he told me when I’d tried to fathom his smile with personal questions. ‘I pray and I like my

Taki

High life | 11 December 2010

This is in praise of younger men. An outrage is about to take place at Preston Crown Court, where on 7 January 2011, a beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher, Sarah Pirie, will be sentenced for ‘abducting a 15-year-old’, who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my not so humble opinion, this is dead wrong. And if the ballet teacher is sent to prison, it will be the cruellest decision since the Athenians sent poor old Socrates down for corrupting the young. Mind you, the Brits have always been undersexed, underfinanced and, most of the time, under the table with drink, but this is ridiculous. Because is there a

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Funny business is a serious matter

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing jokes recently. Have you heard the one about the next wave of Irish immigrants? Luckily, they’ll be coming by Ryanair so they’ll be indefinitely delayed. Okay, it probably wouldn’t pass muster on Have I Got News For You, but it’s the best I can do. At this time of year I get asked to do a lot of after-dinner speaking and audiences don’t like it if you recycle old material. They want topical gags based on that day’s headlines. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I told the patrons of the Oxford Society at their annual dinner at the House of Commons last week. ‘I

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 11 December 2010

Q. Each year I help to organise a big Christmas event for charity. In October I write to all my rich friends inviting them to buy tickets. Some loyally do, others say they won’t be able to come but send donations anyway. A third lot don’t even bother to reply. Falling into this last category are three friends who, when I run into them, always insist that though they won’t be able to come they will definitely be sending a donation ‘because you are always so good at supporting my charity’. This is true. They do not realise that, as a trustee, I see the names of everyone who has

The Spectator

Letters | 11 December 2010

Assange’s intentions Sir: Your leading article (‘In praise of secrecy’, 4 December) notes that the latest round of WikiLeaks disclosures has ‘sent a worrying chill through diplomatic circles’, and made it more difficult for nations to co-operate. Quite so. But this is, as computer programmers sometimes say, a feature, not a bug. WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange is the author of a paper entitled ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies’, in which he identifies such easy informal communications, behind the backs of democratic electorates, as a key means through which authoritarian policies can be enacted. Charles Stross, the science-fiction writer whose blog drew my attention to the essay, declares that Assange is ‘defending

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 11 December 2010

There is no point in Mr Cameron snooping into how happy we are unless he believes government can do something about it. Greek and Romans would have been aghast. Greeks knew perfectly well what made people happy. Aristotle (384–322 bc) cites success, self-sufficiency, security, material and physical well-being and the capacity to safeguard them; ‘markers’ included good birth, creditable children, wealth, high status and a circle of respectable friends. But Greek intellectuals knew such happiness was rarely lasting. The lesson was never more perfectly expressed than by Herodotus (490–425 bc) in his story of the meeting between the wise Athenian Solon and Croesus, the richest man in the world. When

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 December 2010

Model towns Celebration, the town in Florida founded by Disney in the 1990s, has suffered its first murder and a suicide. Model towns have had mixed fortunes. —New Lanark, near Glasgow, was built by industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen as a model for utopian socialism. It narrowly escaped demolition in the 1960s and is now a World Heritage Site. —Chandigargh, India, was instituted by Nehru after partition as the modern face of India. It now has the highest per capita income of any Indian city, but it also has rising crime, recording 19 murders in 2007. —Brasilia, built in the isolated centre of Brazil between 1957 and 1960, survived

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 December 2010

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 11 December 2010

Home Katia Zatuliveter, 25, a Russian working for Mike Hancock, a Liberal Democrat MP who sits on the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, was arrested. She appealed against a deportation order, made after an investigation by MI5, and denied alleged links to Russian intelligence services. John Varley, the chief executive of Barclays, told a seminar: ‘It is possible that free-if-in-credit banking is a structure that has outlived its time.’ After a 17-month investigation, the Financial Services Authority found that the Royal Bank of Scotland and its former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin were not guilty of fraud, dishonesty or failure of governance before the government bought a 70 per

The Spectator

The Brown version

For children who have been naughty this year, Simon & Schuster have just produced the perfect punitive Christmas present: a new book from Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash. It would be a mistake to write off our former prime minister’s musings on the financial crisis as an irrelevance, to be read only by Tories with a taste for schadenfreude. It provides a compendium of the dangerous thinking which brought such economic calamity to Britain, and threatens us still. Brown claims, preposterously, that the crash would have been much less severe if only senior bankers had paid themselves 10 per cent less. He speaks darkly of ‘unchecked greed’, when the root

Fiona Melville

Conservatism is a broad church

A long time ago, I worked for CCHQ, David Cameron’s leadership campaign and them back in CCHQ again. We spent months trying to define what Conservatism really is. I don’t think we ever really got a pithy soundbite, because the root of its success is that it evolves to suit the times. Perhaps the best description is that it is a pragmatic creed, wary of dogma, going with the grain of human nature, and focusing on effective policy that leads to real improvements. We have some fundamental values – a belief in individual freedom but also in social and personal responsibility, an understanding that power must be devolved as close

Martin Bright

A matter of diversity

I was astonished by the Guardian’s story this week about the lack of British African-Caribbean students at Oxbridge colleges. If we weren’t quite so blinded by the Wikileaks blizzard, I’m sure more would have been made of this. Hats off to David Lammy for raising the issue. I suspect this is as much an issue of class as race, but it remains an aberration that Oxbridge is so monocultural and dominated by the product of the independent school system. Like Alex, I don’t believe this is necessarily evidence of racism. The “Oxbridge problem” has always been that so few people from un-posh backgrounds apply. They, their parents or teachers simply

Alex Massie

Public Services vs Government Services

During the latest bout of America’s interminable health care wars, Fox News decided that its presenters should refer to the “public option” as the “government option” or “government-run health insurance”. Big deal, you may say and you would have a point, but this has people in a tizzy about Fox’s “bias”. As if this had previously been a mystery! Happily Jack Shafer is on hand to defend what Andrew Sullivan calls, oddly, the “indefensible”: The call to refer to the program as the government option instead of the public option came from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Media Matters and Kurtz report. But this shouldn’t disqualify the new term from the

Andrew Gilligan

The true cost of the Olympics

There was something rather un-British about all that grovelling to Fifa last week. That, at least, appears to be the new national consensus after even the combined charms of Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham failed to land England the World Cup. We are not, we now realise, the kind of people who prostrate themselves to fat foreign sports bureaucrats. The mother of parliaments will never yield its cherished prerogatives to the rococo whims of some grubby Swiss tax-dodgers. Oh, wait a minute… Entirely without the help of Mr Julian Assange, The Spectator today publishes an international sporting equivalent of the WikiLeaks cables. Our document cache is just as

Anne Applebaum

The sensational truth

For a man who earns his living by publishing other people’s email, Julian Assange has a high opinion of himself. You can hear that in his rhetoric, which combines the paranoia of the early Bolsheviks with the arrogance of a teenage computer hacker. When a subordinate dared threaten him a few months ago, Assange slapped him down by declaring himself ‘the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest’. When others threatened to leave, he declared, in the manner of the young Lenin, that the organisation was in ‘a Unity or Death situation’. His goals are as vast as his

Oliver Lewis

The Gaokao challenge

There is a word, unknown in this country, which once a year strikes terror into the hearts of millions of young people: Gaokao. This is the slang term for the Chinese National Higher Education Entrance Examinations, and though only a few translated questions have found their way out of the secretive state, their level of complexity raises serious concerns about our own education system. The results released by Pisa (the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment) this week not only raise the same concerns but absolutely confirm them. The Pisa people tested nearly half a million 15-year-olds worldwide, in maths, literacy and science. What did they find? China comes top; Britain

Rod Liddle

The ‘c’ word used to be the one thing you could never say. How times change

The kids are all asleep, the wife is in bed reading feminist propaganda, from outside in the darkness I hear the shocked keewick of a Little Owl. Otherwise, all is silent and at rest. This is the time of evening when I make my way very quietly to my study with a glass of wine ‘to do some work’. I don’t want anyone to catch me at it, so I put my hand over the computer’s little loudspeaker when that annoying Windows ident music comes on. She caught me at it, once, my wife. Came downstairs for a glass of water and saw me hunched and furtive over the laptop,

Melanie McDonagh

Scents and nonsense

Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought my mother some pleasing aftershave. Others will know exactly what they’re after: the scent their womenfolk have always liked, the perfume their own mothers used to wear. Which is dandy: some of the most beautiful and original perfumes have been with us for decades, a century even. But it’s an illusion to think that what