Society

Saturday

29 Jan 2011

Status Anxiety: A toff act to follow

Fantastic news about The King’s Speech. Its 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay, mean it’s just two short of the all-time record. The film has also been a box-office smash, taking over $57 million in America and over £18 million in the UK. Why has the film been such a critical and commercial success? It has plenty going for it: great direction, good performances, gripping story, witty dialogue. But then, so did Made in Dagenham and that hasn’t been anything like as successful. The key is in the subject matter. Our royal family is still a

Melissa Kite

Real life | 29 January 2011

The mid-life crisis has arrived early. It took me by surprise. I woke up, made coffee and at the very point I would usually be thinking, ‘Oo, I must put the recycling out,’ I thought, ‘Oo, I must buy a Porsche.’ How can this happen? I hate flash cars. My motoring history includes two small Peugeots, a Renault 5 with flower transfers down the side and a broken accelerator pedal, and a fire-engine red Ford Fiesta called Bunbury, after the non-existent character in The Importance of Being Earnest. It just shows how powerful is the urge to cling in vain to the remnants of one’s youth. One minute I was

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 29 January 2011

My car was at the garage for repairs so often last year that they asked me to their Christmas party. The event was snowed off and rescheduled for last Friday night. The prospect of a party scared as well as exhilarated me. I had been living exclusively among my own banal thoughts for so long I was prey to the peculiar fear that in company they might be laughably transparent. I had a strip wash in the kitchen sink using stream water heated in a saucepan on the wood-burning stove, shaved with an old Bic disposable razor I found in the bathroom cabinet, staunched the bleeding with cigarette papers I

Taki

High life | 29 January 2011

About 15 or so years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known to me as ‘l’entarteur’, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious and shove a pie in their face. He would never insult the victims nor use foul language — in fact, he always remained silent — and he assured me in his letter that he used only the finest ingredients and very fresh milk. The first name which came to mind was Edward Heath but almost

The Spectator

Letters | 29 January 2011

The scale of the loss Sir: You state that ‘the British army was defeated in Basra’ (leading article, 22 January) as though it were a re-run of Alamein or Waterloo. Would it not be more true to say that the undermanned and under-resourced segment of the army in Basra was insufficient to cope with the task it was given? Had it been able to deploy force on the same scale as the Americans, perhaps the result would have been different. It has been suggested that the government couldn’t face the possibility of heavy casualties in such a scenario, but unavailability of troops must have been an overwhelming factor. All deaths

The Spectator

Barometer | 29 January 2011

No such thing as society The government’s ‘Big Society’ project is partly inspired by a desire to undo the damage created by a remark made by Mrs Thatcher in an interview with Woman’s Own on 31 October 1987. Here are some extracts from the transcript: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!”… If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language: Between you and me

‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost. ‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost. I left the room to turn down the stock on the gas-stove. With Dickens, I have since discovered, or with Miss La Creevy, the miniature-painter in Nicholas Nickleby, it was ‘between you and me and the post’. That was in 1839. Others have it as gatepost or lamp post. The unhearing, unspeaking reliability of posts is the point, the exception being a listening-post. My real interest

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 January 2011

Home The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom shrank by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010 compared with that quarter the previous year, according to initial figures from the Office for National Statistics. Home The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom shrank by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010 compared with that quarter the previous year, according to initial figures from the Office for National Statistics. Manufacturing was up 1.4 per cent and construction down by 3.3 per cent. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, said that living standards would shrink more than at any time since the 1920s.

James Forsyth

Egypt, moving from revolt to revolution

Sitting in London it is hard to know what is going to happen next in Egypt but one particular detail in the New York Times’ latest report makes me think that Mubarak’s fall is fast becoming more likely than not: “In Ramses Square in central Cairo Saturday midday, protesters commandeered a flatbed army truck. One protester was driving the truck around the square while a dozen others on the back were chanting for President Mubarak to leave office. Nearby, soldiers relaxed around their tanks and armored vehicles and chatted with protesters. There were no policemen in sight.” Over at the Atlantic, Eli Lake has some interesting thoughts on how a

Daniel Korski

The neoconservatives were right

The last six years have been fallow ones for the neoconservatives. From around 2005, when Iraq began its descent into chaos, the ideology that did so much to shape US foreign policy became marginalised as, first, George W Bush turned increasingly realist and, then, Barack Obama continued where his predecessor left off. While ideas are not responsible for the people who hold them, it did not help that, after President Bush left office, those who espoused a neoconservative outlook included the likes of Sarah Palin. Funding for democracy-promotion was slashed, and the focus for aid programmes became “accountability” – with the word “democracy” banished from sight. To declare oneself a

Michael Henderson

Bookselling for illiterates

Books, we are continually told, particularly by people who rarely read them, are going the way of the dodo. The shops that sell them are closing at an alarming rate, as the dreaded Kindle takes over, and public libraries are being encouraged to turn themselves into noisy ‘resource centres’, designed to attract the feckless young. One might think that the places continuing to sell such glorious, old-fashioned things would be eager to put their best foot forward. So a post-Christmas visit to the biggest bookshop in Europe, as Waterstone’s in Piccadilly likes to call itself, was an eye-opener. It’s a shop that evokes happy memories. I have been buying books

Andrew Neil

The fall of the meritocracy

I caught the figure strolling towards me out the corner of my eye. At first I thought I was mistaken. Then it nearly took my breath away. I was standing in the impressive wooden-beamed assembly hall of Paisley Grammar, where I’d gathered at the start of each school day many years before, silent and smartly uninformed, along with 900 other pupils. The current head was explaining how this ancient institution, dating back to the 16th century, was still giving children as fine an education as the one I had enjoyed. It was then I noticed the policeman coming along the corridor and into the hall, sauntering along as if his

Rod Liddle

Islamophobia? Not until after dessert

When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. ‘Friends: it’s time to have a go at the Muslims’? I ask because at my dinner parties we usually spend a half an hour moaning about Muslims in between the dessert and the cheese board, whereas

Anna Szlejter

Go east, young man

When Poles arrive in Britain, we learn some fascinating things about ourselves. We are, it seems, from a part of the world known as the ‘Eastern bloc’. It is populated by lazy benefits thieves, most of whom want to move to Britain. When the EU flung open Britain’s barriers seven years ago, the stereotype wasn’t entirely false — at least about wanting to move. Hundreds of thousands of Polish workers, students and professionals did come to Britain; I was one of them. Today, though, only a trickle of Poles come over, and a migratory tide is flowing in the other direction. Britons are going to Poland. Poland has had a

Susannah Herbert

Social engineering

Heinz Wolff’s latest and most ambitious experiment might just solve the problem of care for the elderly Heinz Wolff has been offered Maidenhead by the government as the laboratory for his next and boldest experiment, but it is not enough. ‘They should give me the Isle of Wight,’ he cries, domed cranium pulsing beneath his Branestawm specs. ‘All of it. It’s perfect for my purposes.’ As seasoned film audiences know, when a scientist starts making territorial demands in a strong German accent, it’s generally time to confiscate his Bunsen burners. But at the age of 82, Emeritus Professor Wolff — the father of bio-engineering, the beaming genius of television’s The

The Spectator

Ancient and modern: The art of dying

So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? They came at the problem from different angles. Homeric heroes sought to compensate for death with eternal heroic glory (and got it, judging from the number of people who still read Homer). Plato argued that the soul was immortal. The Roman poet Lucretius thought

Tim Stanley

Welcome home, Baby

Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator of Haiti once known as Baby Doc, returned to his native land last week, looking wide-eyed and frail. He read a statement in which he expressed ‘deep sorrow for all those who say they were victims of my government’ and promised that he hadn’t come home to cause trouble, but to help rebuild his country. Should we believe him? The press think that he wants to clear his name in order to get access to $6 million in frozen Swiss bank accounts; Haiti’s socialist leaders worry that he has returned to seize power; many people living in dugouts beneath scraps of corrugated iron might secretly

Hugo Rifkind

People who scream on buses need looking after – but not by me

Where does the Big Society stand on the screamers on the bus? We had one the other day. It was during the rush hour, and I was late to pick up my daughter from the nursery. It was a big lady, heavily upholstered in beige, dragging a trolley almost the same size which was upholstered in tartan. The bus jolted, she almost fell, and we all rushed to help her, like David Cameron surely reckons we’re supposed to. That should have been that. The next time the bus stopped, though, she was off up the aisle, trolley battering through plenty of people older and fatter than her, to shriek at

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 29 January 2011

Interim findings from my Really Independent Commission on banking reform The Warden of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, has revealed the outlines of what he thinks about banking reform, so perhaps the Warden of Any Other Business — that’s me — should do likewise. Vickers, a former Bank of England economist, is chairman of the Independent Commission on Banking, which will publish interim findings in April and conclusions in September. Its objective is to recommend ways to stabilise the banking system and make it more competitive, while reassuring savers that their money is safe without implicit or explicit government guarantee. In a speech last weekend, Vickers indicated that he hasn’t

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Thoroughly Modern Willie

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition. In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day. John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to George Simmers, who nets £30. His fellow winners, also printed below, get £25 each. Next week’s competition slot will be given over to a celebration of the 2,000th crossword so the results of Competition 2683, After the Dance, will appear in the issue dated 12 February. Indeed, Princess, ’tis a strange country we are in,