Society

Saturday

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 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 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,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Anyone can be a phone hacker

To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad. To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad. Just log on to any website that allows you to send anonymous texts and, while the friend is in mid-flight, send an SMS to his phone (let’s assume he is landing in Cape Town) along the following lines: ‘Vodacom international roaming service welcomes you to South Africa. For emergencies dial 112. For voicemail dial 191, you fat beardie twat.’ Obviously it adds to the general hilarity here if the person receiving this is bearded and fat. (Male is preferable, too, as women are all too liable to take

Friday

The Spectator

The week that was | 28 January 2011

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson explains why the GDP drop may not be as bad as it first appears, and reveals what’s inside this week’s Spectator. James Forsyth wonders what the Tories must do to win in 2015, and reports on the shrinking GDP figures. Peter Hoskin investigates the lineage of the Big Society, and explains how our national debt went up by £1,300 billion in one day. David Blackburn sees Nimrod fall from a symbol of pride to one of decline, and tracks the government’s changes to control orders. Daniel Korski wonders whether Hosni Mubarak will fall. Martin Bright

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Gove entrenches his reforms

In another sign of how the pace of Gove’s reforms is quickening, the education secretary has told local authorities that all new schools should be free schools or academies. This is a big step towards changing the default nature of the system from state-funded and state-run to state-funded but independent.   Local authorities will not be able to open a bureaucrat-controlled school unless they can satisfy the Secretary of State that there is no free school or academy provider willing to step in.   Gove has always argued that once free schools and academies become a significant part of the system it’ll be no more politically possible to abolish them

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Life on the Nile?

The risks of the status quo are always safer and more appealling than the uncertainties of the new, the unfamiliar and the unpredictable. So it wasn’t a great surprise to discover Vice-President Joe Biden saying last night that, all things considered, he wouldn’t refer to Hosni Mubarak “as a dictator” or outgoing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisting that Washington has no interest in “taking sides” in the struggle between the sclerotic Egyptian regime and the protestors. Depressing, perhaps, but not surprising. Like everyone else, the White House is waiting to see what happens today. Everyone agress that Mubarak’s regime is rotten and that the 82-year old dictator (sorry,

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

When a leak starts to smell

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, has written a highly readable piece chronicling his paper’s tempestuous relationship with Julian Assange. Keller does a good job defending how The New York Times handled the documents that Wikileaks passed it, the steps it took to minimise the risk posed to the lives of the people mentioned in the documents. But the part of the piece that sticks in the mind is how the man Keller sent to meet Assange described the source to his editor: “He’s tall — probably 6-foot-2 or 6-3 — and lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You’re Dead Son. Get Yourself Buried.

I enjoyed Samira Ahmed’s trawl through the history of movies about journalism but was surprised she didn’t mention arguably the greatest example of the genre: Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. It’s just as, perhaps even more, relevant today as when it was made. Lancaster, playing the all-powerful columnist J.J Hunsecker, produces the performance of his career. So does Tony Curtis as that “cookie full of arsenic” and press agent Sidney Falco. Though set in New York, the movie is easily seen as a searing expose of the viciousness, hypocrisy, venality and arrogance of our own beloved tabloid press. It’s all there: the ceaseless bullying of public figures, the rebarbative

Daniel Korski

Thank you, Nacia Anastazja Brodziak

Today is Holocaust Day. A day to remember the horrors of the past. But it should also be an occasion to recall the moments of hope and the people – and peoples –  that personified that life-saving hope. Like Nacia Anastazja Brodziak who took in my fleeing grandparents, hid them from the Nazis in her tiny Warsaw flat and for five years pretended they were her Catholic cousins from the countryside. I went to see her more than a decade ago. I wanted to thank her. It is actually hard to thank someone without whom neither I nor my father would have been born. Today is a way to do

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Losing Control of Control Orders

Well, this is another fine mess. You can do two sensible things with control orders: abolish them or keep ’em. The government has boldly tried to find a third way: keeping them but giving them a new name so people think that there’s been some real change. In general there has not. If you were opposed to control orders I can’t see how you can support TPIMS. And if you supported control orders then you can, I think, make a case that they were more effective, and certainly easier to explain, than their pseudo-replacement. So, heckuva job, Dave’n’Nick. You’ve come up with a “compromise” that is barely a compromise at

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In this week’s Spectator | 27 January 2011

The new issue of The Spectator is out in the shops today – subscribers can read it online, or on Kindle/iPad – and here are a few pieces that I thought might interest CoffeeHousers.   1. The death of meritocracy. Social mobility – or the lack thereof – is a subject that no political party feels comfortable with. And why? For the very good reasons that Andrew Neil outlines in the cover story of this week’s Spectator. One vignette is that when Cameron’s inner circle convened to discuss the recent school sports fiasco, the conversation turned to who played which positions in the Eton Wall game. If you missed his

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Andy Gray: The View from the Sports Desk

After expressing some doubt yesterday that Andy Gray was as wicked or the journalists denouncing him were as virtuous as the media were claiming, I received the following email from a British football correspondent based in Europe. ‘Hi Nick, Just wanted to say spot on with the Spectator blog on Andy Gray and the media. There is also something very unpleasant about the mob justice element of it all that seems to be intensified by cretins on twitter calling for heads. The sports press has plenty of previous on this – Glen Hoddle’s hounding from his job for silly comments about reincarnation being one. You usually find the victim has

Daniel Korski

The dangers of CameronCare

A consensus has formed in the commentariat that besides George Osborne’s stewardship of the economy, Andrew Lansley’s healthcare reforms could become the government’s vote-loser. The political facts are as simple as the forms are complex. One, David Cameron ran a campaign based on a promise to protect the NHS. Many people thought that meant from cuts and culls alike. The Health Secretary’s reforms look, whatever the truth may be, like they are going back on the PM’s promise. Second, the reforms can only be successful if a range of stakeholders – voters, practitioners, analysts – have been brought along, and had a chance to debate the issues. What Michael Gove

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This Ed’s no Goliath

Ed Milliband took up his position at PMQs today flanked by Caroline Flint and Ed Balls. Between a rock and a hard face. His proximity to so many colleagues who wish him ill can hardly have helped his performance. He was like a stale doughnut. Layers of stodge surrounding a hole in the air.   His battle-plan wasn’t entirely useless. He wanted to tempt the prime minister into foolish speculation about the causes of last quarter’s poor growth figures. Cameron stood up and admitted that the numbers were pretty lousy whether the weather were blamed or not. And that whether-the-weather left Miliband completely stuffed. He’d expected Cameron to shift at

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

An Unusually Unimportant State of the Union Address

Last year I suggested that the State of the Union speech was an unexpectedly important moment for Barack Obama. Except in as much as it was needed to steady Democratic nerves frayed by Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, I don’t think this was true. In part that’s because I can’t remember anything about it and had to remind myself what I thought of it at the time. So let’s try something different this* year: this is an unusually unimportant State of the Union address. As Ezra Klein notes, these things rarely make much of a difference (they rarely confirm or reverse any prevailing media “narrative”) and, in any case, the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Government Efficiency vs Cost of Government? Why not try both!

Hey ho, it’s the State of the Union speech tonight and as usual there’s no shortage of advice for President Obama. Via Steve Benen, here’s Ruy Teixeira: Make no mistake: a more effective government is the public’s priority, not a smaller government. In a survey I helped conduct for the Center for American Progress’s Doing What Works government reform project, we found that, by a decisive 62 to 36 margin, the public said their priority for improving the federal government was increasing its efficiency and effectiveness, not reducing its cost and size. Significantly, we found an identical result among the independents in our survey. I’m sure this is true just

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The touchline is the best place for a woman

Magnificent schadenfreude being shown by all and sundry over the case of Sky Sports presenters Richard Keys and Andy Gray and their off-mic comments about how useless woman are. This is at least partly because Keys and Gray are genuinely awful and nobody liked them very much anyway. And their off-mic comments were precisely what you might have expected from them. You wouldn’t have expected to overhear Gray saying, for example, “how refreshing to see a woman running the line today – it is about time that football, like so many of our institutions, showed a commitment to equality, diversity and inclusiveness. Incidentally, Richard, you must try to catch Marton

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Brutal Bigotry of Low Expectations

Bagehot has a properly righteous post lambasting teachers who complain that it’s too difficult to teach their charges to read and write and count properly. A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history. Such history is never going to be relevant to many