Society

Saturday

1 Jan 2011

Taki

High life | 1 January 2011

My son J.T. managed to seriously shorten my life by inviting close to 75 young people to my house for an end-of-the-year party, among whom I found some seriously beautiful girls who were out way past their bedtime. My routine for my children’s bashes is a simple one. I train hard either in judo or karate, work up a very good sweat, shower, shave, put on my finest Anderson & Sheppard suit, go to the drawing room where the main battle is about to take place, and start downing vodka and cranberry juice. I never touch food, as it produces a hangover the next day. After about one hour and

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 1 January 2011

The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, spoke of an ‘obesogenic environment’. I thought he’d made up the word obesogenic. It’s a bastard formation, half-Latin and half-Greek. But my husband tells me it has been around in bariatric circles for decades. ‘Bariatric?’ I said. Yes, he said, bariatrics is a medical specialty spawned in America in the 1960s, in response to a condition brought on by prosperity, but now prevalent among the poor: fatness. Perhaps Mr Lansley should have spoken

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Who’s afraid of Michael Wolff?

In the current issue of GQ, the writer Michael Wolff has rather an amusing piece about his predilection for feuding with his friends. ‘My longest feud was 15 years,’ he writes. ‘At that point, I met my feuding companion on Madison Avenue and we immediately took up where we left off. Feuds are, in a sense, a courtship. Even a seduction: has my absence, my resistance, my resolve, impressed you — or worn you down?’ The subject of the piece is his latest feud, which happens to be with me. I first met Michael in New York when I was working at Vanity Fair. I’d read his book about his

The Spectator

Letters | 1 January 2011

An education Sir: Quite apart from the pressure the Gaokao exam puts on students (Letters, 18/25 December), the Chinese education system is unsatisfactory in other ways. I taught English to undergraduates in Beijing for two years and it could be a dispiriting experience. Chinese students are taught very intensively, there is a lot of learning by repetition, and they are also drilled so that they do not ever offend against the party line. You could say they are taught not to think, although that would be a bit unfair. Anyway, they are going to rule the world so it’s all academic. Rebecca Jed, London SW4 Sir: Oliver Lewis made some

The Spectator

Leader: Winter sunshine

Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less. Every day of this new year, some 200,000 people are likely to be lifted out of what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty: living on $1.25 a day or less. This remarkable pace of improvement will probably quicken over the rest of the decade. This is not due to any government development goal or charity outreach programme. It is driven by global capitalism, just like the transformation of India, China and other emerging markets. We are living in

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 January 2011

Home Nine men were charged with conspiracy to bomb London targets such as the Stock Exchange and the tower of Big Ben before Christmas. Three of the men, aged between 19 and 28, came from Cardiff, two from London and four from Stoke-on-Trent. The Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, spoke of ‘an imbalance in the legal position with regard to the freedom of Christians and people of other faiths to pursue the calling of their faith in public life’. Stephen Griffiths, the self-styled Crossbow Cannibal, was said to be refusing food in jail after his conviction for murdering three prostitutes. Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton said

James Forsyth

Top Republican prepares to leave Obama’s big tent

When John Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, accepted Barack Obama’s offer of the ambassadorship to China it seemed to be further evidence that Obama was going to be a two term president. The ambitious Huntsman, who would stand a good chance in a Republican primary, appeared to have decided that the nomination in 2012 wasn’t worth having. So it is a sign of the shifting political tide that Huntsman is now indicating that he may resign as ambassador to China soon and run for the Republican nomination. With Obama’s approval rating now significantly below 50 percent, the Republican nomination is now a far more appealing prize. There is, unusually for

Mary Wakefield

Egyptian Notebook

The adventures of a wrecked ship can be pieced together from entries in its log book. The last moments of some doomed flight can be reconstructed by consulting its black box. If Dominic and I come a cropper here on the hard shoulder of the Cairo–Alexandria desert road, our iPhones will tell our story in Google searches: 23:30: ‘how do you get out of Cairo airport?’ 00:07: ‘why don’t Egypt drivers use headlights?’ 03:00: ‘Toyota Corolla won’t start’ 03:30: ‘How to deactivate Toyota Corolla immobiliser?’ 04:00: ‘Hertz Cairo number’ 05:00: ‘Hertz worldwide emergency number’ 05:14: ‘What time sun rise in Egypt?’ Soon after that, the iPhones’ innards will record that

Johan Norberg

The great debt bubble of 2011

Have our governments averted a financial disaster – or paved the way for one? ‘The worst of the storm has passed,’ declared Barack Obama at the start of last year, seeking to calm the fearful. For his part, Gordon Brown assured Britain that talk of tough years ahead was ‘simply not true’. Both men spoke of their resolve to cure their economies, and did not seem to mind using the same techniques that created the old bubble. Bank bailouts and massive stimulus efforts have indeed encouraged us to borrow, spend and speculate again. Bank interest rates have dropped to historic lows, bringing cheap credit to the housing market and the

James Forsyth

Politics: Get ready for a year of upheavals

This will be the year of the political identity crisis. This will be the year of the political identity crisis. As we enter 2011, all three major parties are having internal debates about who they are and what they stand for. Add to that the fact that there is discontent in the ranks of all three parties and it makes for a particularly volatile combination. It could turn out to be even more dramatic politically than 2010. The past 12 months have transformed the Liberal Democrats. At the beginning of the year, they were perceived as the most harmless of political parties, the one that actors could safely endorse without

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: your problems solved

Q. Each year I send out about 130 Christmas cards and get back about 80. This year I received 40. I have no reason to think that I have become less popular. Can you shed any light on this disheartening development, Mary? — J.F., London SW12 A. Many people simply could not afford to send them, but there were other factors at play. Traditional scenes celebrating the birth of Christ were widely unavailable outside of galleries and museums (where they are costly). It seems pointless to send a Simpsons Christmas card. The Post Office, in a bid to avoid offending non-Christians, is issuing secular stamps one year and non-secular the

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: A question of trust

One of many reasons I love reading about crime on Wikipedia is the marvellous pieces of unintentional comedy you get at the end of an article in the list of internal links. Beneath the entry for the Hay poisoner Herbert Rowse Armstrong, for instance, comes: Poisoners | People executed by hanging | Executed English people | English people convicted of murder | Alumni of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge Even finer is the tailpiece to the entry on Fred West: English rapists | British people convicted of child sexual abuse | People convicted of theft | English serial killers | Parents who killed their children | People who committed suicide in

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 1 January 2011

In the land of my Flemish forefathers, I draw a key lesson for 2011: always have a Plan B To Ghent, in the land of my ancestors, to address a conclave of ‘risk managers’. Though the mother tongue of most participants is Dutch or French, the conference is in English — and I feel obliged to explain that despite my surname that’s what I shall speak too, because it’s 200 years since my silkweaving Flemish forefathers moved from Antwerp to Norwich to take advantage of a tax scheme for migrant craftsmen that would no doubt now be banned by EU ‘single market’ rules. I spare them the detail that I did

Lucy Vickery

Competition: New leaf

In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. It was a smallish and somewhat lacklustre entry, possibly owing to the earlier-than-usual deadline. But I warmed to D.A. Prince’s Lord Voldemort: ‘Get him; just get him. Then the series will be over’, and was amused by Chris O’Carroll’s Edward Hyde, ‘Be myself’, and Bill Greenwell’s Count Dracula: ‘Get a life’. Gerard Benson, meanwhile, kept it brief on behalf of Bill Sikes: ‘No more Mr Nice Guy!’ There is a distinctly Dickensian feel to the winners’

Rod Liddle

From here until the royal wedding, it’s sewage all the way

I hope you are looking forward to the tsunami of industrial effluent which is coming your way in the first quarter of the new year. You will not be able to avoid it, unless you are Helen Keller. One way or another, Wills and Kate are going to get you. Or, more properly, their agents of misrule are going to get you, the meeja, with their tele-photo lenses and their hacked mobile phone accounts, and their rubber gloves for rummaging through dustbins and their long sharp noses for filth and discord and their deep gullets and unquenchable thirst for vapid, pointless liquid excrement. If you were being charitable you might

Theo Hobson

‘Jesus hung out with freaks’

Why does the American religious right get all the attention: is there not also a religious left? Why is it always on the back foot? Why, though such a basic part of the nation’s history, does it seem un-American? It suffers from the same problem as its political cousin: most Americans think of the left as something for metropolitan elites or angry black radicals. (President Obama is associated with both.) But liberal Christian voices are breaking out. A few young preachers have edged away from conservative evangelicalism, but their criticism of the dominant religious culture tends to remain cautious (why lose the chance of a massive congregation?). A notable exception

Friday

31 Dec 2010

Alex Massie

Happy New Year | 31 December 2010

And so another year passes, replete with the usual misadventures, follies and debacles. Of course there were better moments too but this is no time to be dwelling on those. Anyway, thank you all for your company here this year and may the New Year bring you great joy and encouragement. See you again in 2011. Meanwhile, here’s another cheery Hogmanay missive from that sage of all our Caledonian yesteryears, the Reverend I.M. Jolly.

Melanie McDonagh

The complex parentage of Elton John’s baby

The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and possibly two – bear with me – has had a baby with one of them. And as it turned out, the birth mother was a client of the Center for Surrogate Parenting based in Encino, California, which has been providing surrogacy arrangements for gay would-be parents since 1989. Elton John and David Furnish will, I’d have thought,

Daniel Korski

Help for Helmand

With 2011 promising to be another difficult year in Afghanistan, my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten – a noted scholar of the region – has decided to do something to help. He is organising to get some charcoal to refugee families from Helmand, who have fled the fighting between NATO and the Taliban and now live at a makeshift refugee camp just outside Kabul City. Like millions of refugees, the people at the camp have seen things they will rarely forget: “The sight of a woman’s hair entangled in the mulberry branches, her legs strewn far away in the dirt. Or the sounds they heard as they hid in an underground hole, counting the bombs to

Peter Hoskin

What are your predictions for 2011?

New Year’s Eve, a time to dwell upon Things to Come – so I thought I’d mine CoffeeHousers for their predictions for 2011. We went through the same process with some friends of The Spectator for the recent Christmas issue, and I’ve pasted their responses below to get you started. And that’s not all: the most amusing prediction, to be chosen next week, will win its author a bottle of Pol Roger. The comment section is, as always, yours. Dame Eileen Atkins I hope we start getting education right. Michael Gove is correct when he says we should go back to an emphasis on five basic subjects: English, maths, geography, history and