Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 June 2010

Q. I have three children in their early twenties. There is a fashion in their circles not to know each other’s surnames. They always introduce themselves to each other, and to one, by Christian names only. Perhaps they feel it adds to the mystery of their lives. Last weekend, however, I had 32 of my daughter’s friends to stay for a party. Only when they were leaving and were signing the visitors’ book did I see their surnames and realise that three of them were children of old friends of mine. By then it was too late to catch up with news. How can I get around this frustration, Mary?

Toby Young Toby Young

Ben Goldacre is supercilious and puritanical — but he’s got a point

Until last week I didn’t have much time for Ben Goldacre, the Guardian journalist and author of Bad Science. He devotes his life to the exposure of snake oil salesmen, whether nutritionists with bogus qualifications or practitioners of alternative medicine, pointing out that there is no scientific basis for their claims. A useful service, to be sure, but he suffers from the Guardian columnist’s vice of being overly puritanical. He combines superciliousness with moral superiority, as if ignorance and stupidity are to be condemned rather than pitied. He is a self-proclaimed atheist, but exhibits a near religious attachment to the empirical method. So what’s changed? The answer is that my

The Spectator

Letters | 19 June 2010

Let Turkey join the EU Sir: There are many answers to your editorial ‘Turkish menace’ (12 June) — but perhaps the one that serves its purpose best is: ‘EU asked for it’. Turks feel, quite simply, that they have been insulted by the EU in the way their membership application has been endlessly delayed, while dubious ex-communist countries like Bulgaria and Romania have been given the red carpet treatment. And the ultimate insult is to allow Greek Cyprus, with a population one hundredth that of Turkey, to dominate the proceedings, demanding that the Turks stand to attention while what they regard as insult after insult is flung in their face.

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 19 June 2010

My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments. My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments. At a dinner attended by Gladstone, Holman Hunt, Francis Palgrave and Thomas Woolner in 1865, conversation turned to the rebellion at Morant Bay, Jamaica and its repression. As Gladstone expatiated on the cruelty of the white man, Tennyson was heard to provide a sotto voce obbligato: ‘Niggers are

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 June 2010

As a would-be historian (engaged on the biography of Margaret Thatcher), I feel envious of Lord Saville. I could do with having all my hotel bills paid for 12 years, a full legal team to assist, the right to demand the presence of witnesses and £191 million. His 5,000 pages are the most expensive history book ever written. But however judicious Lord Saville has tried to be, his report cannot escape its ultimate political purpose — to please Sinn Fein. In that sense, its author is not Lord Saville, but Tony Blair, who set up the inquiry as part of a political deal. As people call for the soldiers who

Mark Mardell

Diary – 19 June 2010

Barack Obama seems to have been eating his way around the Gulf of Mexico, munching through a plate of crawfish tails, crab claws and ribs at Tacky Jack’s in Alabama, posing with a super-sized ice cream in Mississippi. The message is, of course, that the Gulf coast is open for business. The wider message is that he ‘gets it’. The Washington media don’t get him. The qualities the President prizes, coolness and detachment, they see as un-American disengagement. In truth it is a little odd sometimes, for someone who got the job partly because of his empathy and ability to identify with the audience. At his final speech at a

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 19 June 2010

The Office for Budget Responsibil-ity (OBR) forecast that gross domestic product would grow by 2.6 per cent in 2011, compared with the 3.25 per cent predicted by the previous government. But the deficit and inflation would nonetheless fall faster than predicted. ‘This is our best shot at an impossible task,’ said Sir Alan Budd, the head of the OBR. The government is to make an emergency Budget on 22 June. The OBR also said that the cost to the taxpayer of public sector pensions will rise from £4 billion a year now to £9 billion by 2014-15. Mr Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister said: ‘It’s not affordable.’ The annual

The Spectator

Club vs country

Every four years, the World Cup presents an opportunity to see what English football would be like with only English players. The difference is more striking with each tournament. Our club game may well have become a global industry — but it is hard to see how the money has helped the national team. Our club sides are filled with global talent — but a young native player has never found it more difficult to reach the top. Since the Premiership’s inception in 1992, the number of English under-25s in the league has fallen by two thirds. Certainly, English players benefit from playing alongside the likes of Didier Drogba and

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 19 June 2010

There is something depressing about the ways university vice-chancellors talk up their plight in the face of cuts. Not only do they not seem to have the faintest idea what a university is actually for, they also do not seem to realise the implications of their demands for vast increases in fees. In the ancient world, education was a service, not a right, provided by individuals, not the state, for a fee. Its purpose in what one might call the ‘higher education’ sector was, for the most part, to serve the children of the elite by providing them with the skills required for a successful elite career, i.e. in law

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Another BP PR blunder

The Energy Secretary’s actions will rather obscure the latest developments in the BP story, but they are well worth noting. First, Tony Hayward has made yet another PR blunder with his decision to attend a yachting event off the Isle of Wight. In a way it might not matter what Hayward is up to—he’s not going to plug the spill himself—but, as the White House Chief of Staff has been quick to point out, it is hardly a smart PR move. This mistakes following hot on him being moved away from day to day management of the spill, does suggest that Hayward might not be in this particular job for that

Charley Boorman

The connoisseur’s guide to Paris

Charley Boorman is an ambassador for the American Express® Platinum Card and a Cardmember. Here he shares his experiences and the one thing to do in Paris. The French capital is a melting pot of cultural diversity and is jam-packed with things to do and see. It is little wonder then that 45 million people visit the City of Light every year. ‘Whenever I journey away from home, I am always looking for new and exciting adventures,’ says Charley. ‘I love seeing cities and places from a different perspective. On a recent trip to Paris, I discovered the one thing you just can’t miss if you are in town: a

Melissa Kite

Why I decided to kill Tamzin Lightwater

V sad… No, it’s no good, I can’t talk like that. Only she can, which is why the retirement of Tamzin Lightwater is very sad because she is so much funnier than I could ever be. I know this because I once saw an irate posting on the internet under the heading ‘Who is Tamzin?’, by a man outraged by the suggestion that she might be me. This was ridiculous, he said. Tamzin was funny and clever which proved she could never be a woman, least of all that ghastly Melissa Kite. Well, I can understand that. Tamzin had a lot of extremely loyal followers who were intensely protective of

Max Hastings

How much defence can we afford?

Max Hastings says that the stakes are high for Liam Fox’s strategic defence review: but we must maintain our current troop numbers and cut in other areas to pay for them Britain’s armed forces are entering a dangerous period of upheaval. The new government’s strategic defence review (SDR) will impose swingeing cuts, and the only uncertainty concerns where the axe will fall. Defence Secretary Liam Fox has announced — in the Sunday Times, rather than to parliament, that the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, will step down in the autumn. Stirrup will therefore remain as a lame duck while the SDR is carried out. This

Jaakko-Kooroshy

The Afghan ‘mineral strike’ is just spin

This week, just as things were looking at their bleakest in Afghanistan — growing casualties and the damning report on the links between Taleban leaders and the Pakistani secret service — the Pentagon pulled a rare piece of good news out of the hat: Afghanistan, it turns out, is not only a poppy-growing paradise but also a mining El Dorado. Around $1 trillion worth of minerals has been discovered (says the US Geological Survey) and according to enthusiastic US and Afghan officials, this stunning potential could make mining the future backbone of the Afghan economy. Well, hooray, then let’s not pull out so hastily, people have begun to say. Perhaps

Charlotte Moore

Aunt Barbara’s fireplace

Charlotte Moore on her intrepid relative, who numbered many of the great Victorians — Rossetti, Gertrude Jekyll, George Eliot — among her closest friends ‘A young lady… blessed with large rations of tin, fat, enthusiasm, and golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches, or wading through a stream in none.’ So Dante Gabriel Rossetti described his new friend Barbara Leigh Smith, later Bodichon. ‘Aunt Barbara’ stood out, vibrant even among a pretty exceptional bunch. She was an artist, traveller, journalist, feminist agitator, co-founder of Girton College, architect of the Married Women’s Property Act, philanthropist, plantswoman and friend. At Scalands Gate, her Sussex home, visitors painted

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 19 June 2010

I am, it’s true, optimistic about the role of technology in making life more pleasant and interesting, but in some areas I am sceptical, even fogeyish. Ask me to design a perfect world and it will have electronics (and medicine) from the present day but engineering and architecture from the 1930s. My answer to any volcanic ash cloud would be to reintroduce a transatlantic Zeppelin service. As for Heathrow’s third runway, let Short Brothers’ Empire flying boats land on the Thames. It is all too easy to fantasise about a golden age of travel while forgetting that it was golden only for the few who could afford it. But something

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 19 June 2010

In Competition No. 2651 you were invited to submit limericks that are also tongue-twisters. Thanks to J. Seery for suggesting this fiendish assignment. It is not easy to produce a true tongue-twister within the confines of the meter and rhyme scheme of the limerick. Perhaps the suggestion was inspired by Lou Brooks’s Twimericks: The Book of Tongue-Twisting Limericks, which I happen to have been reading to my young son. He finds my pitiful attempts at articulating ‘Flapjack Jack flipped flat flapjacks at Phil’ hilarious, but ‘Flapjack Jack’ is a piece of cake compared with some of your offerings. Gillian Ewing, Jane Dards and Virginia Price-Evans all reduced me to lisping

Deborah Ross

Lost lives

Ajami 15, Key Cities This week I’m reviewing an independent foreign film of the kind which is possibly only showing in a cinema several miles away from you, but do not complain, as the walk will do you good and also put colour in your cheeks. This film is Ajami, and while it is set in one of those male-dominated communities defined by crime, violence and drug-taking and I am growing weary of films about male-dominated communities defined by crime, violence and drug-taking (Gomorrah, A Prophet, and so on) I am happy to forgive it because the sun is out, which always makes me cheerful, and because there are no

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatrical wizardry

The Late Middle Classes Donmar, until 17 July Lilies of the Land Arts, until 17 July Plotless plays are usually the work of beginners or nutcases. Very occasionally they’re produced by seasoned theatrical wizards. Simon Gray belongs to the third type. The Late Middle Classes is an absorbing and often hilarious portrait of the buttoned-up English bourgeoisie of the 1950s. Celia and her pathologist husband Charles have pitched up in Hayling Island but they can’t wait to swap its provincial torpor for the glamour of London. Their big move is dependent on their son Holly’s ability to get a full scholarship to a public school. His musical talent is being

William Waldegrave

Almost a great man

Of those prime ministers whom the old grammar schools escalator propelled from the bottom to the top of British society since the second world war, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher were in many ways the most alike. Wilson, that classic greasy-pole climber, tactically brilliant, strategically trivial; Major, decent, straightforward, a good man lifted to power on the shoulders of his many friends as a healer who could unite: both these are types, the one less admirable than the other, but familiar to history. Heath and Thatcher are much odder, more dangerous and more remarkable. It is an extraordinary tribute to the modern Conservative Party that both chose it as the