Society

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 12 June 2010

Monday Gids in a stinky mood. He’s still traumatised after having to travel economy class to Korea. Rang from the airport to say, ‘I don’t turn right on planes.’ But Poppy said you could tell from his voice that he knew the game was up. We all turn right on planes now. It’s a bit depressing, to be honest. Only a month since we got in and everyone’s exhausted. Also realised today, it’s four years since I started work at Compassionate Conservative Headquarters. Can you believe it? Could never have predicted it would turn out like this. I mean, it’s v nice being In Power. But after all the years

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 June 2010

Disney has, I hear, decided to rename its animated film Rapunzel (due at cinemas in time for Advent) Tangled. It is thought that little boys would not want to go to see a film named after a heroine. But since Rapunzel herself is named after a root vegetable, they might perhaps have called the film Rampion instead. It has a manly sound, as if it were the name of a television detective. In the story that we vaguely remember from the Brothers Grimm, a man steals some rampion from an enchantress’s garden because his wife says: ‘If I can’t eat some of the rampion which is in the garden behind

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 June 2010

We are all being asked by the government what should be cut. I bet the British people will take part happily. Contrary to what you read in the papers, cutting is great fun. One serious contribution is already being offered by Paul Goodman, the excellent former MP for Wycombe, who stood down at the last election. Mr Goodman’s argument, in a new paper for Policy Exchange called ‘What do we want MPs to be?’, is the counterintuitive but correct one that the new restrictions on MPs’ earnings are against the public good. Once they depend on payment from the state, and are forced to account for all their time not

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 June 2010

Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that ‘in five years’ time the interest we are paying on our debt is predicted to be ‘around £70 billion’; this meant that of ‘every single pound you pay in tax, ten pence would be spent on interest’. Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said in a speech that ‘in five years’ time the interest we are paying on our debt is predicted to be ‘around £70 billion’; this meant that of ‘every single pound you pay in tax, ten pence would be spent on interest’. Decisions on how to reduce the deficit ‘will affect every single person in our

The Spectator

Our debt to Maggie

Some politicians and members of the press have worked themselves into a fury with John McDonnell, the Labour politician who said this week that he wished he could go back in time and ‘assassinate Thatcher’. Harriet Harman has been urged to denounce him for making a ‘threat’ against the former prime minister. Though their indignation is understandable, they should lighten up. McDonnell (who on Tuesday withdrew from the Labour leadership race) was not, of course, being serious. His line drew loud laughs from his audience, a GMB trade union crowd. But more than that, John McDonnell has in fact done the Lady a service. In postulating a world without her,

The Spectator

Turkish menace

For years, Turkey has been the West’s great hope. For years, Turkey has been the West’s great hope. It is a Muslim democracy and loyal Nato member, ally in the war on terror and living rejection of the idea of a clash of civilisations. We flattered ourselves that it was keen to join the European Union so it could further ‘modernise’ — by which we meant westernise. As Turkey became richer, so we imagined, it would become a more moderate and a dependable ally of the free world. It is now clear that this was a fundamental misjudgment. Turkey is indeed growing richer, but the extra wealth is only lubricating

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 12 June 2010

The newspapers are turning up the heat on government proposals to raise capital gains tax from 18 to 40 per cent. From powerful business factions to starving pensioners, howls of outrage echo across the pages. A success, then, for the coalition: getting the newspapers to do the scaremongering for you is a very efficient way of gauging public opinion. The only way the ancients could do this was in secret. The greatest sculptor of the Greek world, Pheidias, needing the reassurance of public approval, hid (we are told) in his studio and listened to the comments. In ad 16, Germanicus, the popular adopted son of the Roman emperor Tiberius, was

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour leadership contenders go head to head

The news from today’s Labour leadership hustings was Ed Balls saying that he thought the last Labour’s government plan to halve the deficit over the next four years was too ambitious. But the thing that struck me most about today’s event was how the entry of Diane Abbott into the race has changed its dynamic. Her crowd-pleasing answers and her styling of herself as the heart of the Labour party has made it harder for Ed Miliband to make the emotional connection with Labour audiences that was always one of his great strengths. The candidate, though, who is in real trouble in this race is Andy Burnham. It is hard to

Douglas Murray

We’ll never know the truth of Bloody Sunday

On 30 January 1972, a 41-year- old man named Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats in Londonderry. Some witnesses saw a white handkerchief in his hand, others remember his hands being empty. Across the road, a soldier from the 1st Battalion of the Parachute regiment was seen by another soldier going down on one knee to a firing pos-ition. A bullet entered McGuigan’s head from the back. The head exploded, as one witness told the judge, ‘like a tomato’. Thirty years after this incident the soldier accused of firing that shot, Soldier ‘F’, testified in London. In the humming air-conditioned room, a mortuary photo of McGuigan’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Monty Hall will change the way you think

Here’s a game to play this evening with your wife or your catamite. It is an incredibly boring game, but it will help you understand the world better than a bunch of Nobel prize-winners and more than 100 mathematical geniuses, who we will come to in good time. Take three cards — an ace and a couple of jokers. Shuffle them up. Lay the cards face down in front of your partner and tell her that if she picks the ace, you’ll give her a bourbon or maybe a garibaldi biscuit. If she picks one of the jokers, however, she gets nowt. Tell her not to turn over the card

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Men fight for their ‘mates’ — it is the secret of why they so love war

One of the nicest, gentlest fellows I’ve ever met is a man named Mike Dauncey. He’s so terribly polite that he can’t bring himself to swear even in extremis and if you had to guess what he did before he retired, you’d probably say ‘country parson’. In fact, though, Brigadier Mike Dauncey DSO is a bona fide war hero, known as the ‘sixth Arnhem VC’. Only five were in fact awarded at the battle. Mike was put up for the sixth, only to have the letters ‘VC’ crossed out on his citation and amended to ‘DSO’ by one BLM (that’ll be Bernard Law Montgomery) who felt that, heroism or no

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

What I need is a world view — the problem is that I’m looking for it all over the place

This is going to be a wibbling and self-indulgent column, so don’t say you haven’t been warned. There are various reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that I’m on holiday right now, in St Tropez. It’s possible that you already know this, if the Spectator overlords have decided to put one of those ‘dateline: St Tropez’ bits at the top, but it’s also possible that they thought it was a bit wibbling and self-indulgent for that, and didn’t bother. And anyway, I’m not actually in St Tropez, but in an idyllic hill village a few miles outside. This is a state of affairs I hope will

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Who says we can’t replace grossly overpaid top executives for less?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I’m baffled why anyone should be offended by the £275,000 salary paid to John Fingleton, the director of the Office of Fair Trading who was declared last week to be Britain’s highest-paid public servant. Even if Fingleton’s wad represents double the prime minister’s, it is barely more than one tenth of the bundle taken home by Adam Crozier in his final year as chief executive of the Royal Mail, which — despite Vince Cable’s declared intention to press ahead with part-privatisation — is still wholly in the state sector. The Teflon-coated Crozier, who came to the Royal Mail from the Football Association and has

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 12 June 2010

In Competition 2650 you were invited to submit a letter from a publisher rejecting the Book of Genesis or Revelation. You lambasted both for a lack of coherent plot and narrative inconsistencies, and prescribed extensive editing. There were redeeming features, though: Paddy Briggs applauded the ‘geriatric sex narrative’ in Genesis, while J. Seery found much to commend — ‘Noah’s robust response to environmental challenge has current market appeal…’ — but ruled out publication on the grounds of ‘the author’s unwillingness to undertake the usual promotional tours’. Brian Murdoch also saw signs of promise: ‘The opening nude romp, the phallic snake and all that begetting could be a turn-on, and we

Roger Alton Roger Alton

A manager’s World Cup

If anything can, even temporarily, fill the gaping hole left by the absence of 24 from our screens, then I suppose a World Cup will just have to do. My 10-year-old godson got it about right the other day, returning from Tesco with a stash of England-branded Mars bars. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to win.’ Well, almost certainly not, but England do have one of a handful of world-class managers in the tournament. The others are Spain’s Vicente del Bosque, humble, unassuming, hugely successful and far, far more than just a plump bloke with a moustache, and Italy’s Marcello Lippi.

Deborah Ross

Awkward questions

Greenberg, 15 Nationwide If you have ever wondered what the point of Ben Stiller is — and who hasn’t, at some stage in their life? Who hasn’t woken at 4 a.m., asking over and over: what is the point of Ben Stiller? What, what? — here is the answer: Roger Greenberg. There is nothing much to like about Roger Greenberg. He’s a narcissistic, prickly, nervy pain in the butt. But Stiller’s astonishing performance makes him so true that, if we can’t care exactly, we are fascinated by him, and his pained and painful struggle simply to get through the day. Just a look and we understand more about Greenberg than

Alan Judd

Good manners

It’s fairly safe to say that when the experimental Lohner-Porsche became the world’s first four-wheel-drive car in 1899 its designers did not anticipate that exactly a century later another prestigious German manufacturer would launch a rather more successful 4WD that was — in one respect — technologically less advanced. That earlier car was powered by an electric motor fitted to each wheel, which is the sort of technology that manufacturers such as BMW, makers of the X5, are now beginning to look at. Meanwhile, we can all feel pretty content with the offspring of Herr Rudolph Diesel (d.1913, presumed lost overboard from the Antwerp–Harwich steamer) that powers the current X5.

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s BP problem

Now that the World Cup is under way, there’ll be a definite lull in the pace of government announcements. There’s no point in putting a good news story out only for it to end up on page seven behind six pages of World Cup coverage. I suspect though that the BP story will keep rumbling on. Obama will keep on upping the rhetoric as he needs a target for the public’s anger that at the damage that’s been caused and that the spill hasn’t been stopped yet. The Louisiana state treasure is even speculating that the clean-up bill could bankrupt BP. This puts Cameron in a very difficult position. If he

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Immigrants making Germany dumber

I can understand why one might not want to be associated with these comments. I can also understand why, for the same reasons, one would wish to condemn them, with great fervour, to the press. All for pragmatic reasons, of course. But has anyone yet been able to argue against these comments from a position of fact and logic? Maybe it’s the time the PCC got involved………… Well said, Herr Bundesbank. Now resign.

David Blackburn

Field gets to work

The Times leads with the story that Frank Field, the government’s independent poverty advisor, is recommending that child benefit be stopped at age 13, arguing that: ‘at that age mothers feel even more engaged with work than they are with children.’ Currently, the benefit is paid until children are 19 – £20 is paid for the first child and £13.40 for each subsequent child. The benefit costs the taxpayer £11bn per year; Field’s proposal would save £3bn a year and there would be considerably larger savings if the cut was extended to child tax credits. Field and IDS will propose radical reform of incapacity and out of work benefits that