Society

Saturday

2 Oct 2010

The turf: Rescue remedy

Asked why he had sent a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt, a friend at the funeral of a man who had drowned replied, ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’ Does Flat racing, which keeps convincing itself it is drowning, need a lifebelt in the shape of a rich new fixture at Ascot on the second weekend in October to be called Champions Day? In the parade ring on Sunday, Ascot’s chairman Stoker Hartington, the Duke of Devonshire, just about convinced me that it does. Asked why he had sent a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt, a friend at the funeral of a man who had drowned

Melissa Kite

Real life | 2 October 2010

Tack shops. You can’t live with them, can’t live without them. There is no logical explanation for how compulsively these places draw you in. It is entirely probable they put something addictive in the air supply. Or would they even need to? The intoxicating smell of leather and leather soap, of soft brown suede, of waxed jackets, of hoof oil, of rubber and neoprene Hunters, ooh aah… Sorry, I’m having a moment. I know it’s not just me who suffers from addiction to specialist shops. Morrissey once made a very persuasive argument that he was in the grip of an obsessive compulsion involving Ryman’s the stationers. Every time he saw

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 2 October 2010

I thought I’d never see the day when Sharon would be content to spend a quiet hour with me looking at my holiday snaps on the laptop. I thought I’d never see the day when Sharon would be content to spend a quiet hour with me looking at my holiday snaps on the laptop. Alcoholic nymphomaniacs, I suppose, must mellow over time like everybody else. Her interest was unflagging, even when we came to 50 pictures of the same three elephants enjoying themselves in the Shire river in Malawi. And when we got on to the ones I took of Madonna at a tree-planting ceremony near Lilongwe, she was avid.

Taki

High life | 2 October 2010

When Tom Wolfe harpooned Leonard Bernstein in his famous Sixties essay, he did it by quoting directly from those attending the infamous cocktail party Lenny gave for the Black Panthers. Wolfe had finagled an invite to the grand 5th Avenue Bernstein pad, and was taking notes throughout the evening. The end result was devastating. In fact, it killed radical chic once and for all. The rich and famous stopped giving dinners for cop killers and drug dealers and turned instead to philanthropy. Soon after, the great social climb began with a vengeance, John Fairchild’s nouvelle society was created and names like Steinberg, Kravis, Gutfreund, and so on became household ones

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 2 October 2010

Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph hours after his election. Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph

Toby Young

Hoarding doesn’t pay

Toby Young’s Status Anxiety I’m a pack rat. I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. When Caroline first moved in with me she couldn’t get from one end of our bedroom to the other because every inch of floor space was taken up with piles of old newspapers and magazines. I have lock-ups full of stuff, some of them in New York. At one point, I asked a friend if I could use the space under his stairs to store a cache of second-hand coats I’d bought at a jumble sale. When I wanted to retrieve one five years later, he gave me a blank look and told me

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 2 October 2010

Q. How can I, before accepting an invitation to dinner, find out if the person issuing it has a sweep? The question seems so snobbish but the truth is that unless they have one, my husband and I can’t go. To explain: our normal car was in an accident and will take weeks to repair. In the meantime we can only drive the Maserati my husband bought during his midlife crisis. Having got it out of the garage we found the reverse gear was broken, and a replacement cannot be fitted for months. Now you will see, Mary, that we are not being pretentious. Since we can only drive forwards,

David Blackburn

What to do with Balls?

Ed Balls is adept at opposition – making a case throughout the recent leadership hustings for immigration controls that he knows are unworkable in practice. Mike Smithson reports than a senior Lib Dem thinks Ed Balls would be an ideal opponent for Liam Fox, the man to exploit the coalition’s most obvious weakness. It’s a salivating prospect for the independent observer – confrontation between two skilled and principled communicators – and if anyone can damage a Conservative-led government on defence it is Balls. But there’s the rub. In their ideal worlds, Balls and Fox don’t differ on the broad principles of defence policy. Balls’ call for the independent nuclear deterrent’s renewal and

Alex Massie

It Can Be Brave to be Gay

The bravest person in my school days was the only chap who, aged 16, told the rest of our boys-only (at that time) school that he was gay. It took some guts to be the only openly-gay boy at a rural boarding-school at which being called faggot was akin to being handed the black spot. I have no idea what Donald is doing now but hope it is, whatever it may be, brilliant. And that he is happy. We were a strange and often savage and expensively educated bunch and that’s partly why I think plenty of kids should see this: More at Dan Savage’s place.

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Pseuds corner

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35. I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not

Roger Alton

Smells like team spirit

People who think that life is always about money will have a hard job explaining the Ryder Cup. Top golfers earn serious cash these days, and fairly so-so golfers do too. But once every two years they play for nothing; nothing, that is, beyond the honour of winning. If you think that all sportsmen care about is the cheque, just ask Paul Casey how he feels about being left out of the European team. The Ryder Cup also lies at the heart of the mysterious career of Colin Montgomerie, Europe’s captain this year. It’s his ninth biennial biff at the Americans, but his first when he’s not been playing. Make

Peter Hoskin

We need your vote

To celebrate 25 years of The Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards, we invite you to nominate the best MP of the past quarter-century The question hangs in the air: what makes a great parliamentarian? And the answer echoes back: many things. A great parliamentarian may be a swashbuckling orator whose rhetoric never fails to draw blood. He or she may be an energetic campaigner, striving on their constituents’ behalf for a new hospital or school. He may be a crumpled backbencher who upholds the tenets and conventions of their party. He may be a thinker, a gambler, a rebel or a ham. A gilded few might claim with some justification, ‘I am

Melanie McDonagh

Find yourself in Thurso

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, starring Julia Roberts. The story involves Julia/Elizabeth taking a year out of her life — funded, though the film doesn’t make this clear, by a generous advance from her publisher — in order to discover food in Italy, God in India and love in Bali. It could just as well have been the other way

Michael Tanner

Age concern

English National Opera seems, at the start of the season, to be preoccupied, as we should all be, with how long we want to live, and in what kind of condition. In Janacek’s The Makropoulos Case the eponymous heroine is able, if she wants to, to live in a state of perpetual early maturity, but after 337 years decides to call it a day. In Gounod’s Faust the eponymous hero is feeling his years, and is offered back his youth by a diabolical force in return for his soul. Neither of these works, even in brilliant productions, advances the discussion much, but neither of the productions on offer is helpful,

The Spectator

What’s not to like

The Spectator on Emma Thompson and contemporary English Was Emma Thompson right to berate a group of schoolgirls this week for saying ‘like’ and ‘innit’? Many Spectator readers would, we imagine, have cheered her on. It is annoying the way today’s teenagers pepper their speech with ‘like’ and put ‘innit?’ at the end of each sentence. But if Miss Thompson is determined to improve articulacy, she is attacking the wrong target. After all, English is mistreated in many other more pernicious ways — and by adults, not children. Look at what ‘management speak’ is doing to the mother tongue. It is common today to hear grown-ups using impact as a

Martin Vander Weyer

A brief scuffle on the bridge of the HSBC supertanker doesn’t mean a change of course

‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets banks into trouble,’ I wrote in May, in response to whispers that executive chairman Stephen Green was under pressure to make way for a conventionally non-executive outsider. ‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets banks into trouble,’ I wrote in May, in response to whispers that executive chairman Stephen Green was under pressure to make way for a conventionally non-executive outsider. The bank’s board certainly seems to have taken my message to heart, having persuaded its major institutional investors to accept a reshuffle that offends against every nostrum of

James Delingpole

How I provoked the wrath of Mumsnet

James Delingpole says You Know It Makes Sense Apparently I’m in the doghouse. It’s because of a piece I wrote in Tatler which asked the question: ‘If you had a boy and a girl and could only afford to educate one of them privately, which would you choose?’ All other things being equal, I foolhardily argued, it should be the boy. This is the kind of article guaranteed to grab the attention of the termagants’ website Mumsnet. And so it came to pass. Friends kept forwarding me links to the discussion going on about me, in much the same kindly, helpful way they email links to unpleasant reviews of my

Sholto Byrnes

Moral authority

Baroness Warnock, atheist pillar of the liberal establishment, on the need for Christianity in schools and the folly of human rights Baroness Warnock has had many battles with religion over the course of her long and distinguished career. In 1984, when the Warnock Report recommended allowing in vitro fertilisation and research on embryos, she was attacked by the chief rabbi, Immanuel Jacobowitz. The Times headline, she recalls when we meet at the Royal Society of Arts, was ‘Warnock destroys morality’. ‘I rather treasured that.’ The next year, Enoch Powell, who expressed ‘revulsion and repugnance’ at the report, introduced the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill into parliament to counteract it. I tell

Rod Liddle

I refuse to buy meat from supermarkets until they ban halal slaughter

There is a view, prevalent among a sizeable minority of people in this country, and particularly within the angry, fat and drunk white underclass, that one day very soon the green flag of Islam will fly above Westminster and Britain will have become a Muslim country, by stealth. This is the snarled and yet resigned reaction to every inflammatory news story printed in the popular press about Muslim-only swimming nights at local leisure centres, or councils banning Christmas, or teachers upbraided for talking about Jesus Christ in school and so on. There are one or two Muslim groups who would cheerfully concur with this assessment, arguing that this would be the consequence of

Friday

1 Oct 2010

Alex Massie

Global Warming Fail

Long-time and recent readers alike will have noticed that I almost never write about climate-change or global warming or whatever you want to call it. That’s because I think it an unusually tedious subject about which I lack both the ability and the interest to either care or make an informed judgement. Like many people, then, I take the view that it may well be a biggish problem but, as that wise man Mr Micawber nearly said, something may turn up to help us out of the jam. It is the Iran-Iraq War of policy debates in which one wishes that the most passionate advocates on either side could, well,