Society

Saturday

Taki

Strained relationships

Gstaad An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over 40 years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 when he was well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an aeroplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in the days when few people skied. He was a heterosexual dress designer who designed very ugly clothes for women and even worse ones for men. Women, however, had made Oleg famous in an age when people were celebrated for proper reasons. He first married Gene Tierney, the beautiful sloe-eyed star

Robin Oakley

Ladies in demand

Life is all about perspective. I used to believe that rugby was invented by William Webb Ellis, the schoolboy who picked up and ran with a football. But only until I heard an ex-England international explain that it wasn’t Webb Ellis at all who deserved the credit but Dalrymple, the guy who ran after him, wrestled him to the ground and said, ‘Give us our effing ball back.’ I used to think, too, that if a racetrack put on first-class races with decent prizes, top trainers would send good jockeys along with talented mounts and we would all enjoy good sport. That is no longer enough. Faced with increasing competition

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 August 2010

Q. The forthcoming Chatsworth attic sale has inspired me to stage a similar, though much smaller event. The problem is opposition from my 85-year-old mother, who resists any kind of change and does not like to see things going out which she imagines could be put to use at some stage in the future. Our attics and farm buildings are bursting with things which will not see active service again — monogrammed unwieldy suitcases, meat domes, rusty scythes, etc… but they are things which would do well in a so-called country house sale because of their ‘provenance’. How should I tackle my mother, Mary? Name and address withheld A. The

Toby Young Toby Young

This summer, Sasha has given us a masterclass in Machiavellian power politics

One of the advantages of being brought up in large families, supposedly, is that you learn the art of politics at an early age. The idea is that if you’re surrounded by lots of siblings you become skilled at forging alliances, isolating your enemies, and so forth. I didn’t give much credence to this theory until recently, but a change in the dynamic between three of my own children has persuaded me there may be something in it. The top dog among my brood is seven-year-old Sasha. Not only is she better at fighting than her three younger brothers, having been raised on a diet of ultra-violent martial arts cartoons,

The Spectator

Letters | 21 August 2010

What the PCC is for Sir: While I really do not wish to react humourlessly to Douglas Murray’s thoughtful piece on society’s collective sense of humour failure (‘Why can’t anyone take a joke any more?’, 14 August), I would like to clear up a couple of his points about the Press Complaints Commission. He says that we encourage people to ‘claim an offence’ if they do not like something they read. Not quite true. The PCC deliberately makes no judgment on taste or decency, and actively discourages people from complaining on the grounds simply that they have been offended. We encourage people to complain about accuracy and intrusion and the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 21 August 2010

I found myself in a fine pickle trying to give my email address on the telephone in Spanish. It was bad enough with W, an uncommon letter in Spanish. They have their own version of Alpha, Bravo, Charlie (or Able, Baker, Charlie for older readers), but I didn’t know it. Whisky for W seemed to work, but I dried up when it came to the @ sign. The newly useful @ sign is called apestaartje, ‘little monkey’s tail’ in Dutch, and Germans follow suit. It is chiocciola, ‘snail’ in Italian, and a snail is also apparently what Koreans name it after. The Danes and Swedes liken it to an elephant’s

Nicky Campbell

Diary – 21 August 2010

I am organising a memorial service at All Souls Church next to Broadcasting House for my oldest and greatest friend: Allan Robb, the BBC journalist and broadcaster, who died last month. He was 49 and, from the day we met as five-year-olds on our first morning at the Edinburgh Academy, we were like brothers. Allan worked for Radio 1’s Newsbeat and then Radio 5 Live for a number of years. You would have liked him. Like many of my colleagues, he didn’t fit the right-wing stereotype of a BBC journalist: he was not a bien-pensant leftie. Every morning he would march into the newsroom brandishing his Telegraph and railing against

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 August 2010

Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, got no further than Buckingham-shire on his summer holiday before Mr Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, cast doubts on replacing Trident. ‘It’s going to be difficult for someone who is going to receive less housing benefit,’ he said, if the government spent ‘huge, huge amounts of money in a hurry on replacing Trident in full’. Dr Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for Defence, had suggested that the numbers of civil servants and senior officers in the armed forces would be notably reduced. Mr Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was said to have had a ‘blazing, shouting,

The Spectator

Give Clegg credit

Nick Clegg’s triumphant performance in the first televised leaders’ debate has already faded in the public imagination. Back then, Lib Dems spoke breathlessly about overtaking Labour as the nation’s second largest party. But a general election in which they lost more seats than they gained has dampened that optimism, and recent opinion polls have all but extinguished it. Were an election held tomorrow, it is suggested, they would stand to lose a further two thirds of their seats. No longer an insurgent force acting against the Conservatives, Mr Clegg is presiding over a party which fears disappearing altogether. It’s easy to mock Nick Clegg — it was David Cameron’s favourite

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 21 August 2010

Universities warn that even those with top A-levels may not get in, such is the pressure on places. But are A-levels the right criteria for university entrance? In his Metaphysics Aristotle begins by arguing that memory is the means by which humans acquire experience (empeiria). From this they learn that something is the case. But they can then go on to gain epistêmê — ‘knowledge’ based on logical reasoning, and technê — the ‘skill’ to produce something with an awareness of the principles underlying the process. Such people know why and how something is the case and can draw general conclusions from specific experiences. But applying this requires phronêsis, ‘practical

Lucy Vickery

Competition No. 2660: Body language

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2660 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a bodily part that has been overlooked by poets. You turned out in force to celebrate the unsung heroes of our anatomy. Sonnets to the spleen rubbed shoulders with paeans to the pancreas and odes to organs I’d never heard of. Some made me queasy, others — Mick Poole, especially — made me chortle; but everyone impressed, so congratulations all round. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and G.M. Davis pockets £30. There are those whose gonads ripple at the mention of a nipple, While others prize the knuckle

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A council-funded visit to a whore in Amsterdam? Yes please

Under guidelines introduced by the last government, dis-abled people are now allowed to decide the kind of services they want from local authorities. This is called ‘empowerment’ and ‘devolving services to people in the front line’, and it is a good thing, apparently. But it has had certain unexpected consequences. Bizarrely, it seems that in many cases dis-abled people do not want to sit in a frowsy community centre which smells of stale flatus making raffia baskets for begonias, fortified by the occasional cup of tea and a pat on the shoulder and so on, as was previously assumed. What they actually want, it transpires, is a bloody good seeing

Theo Morgan

I want to kill my cat

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. And so was the road to Eric. Eric is our cat. My wife and I rescued him from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home in July 2008: two wide-eyed ‘parents’, excited about giving a young life a fresh start. Two years on, I want him dead. In fact, unbeknown to my wife, I have just asked the vet if he will put him down. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals — and I believe Battersea is a noble enterprise. But although Eric appeared initially to be shy and gentle, he has grown into a monster. He deserves an asbo.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

It is not drugs that cause the problems, it’s the wholly unwinnable war on drugs

At a dinner party a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be sat near one of my heroes, Roger Scruton — like being a couch away from Socrates at a symposium. But then, halfway through, the great man began sounding off on one of the two things he is completely and utterly wrong about (the other one being pop music): drugs. By ‘drugs’, of course, dear, brave, brilliant Roger didn’t mean to include the alcohol he had been quaffing all evening nor yet the highly addictive yet legal nicotine death sticks of which the Fawn and I had partaken before dinner. What he meant was yer proper,

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Forever England | 21 August 2010

There’s a chant they sing at Anfield to the tune of Yellow Submarine — ‘We all dream of a team of Carraghers…’. And so they should. The doughty old Scouser has emerged as something of a hero. There was his gift of £10,000 to Andy Burnham’s Labour leadership campaign, one of the most startling acts of political activism since Robbie Fowler showed his ‘I support the Dockers’ T-shirt. Carragher ended his international ‘retirement’ to turn out for England and Fabio Capello in the World Cup, so his gift shows that his appetite for lost causes is undiminished. Even more surprising, and engaging, was his warmth towards the England manager. Everyone

Melissa Kite

Rural rides

‘Ring us when you get lost and we’ll come and get you,’ was the reaction of the gamekeeper at the farm where I keep my horses when I told him I was going on a trail ride with three female friends. ‘Really,’ I said, ‘just because four women are going off on a riding holiday does not mean we’re going to get lost and need a man to rescue us. We can read maps, you know. We’ve got a compass. And a TomTom.’ ‘Right you are,’ he said, giving me one of his deadpan looks. Which was unfair, I thought, because we were very well prepared. We packed all the

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

In praise of British ingenuity

Two spitfires have just flown over our offices at The Spectator, to commemorate the Battle of Britain. The aircraft are deservedly iconic, but it’s a bit of shame that over the years they’ve eclipsed the de Havilland Mosquito in the public memory. They were developed too late for the Battle itself, but were incredible aircraft when they were deployed. And, crucially, privately-developed. In 1937, the British had only 46 bombers where the Germans had about 800 – and the speed at which the RAF developed was extraordinary. The battle of Britain exposed the weaknesses in the Luftwaffe – and Nazi procurement policy. Hitler relied on a vast, unwieldy bureaucracy to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

CNN Fail

Via Chris Bodenner. Plenty of folk seem surprised by the fact that, apparently or at least according to one poll, 18% of Americans think Barack Obama is a muslim. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Since at least 10% of the population can be relied upon to believe any old nonsense I’m not sure that this is quite so impressive or troubling a finding as many people seem to think. Rather more people, for instance, think that the sun revolves around the earth or, I dare say, that Elvis is still alive. More importantly, however, it permits one to mock cable news.