Society

Saturday

Taki

Useful lives

New York If one was making £160,000 per week — that’s more than a quarter of a million dollars every seven days — it would be safe to assume that one’s father would not choose to deal in cocaine for a living. Not necessarily, it seems — at least not in the John Terry family. The man who had to stand down as captain of the England football squad for having screwed a teammate’s girl is a hell of a fellow. His mother and mother-in-law were cautioned last year for shoplifting. Now his old man is charged with dealing in the wrong kind of coke. What in hell’s name is

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 April 2010

Q. May I offer an alternative solution to the query from Yokohama last week? A 60-year-old man wrote that people complimented him on his girlfriend’s looks — but in a manner barely concealing amazement that he has managed to attract such a beauty. When this happens, I would suggest he reply: ‘Yes, I agree. And the wonderful thing is that everyone assumes I must be much richer than I actually am.’ N.P., Winchester A. Thank you. This complements my own suggested response. Apologies to T.E. of Yokohama to whose letter I attributed the wrong initials. Q. Where a brown ‘Services’ sign appears on a main road and no public lavatories

Toby Young Toby Young

Funny to think that empowering ordinary citizens was once a rallying cry of the left

Just how much appetite is there for David Cameron’s Big Society? Not much, according to the chattering classes. One of the more bizarre sights on the day the Conservatives’ launched their manifesto was watching the liberal left poo-poo the notion that ordinary people could be ‘prised away from the telly’. Jackie Ashley in the Guardian, for instance, had never heard of such a preposterous idea. ‘Modern life is so busy, with longer working hours, 24-hour TV, emails, blogging, tweeting and the rest, that I wonder how many people will find the time to go along and organise their local school or hospital or police force,’ she wrote. Funny to think

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 17 April 2010

Monday So exciting! Our lovely Cadbury bluey-purple manifesto is finally ready. The toll it has taken on Mr Letwin is horrific but Jed says a few months in the Austerity Room and he should be back to ‘normal’. (Our head of strategy’s finger quotation marks, not mine.) Mr Willetts jumping up and down with excitement at California-style referendums. Dave a bit cross-patchy about them. He says people had ‘bloody better not start demanding daft things like taking all the traffic lights down. What then, eh?’ Mr Letwin just squeaked. Our Leader also nervous about the ‘be your own boss’ idea. Keeps asking Mr Gove to explain how it won’t mean

The Spectator

Letters | 17 April 2010

Tea parties began here Sir: Daniel McCarthy is right that the tea party is ‘a symbol of colonial rebellion’ (‘The trouble with tea parties’, 10 April). But where does he suppose the rebels drew their inspiration from? The American patriots of 1773 didn’t see themselves as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their minds, all they were asking for was what they had always assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen. Part of that birthright was liberty from unjust, arbitrary or punitive taxation. The proposition that taxes ought not to be levied except by elected representatives would have been every bit as popular in contemporary Great Britain as in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 April 2010

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, sent the Foreign Secretary to a nuclear security summit in Washington, so that he could launch the Labour party manifesto in an empty hospital in Birmingham. It promised to halve the annual deficit by 2014, through growth, taxes and cuts, but not to raise rates of income tax and not to extend VAT to food, children’s clothes, books, newspapers and public transport fares. Underperforming schools might be taken over by more successful ones; failing police forces might be taken over by more successful ones. There would be a referendum before 2011 on the alternative vote method of electing MPs. Mr David Cameron launched the

The Spectator

Manifesto destiny

If economics is the dismal science, manifesto-writing must rank as a candidate for the most dismal of arts. Too often in recent times it has been a case of writing down the word ‘future’ and then throwing virtuous-sounding words such as ‘fairness’, ‘change’ and ‘all’ into the air and seeing in what order they land. Manifesto-writers ought to subject each sentence to a test: do not include any statement unless you can imagine your political opponents saying the opposite. The title of Labour’s manifesto sums up its intellectual exhaustion: which politician this side of the 19th-century would ever have opposed a ‘Future Fair for All’? That is what makes the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 17 April 2010

Manifesto pledges, arguments, debates: but do any of them discuss the real issue at hand — what makes for good government? Socrates had strong views on the subject. Manifesto pledges, arguments, debates: but do any of them discuss the real issue at hand — what makes for good government? Socrates had strong views on the subject. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato puts Socrates head-to-head with Callicles, who proclaims the gospel that might is right, and that by effective use of rhetoric a politician can rise above the common herd and get whatever he wants. Socrates was talking in the context of a radical, direct democracy, where all decisions about the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Lib Dems in the lead

A BPIX poll for the Mail on Sunday has the Lib Dems in the lead. The poll, which uses a similar methodology to YouGov, puts the Lib Dems up 12 on 32, the Tories down 7 to 31 and Labour down three to 28. Time will tell if this is a bubble that will burst but the first ever TV debate has certainly shaken the kaleidoscope of British politics. Update: Do read Andrew Neil’s blog on whether the Lib Dem surge will last

James Forsyth James Forsyth

More evidence of a Lib Dem poll surge

There’s another poll putting the Lib Dems in second place now, Com Res has them up eight to 29, the Tories down four to 31 and Labour down two to 27. An ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph has the Lib Dems up 7 to 27. The Tories are on 34, down 3,  and Labour are down two to 29. Interestingly, the paper is reporting that most of the polling was carried out before the debate–so ICM’s numbers may well under-estimate the Lib Dem’s current strength.   Again, we will have to wait a few more days to see whether this Lib Dem surge is solid. But there’s no doubt that something interesting is going on.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron needs to go big on the big society

The more I think about David Cameron’s debate performance the more I think that the problem with it was that it was too one-note. He said little that would make voters think of him as a different kind of Conservative. As with his 2008 conference speech, there was too much health and safety and not enough hope. Cameron actually started the debate strongly, I thought his answers on immigration and crime were solid. But an example of what he didn’t do came when education came up. Cameron talked about excessive bureaucracy, discipline and government waste. Not once did he mention how he was going to let parents, teachers and voluntary

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 April 2010

Since I so much agree with the Big Society which David Cameron wants to create rather than the big state which we have got, I should like to enthuse about the Tory manifesto which makes this the central theme. But there is a problem. The document does not really speak to us, the voters. True, it offers us on its front page an ‘invitation to join the government of Britain’. But haven’t we got enough on our plates without having to do politicians’ job for them? We pay them half our income, and still they want more from us! The manifesto does not start from the viewpoint of particular people

Ed Howker

How New Labour met its nemesis

Last summer, Charlie Whelan’s lawyers threatened to sue The Spectator for an article describing him as a bully. The article was entirely correct. So what was he so keen to cover up? Fraser Nelson and Ed Howker investigate The Labour rebellettes fear the creeping takeover of the party by the Unite trade union via Charlie Whelan. He has been taken on by female officers in the union and formally charged with bullying. Certain Labour women see the Brown-Simpson-Whelan alliance as part of a menacing testosterone-sodden axis. And one that needs to be challenged. Spectator Coffee House blog, 24 May 2009 Two months later, a letter arrived from Mr Whelan’s lawyers.

Andrew Gilligan

The revolution will not be tweeted

Don’t listen to the hype about ‘Web 2.0’ politics, says Andrew Gilligan. Online campaigning is only of interest to a handful of Westminster nerds and journalists Ed Balls has ‘had to take the roast chicken out of the oven’. For Sarah Brown, ‘waking up in our house in Fife was today’s special treat’. William Hague is ‘enjoying a good Burger King at Wetherby services’, and the breaking news from Eric Pickles is that he is ‘out with the team in Brentwood’. In the general election as it appears on Twitter — or should that be Pooter? — there can be no doubt that the battle of ideas is well and

Harry Mount

Barking mad — a day out with the BNP

Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it right. Far-right groups are unlikely to take off in Britain because, for all their nastiness, they always come across as just a little too ridiculous. That’s certainly the impression I got after spending last Saturday in Barking, east London, at the BNP campaign launch. In The Code of the Woosters (1938), Wodehouse neatly took care of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, by casting him as Sir Roderick Spode in his black shorts; by the time

David Modell

The rise and fall of a young fanatic

Examine Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time last year, or the British National Party’s campaign for the European parliament, or even their work ‘on the ground’ in Barking today and you will find something very peculiar. The party is desperate to demonstrate to an electorate angered by expense abuses that it is a tightly run, principled organisation, unblighted by self-serving corruption and ready to ‘clean up’ mainstream politics. The reality (as Harry Mount points out opposite) could not be more different — witness the headline ‘BNP Publicist Sacked Over Plot to Kill Nick Griffin’ which appeared on the Sky News website at the start of this month. The publicist in

Anne Applebaum

A flicker of light in a dark Russian forest

Anne Applebaum says the catastrophic plane crash near Smolensk, which killed so many of Poland’s leading figures, may hasten a rapprochement between Warsaw and Moscow The President, the First Lady, the chairman of the National Bank. Fifteen members of parliament. Ten generals. Anna Walentynowicz, 80-year-old heroine of the Solidarity strike of 1980. Ryszard Kaczorowski, the 91-year-old former president-in-exile. The list of Polish dignitaries who died in the tragic plane crash in the forest near Smolensk, Russia, not far from where 20,000 Polish officers were secretly murdered by Stalin 70 years ago, is extraordinarily long. Yet this time around, nobody suspects a Russian conspiracy. Or almost nobody: a handful of fringe

John L-Allen-Jr

Don’t be daft — you can’t put the Pope on trial

Benedict XVI’s handling of sex abuse cases is not above criticism, says John L. Allen Jr. But the campaign for him to be hauled before an international court is ill informed A Vatican spokesperson recently laughed off the campaign to issue an arrest warrant for Pope Benedict XVI when he visits the United Kingdom in September, describing it as an idea designed to make a splash in public opinion rather than something ‘serious’. One understands that response. Whatever you think about Pope Benedict or Catholicism, it does seem a bit over-heated to suggest that international tribunals designed to prosecute mass-murderers and architects of genocide should go after someone who’s never

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Most gay men have realised that the Oppressed Victimhood party is totally over

Some of my best friends are gay — but now I can go one better than that: one of them is HIV positive. Some of my best friends are gay — but now I can go one better than that: one of them is HIV positive. ‘But that’s brilliant news!’ I told my friend when he spilled the beans the other day. ‘Now I can go round claiming victim cred by association. And if anyone makes an Aids joke I can be, like, seriously offended and put on a solemn voice and say: “Actually, you know, if you had an HIV positive friend like I do…”.’ My friend agreed that

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 17 April 2010

In Competition 2642 you were invited to submit a homage, in verse, to an educational institution. A century or so ago Balliol man Hilaire Belloc wrote with great affection: Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, Whatever I had she gave me again; And the best of Balliol loved and led me. God be with you, Balliol men. How times have changed. Here is Jerome Betts’s entry for this week’s competition: Hail, Alma Mater on the Isis! Your three long years of essay-crisis Prepared for all I now possess — A mortgage, debts, and constant stress! From Trinity College, Oxford, to the University of Bootle, from Bridge Road Infants to Harvard;