Society

Monday

12 Jul 2010

Suffer the Poor Civil Servants

This hand-wringing, bed-wetting piece of Pootery is probably the funniest thing the Observer has printed in years. Written by a “senior civil servant” one could be forgiven for thinking that the End Times are upon us. In reality, of course, the government has decided to spend just £700bn or so in the final year of this parliament. Disaster! Speaking last week to junior civil servants, I found it impossible to muster the usual energy and excitement. I normally ignite the groups with a vision of our higher purpose and entrance them with the dream of a long bright career. Sadly my dream is dead. I don’t know what we are

Saturday

10 Jul 2010

Melissa Kite

Texting tyranny

Try this experiment. The next time your phone beeps you with a text message don’t answer it for five minutes. I bet you can’t do it. I bet you can’t look at ‘message received’ and not press ‘view’. I bet like me you get a tight feeling in your chest after just ten seconds. After 30 seconds you will suffer shooting pains down your left arm and after one minute, if you manage one minute, you will become lightheaded, see stars and very possibly black out. This is because you have been conditioned to the tyranny of the instant response. You are condemned to being endlessly available to absolutely anyone

Jeremy Clarke

Round trip

Two buses a week leave from the bus stop at the lonely crossroads on Thursday and Saturday. I’d caught the Thursday one as the first leg of a journey up to Westminster, to attend The Spectator’s summer party. Dressed in a dark suit and party tie, and attended by a herd of heavily pregnant cows browsing for herbs at the roadside, I was an object of curiosity not only for the other passengers, but also for the driver, a genial Geordie, who had assumed the mantle of expedition spokesman as well as pilot. ‘Getting married?’ he said, as I stepped aboard. I’d got myself into a party mood by spending

Taki

Island idyll

Mykonos Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and Lady John were just here, received like royalty by the gay community, which is comprised mostly of foreigners. The locals are very liberal in their acceptance of ‘foreign customs’, as they call them, ‘as long as nobody comes near my children’. The place was known only to a few of us back in the late-Fifties for its whitewashed picturesque houses,

Robin Oakley

The People’s Toff

Eclipse Day at Sandown Park was nearly a disaster. Feeling for my wallet en route to Waterloo, my heart sank as my hand went into an empty pocket, and then I remembered. Mrs Oakley, by then uncontactable at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, had the night before purloined it to pay for a MarshRuby takeaway curry. (Don’t miss them. The perfectionist Mrs O never normally allows across our doorstep a meal prepared elsewhere but makes an exception for this one-woman enterprise in Lower Marsh.) Shorn of cash and credit cards for rail ticket or racecard I slunk home, reconciled to TV racing. But then I wondered: didn’t Mrs O have

Alan Judd

My old girls

The Range Rover was 40 on 17 June, which is cause for congratulation even if relations with the three I’ve owned were not uniformly harmonious. They were all what are now called Classics and in good condition would be appreciating assets. The first, a 1972 two-door, accompanied me to South Africa where it suffered a mysterious, unheralded engine seizure. Shipped back to Britain, it was given a brand-new engine transplant, sold to friends to revive my finances and taken by them to Angola where it spent months in a container, undocked. When eventually it landed, a lorry drove into it. After more months waiting for parts it was sold to

Toby Young

A demented cage-fighter has taken over my home. It’s terrifying

In the last few weeks my life has begun to resemble the plot of a Hollywood B movie. An alpha male has invaded my home, terrorised my children and enslaved my wife. If I raise the slightest objection to anything he does, he kicks me in the balls. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have become his bitch, running and dashing to satisfy his every need. I’m talking about my two-year-old son Charlie. He has always been my most difficult child, refusing to sleep through the night, prone to tantrums, etc. But until recently he existed on the periphery of my life. He was a little ball of

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 10 July 2010

Q. My godson, who has just finished his A-levels, has always wanted to work in television or film production. I would like to help him get an internship but, although I am a journalist and have some friends in that world, they all say their books are full. If only they would just meet him. The boy is charismatic, hard-working and witty and would be quickly seen to be a great asset in any team he joined. He has written hundreds of letters but to no avail. I would hate to see his charisma diminish when summer ends and he has no job in sight. What do you suggest, Mary?

The Spectator

Letters | 10 July 2010

How to save the seas Sir: We can predict, sadly, that the so-called management of the ocean mining described in Charles Clover’s article (‘The scramble for the seas’, 3 July), will be as poor as the current management of the oceans’ fish stocks. To save the world’s oceans, we need much better policy, coupled with credible enforcement wherever exploitation is permitted, and the establishment of large protected marine reserves where fish and ocean beds are completely protected. Large marine reserves are vital guarantors that will allow ocean resources to survive if the fishing and mineral extraction which are permitted elsewhere fail to be sustainable. The protection of the Chagos archipelago

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 10 July 2010

Mr Nick Clegg attracted some mockery recently by using the words cuts and progressive in the same sentence. Mr George Osborne, in his Budget speech, said: ‘We are a progressive alliance governing in the national interest.’ Some accused them of using the word progressive because it meant nothing. In reality progressive means several things. Usage slides from one to another. Thus Mr Clegg had spoken in the same interview about reduced taxes for the poor (or, rather, ‘people on lower incomes’). Taxation which increases according to income is called progressive taxation. This appeals to progressive-minded people. The latter sense is the most slippery. Fortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary last month

Ozzy Osbourne

Diary – 10 July 2010

When I finally croak, this is what it’s gonna say on my headstone: ‘Ozzy Osbourne: born 1948; died whenever. PS: He bit the head off a bat.’ It’s been almost 30 years since I mistook that bat for a rubber toy — it’s not like I wanted to get rabies shots for the next two months — but it’s still the first question out of people’s mouths when I’m promoting a new album. But that’s what comes with being the Prince of Darkness, I suppose, so I’m not complaining — especially not when my new record, Scream, has gone into the Top Ten of the album charts in seven different

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 July 2010

The coalition government contemplated legislation to reduce Civil Service lay-off payments in prospect of large redundancies. The Public and Commercial Services Union predicted strikes. Mr George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was accused by the opposition of scare tactics after asking ministerial colleagues to prepare plans for departmental cuts of 40 per cent. Mr Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said that 715 school reconstruction schemes under Labour’s programme called Building Schools for the Future would not go ahead. Mr Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, encouraged ‘better off’ people with free bus passes to pay their fares. The BBC is to close its Asian Network radio channel but reprieve 6

The Spectator

God bless the Queen

The Queen’s speech to the United Nations this week was a masterpiece. A forum which hears so much from politicians with, at best, a passing grasp of world affairs was treated to the views of a head of state with half a century of experience and wisdom. As she so rightly observed, the most ‘sweeping advances’ she has seen came not at the behest of governments but because ‘millions of people wanted them’. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, perfectly captured the characteristics of her triumphant reign: ‘grace, constancy and dignity’. ‘In a changing and churning world,’ he told the monarch, ‘you are an anchor for our age.’ She

Alex Massie

Good News! The Government Will Not Ban Cheddar Cheese Sandwiches

I can’t say for sure if this is the strangest parliamentary question asked in recent years but, via John Rentoul, it’s certainly rum. John Spellar, Labour MP for Waring submitted this as a written question: Hospitals: Food Mr Spellar: To ask the Secretary of State for Health whether he plans to ban the sale of (a) tea and coffee with sugar and (b) cheddar cheese sandwiches in hospitals. [5340] Anne Milton: No. I suppose that we can only be glad that the answer was in fact “no”, not “we have no plans to ban cheddar cheese sandwiches in hospitals” or, more succinctly, “yes”. UPDATE: In the coments, Guto Daffyd has a good

David Blackburn

Insane culture

I’ve just flicked on the television in search of fresh disasters. The news that Raoul Moat shot himself when cornered in a kessel is still ‘breaking’. In this heat I’d be surprised if he wasn’t oozing by now, but 24 hour news doesn’t concern itself with such trivialities. The ‘Yours Concerned’ BBC reporter intoned in horror that 2 tasers had been used in the operation. Now, I wouldn’t arm the officious clown who asked why I was carrying a bottle of Crozes Hermitage through Waterloo station yesterday evening. I oppose the adoption of tasers in anything other than extreme circumstances. But Mr Moat was fairly extreme in my book, given,

Alex Massie

When Death Freezes Over…

A fascinating and typically well-written piece by Kerry Howley about cryonics and death, published in the New York Times Magazine last week. It begins well and gets better: There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Virginia. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that

David Blackburn

Sir Humphrey always has the last word

The Great Repeal Act seems to have gone the way of all flesh. Perhaps the task was deemed too cumbrous. Or perhaps the Civil Service replaced their original contrivances with a bill so convoluted that the Repeal Act itself would have to be repealed. As Alan Clark wrote: ‘Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives and convoluted apology’. I mention the civil service because the government plan to ‘cure Labour’s Health and Safety neurosis’. Lovely turns of phrase from David Cameron in interview with the Mail: concern for safety and welfare has invaded the private sphere and it will be

David Blackburn

Send for Chote

And so it continues. The FT reports that Sir Alan Budd has denied that George Osborne cooked the OBR’s job loss forecasts. ‘It was genuinely a forecasting correction with no ministerial interference,’ he said, blandly. The correction was the result of the OBR’s use of a narrow definition of public sector workforce than is employed by other statisticians. That is not abnormal: statisticians are a law unto themselves. But, as the saying goes, it doesn’t look good. The OBR’s figures supported the government and the story is beginning to emit of a whiff of mendacity. Once more, George Osborne is in a mess of his own making. His political instincts veer

Rod Liddle

Should the Schonrock kids be allowed to cycle to school?

It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains. I would walk the half-mile or so along Clifton Road by myself and camp out — usually on the southbound platform — well away from the occasional adult trainspotters with their flasks, anoraks and notebooks. I think we all recognise today that adult trainspotters are invariably paedophiles, but this was something I knew, at the

James Delingpole

Lefties have got away with feeling superior for too long — let the fightback begin

I was at a debate at the Institute of Economic Affairs last week when the speaker next to me — a preening, prickly chap with a moustache and hugely self-important manner — took it upon himself to apprise the assembled throng of the most extraordinary fact: apparently, James Delingpole is nowhere near as good at delivering Ronald Reagan quotes as Ronald Reagan was. ‘As I can testify from experience,’ he added, impressively, ‘having heard Reagan speak on several occasions.’ ‘Gosh!’ I thought to myself. And again ‘Gosh!’ I’m often taken aback when complete strangers decide to have a go at me personally in debates. ‘Hey, you don’t even know me,’