Society

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

What we need is a glorious alliance between all sorts of people who hate each other

I once wrote a column about Camden Council, the total bastards, stealing my car. Never had a response like it. Lawyers got in touch, offering their services. Motorist groups wanted to sign me up. Readers wrote in, offering other tales of total Camden bastardy, or similar bastardy from elsewhere, and Tom Conti invited me round for a coffee. It was the first time I properly realised that modern Britain does, after all, possess a fearless, freedom-loving backbone. It’s just peculiarly preoccupied with things like parking tickets. No disrespect intended to the glowering love interest from Shirley Valentine, but I always thought freedom was supposed to be sexier than this. It’s

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I feel the need to offer Wikipedia some ammunition in its quest to discredit me

James Delingpole says You Know It Makes Sense The most excruciatingly awful thing I have ever done in my entire life happened in my penultimate year at school. At the time I was learning classical guitar and occasionally I would meet up with one of my English teachers, ‘Mattie’ Simpson, so that we could play duets together. On the fateful day I’m about to describe the piece we were practising was Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. Now my other main activity at the time was cross-country running. Like many of the boys in my house I would train regularly and hard, killing myself up and down the Malvern Hills

Edie Lush

Small can be beautiful in difficult times

Uncertainty reigns among UK investors. Will this week’s Budget cuts wither the green shoots of growth? Whatever happened to safety in blue chips when BP’s dividends can vanish into an oil slick? Where’s a stock-picker to turn? If the words ‘small cap’ don’t send you rigid with fright, then there are good reasons to look towards AIM, London’s market for listed smaller companies. You’ll find businesses there that are an unusually good bet in tough times. And you’ll find some that are sufficiently global, despite their modest size, not to flinch at a prolonged UK downturn. Long time AIM watcher Tom Bulford, author of the Red Hot Penny Shares newsletter,

Alex Brummer

Despite BP, high yields are still worth chasing

Alex Brummer says blue chip stocks that pay a handsome stream of dividends are — usually — a reliable bet First, I have a serious confession to make. For as long as I can remember, my informal advice to any UK investor considering a share purchase — particularly during the volatile years of the ‘great panic’ followed by the ‘great recession’ — has been to buy BP. In a world ever more desperate for energy, the oil price had only one direction to travel over the long haul and that is upwards. BP looked particularly well placed to benefit because of its exposure (around 40 per cent of its income)

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A VAT rise makes sense — and is the least painful sting in this bold Budget

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I wrote here in February that I did not believe the Conservatives’ pretence of having ‘absolutely no plans to increase VAT’, and that, having examined this fiercely complex issue at some length with an ice pack on my head, I had come down in favour of a VAT rise — as indeed had the experts at the Institute of Directors, who wrote: ‘The VAT rate should be increased to 20 per cent, in order to allow for more substantial and rapid tax reductions elsewhere than would otherwise be possible.’ That has now come to pass, and despite the howls of protest in the House

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 26 June 2010

In Competition No. 2652 you were invited to submit an extract from the autobiography of a sportsman packed with as many clichés as possible. The World Cup will no doubt provide a feast of words and phrases that have had the life squeezed out of them, as well as ample opportunity to mock players and pundits for their unimaginative use of language. But no less a literary giant than Kazuo Ishiguro has come to the defence of footballing clichés, describing them as poignant and beautiful. ‘At the end of the day’ was singled out by the Booker prize-winning author as an expression of stoic ruefulness that comes close to reflecting

Patrick Carnegy

Camelot on Avon

Morte d’Arthur Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in rep until 28 August The quest for King Arthur is not to be undertaken lightly. The RSC’s éminence grise, John Barton, has devoted much of his life to it — or at least what has remained to him after Tantalus, his nine-hour dramatisation of the literature piled up around the walls of Troy. It’s not Barton, though, but Mike Poulton who’s now claiming the Grail of a completed stage adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s massive Arthurian epic. It’s taken Poulton ten years and the result, running for nearly four hours, arrives at Stratford directed by Gregory Doran. In 2005 Poulton and Doran came up

Deborah Ross

Hair brained

Good Hair 12A, Key Cities Get Him to the Greek 15, Nationwide When Chris Rock’s four-year-old daughter Lola came up to him crying and asked, ‘Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?’, he did not do what I would have done, which would have been to send her to bed without supper. Honestly, don’t today’s parents have enough to do without answering awkward questions? (For more child-neglecting tips, please see my Big Book of Child-Neglecting Tips, which is the definitive work of its kind.) Instead, Mr Rock, the American black comedian, lets us all down by thinking seriously about Lola’s question, and making this documentary as a kind of reply

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Dizzying heights

The veteran Himalayan mountaineer (70 next year) and now indefatigable fundraiser for his Nepalese charity, Doug Scott, held a packed audience spellbound at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington last week describing the moment he was swept from west ridge of K2, second only to Everest in height but far more dangerous. ‘I thought, this is the first time I have been in an avalanche,’ he said. ‘And then I thought, I am going to die.’ He added he felt very serene. Scott had already endured the world’s highest bivouac, without tent or sleeping bag, just below the summit of Everest, and the year before in Pakistan’s Karakoram crawled down

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Afghan Hearts and Minds are Decided

A terrific, if gloomy, Afghanistan dispatch from William Dalrymple, published by our friends over at the New Statesman. I don’t know how useful comparisons with the First Afghan War are but the psychology of occupation is a different matter: The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban. As

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Swedish lessons | 25 June 2010

I’m in Stockholm today to celebrate the summer solstice. It’s a magical part of the year, best illustrated by the newspaper column (below) giving times for sunrise and sunset in various parts of Sweden. In Kiruna there’s just a dash – the sun doesn’t rise or set in this part of the year. (The same is true in winter, the poor things). Normally, the Swedes disguise their pagan festivals with a Christian veneer (like Santa Lucia) but today’s all-out dance-round-the-fertility-pole without apology. It’s like a cross between the Waltons, Woodstock and the Wicker Man. Events like these drive home the limitations of taxing alcohol: it’s far from unusual, in the evening,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Abbott gives no answers

There’s one thing that people want to talk about today and that’s Diane Abbott’s appearance on This Week last night. As you can see above, it was a total disaster for Abbott. She was all over the place on her taxi claims and she got into a total tangle on whether she had meant to imply with her comment that ‘West Indian mothers will go to the wall for their children’ that West Indian mothers were better than mothers of other ethnicities. Under repeated questioning, all she would say is that she had said all she was going to say on the subject.  Even when it was clear that this

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Time to leave?

The Spectator’s summer debating season ended with a strident appeal. ‘Too late to save Britain. It’s time to leave’. Proposing the motion, Rod Liddle claimed to have mis-read his invitation. ‘I thought this was a foregone conclusion and we’d come here to arrange the tickets.’ Surging immigration, he said, was ruining the education system and our love lives. ‘By 2029 no one will be having sex, we’ll be so crowded out.’ The recent election had proved nothing but democracy’s impotence. ‘The poverty gap keeps widening, financiers still get bonuses and schools support Lesbian Gay and Trans-gender History Month.’ Soon he predicted that the definition of disability ‘will cover everyone except

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Billionaires for Immigration

I guess Michael Bloomberg and Co aren’t necessarily the most sympathetic folks out there. But here, via Dave Weigel, is what Rupert Murdoch has to say about immigration: “We’re just going to keep the pressure on the congressmen,” Murdoch said. “I think we can show to the public the benefits of having migrants and the jobs that go with them.” Sure, he’s talking about the United States but the gist of the argument is the same here. Perhaps he could have a word with the editor of the Sun? Sure too, immigration is a non-runner given the current economic climate. But at some point we’re going to need more workers.

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Downing Street monitoring three potential Whitehall trouble spots

Benedict Brogan, who is extremely well sourced inside Number 10, has a very interesting report on three potential problems that Downing Street is keeping a close eye on. The first is the Cameron Fox relationship. As James Kirkup writes in the Telegraph today, Cameron was not best pleased when Fox announced Sir Jock Stirrup’s sacking in a newspaper interview. There’s a feeling among some of his Cabinet colleagues that Fox is using up his lives rather quickly what with this mistake and the comment about Afghanistan being a broken 13th century just before he and William Hague and Andrew Mitchell arrived there. There’s also a lot of briefing against Fox coming

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cable begs for protection

Vince Cable is announcing to Metro that “We do not want to make such deep cuts to transport, energy, science research and universities.” Really? According to whom? The science budget, which has shot from £1.3bn to an indefensible £3.7bn, is a prime example of a cost that should not be borne by the taxpayer. Scientists are best left to get on with this themselves, and companies are more than capable of funding research. On energy, again, there are many expensive vanity projects just begging for the axe. Given that Cable is in charge of the universities brief – the most important part of his otherwise non-job – you can expect

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Rudd resigns, Australia has its first female PM

In the end, Kevin Rudd didn’t even last to the leadership ballot. He agreed to step down as PM and Labour leader this morning and the party immediately replaced him with Julia Gillard, his deputy who announced she was prepared to stand against him yesterday. At the start of the year, Rudd was the most popular PM in thirty years. His departure is a remarkable turn of events. We’ll have more analysis later in the day.

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron and Clegg offer joint defence of the Budget

David Cameron did particularly well in the Cameron and Clegg joint interview just now. He has a real ability to read the mood of an audience; the debates could have been very different if the audience hadn’t been required to be silent. The only news made during the interview was Cameron saying that he will not take the Prime Minister’s pension. But there was an interesting bit at the very end when Nick Robinson asked Nick Clegg what he had kept out of the Budget. Clegg said he didn’t want to go into the ‘gory details’, a phrase that Robinson immediately jumped on. Cameron then intervened to say that the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The McChrystal Affair

Yesterday there was some chatter that the smart thing would be for General Stanley McChrystal to offer his resignation but for President Barack Obama to decline it. That had the advantage of cuteness, but I’m not sure it was ever feasible and not least because, as best I can tell, the more military-minded an observer is the more certain they were that the general had to go. It is not, evidently, an ideal situation. Of course it isn’t, it’s Afghanistan. Nevertheless, from both a political and military perspective replacing McChrystal with General David Petraeus is as close to a win-win result as its possible to salvage from this clusterfuck brouhaha.