Society

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 14 November 2009

In Competition No. 2621 you were invited to invent a new magazine combining two existing publications and provide an extract from it. It was with great reluctance that I disqualified Josh Ekroy’s poignant portrait of an angst-ridden budgerigar. The publications in question had to be real ones, and energetic attempts to track down Existentialist Monthly and Your Budgie came to naught. In a strong field, Frank McDonald and W.J. Webster stood out; while Bill Greenwell’s synthesis of the phenomenally popular Take a Break — which invites readers to sell their stories of ‘love and betrayal, loss and sin’ — and Identity, the BNP house mag, had a pleasing ring of

Richard Northedge

In the boardroom | 14 November 2009

One of the oft-repeated excuses for high executive pay is the need to compete for top talent in an international market. A scan through a list of heads of FTSE 100 companies certainly shows just how many boards go abroad for their boss: 41 of the UK’s top 100 chief executives are foreigners, including three who are now naturalised Brits. They come from 14 different countries, from Mexico to the Ivory Coast and India. But a market ought to be a two-way exchange, and while we import senior managers from overseas, where are the British businessmen heading foreign public companies? There is a serious trade deficit in boardroom bosses. Are

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m famous at last — thanks to the internet (and this column)

I don’t know quite how to put this without sounding nauseatingly smug or dangerously hubristic, but I think I might finally have become almost-famous. The revelation occurred while I was doing Vanessa Feltz’s show on BBC Radio London. I was burbling away in my usual self-hating way about how needy I am and unappreciated, and Vanessa said: ‘You know a lot of listeners are going to be quite puzzled by that, because you’re a successful columnist with a huge audience and you’re broadcasting to thousands of people right now.’ And I thought, ‘Bloody hell, Vanessa. You’re right.’ Sure I’m not famous enough to be mobbed in the street, or get

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Is running a country just too big a job for anyone?

You don’t expect people to take their political inspiration from Jon Bon Jovi. Or at least I don’t. Maybe that’s terribly presumptuous of me. Maybe some people do. ‘Tommy used to work on the docks/ Union’s been on strike/ He’s down on his luck, it’s tough/ so tough.’ Maybe that’s what got Tony Blair up in the morning. A decade of New Labour, ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’. It’s not entirely impossible, although I did always think that New Jersey’s most accessible rock star was more about bouffant hair and catchy guitar solos than hardcore political philosophy. Mind you, I always thought much the same about Tony Blair. He was in

John C-Hulsman

Sleepwalking into disaster in Afghanistan

John C. Hulsman says that America’s declining status will ultimately doom its Afghan campaign. Obama must learn from Britain how best to manage the decline of an empire I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward disaster in Afghanistan. The President, reminded by his domestic advisers of the fate of another domestically ambitious president, LBJ, has hesitated before going all-in to rescue the mission in Kabul. He is right to take his time before risking his presidency on a war whose outcome is clearly uncertain. But by all accounts, pressured by

Taki

Follow the leader

New York At an outdoor luncheon party in Sussex celebrating Willy Shawcross’s birthday some years ago, I asked his then 95-year-old father whom he found the most interesting man at Nuremberg. ‘Goering,’ was the monosyllabic reply. ‘I mean from both sides,’ I said. ‘Goering,’ said Lord Shawcross. He later told me how the Nazi would catch out the American prosecutor Jackson in some howler, correct him, then smile at Shawcross, who had trouble not smiling back. I saw a lot of William last week here in the Bagel, as he is over for his book on the Queen Mother, an undertaking that took him six years of hard work. Mind

Jeremy Clarke

Opportunity knocks

I met Combo at dawn. I was standing on the Malawian shore of the lake watching the sun rise over the mountains in Mozambique and she came and stood wordlessly beside me and we watched together. After a while I offered her a swig from the bottle I was holding. ‘No,’ she said, without taking her eyes away from the sun. ‘I am too drunk.’ It was the first sunrise of a four-day music festival. I’d been dancing all night on the beach. A line of four middle-class English girls were kneeling in a row at the water’s edge performing the Astanga yoga Salute to the Sun. You could feel

Friday

Mark Bathgate

The perfect storm

The UK debt crisis has three constituent parts – household, government and banking. The fact that households, government and banks all went on a debt binge at the same time makes the risks for the UK economy so unusual.  The European Commission is now estimating that total UK Government debt will rise above £1.3trillion by the end of 2011, representing a more than trebling in the total debt load since 1997. If interest rates normalise to the 5% or so seen during recoveries in previous cycles, this will see the interest service bill alone rise to around £65billion a year – more than double the total defence budget. Assuming continuing

David Blackburn

The future of neo-conservatism

Writing in this week’s Spectator, internationally renowned expert John. C. Hulsman argues that America is too economically imperilled to commit to expensive foreign adventures that yield nothing. Hulsman urges Obama to learn from the foreign policy mistakes made by Britain, the last western imperial power. He gives a whistle-stop tour of humiliations, from Amritsar, Ireland and Suez, and sketches how obvious decline forced Britain to re-imagine its foreign policy objectives.  Despite pressure from neo-conservative opposition, Obama must pursue a new modus operandi, as British imperialists were forced to do. The key is to recognise Afghanistan’s political complexity and seek stability through compromise and realism, starting with the Afghan constitution. Hulsman

The Spectator

Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards

As promised, here is the video footage from yesterday’s awards ceremony at Claridge’s. Politicians, journalists, legendary broadcasters and the Spectator’s most prestigious writers attended. You can watch Fraser Nelson’s speech and each of the winners’ acceptance speeches, including James Purnell’s very dry observation that his career has nose-dived ever since this magazine started to back him. Anyway, we hope you enjoy it.

Thursday

Martin Bright

Bright’s Blog: The Comeback

Apologies that the blog hasn’t been as regular as it should have been recently. The Jewish Chronicle has worked me hard in my first few weeks and I have been unable to keep posting as often as I would have liked. I have now decided to blog at regular times during the week.  I therefore intend to begin the week with a political round-up after the Sunday papers. I will post again on Tuesday and Thursday with updates on the crisis on the left as I perceive it. I reserve the right to comment on other aspects of politics (or indeed other matters) around those fixed points. I look forward,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Satan’s Legions are…charming. Bugger.

Never meet your enemies; you might end up liking them. I’ve just got back from The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards and the buggers had sat me next to James Purnell, about whom I was a bit snippy in print not so long ago. It was the usual measured, level-headed stuff about him being an agent of Satan, whore of the anti-christ etc. The problem I have with Purnell is not just his Blairite politics, but his former incarnation as a wonk for John Birt at the BBC, working in the fabulously hopeless corporate centre. I think I may have spewed all this out a while back in the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Harman won

Harriet Harman as the Spectator/Threadneedle parliamentarian of the year? When the judging panel started our deliberations, we had no idea we’d end up giving the top laurels to Harperson and Mandelson. Well, Mandelson as politician of the year was a no-brainer: you don’t need an explanation. He just is. He took over a government single-handedly. But Harman? I bow to no one (except Rod Liddle) in my hostility to her equalities agenda. But her critics must admit that a) she actually has an agenda, unlike so many of her colleagues b) she advances her agenda powerfully, as she did every day with her displays of political pyrotechnics when she stood

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How long can Obama leave Brown hanging on Afghanistan?

Gordon Brown is in a nigh-on-impossible position on Afghanistan until President Obama makes up his mind about how many more troops he wants to send and what strategy he wants to pursue. Yesterday at PMQs, Brown said with a sense of relief that there would be a decision from Washington in days. The White House rapidly distanced itself from Brown’s comments. Now, the New York Times is reporting that the ‘announcement is still likely at least two weeks away – perhaps more.’ Two weeks where Brown can’t say that Britain is winning in Afghanistan but equally can’t announce a new strategy is going to be corrosive of support for the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Kevin Pietersen’s Sense of History

Kevin Pietersen is an idiot. One day that will become endearing and amusing and we’ll look upon his daftness with fondness and so on. But that moment hasn’t arrived yet. So, for the time being, we look at Pietersen and wonder what on earth is going on. No normal person would tell the Times that:  “I truly believe Jacques Kallis is the greatest cricketer ever.” This is as absurd as Chris Adams’s claim that Mushtaq Ahmed was the finest cricketer who ever played for Sussex. I suppose we ask quite a lot of professional sportsmen, but is it too demanding to wonder if, from time to time, they might actually

The Spectator

In this week’s Spectator | 12 November 2009

The latest issue of the Spectator is released today. If you are a subscriber you can view it here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online now. Five articles from the latest issue are available for free online to all website users: A week after David Cameron ruled out a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, hardly a squeak of protest has been heard from Eurosceptics in his party. It’s not because they have accepted defeat, says Fraser Nelson, but because they are deadly serious about victory. After a good meal, Tory MPs like to play a game: guess the first

Alex Massie Alex Massie

England are Third Best Football Team in the World, Boffins Say!

Sure Barack Obama won the Presidential election last year. But he wasn’t the only big winner. Nate Silver, the number-cruncher behind FiveThirtyEight.com was another victor, having predicted the result with uncanny accuracy. Silver is a sabermetrician, which is to say that he began his public life as an analyst for the brilliant Baseball Prospectus years before he brought his statistical nous to politics. Using regression analyses, among other tools, to predict political outcomes is one thing; trying to create a predictive rankings system for international football is quite another. By “quite another” I mean vastly more difficult. Nonetheless, Silver has attempted this. So, as a rival to FIFA’s rankings (which

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

An impossible position

The moment that stuck out for me from today’s PMQs came right towards the end, the exchanges between the leaders were not particularly enlightening. Gerald Howarth, a member of the Tory defence team, rose from the backbenches to tell the House of an email he had received from a friend of one of those men killed in Afghanistan in recent days saying that the coalition is winning there. Howarth asked the PM to help spread this positive message — prompting Labour cries of ‘tell The Sun.’ But in his reply, Brown conspicuously did not say that we were winning. Instead, he concentrated on paying tribute to the bravery of the

Daniel Korski

Helicopter reality

There is something oddly comforting about discussing NATO’s Afghan mission in terms of kit, helicopters and troop numbers – or the lack thereof. These are tangible categories. You either have the right amount or you don’t. And if you don’t, then it is because somebody made the wrong decision or failed to make a timely one. Even Mrs Janes, grief-stricken after the killing of her son, seems to take some comfort in the question of equipment while Liam Fox has made much political capital of the Government’s failures. There are just two problems with this kind of approach to warfare. First, the stories in the press about helicopters take precedence

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shocker! Public Back Brown!

But only on the absurd row over his letters to the mothers and wives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Heck of a job, Sun. A Politics Home poll reports: And: And: In a way these results are quite comforting. Voters are rather more sophisticated and decent than the papers they read. Thank Christ for that.