Society

Saturday

13 Feb 2010

Multiple choice | 13 February 2010

Choosing frames for my new varifocal lenses was like choosing a new personality. Each pair I tried on projected something slightly different. What kind of person should I pretend to be from now on? Philosophical? Whacky? Left-leaning? Post post-modernist? It was an unexpectedly exciting moment. The young assistant stood with me at the display and offered her professional opinion. In quick succession I popped on a couple of dozen different frames and looked into her eyes and tried to be serious. She knew immediately whether or not a particular pair of frames suited my face. If they did, and she liked them, she shook her fingers as though she’d just

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 February 2010

Q. My husband’s cousin is clever, kind and good-looking and has his own (rather grimy) flat. He works from home, and lives alone. Despite wanting to, he has never married. He and I are good friends and often have lunch. From time to time I have noticed a faint whiff from him but recently it has become quite disgusting. My husband refuses to say anything and a mutual friend tells me it is therefore my duty to tell him because it must be putting women off. What do you suggest? Name and address withheld A. Find a pretext to drop into his flat. Reel with revulsion as you come through

Toby Young

How a bit of competition stopped Ludo being an educationally subnormal moron

As someone trying to set up a school, I’ve been doing a bit of research into different pedagogic philosophies. What’s the most effective way to teach child-ren, particularly if they’re not that interested to begin with? Should we embrace an old-fashioned approach, with masters standing in front of blackboards reciting Latin verbs? Or a ‘personalised learning programme’ in which children acquire ‘skills’? People on both sides of the argument can point to successful examples. For instance, Maple Walk in Harlesden, one of the schools set up by Civitas, is conservative with a small ‘c’, favouring traditional pedagogy, and has proved a huge success. Kunskapsskolan, by contrast, the most prominent of

Interconnect

Mind your language | 13 February 2010

I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. It was first published in 1855 as The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. The presumption was that they used a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary. The book I knew until this week was the ‘fourth edition’ published in 1884 by Field and Tuer at the Leadenhall Presse, as

The Spectator

Letters | 13 February 2010

Scientists must engage more Sir: Arguments over nuclear energy, stolen emails from the University of East Anglia and allegations about flawed climate data have indeed split the green movement (‘The global warming guerrillas’, 6 February). But sceptics mustn’t get too excited. The revelations alter nothing. The centuries-old climate science behind the greenhouse effect of gases, such as carbon dioxide, is indisput-able. The world is still warming and humanity is still mostly to blame. ‘Climategate’ should not be seen as a lapse in climate science but a failure to implement the rigorous procedures that ensure only substantiated evidence is published. The IPCC must recover from its embarrassment, get a grip and

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 13 February 2010

Monday Hooray! Have been promoted. Am being given super-powerful new role heading up our Twitter Monitoring Unit! Obviously, because I am no longer able to do policy work, Wonky Tom will take over responsibility for all that boring stuff. So excited. Have a list of the most troublesome Tweeters, most of them called Nadine. There are about ten of her, all v convincing. The one where she blames the Speaker, the BBC and the Pentagon for colluding in an international conspiracy to vandalise her garden furniture is the most authentic. Only slightly disappointing thing is that Poppy has been made Chief Blog Monitor. This could be seen as a bigger

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 February 2010

At last, the BBC has caught up with me. Readers may remember that I have been keeping and watching my television, but refusing to pay my television licence, for as long as the BBC continues to employ Jonathan Ross. (I sent the sum to Help the Aged instead.) The anti-Ross campaign has had some effect and Ross’s contract will not be renewed, but he continues to collect his £6 million a year from the Corporation until July, so I won’t contribute until he is off the books. I have just received a Summons, which begins ‘Brenda Curry TV LICENSING of TV Licensing, PO Box 88, Darwen, BBS 1YX says that

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 February 2010

Three Labour MPs, Mr Elliot Morley, Mr David Chaytor and Mr Jim Devine, and a Conservative peer, Lord Hanningfield, were charged with false accounting under section 17 of the Theft Act 1968 with regard to claims for parliamentary expenses. Lawyers for the MPs let it be known that they might claim immunity from prosecution under parliamentary privilege guaranteed by the Bill of Rights 1689. Mr David Cameron said that he had asked Sir George Young, the shadow leader of the House, to draft a Parliamentary Privilege Bill to clarify matters. Lord Hanningfield was quickly suspended from the parliamentary Conservative party and stood down as leader of Essex County Council. Three

James Forsyth

Sunday papers to say Labour is considering a 10 percent death tax

The word on the street tonight is that the Sunday papers will report that Labour is considering a 10 percent ‘death tax’ to pay for long term care for the elderly. It will be interesting to see if Labour is prepared to rule out this option or if they will refuse to do so as they have refused to rule out a £20,000 levy. Tomorrow, the three health spokesmen are all appearing on the Politics Show. I expect it will be a contentious encounter with Burnham accusing the Tories of playing politics with the issue and the Tories challenging Burnham to rule out a £20,000 levy. PS One amusing aspect

Francis Fukuyama

Is the age of democracy over?

Twenty years ago, Francis Fukuyama forecast the final triumph of liberal democracy and the ‘end of history’. As pro-democracy movements falter from Ukraine to China, he revisits his thesis — and asks if history has a few more surprises to spring It looked like a revolution in reverse. The announced victory of Viktor Yanukovich in Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential election undid that country’s Orange Revolution of 2004 by returning to power the very man whom tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters came out to defeat. And this is only the latest in a series of apparent setbacks for democracy in recent years. Over the last decade we have seen the collapse

John Laughland

The end of the rainbow: a guide to the colour revolutions

In contrast to the storming of the Bastille, the spate of revolutions which have flickered across our television screens in the last two decades have tended to adopt brand images connected with colours or plants. Most of them have wilted as quickly as they flowered. Whether Burma in 2007, Armenia in 2008, Tehran in 2009, any pro-Western demonstration is now immediately given a brand. And ‘revolution’ is proclaimed even if everything stays the same as before. The ‘rose revolution’, Georgia, 22 November 2003 The ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia turned on a disputed election. Street protests were organised by a group called ‘Kmara’. The opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili and his supporters

Jeff Randall

Dubai Notebook

Easing myself into an expensive seat on a British Airways overnight flight to Dubai, I notice two empty places to my left. The plane, I was told, was full. Someone must be very late. At this point, the rogue bookmaker who operates exclusively inside my head, laying odds on life’s little challenges, pipes up: ‘It’s 1-5 you cop a screaming toddler in that spot; 9-2 you don’t.’ My heart sinks. The bookie is shrewd; he knows the form. Sure enough, just as the crew is preparing to lock the doors, a flustered-looking couple rush on board, with their baby banshee already in full cry. Waahaahaah! As we thunder along the

Rod Liddle

We are all victims of institutional anti-racism

I don’t suppose that anyone is about to build a community centre in commemoration of Waad al-Baghdadi, but maybe they should. There’s one for Stephen Lawrence, constructed as a token of our disgust at what Sir William Macpherson called the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police. Lawrence’s murder was not competently investigated by the Old Bill at least in part, Macpherson argued, for institutionally racist reasons, borrowing the phrase from the borderline psychotic black American activist Stokely Carmichael. Mr al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, was not killed by anyone, but he was smacked around a bit by a copper. He showed great bravery in pursuing that policeman and eventually seeing him convicted —

Andrew Gimson

The property bubble is waiting to burst

As a general rule, it is a mistake to go through life thinking about how much one’s house is worth. In the summer of 2002, when I bought my ‘lovely end of terrace period cottage providing compact character accommodation’ in Gospel Oak, London NW5, I assumed I had managed, with unerring incompetence, to buy at the very top of the boom. It seemed to me unimaginable that anyone would be willing to spend more than the grossly inflated sum of £385,000 which I had paid for my small, damp, jerry-built house. My imagination was defective: to my stupefaction, the property boom continued for another five years, until the collapse of

Matthew Parris

The Australian bush says: ‘Come in’ — and then it breaks your heart

We are driving in inland New South Wales. We could be driving across grassy English lowland. Wide green hills roll towards a dove-grey horizon, and wisps of white curl down from wet clouds to touch the higher ground. Here and there a stand of trees dots a meadow, and small woods fringe pasture; but there is no forest, nothing dense or dark. Green here is not so much a colour in the artist’s palette as the canvas on which he paints. The whole aspect is damp, mild, open; and though wire fence strings the roadside and sometimes a lonely track is lined in wooden post-and-rail, the impression is of parkland:

Richard Northedge

‘Read this and weep’: lessons not learned from Slater Walker

Richard Northedge has unearthed confidential papers that reveal the Bank of England and the Treasury at loggerheads over a banking collapse 35 years ago In the permanently uneasy truce between Threadneedle Street and Whitehall, Bank of England governor Mervyn King has never been shy of publicly criticising the Treasury. But confidential files on a banking crisis of 35 years ago show that private comments between the two institutions can be even more caustic. A civil servant’s handwritten note on a letter from the Bank during the Slater Walker crisis in 1975 says, ‘Read this and weep.’ His boss scribbles back: ‘I have read — and spat blood at this unjustified

Dominic Prince

Mutual satisfaction

I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. Motor insurance, household insurance, pet insurance. Some, like cover for your car, you have to have by law. Other stuff, like cover for your cat or the contents of your house, you don’t. A great deal of insurance is unnecessary and costly. Is it worth insuring an old banger comprehensively? No. Is it worth insuring paintings? Probably not: nicked pictures have little re-sale value and your average burglar wouldn’t know a Van Gogh from your great-aunt’s holiday daub anyway. Each year when the premiums are due, I shudder

Dominic Midgley

Billions more mouths to feed

Food security is the new energy security. So says Susan Payne, chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, a Surrey-based company which claims to run the biggest agricultural fund in Africa following the launch of its first fund less than 18 months ago. Payne, a Canadian who cut her teeth as an emerging-markets expert first at JPMorgan and then at Goldman Sachs, attracts investors by conjuring up the Malthusian devil. The world’s population is set to grow by 2 billion to 9.1 billion over the next 40 years; feeding the children of tomorrow will require a 50 per cent increase in farm output by 2025 and a doubling by 2050. Meanwhile,

Elliot Wilson

Gallantry is a finite resource

Few individuals better personify the eccentric, combative and rarefied world of medal collecting than Michael Ashcroft, the businessman and controversially deep-pocketed Tory party eminence grise. A self-made man whose fortune is estimated by the Sunday Times at £1.1 billion — more than the entire net worth of Belize, the tiny Central American state he calls home — Lord Ashcroft has also carved out a near-monopoly of a very finite resource: the Victoria Cross. Since being introduced in 1856 at the tail end of the Crimean War, just 1,356 VCs have been awarded. Most are in public collections, notably that of London’s Imperial War Museum. Those that are not are most

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 13 February 2010

In Competition No. 2633 you were invited to submit a poem lamenting the loss of a small but important object. As I dart around like a headless chicken attempting to track down the latest small but seemingly crucial missing item, the words of ‘One Art’, Elizabeth Bishop’s powerfully understated villanelle, ring in my ears: The art of losing isn’t hard to master so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster, Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master… These flurries of panic seem to punctuate my