Society

Sunday

7 Feb 2010

Until 3pm Sunday, Hope Lives!

This is optimism’s optimum moment. Twelve hours from now everything will change. That’s when, alas, France will most probably begin to take control of this afternoon’s encounter with Scotland at Murrayfield. And yet, stubbornly and despite logic that dictates Chris Cusiter’s boys have just a one in four chance of prevailing, hope still flowers. That’s partly because no-one looked very good today. Beat France and all sorts of things suddenly seem possible. Unlikely? For sure, but this is the time for dreaming. Italy were an affront to rugby and a sad one too; Ireland were pretty poor on Saturday and I still think that David Wallace’s best days are behind

Alex Massie

Raping Haiti!

Connoiseurs of the Guardian will not be surprised by this masterpiece from Mike Gonzalez. The only thing that could improve it is if his piece also found a way to blame the Israelis: News reports still insist on the question of security, as if the pressing problem were the need to maintain public order. This argument has been used to justify placing Haitian society under the direct control of the US military – whose contingent is about to double to 20,000 – very few of whom have skills in distributing aid and assistance. The assumption of control over the airport and the naval blockade around the island’s coasts are, by

Saturday

6 Feb 2010

Melissa Kite

Getting my goat

A perplexing email has arrived from one John Roskam at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia. In the subject field it says: ‘Hey! What did I miss? Xxx’. I have racked my brains but am reasonably sure I have never met Mr Roskam. What’s more, I’m comfortably of the opinion that I have never solicited kisses from him. As I read on, he informs me that the Australian government has just passed a new law stipulating how much insecticide you’re allowed to have in goat fat. What I’m supposed to do about all this — the goat fat, the kisses, the things Mr Roskam might have been missing

Jeremy Clarke

Horse power

After tea on Saturday I had an argument with myself about whether to stay in or go to the pub. The timid side of me listed several valid reasons for staying in, including the 20-mile round trip on icy roads. These my intrepid side sarcastically dismissed one by one, insisting that they merely added up to the single fact that I’ve become a bore. I decided in the end to stay in and read an improving book. Slightly regretting the decision, I chucked another log on the fire, took another sip of green tea, and focused my concentration on Bernard Crick’s jaunty introduction to Machiavelli’s Discourses. After half a page

Taki

Pen pals

‘It was a dark and stormy night, but we were young and thought we could do anything. There was no looking back. None of that David Copperfield kind of nonsense. We were already men. We had our finger on what was going on between self and culture. We did away with the traditional architecture of the short story. It was bull****, so we dumped it. There was no beginning and no middle, just a lot of emotion, irony and mood. MMMooodd. It was Zen, man, and it never snapped shut. We said less, and it counted for more, and the suckers went wild. Holden grabbed them by the coogies and

Robin Oakley

Wazza’s buzz

It is not just the superstars who make a sport. In cricket the Vaughans and Pietersens win the headlines but it is the gritty Paul Collingwoods, making runs when others are losing their heads, who give the England side character. So who expresses jumping’s ethos? Try Warren Marston. A crowd-pulling name? Maybe not. But Warren is the weft and warp of the winter sport, the epitome of jumping’s spirit. Back in the early 1990s he was Adrian Maguire’s No. 2 with The Duke, David Nicholson. He rode Cheltenham Festival winners like Nathen Lad as stable jockey to Jenny Pitman. He has been around Richard Phillips’s yard for years, partnering the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 6 February 2010

Q. On a recent visit to France, I met an old acquaintance from our village in England in the local market town. She invited me back to see her house and we went out to dinner that night and upon our return it became obvious that her intentions were amorous. Resisting her advances, I priggishly insisted on my own room for the night and retired to have a bath. The next morning I discovered that my treasured watch, left to me by my father, had disappeared from the bathroom, where I had left it the night before, beside my car keys, which were still there. Sadly the woman has form.

Toby Young

I’m distressed by the disappearance of our cat — it feels like some ghastly premonition

A few weeks ago my friend James and his wife got a cat. They live in a leafy street in Holland Park, yet they’re so overprotective they refuse to allow Louis out of the house. His wife won’t even leave him alone, insisting they get a ‘babysitter’ if they go out. As the owner of a streetwise, shorthaired domestic called Trixie, I have been mercilessly taking the piss out of them. Trixie has been able to come and go as she pleases via a cat door since the day she arrived from the Mayhew Animal Shelter 18 months ago. She’s jet black and quite petite, like a miniature panther, and

The Spectator

Letters | 6 February 2010

When war is a crime Sir: Andrew Gilligan’s trenchant indictment of Blair (‘How can we punish Blair?’, 30 January) includes the mitigating claim that: ‘For all the cries that he is a “war criminal”, the Nuremberg Principles make clear that war crimes relate largely to atrocities committed in the course of combat or aggression. The act of war is not itself a war crime.’ This is incorrect. Count One of the Indictment at Nuremberg, read out on 20 November 1945, includes these words: ‘The common plan or conspiracy embraced the commission of Crimes against Peace in that the defendants planned, prepared, initiated and waged wars of aggression, which were also

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 6 February 2010

On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ Even so, there is no harm in observing something of the master’s technique, which I contemplated as I enjoyed the book on an aeroplane. In ‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’, Bertie goes to lunch with Bingo Little’s uncle, a very fat man. ‘The gong

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 February 2010

Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said MPs would vote next week on whether a referendum should be held to allow an alternative-vote system in general elections after the next one. The government also came up with new ideas for persecuting smokers, such as driving them from shelter in doorways. Members of the Scottish Parliament passed their own law to make shopkeepers hide cigarettes. During a meeting in Rome with the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, the Pope implicitly criticised the Equality Bill promoted by Miss Harriet Harman. ‘Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity,’ he said. ‘Yet as you have rightly pointed

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 06 February 2010

Tony Blair claimed with almost evangelical fervour that it was ‘right’ to side with America in deciding to attack Iraq and went on: ‘I had to take this decision as Prime Minister. It was a huge responsibility.’ Tony Blair claimed with almost evangelical fervour that it was ‘right’ to side with America in deciding to attack Iraq and went on: ‘I had to take this decision as Prime Minister. It was a huge responsibility.’ Aristotle would have had some questions to ask about this. Aristotle (384-322 bc) raises a major problem in asking how one should lead the good life, and argues that it could be lived only in the

James Forsyth

Young in favour of elected committee chairmen

It is interesting that Sir George Young took the opportunity of his interview with The Times this week to reaffirm the Tory leadership’s support for electing select committee chairmen. In the last fortnight, two Tory MPs who would like to be select committee chairmen in the next parliament have complained to me that the leadership is quietly conspiring against the idea. But Sir George’s words suggest that this is not the case. Select committee chairmen election should mean that we get a chairmen who is determined to hold the executive to account wherever that may lead. But it will be intriguing to see how MPs vote. For instance, will Labour

Fraser Nelson

Rationalism enters the climate change debate

I have been gripped by The Guardian’s climate change investigation and reporting these last few days. We do like to tease George Monbiot but he was one of the first to denounce spinning of the data and science by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit. It’s a mark of his professionalism and seriousness: global warming is a cause important to him, and he resents attempts to misrepresent things by his own side, or by his enemies. The Guardian seems to take the same view, and has sent David Leigh and others out on the investigation trail, and the final in the four-part series is printed today. It shows how

Matt Ridley

The global warming guerrillas

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources. It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the

Richard Orange

Story of a sinking land

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide had already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the

Rod Liddle

Is it really racist to want an English-speaking cab driver?

Rod Liddle says that the outrage directed at a taxi firm for advertising ‘English spoken here’ serves only to strengthen white working-class resentment — and the BNP ‘Rraaaaaaaacissst!’ — that Pavlovian whine of complaint, almost always from a white person, an idle and meaningless howl of outrage where once, when uttered by a black or Asian person who had suffered discrimination, it had a point and a potency. ‘Raaacisst’ — a new definition; a word which, as soon as it is uttered, can cause debate to cease, people to be punished, argument to be subverted, the Old Bill to get involved. ‘Raaaaacccissst!’ — a lie, a mischief, the last redoubt

Christopher Hitchens

Washington Notebook

Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. I also generally think that any use of sporting metaphors to describe politics is an infallible sign of an exhausted hack. But Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is so invigoratingly revealing — in the best and nastiest sense of that word — that it gripped me and held me tight. Senator John McCain shouts the

Leah McLaren

There’s nothing cute about a Canuck

Next week, when the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, the eyes of the world will be on Canada, the sprawling, frigid nation of my birth. It doesn’t happen often, so when the international spotlight swivels our way, we Canadians do our best to hog it. We don’t go in for patriotism and self-belief like our American cousins, but like the shy wallflower who ends up closing the karaoke bar with a lampshade on her head, Canadians are compelled to make fools of ourselves if we are flattered into thinking anyone might notice. So brace yourself in the coming weeks, Britain, for a gushing torrent of maple-flavoured praise for all things

James Delingpole

I hate weddings; funerals are almost invariably better in every way

If I’d written the film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion — as I was reminded the other week when I went to Tisbury, Wiltshire, to bid farewell to my old friend John Clanwilliam. John, you may remember, was the earl I killed last summer during a game of human Cluedo. At Christmas, he died for real and though I shall miss him dearly I don’t think anyone could be too unhappy