Society

Saturday

31 Oct 2009

Real Life | 31 October 2009

Sometimes the irritations are so great, you just have to stand up and be irritating right back. So it was that I found myself loitering under an ugly new sign at the bottom of my road, holding a petition. ‘Excuse me, sir? Would you like to protest about these horrible signs? They cost £1,000 of your taxpayer’s money and as you can see they are obtrusive, ruin our view of the common and serve no purpose whatsoever except to advertise the local authority.’ I love Nimbyism. I think it is a much underrated attitude. I can’t understand why it’s so frowned upon. In fact, I think it’s really hypocritical and

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 31 October 2009

Mvuu Lodge, Liwonde, Malawi I arrived at the jetty in pitch darkness. A boat was waiting to ferry me across the river. On the other side I was handed a refreshing drink and asked to sign a waiver form exempting the management from legal action by my next of kin if I was attacked by wild animals during my stay. Then I was shown to my tent. The ranger led me along a sandy path across open bush. It was a bit of a hike. My tent was ten yards from a lagoon, explained the ranger, when we got there. That peculiar slapping and splashing noise was the sound of

Taki

High Life | 31 October 2009

New York One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, confirming the perception that Britain is a nation that has totally lost its way. Personally, I wasn’t surprised in the least. Dimbleby is a pompous clown, Jack Straw a mincing shyster of a man posing as a leader of men, and Griffin is, well, Griffin: it is the unbearable picking on the unsuitable. I particularly liked the scenes outside the BBC,

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 31 October 2009

Monday Some v awkward people are deliberately misunderstanding what Dave said about women- only shortlists. We feel we must remind these people that troublemaking is fundamentally unConservative and that any further attempts to disrupt Compassionate Cameronian principles of compliance with the party line and non-resistance to the stated policy of the leadership will be met with the strongest possible measures. Just to be clear: when Dave said, ‘I want women-only shortlists’, he did not mean that we are going to bring in women-only shortlists. Duh!! What he meant — and I can’t believe we are having to spell this out — is that we may or may not have all-women shortlists at

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 31 October 2009

Americans taking offence on behalf of poor ‘victimised’ foreigners is offensive — to me Oh dear. I may have to write a book called How to Lose More Friends and Alienate More People. In a recent episode of Top Chef, the American cooking show I appear on, I complained about the other judges’ insistence on pronouncing ‘paella’ as ‘py-ay-a’. ‘You don’t say “Bar-the-lona” or “Me-hi-co”,’ I pointed out. ‘So why say ‘py-ay-a’?’ I thought this was fairly uncontroversial, but it was as if I had just produced a white hood and a burning cross. After the other judges had picked their jaws up off the floor, one of them raised

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 31 October 2009

Q. I am in the lower sixth at school. The following problem arises quite frequently and I would like your advice. When we pupils go to get our lunch it is self-service and by the time you have loaded your tray you are in no mood to hang around with it before sitting down. What happens to me is that I often can’t see any of the other guys in my house and then I will sit down with some of the girls in my year but I won’t really have anything to say to them and then suddenly I will see the people I was looking for in the

The Spectator

Sacred cows

The cow has had it too easy for too long. For years we humans have been jetting across the world, guiltily clutching complimentary snacks, shamed by the feeling that every minute of our flight was damaging our planet’s fragile climate. Our bovine friends, meanwhile, have been openly flatulent, emitting devastating global warming gases without fear of reprisal. Thank goodness then for Lord Stern of Brentford, the New Labour climate change guru who this week has finally focused the nation’s opprobrium where it is deserved. Of course it’s not quite true that every time a cow farts, a baby polar bear falls through the ice, but Lord Stern does have science

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 31 October 2009

Mr Gordon Brown is prepared to campaign actively for Mr Tony Blair, whom he replaced as Prime Minister, to be the first permanent president of the European Council of the European Union, Downing Street said. Mr David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had said earlier that Mr Blair would be a good candidate because ‘we need someone who, when he or she lands in Beijing or Washington or Moscow, the traffic does need to stop’. Sir Christopher Kelly, the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, told party leaders the outline of his report on MPs’ expenses, to be published next week, and shortly afterwards there was a leak

Neil Tennant

Diary – 31 October 2009

On tour one develops air-conditioning paranoia. (I’ve just returned from a two-month Pet Shop Boys’ tour of North and South America, from Montreal to Lima.) You approach your latest hotel room with dread. How noisy is the air-conditioning? Can you turn it off? Is your room on the top floor directly under the main air-conditioning unit and therefore literally vibrating? When you check into your room during the day you often don’t notice the noise, but returning late after the show, the street noise having died down, you can become cruelly and sleeplessly aware of it. It’s time for the early-hours room change. The charmingly helpful hotel staff can never

The Spectator

Letters | 31 October 2009

Squeezing out democracy Sir: Melanie Phillips did a first-rate job in pinning down the Islamofascist ‘elephant in the room’ (‘The clash of uncivilisations’, 24 October). There was, however, one area not touched on: how the Islamists and the BNP are really two sides of the same coin. I live six miles from the BNP heartland of Burnley and stood as a Labour council candidate in a nearby borough last year. Trudging through council estates, I made it my business to ignore instructions from the party to knock only on the doors of former Labour voters. So the campaign gave me weeks of face-to-face contact with the so-called ‘white underclass’ who,

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 31 October 2009

Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’? Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’? In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, this famous intellectual is said to produce the ‘good citizen’ by teaching him ‘proper management of his own business and of the city’s too, so that he can make the most effective contribution to its affairs both as a speaker and man of action’. But Socrates rejects this claim, arguing that ‘goodness’ (Greek aretê) is not

James Forsyth

Heseltine rules out serving in a Cameron government

There has been speculation in the press recently that Michael Heseltine might be offered a Cabinet post after the next election. But in an interview for the BBC’s Straight Talk with Andrew Neil, Hesletine is fairly Shermanesque in his denials: “I would be 77, and frankly David Cameron does not need 77 year olds in his Government. We do not have the physical stamina to sit up all night reading those interminable papers, arriving for breakfast meetings or whatever it may be, 6 days a week, or 5 and a half days a week, so it’s better to, you know – any advice we can give is free and available

David Blackburn

Commanders on the ground were concerned about helicopter shortages

The Mail has obtained a memo sent to the MoD by Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe. He warns that helicopter shortages would cost lives; tragically, he was prescient. The Mail is not publishing the complete memo, which contains sensitive information, but Lt. Col Thorneloe wrote: ‘We cannot not move people, so this moth we have concluded a great deal of administrative movement by road. This increases the IED threat and our exposure to it… The current level of SH (support helicopter) support is therefore unsustainable… and is clearly not fit for purpose.’ This appraisal, widely circulated within the MoD, demolishes Gordon Brown’s denial that helicopter shortages cost lives during Operation Panther’s

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 31 October 2009

The global warming lobby, and the terrier who won’t let go two lines If the devil is in the detail then Satan’s foremost emissary on earth must be Christopher Booker. The Booker does the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour. In my eyes — admittedly biased because he has become a bit of a mate — Booker is way more significant and heroic a journalist

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 31 October 2009

Consider this: barring the intervention of an usually malevolent deity, Bath’s Matt Banahan should be playing on the wing for England during the autumn rugby internationals. Banahan is 22 years old, 6ft 7in tall, and weighs in at 253lbs, or a shade over 18st. Go back 30-odd years and there on the wing for England was Liverpool’s Mike Slemen — this was in the days when Fylde vs Preston Grasshoppers was first up on Rugby Special. Slemen then was 6ft 1in and weighed 12st 4lbs, or pretty much like a reasonably fit bloke you might see on the street today. (If all you met on the street were a race

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 31 October 2009

In Competition No. 2619 you were invited to submit a short fable culminating in a mangled aphorism. The fabulous theme of this comp is a salute to Jaspistos, celebrated translator of fables, whose rendering of La Fontaine’s was deemed by the not-easily-pleased Geoffrey Grigson to have been unsurpassed, ‘earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore’s’. The assignment was also a somewhat backhanded tribute to that most exacting of forms, the aphorism, described by Auden and Louis Kronenberger, in their foreword to The Faber Book of Aphorisms, as ‘an aristocratic genre of writing’. There was a lot to live up to, then, which perhaps accounted for a lower than usual turnout and

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 31 October 2009

Go East, young man: if I was 25 again, this is where I’d try my luck Hong Kong Not four hours since the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok and I’m howling ‘My Way’ into a Wanchai karaoke machine to the discomfort of my Chinese friends, who all sing like Charles Aznavour. I’ll give some of the credit — for my energy level, not my singing — to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class ‘flatbed’, which is so comfortable that Sir Richard Branson is busy claiming patent rights so he can sue competitors who copy the design. But I’ll give most of the credit to Hong Kong itself: brash, noisy, diesel-fumed,

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009

The votes are in, and we now know which parliamentarian has won this year’s Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. The votes are in, and we now know which parliamentarian has won this year’s Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. Their name will be revealed at the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards lunch But here, first, we can announce which reader’s nomination most caught the judges’ collective eye. So congratulations, Sam Rice, whose impassioned support for Douglas Carswell has earned him a bottle of champagne and two tickets to the lunch at Claridges where the awards are announced. Here is Sam’s nomination: ‘I would like to nominate Douglas Carswell MP for Parliamentarian of the

Friday

30 Oct 2009

The Spectator

The week that was | 30 October 2009

Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week Fraser Nelson sees a cartoon that epitomises modern Britain. James Forsyth argues that Liz Truss’ candidacy must stand, and doubts that the army is being funded to its target level. Peter Hoskin is encouraged that IDS is being tasked with finding “affordable policy solutions”, and waits as the Tories prime their civil service shake-up. David Blackburn believes that MPs should get a free vote on the Kelly Review, and says that Thursday was another day where Brown was on the road to perdition. Lloyd Evans watches Dave miss another opportunity. Susan Hill can see rural poverty and

James Forsyth

Free the universities to participate in and mould policy debate

Politics in this country lacks a proper ideas infrastructure. One of the major reasons for this is that the universities play so little part in policy making and the broader policy debate. Vernon Bogdanor has an important piece on the reasons for this in this week’s New Statesman. His argument is that the bureaucratisation of the education system and the emphasis that the research assessment exercise puts on the rapid production of research has led to an emphasis on an intellectually uninteresting scholasticism in the social sciences. Bogdanor believes that the way to get the universities contributing usefully to policy debates is to free them up from government control, to