Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 25 April 2009

The beat goes on Sir: I read with growing rage James Delingpole’s column (You know it makes sense, 18 April). After castigating the policing of the G20 demonstrations, he takes the opportunity to list a number of actions the police have taken in recent times that he objects to. But some context is required. I have worked for nearly 20 years in a large metropolitan police force which deals with nearly 2,000 incidents a day on average. We arrest hundreds of people, and respond to thousands of calls for help and assistance. Nearly 4,000 of us do this — regular police officers, special constables (and sorry, James — they do

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 25 April 2009

In Princeton, New Jersey, last week, I gave two lectures on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. I was told that the last outsider to have spoken at the university on this subject was Edward Heath. He had informed Princetonians that Lady Thatcher posed a greater threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. My second lecture’s audience was not disposed to agree. They were members of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a movement set up to counter the politically correct culture of academia. Afterwards I read Frank Rich in the New York Times complaining that the Madison Program is the semi-covert backer of an organisation which has

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 25 April 2009

Monday What a great call for Dave to get ‘bloody angry’! It’s passionate, sexy and modern, not to mention emotionally intelligent, yet also authoritarian and traditional, and a tiny bit kinky at the same time. All the girls agree that it really suits him and should be used more often. Apparently Jed got it from Google in California where the execs often become ‘bloody angry’ in a dynamic way, usually in special areas filled with ergonomic stress scrunchers and organic beanbags. We are now thinking of coming up with just such a space at CCHQ, to compliment the Austerity Room. Some kind of Anger Zone would be just so exciting

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 25 April 2009

State of Play, the Hollywood remake of Paul Abbot’s six-part thriller, is bound to be politely reviewed by my colleagues because it portrays journalists in a sympathetic light. Indeed, Russell Crowe, who plays a fearless reporter, constantly reminds his cost-conscious editor of the vital role performed by journalists in the democratic process. Without us, he points out, there will be no one to hold corrupt politicians to account. As I watched the film in a screening theatre, surrounded by my fellow hacks, I wondered why it is that a Hollywood studio has decided to lavish all these resources on a eulogy to our profession. After all, newspaper reporters are usually

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 25 April 2009

Q. Arriving for a weekend celebration, I was announced and entered a room in which everyone stood at once in a random formation to greet me. There was the couple who had invited me to mark their golden wedding, their daughter and son-in-law, in whose house I was now to be resident as a guest, and the parents of the son-in-law, who were nearest to my point of entry. Bearing in mind that the latter, I fear, are easily slighted, in what order should I have greeted the people present? It did not help that cheeks and handshakes were proffered simultaneously. To avoid embarrassment, please just use my initials if

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories in Cheltenham

Cheltenham The Tories are gathered here in Cheltenham for their Spring Forum. They are unsurprisingly in confident mood  but there is a real sense of worry about just what a mess they will inherit. The dire numbers in the Budget, which in reality are even worse, seems to have concentrated minds.  Caution, however, is still the order of the day. Today has been deliberatley low key. The press have even being barred from the main speeches. (Activists told me that Michael Gove’s speech on education, the area where the Tories have their most developed and best policies, went down extremely well.) Tomorrow sees speeches from Cameron, Osborne and Ken Clarke.

Peter Hoskin

Introducing the Coffee House national debt counter

So what does Gordon Brown’s debt crisis actually look like?  Cast your eyes to the right-hand side of the Coffee House homepage and you’ll be able to find out.  We’ve added a new “debt counter” to the site, which reveals the UK’s spiralling national debt and the burden it places on each family.  It started at £609.1billion on 5 April 2009, and it’s going up, up, up by around £5,700 per second.   Hopefully, this counter will shine a light on what is not only a fiscal crisis but a moral one too.  Future taxpayers will be left picking up the tab for the £billions and – perhaps, one day

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Mandelson’s candid reflections on being the third person in Blair and Brown’s marriage

Robert Crampton’s interview with Peter Mandelson in The Times magazine today is compelling reading. Mandelson talks frankly about the Blair-Brown marriage and how he ‘was the third person in the marriage. I was the casualty.’ It is this that Mansdelson thinks ‘wrecked’ his political career. Mandelson is remarkably candid about how divided things were. At one point Mandelson declares, ‘Everyone was divided, the government was divided, MPs were divided, the media was divided, into camps’. The language he uses is also strikingly emotional even apart from the marriage analogy. When talking about advising Blair from exile Mandelson says, ‘I always felt it was important for me to be there for

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When Lost Blondes Get Mad…

This is the set-up: “Penned up in the Mediterranean’s most infamous prison farm, beautiful young bodies subject to their cruel jailer’s every whim, these man-craving convict women joined forces with a brawling Yank adventurer to burst out of their barbed wire hell cage, setting off a love-and-vengeance revolt that sent tremors through an entire Mid-east empire!” It really can’t get much better than that. Apparently this gripping tale was written by Neil Turnbull and featured in the July 1966 edition of Male magazine. Sadly, the story does not appear to be online. Internet Fail. [Hat-tip: John Holbo. More cool pulp photos here.]

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Blair’s friends start grumbling about the 50p top rate 

Today’s Daily Telegraph contains a story that is as amusing as it is predictable: those close to Blair are grumbling about the 50p tax rate and complaining that he never would have done it. One friend of Mr Blair said: “Tony thought the original proposal to raise the top rate to 45 pence was just about saleable in the current economic circumstances. “But he believes taking 50 per cent is not acceptable. It would not have happened if he was still there. He thinks it’s a terrible mistake.” A 45p top rate to be introduced after the next election was good politics even if it was bad economics. There was

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 25 April 2009

Nobody fully realised the achievement of Sir Joseph Bazalgette until 70 years after his death. The size of the pipes he specified for London’s sewers was determined by calculating what diameter would handle the average daily flow and then doubling it to allow for natural fluctuation. Having arrived at the optimum diameter this way, Bazalgette arbitrarily redoubled the resulting figure, explaining ‘We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.’ The unforeseen turned out to be high-rise buildings. Without his decision, London’s sewage system would have failed 40 years ago.* Something of the same foresight seems to have passed down to his descendant Peter Bazalgette. Writing in

The Spectator

How is Boris doing?

We asked a distinguished panel to assess the Mayor’s progress — and what he should do next David Cameron Boris and his team have done a brilliant job in the last year. Under his leadership City Hall has become less extravagant, and more focused on the right priorities: making London a safer, greener and more affordable place to live. Boris has certainly confounded his detractors. In terms of the future (other than synchronising the traffic lights so those of us who cycle across Hyde Park Corner are less likely to be squashed by a bendy bus) he should carry on doing the excellent work that he is doing. Michael Bloomberg,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The only tax-cutting Tory in town

Ross Clark says that we mustn’t underestimate Boris’s greatest achievement: to have frozen the GLA precept without affecting services is a triumph It is hard to remember the horrors of the London inherited by new Mayor Boris Johnson a year ago. It was a city gridlocked with traffic, with unaffordable housing, and where you couldn’t get a table in a decent restaurant without booking six months in advance. Now, the roads run freely, property is much cheaper and a seat for this evening at London’s finest restaurants is only a phone call away. Admittedly, these improvements are less the work of the Mayor than a consolation for the deepest recession

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 25 April 2009

In the dog’s dinner that was Competition No. 2592 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Name’ in which each line either was an anagram of the name of a well-known poet or contained an anagram of the same. There are two winners in the first category; three in the second. The first version elicited politely expressed howls of protest from some corners — one competitor likened it to the ‘intellectual equivalent of a full body wax’; mark II produced a collective sigh of relief, though some doughty souls, having already struggled through a week of anagram hell, felt compelled to stick with the original brief. It was

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 25 April 2009

Eddie was a model public servant: that’s why Gordon was so rude to him In Tokyo in the mid-Eighties, I bumped into a very senior Japanese investment banker who had just been to London to negotiate an operating licence. ‘We met…’ he paused for effect, bowing slightly at the neck and adopting what I can only describe as obsequious grimace, ‘…Eddie-George-san!’ All the other Japanese present nodded vigorously and sucked their teeth in accord. Lord George, who died last Saturday aged 70, was a big player on the world banking stage long before he became Governor of the Bank of England in 1993. He was also a model public servant:

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

J.G. Ballard was a man of the Right — not that the Right really wanted him

‘I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel, in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel, watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.’ The drug-addled, leather-faced rock star from Detroit, Iggy Pop — né James Newell Osterberg — whose contribution to the canon of modern popular verse includes ‘Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, once wrote and performed a song called ‘I’m a Conservative’. Most of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Politics | 25 April 2009

All Labour budgets are essentially works of deception, and Alistair Darling’s speech on Wednesday was no exception. Once again, the Chancellor deployed the normal, tiresome formula: pyrotechnics intended to distract voters from an ugly truth lurking in the small print. Except this time, the distractions were obvious fakes. No one seriously believes the British economy will be helped by a bribe for buying an imported car. And the truth was the ugliest Britain has been told in its peacetime history: that the nation’s finances are in freefall. By the time you have finished reading this sentence, the national debt will have increased by some £14,000 — rising by £175 billion

The Spectator

The pips squeak

On Budget Day, Alistair Darling achieved something rare among chancellors of the exchequer and unique among members of this Labour government. He actually made us feel sorry for him. By common consensus, he faced — with a stoical calm that has come to be admired even by his opponents — an almost impossible job. Markets and taxpayers wanted him to unveil a strategy to set the public finances on a long-term path back towards fiscal balance without crushing fragile indications of a distant recovery. The Prime Minister clearly wanted him to regain some political ground by being seen to address the sharply rising rate of job losses, while dishing out

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 25 April 2009

Twenty years ago I remember driving down Pacific Coast Highway in California with two of my children strapped into their car seats behind me. They were having a humdinger of a row. They were arguing because India had picked her nose and had proudly managed to produce a bogey the size of an ant. While busy admiring her handiwork, her younger brother Archie had snatched the highly prized treasure from her finger and was attempting to eat it. They were fighting so much I eventually had to swerve onto the hard shoulder, clamber into the back seat and sternly lecture them both on the delicate etiquette of nose-picking. ‘Whoever picks