Society

Saturday

25 Apr 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deborah Ross

Dodgy dealings

State of Play 12A, Nationwide State of Play is a thriller based on the six-part BBC series shown on television in 2003 and which, I confess, I did not see. Probably, it was because What Not To Wear was on the other side and, I’m sorry, I just wouldn’t have had the confidence to know what not to wear if I’d missed it. Anyway, the action has been shifted from London to Washington, the length has been shrunk to two hours and it stars Russell Crowe as Cal McAffrey, an old-school investigative journalist who is also wearily righteous, as these characters so often are. Further, he drives a dirty, scruffy,

Friday

24 Apr 2009

Martin Bright

St George’s Day: A Perfect Celebration of Inferiority

The ersatz English pride expressed by the entirely bogus St George’s Day celebrations is deeply creepy. I hate it. Wandering through London this week and bumping into people wrapped in red and white flags or dressed as knights has made me feel deeply embarrassed to be English. And how can Boris Johnson be so so daft as to embrace this nonsense. He surely can’t mean it. But it did make me wonder about the true scope of the London mayor’s ambitions for himself and Britain-England, coinciding as it did with his admission that has not ruled out a run for Downing Street (presumably after he has beaten David Cameron at

James Forsyth

Grading Obama

As the 100 day landmark approaches, it is day 95 of the Obama presidency today, the punditocracy are coming up with their Obama verdicts. (You can read The Spectator’s 100 days special here). Obviously, rating a president this early is slightly absurd. At the 100 days mark, Jimmy Carter looked like he was going to be a successful president—and look how that turned out. While 100 days into the Bush administration no one was predicting what would turn out to be the defining issue of the presidency. But I think we can tell some important things about President Obama even at this early stage. On domestic policy, Obama has shown

James Forsyth

The torture debate is about to become even more contentious

The torture debate has been dominating American politics ever since the Obama administration released the legal opinions of the Bush administration on what interrogation techniques American operatives could use. There is little doubt that many of the techniques sanctioned would be considered torture by most people. However, Bush administration officials—most notably former Vice President Cheney—have argued that the Obama administration should now also release the memos which show that these techniques produced information which helped prevent further attacks. This news from NBC’s First Read suggests that the debate is about to move to the next level: “U.S. officials tell NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski that the Pentagon and military are preparing to

James Forsyth

The headlines get worse for Labour

The Budget’s press coverage, which was already pretty negative, just keeps getting worse. Today’s Evening Standard headline is: “Darling’s fantasy Budget exploded” The headline refers to the Office for National Statistics saying that the economy shrunk by 1.9 percent in the first quarter not the 1.6 percent that Darling predicted it would in the Budget on Wednesday. It’ll be fascinating to see where the polls go in the next few weeks. Given how badly the Budget has been received, we could begin to see Labour slip further and further into the twenties.

Alex Massie

The Gurkha Campaign

No surprise, alas, that the government should still be trying to find ways to deny Gurkhas the right to live in this country. The most charitable interpretation of today’s announcement is that the Brown ministry is making it more difficult than it should be for Gurkhas who retired before 1997 to live in Britain. A more accurate assessment might be that this is a typically mendacious, mean-spirited, shameless, pointless piece of bullying bullshit from a government that’s so past its sell-by date that there’s no point in even wondering whether there’s any further use for it. Here’s the BBC account: Immigration Minister Phil Woolas denied he had betrayed the Gurkhas,

James Forsyth

A non-denial denial

Do read Andrew Sparrow’s account of how the Prime Minister’s official spokesman responded when asked about whether today’s story about Brown’s printer rage was accurate: This is what the prime minister’s spokesman said in reply: I think it is the sort of unsubstantiated, unsourced nonsense that you would expect to read in Sunday newspapers, not on the supposedly respectable financial wire services. There was then a lovely moment of humour when someone else asked: “But is it untrue, though?” The spokesman said it was “the sort of nonsense that you might expect to read in diary columns” and “not an account that I recognise”. But he did not actually say it

James Forsyth

Threat perception

Bruce Riedel, who ran Obama’s review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, makes a telling point in his interview with the Indian magazine Outlook: “It’s worth noting that the first trip abroad by the new director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, was to New Delhi. That’s a signal that the US recognises that it needs a stronger security partnership in the struggle against terrorism with India.” The US and India are natural allies in the struggle against Islamist terrorism. But the fact that Panetta went to New Delhi first is further evidence that the US regards Pakistan and the instability there as the greatest threat to American security.

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