Society

Saturday

18 Apr 2009

Alex James

Slow Life | 18 April 2009

Possibly, the shoe was where it all started to go wrong for us as a species. Possibly, I say, the shoe represents the end of paradise. Possibly, we donned our size 12s and stomped right out of Eden. There we’d been, running barefoot through the trees with the sun on our faces, reconnecting with mother earth at every stride, a part of it all, part of a vast system that fitted us perfectly, until that very moment we stepped out of the invisible glove, out of the sensual world and into our shoes. Certainly, I’m happiest in bare feet, with nothing in my pockets. I mean, kick off your shoes

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 18 April 2009

I’m virus aware. For example, I don’t touch door handles in public lavatories. If they’ve got in-swinging doors, I time my exit to coincide with someone else and let them grasp the handle. And I never, ever, touch the rubber handrail on Tube station escalators. Imagine what hundreds of thousands of commuting fingertips deposit on one of those during the course of a day! I suppose the paranoia is a leftover from my nursing days. Once you learn about the mechanics of infection, you hear it in every stranger’s cough or sneeze, and see it on every hotel TV remote. I’m always conscious, too, of the 40,000 potentially infectious droplets

Taki

High Life | 18 April 2009

New York I crossed the river last week and went into the heart of darkness. Unlike Conrad’s hero, it took me about 15 minutes by train, and there I was, right in the midst of a city bloated with squalor, oily storefronts, dilapidated tenements, vacant courtyards, and trash-strewn lots. I was the only white man in the station as I watched the arrest of a black hobo by two humongous black police officers. As the hobo was being led away, he screamed at me, ‘Give me a hundred dollars,’ and then broke up in hysterical, drunken laughter. It was three in the afternoon, and I had gone to Newark to

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 18 April 2009

Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks ‘trying to convince the banks to renegotiate the structure of the loans’. This encroachment by convince on to the territory of persuade has been going on for most of my life. It happens all the time now, but I do not feel moved to frighten the dog each time I detect it. My husband, I

The Spectator

Letters | 18 April 2009

Liddle’s Lent Sir: As someone who is employed by and works within the Church of England I have been waiting 20 years to see an article like Rod Liddle’s (‘The C of E has forgotten its purpose’, 11 April) appearing in a major British publication. He is accurate in nearly everything he says. The current church is sadly lacking in leaders of any serious Christian commitment, passion or confidence in the gospel. It is as if they prefer any religion to the Christian one, which they have pledged to ‘defend and stand for’ in their ordination vows. Bring back Bishop Nazir-Ali and sack the liberal self-loathing secularised bishops! Revd Richard

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 18 April 2009

Monday This is just silly. Why won’t anyone tell me what Dave didn’t have? I only asked if it wasn’t a verruca but Poppy got v cross and said: ‘Dave does not not have a verruca!’ in a really aggressive way. ‘Well, what wasn’t it then?’ I asked. ‘He didn’t not have athlete’s foot did he?’ Thought this was reasonable question but was locked in Austerity Room for three hours before Jed ordered my release. By then they’d had all the exciting briefings, including the one about boot polish I was so looking forward to. Why do they always keep this sort of stuff from me? I can cope with

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 18 April 2009

Armando Iannucci’s satirical movie about New Labour is a tribute to the Iron Lady It is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory on 4 May and, not surprisingly, the tributes have already begun to pour in. Most of these are from the usual suspects, but I was pleased to see that Armando Iannucci has joined the ranks of those paying their respects. Not that he meant to, of course. But his latest project — a satirical film about politics called In The Loop — turns out to be an unintentional paean to the Iron Lady. As fans of The Thick of It will know, Iannucci is an

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 18 April 2009

Q. Have you any ideas on how to deal with recurrent offenders in the party-present line? I have an old and intimate friend who always brings a present almost insultingly slight, but, more seriously, also invariably well past its sell-by date. One small jar of pickle was two years too old. Other old friends contributed to an important birthday bash a splendidly packaged bottle of whisky which on opening turned out to have been half-consumed. My view has always been that these little trials must be borne in silence (and with gratitude for being given anything at all); obviously to retaliate with out-of-date or used goods would be simply to

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 18 April 2009

Damian McBride, the latest spawn of the Campbell, has notable forebears in the infamous delatores, or informers, of the Roman empire. They too worked with passionate servility to suck up to the emperor of the day by bringing to his attention those who might be considered dangerous to him. A trumped-up charge of treason would be brought against the victim, followed as often as not by his exile or death, an invitation to commit suicide being the preferred option. The great historian Tacitus sketches the typical delator for us in the person of Caepio Crispinus. He was assistant to the governor of Bithynia, Marcus Granius Marcellus, and brought an accusation

Peter Hoskin

Smeargate II: the dots get joined

Seems like Guido had his crosshairs trained on some other Labour insiders. Tomorrow’s Sunday Times and News of the World are both running stories which implicate other members of Brown’s coterie in the plot to smear top Tories. According to the NotW report, a new email reveals that Ray Collins – the general secretary of the Labour party – chaired a meeting about the Red Rag website in Charlie Whelan’s office. Whelan, Damian McBride, Derek Draper, Andrew Dodgshon and, ahem, the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire also attended. Sounds like quite a crowd. While the Sunday Times targets the Schools Secretary, no less: “ED BALLS, the schools secretary, used Damian McBride,

Martin Bright

The Last Word on the Katwala-Cohen Row… I Hope

Shiraz Maher, the former HIzb-ut-Tahrir member turned thoughtful opponent of Islamist ideology has made his position clear on Harry’s Place. I commend this article to anyone who wants to understand why large sections of the left have got themselves into a terrible muddle over this issue. Maher was the author of a report on radical Islam for the right-of-centre think tank Policy Exchange. The row erupted because he told Nick Cohen that he could never have written such a report for a left-wing think tank. This is the key paragraph: “The real issue is how a liberal society responds to the challenge of ‘entryist’ groups who seek to Islamise the public and political space. This

James Forsyth

What a broken ballot box tells us about the Labour party’s future

I expect that the selection of a Labour candidate in Erith and Thamesmead would normally be of limited interest to Coffee Housers. But the contest there, which has had to be suspended because of a broken seal on a ballot box, is a sign of the coming internecine war in the Labour party. Erith and Thamesmead has Georgia Gould, the 22 year old daughter of Philip Gould Blair’s pollster, competing with a candidate backed by Unite, the union that Charlie Whelan works for. The fact that even with Labour still in government this contest has become so fractious suggests that after a heavy defeat Labour’s internal discipline might come close

James Forsyth

Will Labour try and greenwash the Budget?

It is normally a pretty safe bet that when the Budget comes around, there’ll be increases in the taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. These are taxes that you can raise without encountering too much political opposition. Now, though, the public finances are in such a dire state that such measures can’t do much to fill the huge gap between revenue and expenditure. So, what I expect we might see on Wednesday is increases in ‘green taxes’. This would appeal to Brown because of the tactical dilemma it would cause the Tories. If they accept them, Brown gets away politically with a bunch of tax rises. If they oppose them, Brown

James Forsyth

Britain is not a police state so the police must stop behaving like it is

There are many aspects of the Damian Green affair that are shocking—the breach of Parliamentary privilege, the decision to arrest an opposition MP for essentially doing his job and the role of the permanent secretary at the Home Office—but I think this might be the most disturbing: The police checked his e-mails for information on Britain’s leading civil liberties group. “They chose key words to search all the e-mails and documents and among the more noteworthy and alarming words they were searching were Shami Chakrabarti, [the director of Liberty]. The police wanted to look at every e-mail over the past few years between an opposition politician and a civil liberties

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 18 April 2009

The good guys are having a good time right now. And it makes a change from the usual headline-makers. Look at Chelsea. Hiddink and the formidable Michael Essien apart, John Terry’s men are all steely-eyed, humourless ambition — it’s difficult to warm to them. And the McLaren racing team — ferocious, implacable in their resolve, so ruthless they think nothing of spying and lying. Just as hard to like, despite the obvious charm of Lewis Hamilton. So let’s celebrate nice things happening to some unlikely people. When Argentina’s Angel Cabrera, all scars, bulk and what looks like a daily intake of about 30 tons of nicorette chewing gum, putted in

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 18 April 2009

In Competition No. 2591 you were invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information. Your entries not only made me laugh out loud but also armed me with a mine of useless information with which to bring conversations to a grinding halt should the need arise. I have learnt, for example, that it takes four hours to hard-boil an ostrich egg; that Oxford Circus Tube station has 14 escalators; and that Georges Simenon required sexual intercourse thrice daily. Commendations to Marion Shore, Michael Limb, Steve Baldock and Rosemary Fisher, but top dog this week is Basil

Frank Field

Politics | 18 April 2009

It is difficult to overdramatise the danger that is engulfing our country. In some ways our position is more precarious than in 1940 when we stood alone against the Nazi tyranny. The danger can be stated easily enough. Far from building up reserves during the latter stages of the boom, the government went on a borrowing spree amounting to £200 billion or so. This borrowing disguised the fundamental structural imbalance in our national accounts. No government, however intent on making the pips of the rich squeak, has been able to raise in taxation more than 37 per cent of our gross domestic product. It is as though one of Adam

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense

The coppers round my part of south London are really pretty good. They chase the occasional burglar; they’re courteous when they come to your door; and if you can get hold of their direct lines or mobiles they’re even better. Last year, my friendly local rozzers did an excellent job of removing a large, noisy gang of criminally inclined hoodies who had taken to congregating on some steps by the estate at the bottom of my garden. This made all the homeowners in my neck of the woods feel much happier and more secure. ‘Hurrah! The police doing their ruddy job for once!’ we all thought. But stories like that

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 18 April 2009

As time moves on, and we forget about their slurs and their malice and their rather telling fantasies about seeing George Osborne dressed up as Marlene Dietrich, perhaps what we should remember about Gordon Brown’s inner circle is their control freakery. They don’t trust hospitals to heal, they don’t trust schools to teach, and they don’t even trust scurrilous anonymous blogs to make up their own unsubstantiated gossip. They look out across this land and they see only sheep. Whereas, in fact, we are goats. No, seriously. It’s a good analogy. At least, I think it is. Let’s see. It comes from the great Terry Pratchett. ‘For sheep,’ he wrote,

Tristram Hunt

Eat, drink and be communist

In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’ This was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no