Society

Saturday

4 Apr 2009

Alex James

Slow Life | 4 April 2009

A marshmallow completely failed to live up to its promise yesterday. It’s a good while since I tasted a marshmallow and I was convinced it was going to be gorgeous. Inevitable, I suppose, one’s changing tastes, but somehow it always comes as a surprise when I find I don’t like things any more. Recently, certain books that I loved when I was younger: books that I once set my compasses by, I find repellent. There was a time in my life when everything Camus wrote came over as the voice of God speaking the divine language, such a mature way of looking at the world. Now it all strikes me

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 4 April 2009

On the Eastern Airways flight from Bristol to Aberdeen I spotted a shiny £2 coin lying in the aisle. The businessman in the seat opposite saw me lean down and retrieve it. ‘Toss you for it — heads,’ he said. It came down tails. I trousered the coin and returned triumphantly to the complimentary copy of the current Spectator I’d found in the seat pocket. At Aberdeen airport I said to the taxi driver, ‘Rothes, please.’ I pronounced it to rhyme with clothes and I assumed the town was just around the corner. ‘Ya mean Roth-ess?’ he rasped. It was about 60 miles away. It was the longest and perhaps

Taki

High Life | 4 April 2009

New York Ah, finally in New York, the city of superlatives, as they say, the most diverse metropolis ever. I suppose no one has ever said it better than Jan Morris in her luminous Manhattan ’45, a title the author chose because it sounds ‘partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne’. Here she is right off the bat, in her prologue: ‘Untouched by the war the men had left behind them, they stood there metal-clad, steel-ribbed, glass-shrouded, colossal and romantic — everything that America seemed to represent in a world of loss and ruin.’ Morris is writing about the returning Yankee soldiers encountering the Manhattan skyline from

The Spectator

Letters | 4 April 2009

Bloody rude Sir: Michael Portillo (‘The view from Basra’, 28 March) accuses the British army of arrogance and, effectively, of incompetence. He says we’ve been humiliated. This may accord with his new television persona, but it is still disingenuous, apart from being bloody rude. It is his own political class that has been shown up — shamed, shown treacherous and craven — by reducing the British army again and again, until it could fit into Wembley stadium, but still expecting it to undertake counter-insurgency work. The army has always maintained, in its advice to the politicians, that counter-insurgency in Basra would require a full infantry division. I’d also remind Portillo,

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 4 April 2009

As I write, tens of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters are converging on the City of London to demonstrate against the G20 summit. Marching under the banner ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’, this loose coalition of anarchists, environmentalists and revolutionary socialists aims to bring the capital’s financial centre to a standstill. ‘We hope to control large parts of London,’ says Ian Bone, the founder of Class War. ‘Whether it kicks off depends on numbers. The poll tax riots were all about 50,000 people who wanted a punch-up. This feels like that.’ Ironically, if the protesters really want to do something about the moribund state of Britain’s economy they should take themselves over

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 April 2009

Q. I love my husband but, when we go out together to parties, I often hear him saying things which both of us know are not true and which he is clearly saying just for effect or to keep the conversation moving along with no thought to the consequences of his talking such nonsense. I do not want us to turn into one of those couples who constantly contradict each other’s stories — that would be so boring. Whenever I upbraid him on the way home he always says, ‘Oh don’t worry about it. No one listens to what anyone else says at parties. Even if they did they wouldn’t

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 4 April 2009

Monday Our new Expenses Helpline is completely jammed. We’re not even scratching the surface of the demand. Had an MP on this morning hysterical about his Sky subscription. Something about ‘buxom babes’ and ‘essential research into Broken Britain’. Another backbencher demanding to know what to do about his hunting fees — ‘Are they saying I can’t claim them back now? Ridiculous! It’s only £115 a month for a full subscription including field money.’ I said I thought it probably best if he didn’t, just until the fuss dies down. Then someone who wouldn’t give his name but, weirdly, sounded exactly like Wonky Tom. Said he’d recently claimed back the cost

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 04 April 2009

As the true depth of the recession emerges, and fury increases against bankers for the massive bonuses they have demanded, effectively from the taxpayer, for creating it, Roman generals might set an unexpected example. Manubiae, probably derived from manus ‘hand’ and habere ‘to have’, meant the booty which a general could claim as his own, to do what he liked with, after a successful campaign. But unlike bankers, he knew where his duty lay. First and foremost, there would be handsome hand-outs to those who made it possible: troops, officers and family. He would then memorialise his achievements in Rome with public buildings, magnificent games and dinners for the plebs.

Fraser Nelson

Darling’s less optimistic forecast

Good old Alistair Darling is on manouevres again. Normally, Chancellors stay quiet before the Budget but he has admitted to the Sunday Times that there will not (surprise, surprise) be an economic recovery starting in July as he predicted last October. “We must be realistic about this,” he says. “I think it will be the back end, turn of the year time, before we start seeing growth here.” I can’t remember another time that a Chancellor told a newspaper his new forecast weeks before he told Parliament. The Sunday Times confidently states that the Budget will show a 3% fall in GDP When Darling says “You must not build up

Peter Hoskin

A frugal MP?!

Just in case you’ve completely lost the faith in our political class, it’s well worth reading the profile of Philip Hollobone in today’s Independent. Hollobone, remember, is the Tory MP who claims less than a third of the average annual expenses claim in the Commons. How does he manage it? Mainly by not hiring staff, and by keeping things pared down. This passage is a good taster: “‘It’s quite simple,’ [Hollobone] says, before starting up some rickety stairs. His work room is suitably spartan. Empty computer boxes sit in the corner. The whiff of damp from the dark patches on the wall fills the air. A chipped, dark table sits

James Forsyth

Do they really expect us to believe this?

The weather is so fantastic today that it is hard to work up much outrage but this quote from an anonymous cabinet minister in today’s Telegraph about going to the IMF really is, as Iain Martin says, an insult to our collective intelligence: “Previously, a country would only go if they were in a very bad state. It was a bit like going to accident and emergency to get urgent help. This new facility will not be like that. It is a bit more like getting wellbeing care or even like going to a spa to recuperate.” If this country does have to go to the IMF, it will be

James Forsyth

Pakistani Taliban claim responsibility for upstate New York attack

This story is moving on the wires: “Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the attack on an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y., the Press Trust of India reported Saturday. Mehsud said that a Pakistani and another man carried it out the attack, which left 14 people, including a man the police suspected of being the gunman, dead during a killing spree Friday.” But the principal gunman was a 42 year old Vietnamese immigrant who had recently lost his job which is hardly the usual profile of an Islamist terrorist. (The news reports I’ve seen do not report the involvement of anyone else in the attack) The Pakistani Taliban has

James Forsyth

Live by the spin, perish by the spin

Peter Oborne’s column this morning is magnificent, a thorough demolition of the more hyperbolic claims being made for the G20 agreement. But it is his final paragraphs on the consequences of Brown’s double counting and all the other statistical dodges that he perfected at the Treasury that is especially devastating: “The problem with this kind of duplicity is that you always get caught out in the end. So will be the case with the G20 summit. Gordon Brown has achieved brilliant headlines in the short term, and it is likely that Labour’s rating in the polls will soon start to rise as a result. However, in the long term, very

Rod Liddle

The real scandal is that we always, always end up paying

The Jacqui Smith case and the grotesque sight of her husband apologising for watching porn films at the taxpayer’s expense are just the latest symptoms of a well-advanced political disease, says Rod Liddle. They take the voters for a bunch of mugs At last the politicians have done the decent thing and called in the police over an issue which has enraged and outraged the public these last six months or so: the leaking of MPs’ expenses details to the press. One hopes that there will be a prosecution soon. Like you, I have been appalled at the regularity with which these selfless public servants have seen their privacy transgressed

Victoria Floethe

How I became the ‘femme fatale’ of New York gossip

Several weeks ago I was awakened by a phone call from a man who, speaking in a loud and excited voice, demanded to know the fine details of my personal life. Was I in a relationship with the Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff — and under what circumstances? Who had introduced us? Who had I seen in the past? Where did I work? How much was I paid? He was, I gathered before I hung up, a man with a website. More puzzled than rattled by his aggressiveness and seeming rancour, I googled his site and, as I sat there, saw my name appear and myself go from a girl with

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 4 April 2009

I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work. I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work. It’s not a promising sound. Dishwashers that stop washing dishes, internet servers that fail to serve, waste disposals that spew sewage wrist-deep back up into the sink, cars that make curious grinding noises — all these are problems I want dealt with speedily and with total confidence. I also want the person

Tom Leonard

What I heard at J.D. Salinger’s doorstep

J.D. Salinger is in the kitchen when I turn the corner of his farmhouse, his reported deafness probably explaining why he doesn’t hear me until I am a few feet from him and ringing the doorbell. His wife correctly guesses the identity of the caller and, apprised of the information out of my hearing, the author shouts something that sounds like ‘Oh, no!’ It may be succinct but it is the most he has said to the media for years. A tall but stooped figure in a blue tanktop, Salinger won’t even look at me as he sidles crab-like out of his small kitchen with his back to the window.

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 4 April 2009

Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness. Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness. This is the college basketball play-offs, and the eight nightly games are all played simultaneously. So if you go into a bar anywhere from Hoboken to Hawaii, from Manhattan to Monterey you can take your pick from eight screens to watch with your Bud. Or all at the same time. And it’s looking like next week’s Masters will be golf’s equivalent to the Mega Madness. Sport has many heralds of spring — but nothing makes you get that endorphin rush

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 4 April 2009

In Competition No. 2589 you were invited to submit an extract from the school essay of a well-known figure past or present, aged eight, entitled ‘What I Did On My Holidays’. It was a large and vivid entry, and competition was hot for a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those narrowly pipped to the post include Adrian Fry’s scary eight-year-old John Stuart Mill: ‘We stopped at a fish and chip stall where, as a philosophical investigation, Father attempted to order only “and”; the linguistic and ontological implications arising from this incident proved unexpectedly sustaining.’ And J.C.H. Mounsey’s John Prescott, clearly already struggling with anger-management issues, who comes to blows with

Robert Beaumont

City Life | 4 April 2009

‘From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows’: that was in 1835, but it could be today Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political commentator, visited Manchester in 1835 when the city was the capital of the world’s textile industry. He wrote: ‘From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish.’ This was ten years before Benjamin Disraeli coined his famous ‘two nations’ phrase about the rich and the poor in his novel Sybil. Disraeli was referring to England as a whole, but — thanks to