Society

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama should listen to the architects of the surge

Tom Ricks has a fantastic essay in The Washington Post about the generals who—in defiance of the military establishment—pushed for the surge and the change of tactics in Iraq that have been key to that country making such progress in the last two years. One of the key points in the piece is how the architects of the surge, oppose any rapid draw down of US troops—something that Obama remains committed to. Ricks writes: “Obama is likely to find Odierno and other generals arguing passionately that to come close to meeting his commitment to keeping U.S. troops safe, keeping Iraq edging toward stability and maintaining the pressure on extremists, he

Peter Hoskin

How far we’ve fallen

To be honest, I don’t often stray into the Sunday Times Travel supplement, so I’m not sure whether their ‘Holiday Money’ table – setting out the exchange rates between Sterling and a host of foreign currencies, as well as the position they were in a year ago – is a regular inclusion or not.  But it caught my eye this morning.  Sure, the fall of Sterling is hardly news, but we often hear about it in terms of dollars and Euros.  Seeing the prices against, say, the Kenyan shilling or the Argentinian Peso really hammers the point home.  So I’ve reprinted the Sunday Times table below.   The numbers in brakets

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Time for Cameron to put his colleagues front and centre

Judging from the interview with Alan Johnson in The Sunday Times, Labour have given up on its attempt to character assassinate David Cameron. Johnson concedes that Cameron is “likeable” and that “He’s articulate. He’s a nice guy.” But Johnson argues that Cameron’s own qualities don’t matter that much as this “is a party system” and Cameron’s party hasn’t changed. Labour’s new line of attack is hardly novel but it marks an important step for Cameron, it is a recognition that his persona is established enough with voters that it can’t be changed by ever more vigorous attacks from his opponents. Cameron now needs to adapt his approach to this new

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 February 2009

A failure of fairness Sir: Rod Liddle’s defence of the BBC (Liddle Britain, 31 January) does not stack up. Of course people with close connections to Palestinians, those fully aware of their sufferings and traumas, were in the forefront of calling for the BBC to air the charity’s appeal. How could it be otherwise? Yet for good reason, the BBC’s decision united Fleet Street left and right, triggered criticism of the Corporation from Cabinet ministers as well as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and inspired probably the largest number of MPs in living memory to sign a motion regarding Palestine. This appeal was not about being pro one side

Alex James

Slow Life | 7 February 2009

I wonder how much of what we think we love and need is merely habit. It’s only ten weeks since I stopped smoking 100 a day and now I hardly think about it. For sure, I fancy one occasionally, but I suppose I could say the same thing about women, and I’m happily married. Really, I’m absolutely astonished how quickly cigarettes ceased to preoccupy me, part of another life already, although lighters and papers, flints and filters are still turning up in coat pockets. Of course there’s always plenty of room for the wheels to fall off the no-smoking bus, but I hope they don’t. I think I’m over it.

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 7 February 2009

Apart from going to the nearest town one afternoon to have teeth out, I hadn’t been out of the village for six weeks. I might have been depressed about this normally, but a jolly outing I had entered and underlined in my diary for the end of January kept my spirits up. I was popping up to the metropolis to watch a football match — an evening game, under floodlights. Our new manager, whom the critics were, to start with, eager to write off as an ingénue, a loser, a chancer, even a chimpanzee, was proving to be a man of honour, wisdom, good humour and sanity. Under him, the

Taki

High Life | 7 February 2009

Gstaad Last week I ventured down to Geneva for a meeting with my banker, a gentleman of the old school who did not get carried away by Bernie Madoff’s siren songs. To the contrary, he went as far as Odysseus, tied himself to his desk and plugged up the ears of his underlings. Metaphorically, that is. He had some interesting things to say. The mega-crook and fraudster never met suckers in person, except for those — mostly Jewish — friends of his in Palm Beach and in the Big Bagel. Europeans and Latin Americans were handled by his feeder fund managers, around 150 known ones, and, according to my banker,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 February 2009

Watching white workers protesting in the snow, I cast my mind back 30 years to the Winter of Discontent. The year 1978/79 is the last time I remember being so cold, and taking such keen pleasure in ‘bad’ weather. It is also the last time that one had a prevailing sense that the country was falling apart. Then, as now, a Labour government whose claim to power was a special ability to deal with difficult economic questions was discredited. There are some differences, though. Thirty years ago, the strikers were much more unreasonable and unpopular than the men in the north today who resent being excluded from British jobs which

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 7 February 2009

Monday Am bit confused about Responsible Capitalism. While wanting to Be The Change as always, the new RC guidelines are making the bagel run v complicated. Not sure the little place on the corner fully demonstrates a ‘sense of responsibility and a moral framework’. On the other hand, the only real alternative is the big-chain coffee shop down the road which is clearly engaged in ‘booster capitalism’. And neither of them would appear to have a ‘vision for the country that connects the economy, society and the environment’. Asked Wonky Tom for help but he shouted ‘For f**k’s sake just go and get the bagels!’ It’s all v well him

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 February 2009

While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on the rock cakes in Brief Encounter). I said: ‘Un croissant’. The woman at the till said: ‘Una brioche’. Well, I have since discovered that there is a word croissant in Italian, and indeed a word cornetto with the same meaning. But she was quite right: they call croissants brioches. This is a deep question of

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 7 February 2009

I welcome Sir Jonathan Porritt’s advice about population control According to Sir Jonathan Porritt, the government’s green guru, couples who have more than two children are being ‘irresponsible’. ‘I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate,’ he says. He recommends contraception and abortion as methods of keeping the population down. If only I had known this before I selfishly and thoughtlessly produced four children. The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Sir Jonathan is patron, points out that each baby born in Britain will end up burning the carbon equivalent of two-and-a-half acres

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 February 2009

Q. A friend and I have been working in the new Eliot Reading Room of the London Library and are very pleased with it (the Ladies’ in particular is very swish) but there is one drawback. A bespectacled man of Chinese appearance is in everyday, chomping his way through packets of gum, and making the most annoying series of clacking and liquid chewing noises as he derives maximum oral satisfaction from his unsightly habit. As he is also plugged into his MP3 player, we assume he is blissfully unaware of the intolerable aural pollution he emits. Obviously we all feel like killing him, but do you have any better suggestions?

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The US is so worried about the UK terrorist threat that the CIA has set up its own spying network in this country 

Tim Shipman has an important story in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph. Here’s the start of it: “American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain. They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil. Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Biden’s message to Europe

Vice-President Biden’s speech today at the Munich Security Conference was meant to spell out the kind of partnership that Obama wants between the United and Europe. The tone was very different from the Bush administration, with a lot of stress on the new beginning and how America wants to listen and the like, but the overall agenda seems similar: America wants Europe to step up in Afghanistan. The remarks on Russia are dominating the headlines. But what grabbed my attention was how explicit Biden was about Afghanistan and Pakistan strategies now being one. As Biden put it: no strategy for Afghanistan, in my humble opinion, can succeed without Pakistan. I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

One account of what was said in the One Show green room

Considering the debate that the whole Carol Thatcher business has generated, it seems worth noting Adrian Chiles’ account of what happened. Chiles writes in The Sun today: ‘Carol was in full flow, talking about who’d win the Australian Open. “You also have to consider the frogs,” she said. “You know, that froggy golliwog guy.” “Ooh,” she added — waving an arm about. “If I was Prince Harry I’d get shot for saying that.” Before I’d worked out what to do, Jo — plainly aghast — leant across and said: “Excuse me, did you just say golliwog?” “Yes, well, he’s half-black,” Carol explained, waving her hand in front of her face.’

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 7 February 2009

What treats await this weekend. An England Test match in the Caribbean; a north London derby in the increasingly fractious Premier League; and, joy of joys, at long last the Six Nations is back with three succulent games. There’s always an extra tang when rugby’s European showcase is also the selection process for a summer Lions’ tour. Long gone are the days when England felt they had a God-given right to the pick of places on any flight to the southern hemisphere — now they might not have a single man in the starting XV against South Africa. All the more reason why the highlight of the coming week will

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 7 February 2009

In Competition No. 2581 you were invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. The challenge was inspired by Miles Kington’s masterly The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces, and the standard was top-tiroir. You inflicted mongrel French and English on the literary classics to great comic effect. Here is G.M. Davis’s version of the opening to Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’: ‘Il y a yonks, si je remember correctement, j’avais it large, avec beaucoup de bons mates and beaucoup de plonk flowing…’ Formidable! There were some unfamiliar names sprinkled among the seasoned veterans. A commendation goes to Jane Robertson, while

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 7 February 2009

I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock. I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more

Sarah Standing

Standing Room

I’ve recently developed a callous indifference towards the torrent of amateur self-analysis that’s infiltrating our everyday pattern of speech. I’m over ‘issues’. Way too many people have way too many issues for my liking. And too many people I don’t care about feel compelled to ‘share’ their issues with me. Last week people started ‘gathering’, and now I fear gathering is set to become the new big issue. Ever since Kate Winslet dramatically implored herself to ‘gather’ at the Golden Globes (surely ‘get a grip’ would have worked just as well?) I’ve witnessed two perfectly ordinary mates inexplicably ‘gather’ — rather than just admit they’d lost track of what they

The Spectator

Snowbama

As Britain awoke to the stunning snowscapes of Monday morning, the nation could not make its mind up whether it was on the set of a huge Richard Curtis film, congratulating itself on its social cohesion and snowball-throwing geniality — or whether we were all suddenly locked in a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which no amenities worked, no schools were open, the roads were hauntingly empty, and a phalanx of plague-ridden zombies was probably just round the corner. Half of the British mind wanted to make merry; the other half acted as if a natural disaster had occurred on a par with Hurricane Katrina. Mostly, the former instinct prevailed and liberated