Society

Saturday

21 Feb 2009

Low Life | 21 February 2009

The other night, Jim, a pub landlord, was complaining angrily to me about the government. I listened but said nothing. Then he produced a newspaper clipping. It was an article about the British army’s latest sniper rifle. It had a range of, I forget what — two miles? In the wrong hands, said Jim, it would be possible for someone to lean out of an upstairs window in Lambeth and pot a New Labour politician fumbling for his car keys in the members’ car park of the House of Commons. In fact, I was looking at the wrong hands right now, he said, spreading them on the bar. Would I

Taki

High Life | 21 February 2009

Gstaad Nicola Anouilh is the only son of the great French playwright Jean Anouilh — more than 70 plays, including Antigone, Becket and La Sauvage — and a close friend since Paris in the Sixties. He was of a generation just below mine, one that managed to get into Jimmy’s only during the events of May 1968, when the French bourgeoisie ran off to the south, some of their places on the banquette taken by François de Caraman, my brother-in-law, Peter Bemberg, heir to an old and vast Argentine fortune, Nicola Anouilh, and Vladimir, a Russian boy whom we rechristened Prince Touchepine, a play on words for touching one’s willy.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 21 February 2009

You cannot blame Lord Turner, the Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, for defending the bonuses paid to his employees. He is new to the job and must work with his team. But when he said this week, ‘If you are saying we should now cut the bonuses, you are saying we should cut their pay by 15 per cent’, he was inviting the reaction he did not intend. Yes, that is, now you mention it, what we are saying. The FSA failed to do the most important job assigned to it. Therefore, broadly speaking, its staff should not only not get bonuses, but should get less money than before.

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 21 February 2009

Monday Dave’s horrible clothes are a triumph! Of course everyone is claiming it was their idea, but the fact is no one remembered he’d got those smelly old trainers made out of recycled tyre rubber and wine bottle corks until I pointed it out. Sam was a bit trickier. Once Tom and I got over to the house and started rooting through things it was obvious we weren’t going to find anything scruffy so we had to improvise by scuffing a pair of her best boots with a spaghetti spoon. She wasn’t best pleased at first — lot of choice mockney swearing about stoning crows — but when the photos

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 21 February 2009

A bright rainbow on a wall caught my eye, and the building behind it turned out to belong to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. On its website, the department has a cheerful image of helicopters and cranes constructing a rainbow. When I add that the home page is headed by a picture of a black boy in a wheelchair, you can see the lie of the land. What do they think they mean by their rainbow emblem? In recent years it has been the contested property of campaigners for peace and for homosexual activity. There is something called Broken Rainbow LGBT Domestic Violence Service. ‘LGBT’ stands for ‘lesbian,

The Spectator

Letters | 21 February 2009

Hidden behind Smith Sir: Matthew Parris (Another Voice, 14 February) correctly emphasised the cyclical pattern of economic markets in an optimistic tone that heralded a future recovery. As is almost always the case, writers from Adam Smith onwards are given the credit for the exposition of market theory. However, it was Josiah Tucker (1713-1799), an Oxford-educated cleric, who first articulated such principles in his A brief essay on the advantages and disadvantages, which respectively attend France and Great Britain, published in 1749. Although Tucker firmly advocated free trade, he recommended prudent intervention by government in terms of legislation designed to ensure effective commerce for the benefit of society. It is

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 21 February 2009

One of the paradoxes of social organisations is that the more egalitarian they are on the surface, the more hierarchical they are underneath. Thus, the House of Commons is more class-bound than the House of Lords, the Labour party more rigidly stratified than the Conservatives, and comprehensive schools more cliquey than Eton College. Of nothing is this more true than Twitter. Twitter, as I am sure you know, is the social networking site of the moment. What Facebook was to the autumn of 2007, Twitter is to the spring of 2009. Soon, you will not be able to open a newspaper or switch on the radio without hearing about it.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 February 2009

Q. I was brought up in South Africa and did graduate studies in the US. When I moved to London in the mid-1970s I encountered ‘put downs’ at dinner parties when I mispronounced aristocratic English surnames which I had only seen written. I had some exposure to them in South Africa but obviously not enough. (It was rather like the ‘snooty’ reaction I got when I called Albany ‘The Albany’ — as does Wilde in Importance… — but as I actually lived there from 1976 to 1981 I ignored the criticism.) A clever reply would have been very useful but I did not have one. Now I am living in

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 21 February 2009

Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. Sandwell Council recently advertised for a ‘Thematic Liaison Manager (Performance)’ at £41,000 a year. It would be instructive if any reader could tell from that description what the job entailed. I doubt anyone could, and thereby hangs a tale. Latin was the language of learning in the West for more than 1,000 years after the fall of the western Roman empire in the 5th century ad. When it began to be replaced by vernaculars and translations, some other justification for it had to be found. One common one was that it gave you an entrée into

James Forsyth

Official: Iran told HMG it was killing British troops in Iraq

Tucked away in today’s papers is a very important story, a statement on the record by Sir John Sawers, formerly political director at the Foreign Office now Britain’s ambassador to the UN, about a deal the Iranians offered: “The Iranians wanted to be able to strike a deal whereby they stopped killing our forces in Iraq in return for them being allowed to carry on with their nuclear programme: ‘We stop killing you in Iraq, stop undermining the political process there, you allow us to carry on with our nuclear programme without let or hindrance’.” It has long been known that the Iranians are responsible for the deaths of British

Peter Hoskin

The extent of Stanford’s fakery

In case the English Cricket Board isn’t embarrassed enough, today’s Times has a fresh set of revelations about Allen Stanford and his tawdry cricket spectacular: It was an iconic and now infamous moment as Allen Stanford’s helicopter touched down on the perfectly trimmed grass of Lord’s, the home of English cricket. But the alarm bells should already have been ringing in the ground’s panelled corridors as the aircraft, with its gold flashes and the Stanford name emblazoned along its flanks, emerged from the clouds over London. Despite its impressive logos, there was no Stanford company helicopter. Nor was there a $20 million jackpot in the treasure chest that the beaming

James Forsyth

British politicians must start talking about Iran

The news that Iran now has enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb is a reminder that at some point soon—maybe even before the next election—the moment of decision on Iran will be reached. But listening to the British public debate you’d be blissfully unaware of this. When was the last time you heard Brown, Cameron, Miliband or Hague give a speech on Iran which went beyond the usual platitudes? It’s obvious why our politicians are so reluctant to talk about Iran: there are no votes in it and, realistically, no good options. But Iran going nuclear would be a transformative event. The balance of power in the Middle East

James Forsyth

Brown still believes

Peter Oborne’s column this morning contains this telling anecdote: “Amidst all this shambles, it is only the Prime Minister who keeps faith in his policies. I am told that, at a recent Cabinet meeting, he earnestly told his senior colleagues that it was still possible to win the election, and the main problem was that the Government found it hard to get its message across. As the Prime Minister spoke, Cabinet ministers rolled their eyes and cast despairing glances at each other.” One of the key dynamics in British politics right now is that Brown thinks he can still win the next election even if many of the Cabinet do

Alex Massie

Ecstasy vs Peanuts

Here’s a question for you: Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest? So asks the New Scientist in its latest editorial. I think you know the answer, don’t you? You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA. Now it’s true that some research suggests there may be some ill-effects* associated with ecstasy use; but

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 21 February 2009

A damned fine spell A few of us had a small dinner the other day to thank Angus Fraser for his distinguished stint as the Independent’s cricket correspondent. Not quite reeling off 45 overs from the Nursery End, but a damned fine spell anyway. The evening was, as such occasions should be, wine-fuelled, good-humoured and jam-packed with cracking stories, most of them unrepeatable. Gus was one of those remarkable players who just stepped over the boundary ropes when they finished their career in the first-class game and then, seemingly effortlessly, took up a career as a first-class journalist (think Mike Atherton of the Times, the Telegraph’s Derek Pringle, or the

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 21 February 2009

In Competition No. 2583 you were invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intertextuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender relations in The Famous Five and Malory Towers’. I was pulled up by one regular competitor (obviously not a member of the Noddy Club) for setting two challenges, within a relatively short space of time, requiring knowledge of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. While often panned by adults, Blyton’s books are enormously popular with children. These mock-worthy chapter headings come from an academic volume entitled Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature, by David

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 21 February 2009

Lloyds becomes one more catastrophe for which Brown will never apologise How Lloyds Banking Group chairman Sir Victor Blank must regret not having had a prior engagement on Monday 15 September last year, the night he bumped into Gordon Brown at a City reception and got bounced into the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. Dubbed ‘the bank that did dull’ by Neil Collins, Lloyds was a safe bet to survive this crisis unscathed — until Brown started mumbling through his canapé about sweeping competition issues aside, safeguarding Scottish jobs and saving the world. With its debt downgraded by Moody’s this week, Lloyds will be crippled for years by HBOS’s

Rod Liddle

If we are going to ban nasty foreigners, can we at least be consistent about it?

Rod Liddle parodies the nonsense that is the government’s approach to foreign visitors with unpleasant messages. It makes no sense to ban a critic of Islam but let in every homophobe with a passport Perhaps we should not let anyone into our lovely country, for fear of the mischief they might cause. Almost all foreigners I have met have been devious and malevolent, eaten up with jealousy about what it is to be British, none too bright and with filthy table manners. You would not leave them alone with your wife for ten minutes. Nor, indeed, with your children. A complete ban on these vile people would spare us a

Quentin Willson

I have felt the unlikely zeal of the football convert

Quentin Willson goes to his first ever football match expecting to end up in A&E — and leaves a misty-eyed evangelist for a sport he now feels is grotesquely misrepresented There’s no easy way to confess this. You are the first people I’ve told. Until very recently I’d never, ever, been to a football match. For an alpha male this is a fairly damning admission I know, but I just never fancied all that shouting, that atavistic male tribalism. For me, football’s worst advertisement, like Christianity’s, was always its devotees. Fans like a horde of Mongol storm-troopers on a three-day pass, TV commentators spouting flannel in lengthy widths, barely articulate

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 February 2009

Last week I lost it. I flipped out. Actually if I’m being totally truthful I didn’t just flip: I f***ing flipped. Like Boris Johnson, I had a Vaz-attack of epic, expletive-laden telephone rage. Having recently received the Transport for London form to renew and pre-pay my annual (discounted) congestion charge, I’d managed to get my application in with two weeks to spare before the old one expired. I’d duly ferreted out and enclosed a recent household utility bill. I’d filled in my mobile, work and home contact numbers and given my credit card details. I’d posted it off and as far as I was concerned the job was done, dusted