Society

Saturday

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 21 February 2009

36,000 feet When I was a teenager on a flight to Nairobi I sat next to a pretty Kenyan girl the same age as me. We got talking. Out of the blue at 36,000 feet she slipped me a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I did nothing about it. On another flight back to school in England we got delayed in Zurich, where an attractive older female passenger bummed a cigarette off me. When we reached London she took me back to her posh London flat. ‘Aha,’ I thought. She quite literally showed me her engravings, things got steamy and yet

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Looking ahead to the 81st Academy Awards

Hm. Besides the odd gem, it’s an uninspiring selection of films competing for the main awards at Sunday’s Oscars ceremony.  Even so, just for the record, here’s my should-win / will-win list for the major categories.  Do jot down your own predictions and hopes in the comments section. Best Picture Should win: Frost/Nixon  Will win: Slumdog Millionaire Best Director Should win: Gus Van Sant (Milk)  Will win: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) Best Actor Should win: Sean Penn (Milk)   Will win: Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) Best Actress Should win: Angelina Jolie (Changeling)  Will win: Kate Winslet (The Reader) Best Supporting Actor Should win: Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)   Will win: Heath

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should clarify Brown’s “pro-cyclical” admission

Looking back on Brown’s Wednesday press conference, his admission that the UK regulatory system was “probably too pro-cyclical” seems particularly significant. To my ears, it’s the closest he’s got to saying they his tripartite system just didn’t work, and the closest he’s come to admitting a specific error. Yet the opposition parties haven’t made much of it since, which got me a-wondering why. My guess is that Brown’s language has dissuaded them from launching an attack. One of the PM’s great skills is to hide bad news behind financial jargon and lingo that don’t make sense to the average person. In this case, if the Tories were to major on

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Andrew Motion is a typical Devout Sceptic

Andrew Motion has confirmed his image as the ultimate middlebrow, wet liberal. He is passionately keen that students should read the Bible, so that they can progress on to the true faith of Eng-Lit. ‘I am not for a moment suggesting that everybody be made to go to church during their childhood’ he told the Guardian, but he wishes everyone would have a taste of the ritual, the beautiful mystery, like he did. Yuk. ‘If people want to get down on their knees and believe it line by line, good luck to them. I often wish I could, but as it happens I can’t. But it doesn’t destroy my pleasure

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Doctor is Out

The Economist’s Democracy in America blog raises a good point: whatever happened to Howard Dean? That is, why does the former chairman of the DNC receive so little credit for the party’s resurrection? And why is he not being considered to be Secretary for Health and Human Services, given that, as governor of Vermont, he did assemble a track record on healthcare reform? Dean’s eclipse is partly a matter of personality clashes: he has feuded with both Rahm Emanuel and David Plouffe. Certainly Dean has an abrasive, even arrogant, side to his character that hasn’t helped him; nor has he ever really been trusted by the party’s establishment. And yet

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shumble and Corker in Spain

Mind you, it’s not just the Irish police who are confused by foreign languages. A reader emails this piece of Fleet Street entertainment: That reminds me of XXX’s story chasing a British felon somewhere on the Spanish Costas. He got an interview with a doctor who slagged off the guy on the run but the chap refused to give his name. The Sun newsdesk insisted they have a name, so our intrepid hack went back to the guy’s office and took down the name on the door… Imagine the surprise and embarrassment the next day when Spanish speakers phoned The Sun to ask why they were quoting a doctor called

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Get ready for the return of shadow cabinet elections

One of the fun things about Labour’s return to opposition will be the return of shadow cabinet elections. Tony Blair never managed to change the fact that the Parliamentary Labour Party elects the shadow cabinet. This is going to cause some mighty ruckuses and put some rather odd people in Labour’s top team. Just imagine if David Cameron’s choice of shadow cabinet members was dictated by the Parliamentary Party. The rules are that Labour MPs get to vote for 19 members of the shadow cabinet, at least four of their votes have to be for female candidates. The results are then published with the candidates ranked in order of popularity,

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s PFI dilemma

Good work by the Times, who are tracking the Government’s continuing problems on the PFI front.  If you remember, numerous PFI projects are in danger of collapsing as the banks withdraw funding, and word was that Brown ‘n’ Darling would have to stump up £4 billion of taxpayers’ cash to fill the breach.  I’d assumed that would mean the Government hawking more gilts and adding to our national debt, which has all sorts of implications for the off balance-sheet nature of these schemes.  Turns out the Treasury may have something different in mind: “Billions of pounds could be taken from council staff pension schemes to bail out the Government’s PFI

Peter Hoskin

Debt Britannia

The front cover of today’s Mail should be stuck on the wall of every MPs’ office in Westminster.  It spells out the scale of the national debt burden in the starkest possible terms: £2,000,000,000,000 in big red numerals, with a post-script translating that to £33,000 for every “man, woman and child” in the UK. Thing is, the Mail’s figures – based on the ONS’s release yesterday – are probably a bare minimum.  We don’t yet know full extent of the nationalised banks’ liabilities; there’s likely to be more debt-heavy government action over the next year or so; and Brown’s off-balance sheet ruses will add to the burden faced by taxpayers,

Peter Hoskin

Does Brown hate Cameron and Osborne so much that he’d give up his job to defeat them?

Like Steve Richards in today’s Independent, I think it’s highly unlikely that Brown won’t remain Labour leader until the next election.  But Richards does spell out an alternative scenario which is news to me: “It is still possible that Brown might go of his own accord before an election, without a new job offer. When things were going badly last time around, he told an ally that he felt guilty about what was happening to Labour under his watch. If he felt a Tory victory could be prevented by his departure he would consider going. I suspect that Brown would do anything to stop Cameron and Osborne securing power, including

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lessons from a great Antiguan Drama

Test match cricket is something else, isn’t it? Patrick Kidd has a splendid line making the point that test cricket is terrific because it is “a game in which it is much more exciting when something almost happens than when it happens all the time.” Granted, cricket’s detractors might cite this as evidence to support their prejudices, but who cares about them? Kidd is right. This was a great test match, conjured from the most unlikely circumstances. Full credit to the groundstaff at the ARG and, of course, to both teams who produced a match that vindicated the idea and reality of test cricket even as one of its greatest

Martin Bright

The Adrian Mole Generation Should Step up to the Plate

It’s perhaps a step too far to mix a reference from a popular work of 1980s satirical fiction with a phrase borrowed from baseball in the headline of this piece, but somehow it seemed to capture the situation. With increased speculation about Harriet Harman’s leadership ambitions the time has come for the younger generation of Labour politicians (most of whom are a simillar age to Sue Townsend’s hero) to start sticking their heads aboove the parapet. A name that seems to be emerging as a possible runner is Treasury minister Yvette Cooper. I have often wondered whether we would ever see a husband and wife team in No. 10 and No.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The shadow cast by the Davis agenda

Some eye-caching comments from David Davis, speaking at the launch of the Convention on Modern Liberty earlier.  Here’s how the Guardian reports them: “I talked to Chris Grayling the day he was appointed to make sure that he was signed up to the what I call Davis agenda, and he is – maybe not quite as passionate as I am but it would be insane to be as passionate as I am on this issue,” he said… …However, Davis said it was the justice secretary, rather than the home secretary who had the “most important role” on the issue of liberties, adding that shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, was “brilliant”.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories are having a great and terrible day

So far as the Tories are concerned, today’s brought news of both the extremely encouraging and extremely ominous variety.  The good news is all for the short-to-medium term.  For instance, there’s been the constant drip, drip, drip of Labour leadership speculation, which undermines Brown’s position within his own party.  And then, this afternoon, there’s been a damning indictment of Brown’s economic approach from the CBI’s Richard Lambert.  Here’s what he said: “The government appears to have been fighting a series of forest fires rather than building a platform for economic recovery. There’s little sense of a coherent strategy about what’s happened to date … It’s hard to remember – let

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The British Foreign Secretary gets stood up

Jason Cowley’s profile of David Miliband in the New Statesman is an engaging read. But one line in it stood out to me: “we waited for a group of Indian politicians to arrive for dinner (in fact, only two of the expected nine turned up)” How did it come to this, a British Foreign Secretary, and we are after all a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the fifth largest economy in the world, is not considered worth turning up to dinner with? This is more worrying than anything else that I’ve heard about Miliband’s (disastrous) India trip. It suggests a decline into irrelevance. PS I’ve put in

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Stanford Calamity? Only for Antigua, not for cricket

There’s some good stuff in Michael Henderson’s column on the so-called Stanford debacle* today, even if he indulges himself with a rather rosy,soft-focus view of cricket’s past. The ideal of the village green bathed in evening sunlight with the vicar standing as umpire and children playing by the boundary and all that is a powerful, enduring image for sure but this English arcadia is only one thread running through the game’s history. A history that has been tougher, more scandalous and, often, meaner, than Henderson’s cosy view would have one believe. That’s to say, the sport’s history is well-stocked with cads and frauds and bounders and Allen Stanford is but

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is the Yvette Cooper for leader rumour really a kick at Balls?

The Evening Standard’s scoop that Yvette Cooper is being urged to stand as a ‘stop Harman’ candidate has sent the Westminster bush telegraph into overdrive. The speed with which the Cooper story is spreading is proof that we have now entered the stage of Labour party’s decline where no rumour is too far-fetched to be dismissed. Although, it is only fair to point out that the makeover and media training Cooper has had have worked; she has gone from being one of the worst frontline Labour performers to one of the best. Her intellect—if not her judgement—should also not be in doubt. Treasury civil servants say she has a far

Peter Hoskin

Johnson tries to scratch the “Cameron veneer”

Alan Johnson’s sure putting himself about.  After interviews last week with the Sunday Times and with Fraser in our own magazine, he’s now got a comment piece in today’s Guardian.  Aside from the exaggerations it contains about Labour’s record on public service reform, it makes a rather odd argument.  Johnson’s first point is that Tory health policy is beholden to provider interest and too light on reform – which is, to some extent, true.  But – perhaps mindful that the same things could be said of Labour’s approach on education – he then goes on to attack the Tories’ transformative schools model for basically being too heavy on reform.  Here’s the