Society

Saturday

7 Mar 2009

Letters | 7 March 2009

Don’t go Dutch Sir: The Dutch postal service was privatised, you say, ‘with no perceived damage to the services they offer’ (Leading article, 28 February). You would not say that if you lived here. Firstly, deliveries: there is one a day, which arrives at absolutely random times but is usually around 3 p.m. — even here in the centre of the capital. Nobody seems to ever receive any post at all on Mondays. Most weeks I receive items clearly addressed to somebody else. Secondly, prices: we pay 39p, and that’s only up to 20g (Royal Mail: 36p up to 100g). Put more than two pages into your envelope and it will

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 March 2009

The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables, stressed on the second, and pronounced cn-JEER-i-eez. That is logical, considering that it comes directly from Latin congeries, ‘a heap or pile’. Its connotation of heterogeneity is often suggested by a preceding qualification, ‘mere’. A related Latin word for the same thing is congestus, and congeries is thus connected with the English congest, not very

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 7 March 2009

As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor — ‘golfer’, for instance — but most were slang terms like ‘flick’, ‘honcho’ and ‘hooker’. The message was clear: you’re in the drawing room now and you should leave the language of the saloon bar behind. Snobbery is always a hallmark of such lists, the supreme example being Alan Ross’s famous essay in Encounter distinguishing between U and Non-U words. However, sometimes this snobbery is hidden beneath the surface and those who draw up

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 7 March 2009

Q. Ten years ago, at 15, I met the closest friend of my life. We did everything together and she grew so close to my whole family that, when her own rather difficult home life became too much, she even moved in with us. She has always been the person I felt I could turn to. She was one of my few friends, for example, to make the effort to travel to visit my mother when she was recently very ill, and to keep ringing to check I was OK. Here’s the problem: a few years ago she got married — to a woman. I like her wife, who is

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 07 March 2009

Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant. Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant. But the Stoics would have been baffled why she and her unhappy demise were thought worthy of such attention from the media. Stoicism, invented by the Cypriot Zeno (335-263 bc), taught that the ‘divine’

James Forsyth

Obama: The US is not winning in Afghanistan

Barack Obama’s sit-down interview with The New York Times, the first he has granted the paper since becoming president, contains this exchange: Q. Mr. President, we need to turn it to foreign policy. I know we have a review going on right now about Afghanistan policy, but right now can you tell us, are we winning in Afghanistan? A. No. Obama goes on to talk about what needs to be done in Afghanistan before saying this: “At the heart of a new Afghanistan policy is going to be a smarter Pakistan policy. As long as you’ve got safe havens in these border regions that the Pakistani government can’t control or

James Forsyth

Violence in Iraq down 70 percent since last March

“Attacks are at the lowest level since September 2003, falling 70 percent since last March.” So reports The New York Times in its latest piece on the situation in Iraq. The level of progress in Iraq since the US changed strategy in early 2007 and surged troops into the country has been quite remarkable. If anyone had predicted in January 2007 when President Bush announced the new strategy that the situation in Iraq would have improved so much by March 2009 they would have been dismissed for being absurdly over-optimistic. But as The New York Times points out the national elections in December this year are key to the country’s

James Forsyth

Why isn’t Balls being kicked like Harman is?

I bumped into a Labour MP the other day and he asked me a good question, why is Harriet Harman the only one getting it in the neck for her leadership positioning? Several other members of the Cabinet clearly have an eye on a post-election leadership contest, notably Ed Balls, but they aren’t receiving anywhere near as much criticism. If, as Martin puts it, Harriet is at it so are several others. Some say that it is the absurdity of the idea of Harman leading the party that means she attracts so much flak. I agree that Harman would not be seen as a credible PM by the electorate, but

Peter Hoskin

Common sense over computers?

Recommending what sounds like a prescient report by Edward Chancellor, Crunch Time for Credit? (2005), Charles Moore writes the following in his column today: “Although some of Chancellor’s work is technical, it benefits from a historian’s understanding of what people have done in reality rather than a narrower economist’s obsession with ‘modelling’. It has strong elements of common sense. By that same common sense, though obviously with much less information, the man in the street also predicted the credit crunch.” It’s a crucial point – and one stressed by Nigel Lawson in his evidence to the Spectator Inquiry, which will be up on Coffee House soon – that while common

Alex Massie

The workings of Brown’s brain

Matthew Parris’s column brilliantly skewers the utter predictability of the policy announcements coming out of Number 10. “Much the same may be said of the problem-solving programme known as Mr Brown. Focus-grouping tells him voters are angry that top British bankers have been paying themselves fat salaries and bonuses. Key words in these reports trigger links in the Brown brain to key remedies: thus “angry about British banker’s bonus” triggers “stop British banker’s bonus”. “Salaries too high” triggers “curb salaries”. A cross-linking response is assembled: “control remuneration of British bankers”. But the word “British” then triggers a logic filter; and on to the Brown screen pings a warning pop-up: “Incompatibility

Peter Hoskin

Are the Lib Dems spurning Tory advances?

Plenty of posturing from the Lib Dem corner today, as their Spring Conference continues in Harrogate. Both Nick Clegg and Vince Cable are laying into the Thatcher Years and, by extension, the Tories. Here, for instance, is how the Guardian quotes Cable: “[The Tories] have been completely caught flat-footed by this crisis … They didn’t anticipate it. Many of the problems we have originate from the Thatcher years. If you take for example the way in which they demutualised building societies, which became banks, that was a real Thatcher policy and those institutions have been at the heart of the crisis of irresponsible lending. It originated in the Tory

James Forsyth

More bad news for Britain

Two stories in the papers today illustrate just how badly placed Britain is to get through this recession. In The Times, Patrick Hosking speculates about the possibility of Britain losing its triple A credit rating now that the Bank of England has resorted to quantitative easing. He notes that Moody’s has said that Britain’s triple A rating is now being “tested”. Other advanced economies have lost this rating before and survived, but making borrowing more expensive in the current circumstances would be yet another blow to the public finances as well as a national humiliation. Heather Stewart in The Guardian flags up an IMF report on how much of their

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 7 March 2009

So the war on terror is over is it? Or so we’re told by everyone from David Miliband, scuttling to put distance between himself and his former allies in Washington, to assorted senior spooks, gallantly trying to cover their backs. Even the saintly Barack has indicated that talk of ‘war on terror’ is dangerous. But tell that to the dead Pakistani policeman in Lahore this week, armed with ancient rifles against the brutal force of automatic pistols, RPGs and grenades; tell that to Sri Lanka’s shattered Test cricketers, only saved from wholesale slaughter by a courageous bus driver and a grenade that failed; tell that to the vast sprawl of

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 7 March 2009

In Competition No. 2585 you were invited to submit the memoirs of ten famous figures from history or ten well-known fictional characters, using only six words. In response to a ten-dollar bet that he couldn’t write a six-word short story, Hemingway came up with the haunting mini-masterpiece ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Which, as well as inspiring this challenge, spawned an enormously successful contest, run by the online magazine Smith, that invites readers to tell their life story in half-a-dozen words. Autobiography is not traditionally associated with brevity but perhaps keeping it concise is the way to go in an age of shrinking attention spans. Which is not to

Peter Oborne

Keith Joseph’s lesson to today’s political pygmies

Thirty-five years ago Sir Keith Joseph was the first politician to provide a coherent response to the collapse of the postwar economic settlement. Our ruling elite continued to analyse the financial and social catastrophe of the mid-1970s in traditional terms. But Sir Keith — in an act of quite astonishing courage for a front-rank politician — departed from the orthodox. This meant that he was misrepresented, he was insulted, and in career terms he may have paid a heavy price. In those lonely speeches made in those now far-off times, Sir Keith Joseph invented a revolutionary new political economy. In doing so, he changed British history and saved us from

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 7 March 2009

If there is anything that can bring Gordon Brown a shred of comfort, it is that almost no one in the Labour party is now speculating about his future. There is no shortage of plotting in the bars, tearooms, corridors and urinals of the House of Commons. But what happens to the Prime Minister himself is a subject of negligible interest. He is universally expected to lose the next election and then be gone. Labour MPs are focused on a far more sombre matter: the coming battle not just for the party’s soul, but its very survival. This is the key to understanding a run of political stories that might

The Spectator

Not up to the job

‘Nobody rings a bell at the bottom of the market,’ says an old adage in the investment world — and anyone who thought they had already heard a distant peal signalling the low point of the current financial crisis has been proved woefully mistaken this week. Some stock-market investors, for example, had begun to feel that blue-chip equities looked attractively cheap in relation to historic dividend yields. But now, one after another, and on both sides of the Atlantic, major companies are slashing dividends or abandoning them altogether: in some cases as a matter of urgent necessity, in others as a matter of opportunism at a time when yields on

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 7 March 2009

A.J.P. Taylor liked to talk about the Great Depression of the Thirties. ‘It was all right for some, such as myself,’ he said, with satisfaction. ‘With a nice, safe job as a university don, I was sitting pretty. Prices were stable or going down. Don’t let anyone tell you deflation is a bad thing. It’s a jolly good thing for the middle classes with salaried jobs and savings. Life was good to us. Empty roads. You often had a railway carriage to yourself. You didn’t have to book a hotel room. Or a restaurant. Everyone glad to see you — service with a smile. You could buy a three-bedroom house

Kate Williams

History isn’t just about bodice-ripping, you know

Kate Williams, author of a book on the young Victoria, welcomes the new film on the early life of the queen, but says historical cinema should portray politics as well as romance ‘Utterly gorgeous’, declares the advertising for the new film The Young Victoria. Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the world’s souls, and saw the world change immeasurably during her 64-year reign. As a biographer of Victoria’s young life, I relished the film’s investigation of the power struggles of her marriage with Albert and her battle for self-determination. But the review quoted might refer to a dress, not a film about the life of our longest-reigning monarch. We are