Society

Saturday

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

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 7 February 2009

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense. The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect. Some worship science

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The London connection to the Somali pirates

The Daily Beast has an absolutely fascinating interview with Andrew Mwangura who fixes the release of ships and sailors captured by the pirates off the coast of Somalia. (He’s currently on trial in Kenya) Do read the whole thing but this  section sbout the role of London in the whole business particularly jumped out at me: “But most of that money does not stay in Somalia. These young men carrying guns are just foot soldiers. Their leaders are in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Canada. It is not easy for a common man in Africa to afford a motorboat with an 80-horsepower engine. It takes people out of Somalia

The Spectator

The week that was | 6 February 2009

Fraser Nelson thinks that the Tories’ education policy is transformative, and suggests that we shouldn’t ignore the poverty in our own country. James Forsyth says that the bad war is coming good and the good war is going bad, and gives his take on the Carol Thatcher controversy. Peter Hoskin wonders whether David Miliband has in lost out in the torture row, and thinks Gordon Brown has set a BJ4BW timebomb for the Tories. Alex Massie says choice matters in education. Melanie Phillips argues that rights and wrongs are out of control. Clive Davis gives his take on the Carol Thatcher controversy Trading Floor looks into setting a timetable for reprivatisation. And Americano watches

Peter Hoskin

Some weekend fun

A fun take on the Brown-Sarkozy spat from the ConservativeHome team: Click here to go to the ConservativeHome discussion page.  

Peter Hoskin

Will Howard be the next Big Beast to return?

Andrew Grice sets the rumour mill a-whirling with this blog post suggesting that David Cameron might ennoble Michael Howard and draft him into the Cabinet, should the Tories win the next election.  It certainly sounds plausible enough.  After all, Howard has been a key figure in Cameron’s career; he’s had experience of government already; and has been making some impactful media appearances over the past few weeks.  On top of that, the largely successful* return of Ken Clarke has shown the worth of having some Big Beasts around. The worry, though – particularly for current members of the Tory shadow cabinet – is that Cameron’s set to go Big Beast crazy, and overlook the contributions

Peter Hoskin

Grace under pressure | 6 February 2009

The Flight 1549 story – the emergency landing into the Hudson river on 15 January – will never cease to amaze me.  And now the FAA releases audio tapes of the event that make it even more astonishing.  They’re compelling listening, and I’ve embedded them below for CoffeeHousers to tune into on this weary Friday afternoon.  Captain Sullenberger’s terse “We’re gonna be in the Hudson…” (at the 1’57 mark) is just as cool as speech can get:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A time for choosing for Obama

To my mind, no commentator has better understood Obama and what he represents than David Brooks which makes Brooks’ column today particularly interesting. Here’s the key question that he poses: “Barack Obama is a potentially transformational figure. In political style and intellectual outlook, he is unlike anything that has come before. On matters of policy substance, however, he’s been pretty conventional. The policies he offered during the campaign matched those of just about every other Democrat. So an important question for the Obama presidency is this: Will his transformational style eventually lead to transformational policies, or will his conventional policies eventually force him to shelve his transformational style?” Brooks goes

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Italian Jobs for British Workers

I’m indebted to Justin at Chicken Yoghurt for alerting me to this article from La Repubblica: “PORTO VIRO (Rovigo) – ‘It’s a pity – È un peccato – I love working with the Italians, I love Italy. I just hope this Ssuff about the Grimsby refinery is just a one-off’. Brian has just got back from the oil rig in the Adriatic where one hundred Brits, along with two hundred Italian and foreign colleagues, are working cheek by jowl on a regasifier that will provide 10% of our country with methane. He doesn’t want to talk, as he walks out from the Porto Viro base, guarded like  a barracks, where

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The next election is lost so Brown might as well take some risks

On the current political trajectory, Labour will go down to a heavy defeat at the next election. For this reason, it would be foolish in the extreme for Brown to carry on with his current approach: the polls show that it clearly isn’t working. Brown should be prepared to try something completely different; it can hardly lead to a worse result. Matthew Taylor, the former Blair aide, has suggested that Brown should declare a ‘unilateral political ceasefire’ and concentrate solely on the economy. The theory being that the country would be impressed by the statesman-like action and give Brown until May 2010 to turn things around. But any effort to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The tragedy of welfare ghettoes

So, Tom Harris and I had our duel on Radio Scotland this morning. His line of attack was straightforward: that when I said “scummy estates” – a charge for which I’m being denounced in the Scottish Parliament – I could only be referring to the people who lived in those estates. I thought back to the Easterhouse estate I visited a few months back in the Glasgow East by-election (see it for yourself – 2’20 into the YouTube video). There were dead rats in the landing, evidence of drug abuse, children playing around broken vodka bottles in the park, a pub boarded up like a Balkan arms stash to save

Peter Hoskin

Brown shouldn’t expect a Budget bounce

A thought-provoking article from Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian.  He makes the point that the worsening economy, and a heavy defeat for Labour in this year’s European elections, could encourage calls for a national government.  But he also mentions the moments when Team Brown might expect to claw back some ground on the Tories: “The 2009 political calendar offers a few openings for ministers to take charge of the agenda, such as the G20 London summit and, more significantly, the budget, out of which a popular political leader might hope to conjure fresh support.” Here on Coffee House, we’ve already raised a sceptical eyebrow or two at the idea the

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A White House pest problem

The Washington Post reports: “A small band of masked intruders has broken into the secure White House grounds and has evaded capture by agents of the new Obama administration, officials said today. The National Park Service is in pursuit of one very large raccoon and several medium-sized raccoons, who have been spotted roaming the grounds around the Executive Mansion and the West Wing, a spokesman said.” One wonders whether the raccoons have paid all their taxes

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The sky is falling

Good grief. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and House Speaker William J. Howell announced a deal Thursday morning to ban smoking in restaurants and bars in Virginia, a monumental decision in a state built on the profits of cigarette sales that remains the home to the nation’s largest tobacco company. If Virginia falls*, can the Carolinas be far behind? The Outlaw, Michael Heath’s brilliant Spectator cartoon strip about the last remaining smoker, becomes ever more prescient. Not for the first time, one can only mutter O Tempora, O Mores… *The proposed Virginia bill is less draconian than most in as much as it exempts private clubs and permits bars to have