Society

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Britain at its best

Matt in his Sunday Telegraph column sums up perfectly why it was right that PMQs was suspended following Ivan Cameron’s death:  “This was our unwritten constitution at its very best, as the Commons responded with nimble common sense to a practical dilemma presented by a private tragedy. It would have been grotesque to proceed with Prime Minister’s Questions only a few hours after the death of young son of the Leader of the Opposition. The properly British solution was not to pore over Erskine May or to fret about setting a precedent, or sliding down a slippery slope. Does anyone seriously believe these extraordinary circumstances are likely to recur? As

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Three very different Prime Ministers

Simon Hoggart’s column in The Guardian today has this great little anecdote: “The other day I heard a story about Sir Robin Butler, the cabinet secretary to three prime ministers. At a dinner he was asked their reaction when he said something they disagreed with. Thatcher, he said, simply blew up. John Major would not say anything, but would look hurt. And Tony Blair would – pause for effect – say: “Um, yes, I agree with you.”

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Bagehot’s blog

Bagehot, The Economist’s political columnist, has started a blog which promises to be well worth reading. In one of his early entries, Bagehot wonders about the effect of the recession on non-economic areas of policy and life. It seems almost inevitable that the lack of money and the mounting public debt are going to lead to a restructuring of the way public services are provided. The head of the Audit Commission warned on the Today programme this morning, that there are going to have to be “very substantial expenditure cuts” once the economy begins to recover.  He said that these cuts would have to be “substantially” larger than £30 billion. 

Peter Hoskin

Krohn 2032?

I doubt even Rod Liddle was as precocious as this aged 13: [Footage of thirteen-year-old Jonathan Krohn addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC yesterday] Hat-tip: Paul Waugh

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Scrummaging for Jesus

Another Saturday, another trip to Murrayfield. Frank Hadden is not a lucky coach; the Scotland front five was supposed to be the team’s strength but Nathan Hines will miss the entire championship, while Euan Murray’s rib injjury has kept him out until this afternoon’s must-win match against Italy. Murray’s an unusal rugby player. Not only is he a qualified veterinary surgeon, he’s a born-again Christian. This would scarcely be worth mentioning if he were American (many NFL locker rooms, for instance, are well stocked with religious fervour and team prayers and prayer meetings are common) but in British rugby it’s something rather different. You get a flavour of this from

Peter Hoskin

A failure of expectations management ahead of Brown’s meeting with Obama

Just as an addendum to James’s post earlier, one thing that strikes me about the run-up to the Brown-Obama meeting is how counterproductive the message coming out of Downing street is.  Today’s Times report contains another example of the kind of quote that’s been cropping up: a “seasoned Labour strategist” saying that this is the PM’s “best, if not last, chance” to win the next election.  These sentiments have now become the dominant narrative. Not only is this a failure of expectations management – meaning that the meeting will probably be judged by its potential to save Brown’s premiership – but it strengthens the idea that Brown needs Obama far

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What can Brown get from the Obama meeting?

It is an achievement for Gordon Brown to be the first European leader to visit the Obama White House. The invitation to the Prime Minister to address a joint session of Congress next week is also impressive. One imagines that these scenes of Brown on the world stage will, at least temporarily, help his ratings at home. But Brown appears to be hoping for much more from that from the visit. As Tom Baldwin writes in The Times today: “While Mr Brown does not expect any immediate improvement in his domestic fortunes, a seasoned party strategist said that the trip represented his “best — if not last — chance” of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 28 February 2009

David Young’s Spectator article ‘Health’n’safety everywhere, except in banking’ (14 February) was inspired. He might have added that bankers are occasionally made to pay for their excesses. Unlike regulators. For years the Food Standards Agency warned we should eat no more than three eggs a week. It now emerges that this figure had no evidential basis at all: there is no reason a normal person should not eat two eggs every day. I think we should sue. After all, for 50 million Britons to forgo 11 eggs every week seems a heavy loss of net human happiness. A gain in weight, too, since recent trials in Baton Rouge suggest women

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 February 2009

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2584 you were invited to contribute to the wave of Darwin mania sweeping the globe by submitting limericks to mark the bicentenary of the naturalist’s birth. Limerick comps are guaranteed to pull in the punters and this one prompted a flood of biblical proportions, with a lot of unfamiliar names — from the United States, in particular. There is room for only 17, which meant that many worthy contenders didn’t make the cut. So in the interests of making way for as many winners as possible, I’ll put a sock in it. Those printed below are rewarded with a princely £8

Hardeep Singh-Kohli

The lesson of The Long Good Friday

On the 30th anniversary of the release of Britain’s best gangster movie, Hardeep Singh Kohli celebrates its eerie prescience ‘I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman with a sense of history… our country is not an island any more…’ Harold Shand; gangster, visionary and entrepreneur. For many, The Long Good Friday is the finest British gangster film ever made. Much as I concur with that recommendation, to describe it as merely a gangster movie is to be excessively reductive. When I first watched The Long Good Friday a couple of decades ago, I too loved it as a gangster movie; a film bristling with brutality, suffocatingly suspenseful and fulfilling all

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Politics | 28 February 2009

The name Michael Ashcroft is spat out like a curse whenever it is uttered on the Labour benches. David Cameron may be an annoyingly effective enemy, George Osborne a tricksy strategist — but there is something about Lord Ashcroft that has earned him a special place in Labour demonology. This is why last week’s decision by the Electoral Commission to investigate donations made by one of His Lordship’s companies is being quietly celebrated as a breakthrough that could finally torpedo the engine room of David Cameron’s electoral operation. A substantial bounty is at stake. Some £4.5 million has been donated to the party by Bearwood Corporate Services, one of Lord

Eric Ellis

The return of the old-school Thais

Eric Ellis meets the Wykehamist and the Old Etonian who head recession-hit Thailand’s new government, and asks whether foreign investors can have confidence in them He was born in South Kensington; his character was built at the spartan Old Malthouse prep school on the Dorset coast and at Winchester, alma mater of Hugh Gaitskell, Geoffrey Howe and Willie Whitelaw; then came the obligatory degree in PPE at St John’s College, Oxford, before successful spells with Warburgs, Robert Fleming and JPMorgan that transformed him into a very wealthy man. His father was a senior civil servant and his grandfather a Privy Councillor. He’s tall, handsome, charismatic, just 45 — and sure

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 28 February 2009

Some time ago I was in a room containing perhaps half a dozen other adults, a cat on a sofa-arm, and a baby in a carry-cot far from where I was sitting. The air was filled with the noise of general conversation. I had a cold. I coughed. The baby almost jumped out of its cot. The cat jumped. Nobody else moved. None of the adults (even those near me) flickered an eyelid. None so much as registered having heard the noise. Last weekend I returned to our house in Derbyshire, where my brother and his wife, their two children and their beagle dog were staying for a few days’

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 28 February 2009

What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government. However, this, in turn, is made possible by the second and far more serious evil, moral relativism — the belief that there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, good for

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Thirteen, Alfie? I’d almost given up on sex by the age of 13

Rod Liddle recalls his own childhood fumblings and says that the case of Alfie Patten proves nothing much has changed. If Britain is ‘broken’, it always was I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if Julie’s parents had somehow stumbled in. Or mine, for that matter. They would have had to peer pretty hard, the lights being so low. Probably their annoyance would have focused first, as so often, on the music: ‘Turn that bloody row off!’ A confected teen-pap trio called the Arrows, if I remember rightly, emanating from a Dansette, grinding out their only real hit: ‘I wanna touch too much of your sweet sweet loving…’ Well,

Tim Shipman

Why the CIA has to spy on Britain

On the night of the Mumbai attacks I spoke to an old security source of mine, who has friends in SIS, MI5 and defence intelligence. There was only one thought on the minds of our security chiefs that night: ‘Are they British?’ In the bar of the Travellers Club and the pubs and tapas restaurants of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, drink was taken in double and treble measures amid grim assumption that the terrorists would turn out to have links to the UK. It was a fair assumption since, where international terrorism is concerned, Britain is no longer part of the solution; we are part of the problem. Where once we

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 28 February 2009

A family-sized bag of Minstrels. A tube of sour-cream-flavoured Pringles. A drum of popcorn. Cookie-dough-flavoured Häagen-Dazs ice-cream. A litre of Diet Coke. For one brief moment I actually thought Ocado had extended their home delivery service to include Chelsea cinemas. I had to move my handbag off the floor just to make room for the supermarket sweep of junk food a couple beside me brought to consume while ostensibly watching He’s Just Not That Into You. By the time the trailer ended and the film began I found myself unable to concentrate and was furiously overidentifying with the sentiments contained in the title. Believe me, I just wasn’t that into

David Davis

A few thoughts on the apocalypse

It is hard for me not to like James Lovelock. South London grammar-school boy, walker, mountain climber, scientist and admirer of Margaret Thatcher: what is not to like? But as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, he is arguably one of the most influential and provocative radical thinkers of the last 50 years. Forty years ago he thought up the Gaia concept, and was attacked for what people misguidedly saw as a mystical idea, when it was a very scientific concept. He was described as a maverick, which he probably took as a compliment. He is doing it again, with his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Allen Lane,

Friday

Martin Bright

Co-operative Capitalism: The Mother of Invention

I was interested to read Noreena’s Hertz’s take on “Co-Op Capitalism” in The Times. If what she calls “Gucci Capitalism” is going the way of the command economy then what will replace it, Hertz asks. “I believe that the conditions are in place for a new form of capitalism to arise from the debris — co-op capitalism, with co-operation, collaboration and collective interest at its core,” she adds. Wishful thinking, or is there something more to this? Hertz is not the first person to talk about a new form of co-operative capitalism. The music business entrepreneur and all-round good egg Ben Wolff regaled the audience at the We Are Names Not