Society

Saturday

31 Jan 2009

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 31 January 2009

Monday Tricky times. I’ve got two statements to work on and they’re virtually interchangeable. Am worried Dave will end up urging the FSA to investigate the despicable conduct of Labour peers while calling for City fat cats to be suspended from the House of Lords. Possibly there is some overlap so it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Nevertheless would rather get it right so am off to the Austerity Room for a bit of Fiscal Meditation before I start drafting… Oh dear. Ken was in there, smoking a big fat cigar, his feet up on the BrightHouse coffee table. He was in v jolly mood, pointing to the

The Spectator

Letters | 31 January 2009

Israel fuels anti-Semitism Sir: I am a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and have participated in every one of the national demonstrations against Israel’s brutal onslaught against Gaza. I have never heard the slogans ‘Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas’ and ‘Death to the Jews’ that Douglas Davis (‘The terrible warning of a Holocaust survivor’, 24 January) claims are being chanted on these marches. I know that the stewards have strict orders to clamp down on any expression of anti-Semitism. Like the majority of the demonstrators, I am not a supporter of Hamas. But though the Hamas Charter is indeed appallingly anti-Semitic, it played no part in

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 31 January 2009

‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. ‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. That was more than I knew, but he is almost right. There is a Barak who features in a stirring adventure in the book of Judges. He takes ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun, at the command of the prophetess Deborah and defeats Sisera’s nine hundred chariots of iron. It is in the aftermath of the battle that

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 31 January 2009

An unbiased review of the restaurant owned by my new employer at the Standard It is what is known on Fleet Street as a ‘marmalade dropper’ — a story so surprising that the piece of toast you are eating as you read it falls from your hand. No, I am not talking about the news that a former KGB colonel has bought the London Evening Standard, but about a small detail buried in the fifth or sixth paragraph of that story. Apparently, Alexander Lebedev’s son Evgeny, who has been appointed a director of the Standard, is the owner of a London restaurant. The reason this came as such a shock

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 31 January 2009

Q. My cousin and her husband recently went to a dinner party. When they compared notes later, it emerged that the husband had seen the cat before dinner with its paw and tongue in the butter dish, which was then placed on the table, and the wife had seen the cat sitting in the bowl of fresh salad which was also then served. How could they have warned each other and the other guests without offending the hostess, who adores her cats? E.S., London W11 A. Should this happen again it would be advisable for the witness to affect to sneeze over the dishes in question. He/she could then announce,

James Forsyth

Iraq votes

Here’s the lede of The New York Times’ story on today’s Iraqi provincial elections: “Iraqis voted on Saturday for local representatives, on an almost violence-free election day aimed at creating provincial councils that more closely represent Iraq’s ethnic, sectarian and tribal balance. By nightfall, there were no confirmed deaths, and children played soccer on closed-off streets in a generally joyous atmosphere.” To be sure, there seem to have been problems with voter registration which might have reduced turnout. But 14,400 candidates running for 440 seats and the peaceful nature of these polls is testament to the progress that has been made in Iraq since the surge and the change in

James Forsyth

Republicans Steele themselves for the future

One of the biggest dangers for the Republican Party right now is that it becomes a rump, a regional party. So, it is hugely encouraging that the newly elected head of the Republican National Committee, the titular leader of the party, is from the Democratic voting, mid-Atlantic state of Maryland. The Republicans will have to change if they want to win nationally again. The voting coalition that they use to rely on has both fractured and lost demographic weight. Michael Steele (pictured), the new RNC head, seems to have grasped this better than most in the party. When he ran for the Senate from Maryland in 2006, he shaped an

Rory Sutherland

Advertising alone can’t cheer people up. But advertisers could.

Generally the view of marketing and advertising is that it is a zero sum game. A nifty piece of advertising might steal a bit of brand share here and there, but at the expense of someone else’s sales. That’s the usual assumption. Today I’m not sure it’s true. I think we are now in a position where we need to stimulate demand rather than merely redirecting it. In some cases, marketers have already responded ingeniously to this problem. Hyundai in the US offers a kind of redundancy insurance with every purchase of a new car and under the banner of “We’re in this together” the car manufacturer offers to take

James Forsyth

The first Brown to sack Mandelson rumour

Ben Brogan’s piece in the Mail today about a possible reshuffle in June after the local and European elections which would see Alistair Darling and Jacqui Smith moved from their current posts, contains the first report of a rumour that Peter Mandelson might be sacked. It ends with this line: “There are also fears that the number of ministers being targeted could be expanded in coming months to include Peter Mandelson.” Realistically, I don’t think Brown will, or could, drop Mandelson. But it says something about the mood within the Labour party that these rumours are even circulating. PS The cui bono on this story seems pretty obvious. It’ll be

James Forsyth

The blame game | 31 January 2009

Matthew Parris’s column in The Times today contains this excellent advice for the Tories: “The Tory task is to move the angry inquiry forward from the geography of origin to the geography of recuperation. Which economies will heal first? Which fastest? And when chaos recedes and a weakened West picks itself up again, who will be shakiest on their legs? As we move into the new century’s second decade, will Britain have moved up or down the international economic league? If, as I believe, the answer is sharply down, the Tories must be merciless in pinning the collapse on the decade that went before; and on the man in charge

Alex Massie

The Bearded Wonder Was Right

Sad news that Bill Frindall has been run out, courtesy of a dodgy call from the non-strikers’ end. From the BBC’s tribute: “These are serious men, who will take up hours of your life if you let them, arguing about whether Fred Trueman lighting his pipe 21 times between lunch and tea was a record for an Oval Test against Bangladesh at Trent Bridge in June.” So wrote Martin Johnson about Bill Frindall and the cricket statistician fraternity in the Daily Telegraph, after England’s Andrew Strauss played all around a Shane Warne delivery in the fifth Ashes Test in Sydney in January 2007, a dismissal which saw the leg-spinner become

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 31 January 2009

I try hard to like the new, darker James Bond, but I miss the camp insouciance of the earlier films. If you’ve grown up with the type of 007 who briefly interrupts a bout of exotic love-making to sabotage a Russian spyplane with a champagne cork, it’s hard to warm to a character who spends most of the film engaged in the kind of fighting you’d expect to see in a pub car-park in Maidstone. But, like him or not, there is nothing un-British about the new Bond. In many ways, crude, inelegant but effective is what Brits do best: the Routemaster bus, PG Tips, the London taxi, the full

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 31 January 2009

In Competition No. 2580 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘New Year Letter’, concluding with the words ‘under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state’. This couplet opens Auden’s long and oft-maligned verse epistle ‘New Year Letter’. Writing in the New Statesman in 1941, G.S. Fraser complained that he’d read the poem ‘five times with a mixture of astonishment, boredom, pleasure and increasing scepticism’ and had still been unable to fathom the author’s philosophical position. A large and varied entry puzzled and occasionally bored but overall it made for a pleasing read. There were star turns from William Danes-Volkov, Andrew Mason, Shirley Curran and D.A.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 31 January 2009

What is simplicity? And is it desirable, on principle? A good question. My recent essay on the origins of the universe, arguing that the simple explanation, its creation by an omni-potent God, is more plausible than its sudden emergence as a result of infinitely complex (and disputed) events, angered some readers. They took the view that only the simple-minded see virtue in simplicity, and that a love of complexity is the mark of intellectual maturity. So, returning to the subject, let us look at complexity, and what promotes it. There seem to be three main factors. The first is constructive knowledge. Human beings are clever creatures and delight in their

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 31 January 2009

I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings hugging this corner were a mass of flowers and paper. That irritated me. Presumably a memorial to somebody who had died nearby. Sad, no doubt, but we never used to make roadside shrines like this in England and the habit has always struck me as mawkish and somehow pagan. Getting closer, it became clear that

Rod Liddle

The BBC was absolutely right about the unbalanced Gaza charity ad

The Corporation has performed admirably during the conflict, says Rod Liddle. It is to Mark Thompson’s credit that he did not cave in to pressure on all sides to air the charity appeal Forgive me for turning into Dr Pangloss all of a sudden, but doesn’t the furore created over the BBC’s decision not to run the film begging for charitable donations for Gaza sort of justify its original decision, at least in part? The most voluble protestors have been drawn, in the main, from the anti-Israeli far left. On the radio phone-in shows the many callers demanding the BBC reverse its decision almost always gave the game away by

Lloyd Evans

Smoky notes of the islands: a Burns Night dinner

A wintry London night and the haunting note of the bagpipes summoned us to Burns supper at Boisdale of Belgravia. In the doorway Pipe Major Willie Cochrane paused for breath and shook my hand. ‘Are they giving you a nip of something later?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got one right there,’ he said, pointing to a glass of Johnny Walker tucked beneath the Boisdale pavement sign. ‘It’s good stuff. But don’t tell anyone.’ ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘my lips are sealed.’ Taxis arrived and a succession of notorious characters appeared. Lorraine Kelly, Kirsty Wark, Dougray Scott, Duncan Bannatyne and others, all nominees for Boisdale’s inaugural ‘Great Scot’ award. I passed through the

The Spectator

Back on the beat

When an institution is plagued by internal feuds, a loss of public trust and a muddled sense of mission, the elevation of an internal candidate to its helm is rarely a matter for celebration. But the appointment of Sir Paul Stephenson to be the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is an exception to this generality. Unlike his predecessor, Sir Ian Blair, and his chief rival for the job, Sir Hugh Orde — head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland — Stephenson is not a politician in uniform. The new commissioner, who still commutes from his home in rural Lancashire, should bring a much-needed dose of common sense to the

Friday

30 Jan 2009

Daniel Korski

Why Karzai is worried

The appointment of the hard-charging Richard Holbrooke as Afghan envoy has not been universally welcomed. One person who is particularly concerned about it is Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan president, who will probably win re-election later this year. Their first, secret meeting was apparently quite frosty. What has really riled Karzai is Holbrooke’s fraternization with Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and presumed presidential candidate. When I briefly advised Lord Ashdown in the run-up to his non-appointment as the UN’s special envoy in Kabul, Karzai was extremely paranoid that Ashdown and Ghani were somehow colluding or that the former was merely a tool for the latter’s leadership ambitions. Long after

The Spectator

The week that was | 30 January 2009

Here are some of the posts made over the past week on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson reveals how Brown’s fiscal stimulus will destroy jobs, and writes on the neglected war. James Forsyth reports on Brown’s cry for help, and analyses the latest opinion polls. Peter Hoskin picks up on an air of uncertainty at the IFS Green Budget launch, and surveys the prospects for Lib-Lab-love. Alex Massie wonders about reforming the Lords. Melanie Phillips highlights the Middle East appeasement process. Clive Davis looks back on ye olde Fleet Street. Trading Floor says the government is subsidising the wrong industry. And Americano asks whether Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern public diplomacy.