Society

Sometimes Oxford, that much-maligned national institution, so often associated only with Brideshead and the Bullingdon, really gets it right. When I was a young Fellow at All Souls, there was one other member of college – not Isaiah Berlin – who liked the Happy Mondays and New Order, and his name was Marcus du Sautoy. I nicknamed him Dr Maths. He was a young mathematician whose references were almost too good to believe. He dressed like a student, had changeable hair colour, was a great cook, loved music and Arsenal, and spent his evening at theatre workshops. He was also, without a shadow of a doubt, the cleverest person I

Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross deserve all the opprobrium being poured on them over their phone calls to Andrew Sachs boasting about Brand’s relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter. Their behaviour was as pathetic as it was boorish. But there is a broader point here, what on earth is the public service justification for Brand’s show? Brand and Ross were providing precisely the kind of lowest common-denominator humour that advocates of the licence fee tell us would dominate the airwaves without public subsidy. Leaving aside the offensiveness of their calls to Sachs, there really does seem to be no justification for having the licence fee support the base comedy that Brand and

As soon as Nat Rothschild’s letter to The Times about George Osborne and Deripaska was published, it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before the Ashcroft issue got dragged into the spotlight again. Sure enough, today Rachel Sylvester devotes her column to Ashcroft’s tax and residency status. There is no getting away from the fact that the questions about Ashcroft are legitimate. As Rachel points out, “The Conservative Party has, however, already taken millions of pounds from a man who refuses to say whether he is resident and pays tax in this country…. The problem is that Lord Ashcroft, who grew up in Belize, refuses to

James Surowiecki has a good primer on why nothing worked to counter the flurry of selling in the markets. Here’s the key part of his argument, but do read the whole thing: “Rating agencies and Wall Street analysts are always with us. But the most destructive procyclical force in today’s market is relatively new—hedge funds. There’s an irony here: hedge funds have been touted as a great countercyclical force. Because hedge-fund investors, unlike mutual-fund investors, usually can’t pull their money out on a daily basis, the funds were supposed to be able to take a longer-term view and pursue contrarian strategies (like the hedge-fund manager John Paulson’s huge bets against

Tim Montgomerie is running an excellent series on what the Tories should do next. One of his ideas is to move Eric Pickles to party chairman in an attempt to make the Tory top team more socially balanced. Certainly since David Davis’ resignation the Tory top team has appeared too posh. The problem has only been exacerbated by all the photos of George Osborne in his Bullindon Club outfit and the descriptions of Osborne’s holiday habits. Pickles would help offset this impression. The class card didn’t work for Labour in Crewe and Nantwich because they played it too crudely. It could be deployed far more effectively against the Tories by