Society

Saturday

Taki

High Life | 18 October 2008

New York Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is a graceful essayist and good Catholic lady who happens to be a political conservative. I haven’t seen her in years but sometimes we exchange emails. She has written a book about how badly Americans need Patriotic Grace, the title of her opus, and I bought it just as the news of a Catholic archbishop being found strangled on the Brighton Beach boardwalk came in. The killers took his wallet, his cellphone and his shoes. Peggy thinks that Washington is a city run by two rival gangs who have a great deal in common with each other, ‘including an

Ursula Buchan

Gardens

We can all think of discoveries, which made little impact at their first introduction, but which changed the ways people worked or lived for ever, nevertheless. Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ of 1840 must be the most strikingly impressive example of this. But I think I may have spotted one in the gardening sphere as well, with the recent harnessing of a scientific discovery of 1885. That discovery concerned the role of mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. When, some five years ago, I first sprinkled some rootgrow (yes, I know, proper names put in the lower case is annoying and unhelpful but it’s not my fault) in a hole in the

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 18 October 2008

Was that the chairman of Coutts I saw emptying his pockets of wads of twenties round the Ascot betting ring on Saturday? Was that the CEO of HBOS in front of me in the Tote queue investing exclusively on 100–1 shots? Illusions, of course. It must have been the unaccustomed glare of sunshine which greeted us punters on Willmot Dixon Group Day. But in a world in which only sock and mattress salesmen can be turning a profit it scarcely seemed like gambling any more to be going to the races. Who could say that a 7–2 shot like Emma Lavelle’s much-touted Champion Hurdle hopeful Crack Away Jack at Chepstow

The Spectator

Letters | 18 October 2008

Our story Sir: Your political editor writes (‘Peter v. George is the key battle’, 11 October) that Peter Mandelson’s conversation on Corfu where he ‘dripped pure poison’ about Gordon Brown was leaked to the press within hours and only later became front-page news. In fact only one paper broke the story initially, the Sunday Times. This is an interesting example of what is known in the trade as the Watergate defence. Everyone ‘knew’ American presidents authorised bugging so Woodward and Bernstein’s stories were no stories at all. There may be a difference in the scale of the revelations but the same principle applies. A scoop is a scoop. Martin Ivens

Philip Hensher

Diary – 18 October 2008

Louise Doughty, one of the judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize and a fine novelist herself, said it best. Novelists, she remarked, are generally shy-ish, observing sorts of people; pushing them on stage, or under a spotlight, is a bit like asking a badger to tap-dance. My tap-dancing badger moment began ten weeks ago, when at a computer in an internet café in a remote Swiss valley I discovered that my novel The Northern Clemency had been longlisted for the Booker. The badger went into double time when it got on the shortlist, and now I’m writing on the afternoon of the dinner itself. (I feel quite safe sucking

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 October 2008

Nearly 20 years ago, after the Tiananmen Square massacres, The Spectator campaigned for all Hong Kong people to be given British passports. Part of our argument was that, if they all had the passports, very few of them would want to come here: they would have the confidence to stay. That, in essence, is the same reasoning that the governments of the Western world are using when they prop up the banks. Banks only lend because they can get their money back, yet if they all try to get their money back, they cannot lend. When they are all terrified, therefore, some external agency has to remove the fear. That

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 18 October 2008

I have been reading with interest the articles in the press about the Afghan family that is supposedly living in a £1.2 million council house. You see, the house in question is just round the corner from mine and if it really is worth £1.2 million that means Acton has been unaffected by the credit crunch. On the contrary, if the papers are to be believed, property prices in Acton have actually increased in the past 12 months. As someone who bought an almost identical property in the area last year, that came as an enormous relief. When the story broke, I called Christian Harper, the Oliver Finn estate agent

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 October 2008

I had not realised that T.S. Eliot was a Sherlock Holmes fan until I thought to look up the word grimpen, which occurs in ‘East Coker’, in the Four Quartets: ‘On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.’ We take grimpen to mean ‘a bog’. The OED undogmatically gives the meaning as ‘marshy area’, and the etymology as ‘uncertain’. This is no surprise since the word, it appears, was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson is on Dartmoor with Stapleton the naturalist. ‘“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 18 October 2008

Your problems solved Q. When my 16-year-old son has friends round I fill the fridge with beer for them. The other night, for example, ten boys came over. I know for a fact that only five of them really drink, yet after they had gone I found all 25 bottles had been opened and about ten left with just a couple of sips taken out of them. I think this is because the boys all want to pretend they drink but keep mislaying their bottles and opening another one. I had to throw all ten bottles away. In the credit crunch I would like to crack down on this waste

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 18 October 2008

In the banking chaos, we should recall the words of the American president Thomas Jefferson: ‘The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale.’ There was no such swindling in the ancient world because minted coin was the sole monetary instrument, and there was no machinery for creating credit. So there were no banks in our sense, and only two sources of wealth: agricultural and mineral, the former far more important, but the latter having more dramatic instant consequences. For example, in 483 bc, it would never have occurred to the Athenians to borrow the money

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Darling–not Brown–came up with the plan to save the banks

There is a great tick-tock in The Times this morning about how the bank recapitalisation plan came into being. The take-away point is that the Chancellor was much more the driving force behind it than the Prime Minister. Here are the key extracts: The Times can reveal today that the Chancellor believed that recapitalisation was the “only show in town” some time before Gordon Brown and that the Prime Minister signed up only after the intervention of his ministerial fixer and enforcer, Baroness Vadera. … Mr Darling had first started plotting his move in mid-September, hiring the legal firm Slaughter and May to carry out contingency planning. He quickly became

Dan Gilgoff

Getting closer to God

Dan Gilgoff on how Barack Obama has narrowed the ‘God gap’ Virtually no political experts saw it coming, but religion was one of the biggest factors in George W. Bush’s 2004 election victory. Bush, who had used evangelical Christian language and championed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — a cause pushed by the Christian Right — won 78 per cent of the evangelical vote, a group comprising almost a quarter of the American electorate. Republican presidential candidates had won the evangelical vote ever since Jerry Falwell launched his Moral Majority in the late 1970s, but no presidential candidate on record had ever achieved this level of support. John Kerry,

Michael Steinberger

A good election to lose

Michael Steinberger says a hefty defeat might be the best result for the Republicans Political parties exist to fight elections, and with the presidential campaign now in its climatic weeks, Republicans are gamely battling to keep the White House. Barack Obama has opened a large, possibly insurmountable lead over John McCain, whose every gambit, not least his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, has failed amid the relentlessly dire news about the economy. But it is not just McCain who is facing possible humiliation on 4 November; the entire Republican party, weighed down by George Bush and beset with profound internal divisions, may be headed for electoral armageddon. As

The Spectator

The electoral map

States with their respective electoral college votes — 270 votes are needed to win Click here to download the map which featured in the US Election supplement. Nevada:This has been the fastest- growing state in the union since the second world war. McCain used to have a comfortable lead here but with almost half of voters saying that the economy is the most important issue, Obama has surged. McCain needs this state to come back into his column before election day. Colorado: The Rocky Mountain west is regarded as the emerging battleground of American politics. The Democrats cleverly decided to hold their convention in Denver, winning acres of positive local

Erica Grieder

Campaign Diary

Erica Grieder follows the US Presidential campaign My favourite souvenir from the campaign season is a nine-page handout on ‘The Nature & Activity of Demons’. This was provided during a sort of adult Sunday school at John Hagee’s mega-church in San Antonio, Texas. Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and Baptist pastor and candidate for the Republican nomination, was there for a guest-preaching stint, and gave a colourful explanation of why we should strive to be less like Herod and more like Jesus. It was sound advice, but perhaps not as immediate as the lesson that preceded it. Satan is engaged in guerrilla warfare: his minions systematically invade the

Reihan Salam

Not what we were expecting

Why have Barack Obama and John McCain run such drearily conventional campaigns? Hard though it is to remember those halcyon days, informed observers once believed that Obama and McCain would barnstorm the country together, flying on the same plane and taking part in Lincoln–Douglas-style debates over war and peace and the meaning of life itself. In fairness to both candidates, there has certainly been plenty of tactical innovation on both sides. Flush with money, the Obama campaign has embraced sophisticated technologies and management techniques. The McCain campaign has gone for death-defying stunts, up to and including the nomination of a largely unvetted unknown for vice president, that are far from

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 18 October 2008

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and then died. I duly performed a hard reboot (that’s the technical term for ‘switching it off and on again’) only for the same thing to happen again. And again. With hindsight, of course, I should have simply called the government pretending to be a banker and explained that I had bought something that at first

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 18 October 2008

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first. Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural world, but here too the tone remained downbeat and melancholic: ‘So autumn closes in’; ‘The falling leaves’; you get the idea. I was cheered, though, by some of the quirkier openings; in particular, Celeste Francis’s intriguing ‘I’d give you a kidney’ and Martin Elster’s ‘Fido chased a doe’. The assignment was too easy for clever

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards | 18 October 2008

The financial crisis is affecting the nominations for the inaugural Spectator Readers’ Representative with Vince Cable receiving more support than a semi-nationalised bank. Dr Peter Roberts sums up the sentiments of many when he proposes Cable on the grounds that he is ‘the only British politician who has emerged with any credit from the recent (and continuing) debacle’. A. Warmington nominates that supposed man of the hour Gordon Brown for ‘the deft footwork and brazen chutzpah whereby he now is claiming credit for fixing the banking crisis and being the Great Helmsman guiding us through these choppy waters — whereas in reality he is saddling us all with mountainous debts