Society

Saturday

Penny Smith

Diary – 4 October 2008

I was without my dance partner last week. John Stapleton had abandoned me on the GMTV sofa for the comforts of a hotel in Manchester and a well-stocked mini-bar. Apparently this particular Labour party conference was like a family having problems, putting on a brave face for Christmas, according to one of those attending. I sat on the sofa in splendid isolation, and talked about global meltdowns. Greg Wise came in to do an interview on GMTV Today. He is one of the nicest men in showbiz. And possibly the most handsome. Last time he was in, I bored him to death with plays I had seen. I thought I

The Spectator

Letters | 4 October 2008

The Church is culpable too Sir: Will Rowan Williams start his call for ‘fresh scrutiny and regulation in the financial world’ (‘Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism’, 27 September) by glancing at the institution he heads? I am told that the 2007 Church of England target for its investment arm was 6 per cent above Bank of England base rate. It should have been clear to the Archbishop that this could not be achieved without the Church getting involved in the murky world of City finance. The Church of England was made to look even more ridiculous when the Archbishop of York called short-sellers ‘bank robbers and asset

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 4 October 2008

Disciplined, cheerful, humble and truly nice -— Simon Pegg is everything I’m not It is a strange experience interviewing the actor who has just played you in the film of your life. Simon Pegg has been cast as yours truly in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the first thing he does is remind me that there is a scene in the film in which he makes a complete hash of an interview with a famous actor. That inevitably raises the question: if I mess up this interview, and the makers of the sequel want to include this scene in the film, who will be cast as ‘Simon

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 4 October 2008

Q. Last week I gave lunch to my dear goddaughter and her equally dear mother in a fashionable restaurant. Both my goddaughter and I were rendered speechless when her mother produced a plastic bottle of water from her handbag and commenced to swig from it. The situation was quickly remedied when we both upbraided her soundly and water was obtained from the management. My question is: what should we have done if we had not been in a position to be so frank with the swigger, given the live-forever industry’s continued insistence on the constant public overconsumption of this fluid? J.S., Goring Heath A. You would have calmly said to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

McCain has to shake the race up

Sarah Plain survived the VP debate on Thursday night but the trajectory of the race still favours Obama-Biden. If things continue as they are, they will win in something approaching a landslide on November fourth. Over the last few weeks, Obama has built a sizable national poll lead, the polling average puts him 5.7 percent ahead, and moved into a lead in most of the key battleground states. McCain needs a game-changer. As one McCain aide told the Washington Post, “There’s no question that we have to change the subject here”. McCain’s next best chance to change the dynamics of this race comes on Tuesday in the second presidential debate.

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Established facts

On the Moral Maze they were discussing the place of religion in society again. What struck me was that none of the Christian participants was willing to defend the establishment of the Church of England. The Catholic commentator Clifford Longley was for disestablishment, and Rev George Pitcher of the Telegraph supposed that he was too. The Evangelical vicar Steve Chalke didn’t quite face the issue, but kept insisting that the churches must reject any form of privilege in order to serve society.  It was left to Melanie Phillips and Michael Portillo to suggest that the established church might be a good thing. The establishment of the C of E is

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The truth about Peronigate

After the Labour conference in Manchester, Iain Martin wrote a very funny post imagining how the whole Ruth Kelly 3am resignation might have leaked out because the Peroni in the bar run out. As with all the best satires, it was the element of truth in it that made it so funny: there was an awful lot of Peroni drunk in Manchester that week and a lot of information was exchanged in hotel bars.  The joke, though, gained a life of its own. A lot of people thought it was true—one Labour figure told me, in all earnestness, that it summed up everything that was wrong with the Brown operation.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Preventing a stab in the back narrative

One of the things that has most worried the Blairites in recent weeks was that in 2010 they would be blamed for Labour’s loss. Their fear was that the party would lurch to the left, burying New Labour, as a left-wing challenger blamed them for the factionalism and in-fighting of the last few years. The return of Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet is, among many other things, an attempt to prevent this scenario from coming to pass. It is a very public statement that the Blairites will do everything they can to get Labour re-elected. As Peter Oborne notes, this position has been rather forced on them. After David Miliband’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Georgia and Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato – Debate report

Georgia is still on our minds. August’s short nasty descent into violence triggered the first emergency debate of the season. John Kampfner, in the chair, began by observing wryly that the crisis had disproved the notion that ‘two countries that have Macdonalds don’t go to war.’ Oleh Rybachuk, a leading Ukrainian democrat, proposed the motion and expressed his country’s fears that Ukraine and Georgia would become a new eastern bloc and their borders ‘a new Checkpoint Charlie’. Expansionist Russia was busy violating Ukraine’s sovereignty by handing out citizenship to residents of Crimea. This alarmed Ukraine because ‘defending Russian citizens’ had been the Kremlin’s pretext for marching into Georgia. He urged

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 4 October 2008

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2564 you were invited to submit a feature looking back at the Olympic Games written in the overblown style of a sportswriter with literary pretensions. High-brow followers of football are nothing new. And these days, as people flit increasingly freely between high and low culture, there is nothing unusual about the sight of a fan leafing through a volume of Barthes during half-time at Millwall. But the spectre of Pseuds Corner hovers over the sports pages and some writers can’t resist spicing up their prose with wince-inducing metaphors and clunking literary allusions. There are some fine examples from this week’s deserving winners,

Neil Collins

Farewell to the bank that did Dull

This is getting serious — so serious that I’ve done something I may have cause to regret terribly a year or two hence. I have sold my shares in Lloyds TSB. I did so with a heavy heart, and an even heavier loss, since they were bought when the shares were yielding 7 per cent, a rate comfortably in excess of the interest on the bank’s most generous deposit account at the time. They are still yielding 7 per cent, in a manner of speaking, but the shares are sad, shrivelled things, and the extra income I’ve had is a tiny fraction of the capital I’ve lost. Lloyds was the

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared opinion | 4 October 2008

‘Would you be interested,’ said the startlingly eager girl at the Birmingham conference centre, ‘in recording a message in the Conservative Video Box?’ God, I was pleased about that. There I was, neither a blond female, nor a read- ily identifiable member of an ethnic minority, and still the flunky reckoned I was the kind of person they wanted on film. It must have been the new suit. It’s grey, and sharp as daggers. You know. The kind of suit you might wear if you are an aspiring young Tory, and Central Office puts you up for a photoshoot in Tatler, which they will then sneeringly disown. That kind of

Paul Johnson

And another thing | 4 October 2008

Why do men want to rule the world? The question is prompted by the British Museum’s exhibition of objects from Hadrian’s day. They have gone to a lot of trouble. Worth it? Hadrian was one of those supremely busy, and colossally boring, people who crop up on history’s pages to puzzle us. He had been brought up by his distant relative Trajan (a much more interesting fellow) to assume wide responsibil-ities — the two tramped the empire together. No doubt old Trajan wanted him to succeed. Even so, Hadrian only did so by murdering four important people. That proved he wanted the job badly, of course. But, having got it,

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why has the word ‘grandmother’ been banned by the Guardian?

There are too few active homosexuals and career women in the Third World. This is because blacks and Asians — from Australasia to Bangalore — have a tendency to put them in a pot, cook them and eat them. Primitive African tribes also eat crippled people — those in a wheelchair, or merely suffering from a hare lip — and indeed those they consider to be ethnic minorities. I know of one handicapped spinster who committed suicide rather than be eaten by some gypsies in Bombay. Her illegitimate daughter, an air hostess, who herself had given birth to Siamese twins in Calcutta, appealed for clemency but this fell on deaf

Venetia Thompson

The masters of the universe have turned to drink

It’s possible to get a reservation again at Scott’s. The City boys have well and truly left the building, and can now be found drowning their sorrows elsewhere, in dark corners of the West End and Chelsea, as far away from the prying eyes of the City as possible. ‘“Reduce your risk. Sell. Get flat.” But all I could think about was the school fees and the new kitchen, and how there’s just no recovering from this.’ I was looking into the pained eyes of a former master of the universe, who had until recently stared the credit crunch in the face and laughed. He was now on his sixth

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards

Nominations for the inaugural Spectator’s Readers’ Representative award are now open. The entries received so far show that there are at least some elected officials who have earned both the trust and respect of their constituents. Oliver Mitchell puts forward Dr Julian Lewis, part of the shadow defence team. Mitchell, 19, met Lewis at the Festival for Heroes event and was touched by the interest that Lewis took in him. Mitchell concedes that his view is biased but says ‘were more MPs able to make so positive an impression in one chance meeting, the faith in politicians of the public and armed forces might be restored’.   Gary Powell nominates

The Spectator

The leader we need

The latest news in the financial crisis is that, after weeks of blame-calling by all parties — generally misdirected, as Dennis Sewell argues in our cover story — a single culprit has at last been identified. It is human nature — that incorrigible force which makes us want too much of a good thing when it is within easy reach, and makes us dangerously complacent about risk when the going is good. It was human nature that made bankers behave irresponsibly when their judgment was warped by the temptation of giant bonuses; it made homebuyers and credit-card holders overreach themselves when they were offered too much cheap credit; it made

Aidan Hartley

Wild Life | 4 October 2008

Wars never get easier. Since Georgia, I have had flashbacks of an elderly woman crying her eyes out after being driven from her village by Russian bombs. When I was younger I used to bring real black dogs home with me, but not so much nowadays. My three-stage prescription for recovery from war journalism is as follows. First, get extremely drunk. Get very, very drunk and you can delete or corrupt entire files of short-term memory. Second, find your woman and make love. A close correspondent friend says he has to do this with his wife the second he arrives back home from an assignment, before he’s even sat down

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Palin on Cheney and Football

Will it never end? In fairness, the question “What do you think is the best and worst thing Dick Cheney has done as Vice-President?” isn’t altogether fair. That is to say, one can’t expect Palin, alas, to start talking about torture. But still, did she have to say this? PALIN: Worst thing I guess that would have been the duck hunting accident–where you know, that was an accident. And I think that was made into a caricature of him. And that was kind of unfortunate. So the best thing though, he’s shown support, along with George W. Bush, of our troops. And I’ve been there when George Bush has spoken

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Biden-Palin: Live! For Real! At Last!

Coffee? Check. Cigarettes? Check. Whisky? Check. Optimism? Not so much. But we’re live and uninterrupted here as we await the Brouhaha in Missourah, aka the biggest let down in Presidential sports. As always, have a pop in the comments or email me. Anyway, let’s get ready to rumble… 3.45: Oh, the CNN focus group is coming from The Ohio State University campus. Of course, now that it transpires that they think Biden won the debate I can assume they’re not actually students at tOSU… 3.42: Oh, you should read Will Wilkinson’s live-blog too. Back later. 3.33: Ifill won’t let us away without reminding us that “there are two more debates