Society

Saturday

1 Nov 2008

Low life | 1 November 2008

The help-yourself breakfast buffet was a single, waxed carton of orange juice (made from concentrate), and a stack of small upturned glasses. I filled one of these, tipped it down my throat, poured another and bore it to a table set for one beside the swing service door leading to the kitchen. A grubby laminated menu on the tea-stained tablecloth said that the Continental breakfast was tea or coffee with brown or white toast. Dotted about at the other tables were what appeared to be foreign tourists: a solitary meditative backpacker, two not quite awake couples, a fitfully vivacious table of four Spaniards. The unspoken shame of having to start

Taki

High life | 1 November 2008

New York America’s diminished intellectualism has made this interminable election period as boring as a Nat Rothschild Corfu party for respectable folk. Part of the problem is that presidential candidates try ‘to reach out to younger voters’, hardly an admirable goal as demographic researchers have gone the way of TV programmers, targeting young morons whose Facebooks comprise 90 per cent of their education. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have all been forced to make appearances on vile and vulgar TV shows — proof that taking the high ground is as much of a vote-getter as George Osborne’s chances of being invited back to Nat’s Corfu lair. It all

Robin Oakley

The turf | 1 November 2008

Last year’s Flat jockeys’ championship was a classic, an intriguing all-out battle to the last week of the season, with Seb Sanders and Jamie Spencer sharing the title. So it was in 1987 when Pat Eddery and Steve Cauthen slugged each other into total exhaustion as Cauthen won 197–195. This year the title has long seemed a foregone conclusion. Put a jockey with the talent of Ryan Moore in combination with Sir Michael Stoute’s 200-plus horsepower and the contest seemed over before it had begun, even with Richard Hughes riding out of his skin. Combine a Kieren Fallon with Sir Michael, let a fired-up Frankie Dettori go after the title

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 November 2008

What would happen if you or I or telephoned an old man we did not know and left a message on his answering machine saying that one of us had ‘f—–ed’ his grand-daughter? What would happen if we then left three more messages, joking about her menstruation and imitating his voice as, in our imagination, he said he would kill himself because of the shame? What if our messages pointed out that most grandparents have pictures of their nine-year-old grandchildren by the telephone on a swing and then went on to say that one of us had ‘enjoyed’ his grand-daughter in that position? What would happen if we also shouted

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 1 November 2008

Monday Yikes! Memo from Jed in California marked ‘Urgent and F***ing Desperate’. It’s v. bad news. It seems the brand is recontaminated. Lord A’s latest focus group asked people to name the first four words that came into their heads when shown a picture of Dave and Gids: yachts; hookers; Coke; and moussaka were the top-scoring words. As Jed explained, while we do not resile from being associated with Greece’s best-loved dish, or indeed America’s best-loved drink, or indeed the world’s oldest profession, we must take as a v. serious warning the fact that we are now associated with large boats. We are therefore beginning Operation Humble Pie, to de-yachtify

Charlotte Metcalf

Wicker’s world

If you have ever received a hamper, you will be familiar with that delicious quiver of anticipation as you unbuckle the creaking wicker lid to see what lies within. How often have you then suppressed a twinge of disappointment to find that, apart from a pretty tin of lapsang souchong and a bottle of decent Sancerre, there is nothing you really want? More than likely those jars of stilton, piccalilli and mincemeat no one knows how to cook with any more are still languishing at the back of your kitchen cupboard. It might seem obvious to fill a hamper with things we really, really want but, like all great, simple

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 1 November 2008

I am surprised by how ready my journalistic colleagues have been to accept Nat Rothschild’s public explanation of why he behaved as he did. According to him — and his anonymous ‘friends’ quoted in the press — he was furious that George Osborne broke the time-honoured rule whereby guests at upper-class house parties are obliged to respect the privacy of their fellow guests and not talk about anything that was said or done in the press. What happens in Corfu stays in Corfu. While such a rule undoubtedly exists, the usual punishment is simply to cross the offender off your Christmas card list, not to write a letter to the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 1 November 2008

‘I hate jokes,’ said my husband affably, and added: ‘Hwumph!’ The latter was an oral marker as he heaved his body from his armchair to the sideboard where the contents of the whisky bottle needed adjusting. With the former remark, I concurred, for he meant formalised jokes (‘Have you heard the one…?) that emerge from the ether like a flu virus. The internet has changed the dissemination of these, as it has changed the way quotations arrive in waves. A quotation from Cicero has been applied to our economic crisis: ‘The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 01 November 2008

Last time we saw that the Romans did not have anything like a banking system i.e. a machinery for creating credit through various negotiable instruments. What they did have was minted coin — and that was the sole monetary instrument. So at a personal level, if you wanted money, you went to a rich friend and hoped he would help you out with a loan. But if there were no bankers in our sense, there were small-scale businessmen such as money-changers, charging up to 5 per cent to change high-value into low-value coins, who also received deposits and advanced credit. We hear of one Novius receiving a short-term loan of 10,000

Alex Massie

Photo of the Day | 1 November 2008

Looking west up the Ettrick Valley during the second half of Selkirk’s tremendous 6-0 victory against Boroughmuir at Philiphaugh this afternoon. The defending Scottish champions were rightly favoured before kick-off but proved unable to breach the home side’s line. A terrific game of rugby, however, played in great spirit by two committed, courageous sides. Great stuff.

James Forsyth

What’s wrong with McCain’s message

I must admit that I left McCain’s rally in northern Virginia today more convinced that ever that this American hero will, sadly, lose on Tuesday. The bulk of McCain’s stump speech is dominated by an argument against redistribution. It is a classic right-left fight—and that’s what’s wrong with it. McCain is preaching to the choir but the choir is smaller than it has been in a generation. If in 2005, when talk began about a second McCain run for the White House, one had been told that McCain would have to win Pennsylvania to win the White House one could have sketched out a plan for how he would do

James Forsyth

McCain tries to use taxes to turn the tide in Virginia

If this election was a speech-making contest it would have been over before it started. McCain is still a halting speaker with a tendency to step on his words. But he has a biography that resonates with his supporters. Warm-up speaker after speaker stressed how McCain had risked his life for his country, so the people here could give up a couple of hours to turn voters out for him. In 2004, John Kerry won this county by 25 points and the McCain campaign knows that they need to stop Obama from racking up a margin here that is so big that they can’t overcome it in the rest of

James Forsyth

McCain’s final push in Virginia

Springfield, Virginia I’m at the final McCain rally in Virginia before polling day. The polls here have Obama ahead by a quite significant margin but the McCain campaign is hoping that its get out the vote operation and Democratic talk of cutting the defence budget by 25 percent can turn things around in this military-heavy state. Interestingly McCain has chosen Northern Virginia, an area regarded as an Obama stronghold, for his final event in the state. It is a beautiful day and the mood among the crowd is upbeat and defiant; a national tracking poll which put McCain up by one has lifted spirits. There is a lot of abortion

Peter Hoskin

A damning indictment

Aside from the tragic deaths incurred, there are few more damning indictments of the Government’s failure to properly equip the armed forces than the resignation of Major Sebastian Morley, the commander of SAS forces in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph, he’s quitting in protest – and disgust – at the “gross negligence” and “chronic underinvestment” which allowed British troops to be transported around Afghanistan in vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers, despite repeated warnings from Major Morley that continued use of the vehicles would contribute towards British fatalities. And contribute it did. On 17 June this year, four of Major Morley’s colleagues were killed when their Snatch Land Rover hit a landmine

Peter Hoskin

Neck-and-neck in Glenrothes?

This just in from Ladbrokes; the latest odds for the Glenrothes by-election: SNP — 5/6 Labour — 5/6 Conservatives — 100/1 Liberal Democrats — 100/1 Back in August, the SNP were at 1/4 and Labour at 5/2.

James Forsyth

They think it’s all over

Washington, DC It says something about the mood in Washington that the chatter today have revolved around who might get what job in an Obama administration rather than which states the McCain campaign is closing in. With polling day only four days away, McCain doesn’t appear to be gaining in the swing states at the speed he needs to. The Obama campaign is sufficiently confident not to have scheduled a stop in Pennsylvania, a state McCain needs to flip, before polling day and is instead sending Obama into traditionally Republican states. Given the state of the polls, the Obama campaign will be quite happy to run down the clock on

Johnny Reed

City Life | 1 November 2008

Moderation has never been popular in Shanghai. Over the years the city has been home to many types of excess, from opium and sing-song girls to Red Guards. At the moment the favourite is construction, and its partner, destruction. One of the newest and boldest examples of the immoderate is the Shanghai World Financial Center. After a false start at the time of the Asian financial crisis, this megalith has shot up quite suddenly across the river from the Bund. Billed as the world’s tallest building for roof height, but second to Taiwan’s Taipei 101 if you count pointy bits, this one is big by any standards. The original design

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 1 November 2008

An amazing piece of financial analysis has been circulating by email recently. If you had purchased $1,000 worth of AIG stock a year ago, you would have $44.34 left. With Wachovia, you would have had $54.74 left of the original $1,000. With Lehman, you would have had $0.00 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling refund, you would have $214 cash. Even better, if a year ago you had decided to entrust your $1,000 to the needy rather than the greedy, you would have ended up today with $1,000. This market-beating

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 1 November 2008

In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor. The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering resentment at a] the world’s failure to acknowledge his true literary genius and b] the inexplicable absence of his entry in a given week from the winning line-up. ‘A fusion of deranged conceit and volcanic anxiety verging on paranoia,’ writes Basil Ransome-Davies, and he should know. Some of you put forward the theory that there

Johnny Reed