Society

Saturday

6 Dec 2008

Low life | 6 December 2008

We first encountered Ahmed, our dragoman in Cairo, when he stepped forward to greet us at passport control. He was dressed soberly in dark suit, black tie, black shoes. Shaved head. Designer glasses. His manner was brisk and unsmiling. But now and again an engagingly complicit smile lighted his hawkish face to remind us that he understood as well as we that all is vanity. He expedited the entry formalities then led us outside to a waiting people carrier and slid back the door for us. Ahmed sat up in front, beside the driver. The driver spoke no English and gave his full attention to the road ahead. Ahmed, on

Taki

High life | 6 December 2008

New York A funny thing happened to me on my way out from a party on 17 November in London. I was temporarily confused until I ran into Naomi Campbell in the Royal Hospital Gardens. She was carrying some packages into her car and offered me a ride. ‘Are you going on to Andrew’s?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Hop in, I’ll take you.’ We chatted away and I reminded her how she had once applied a vice-like grip around my neck when I was about to leave the dance floor and decapitate a poisoned dwarf, who had thrown a missile at me. It was a private party in a private house

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 6 December 2008

Q. I have a well-established and generally wonderful cleaning woman whose job, in her view, includes chatting. This was fine in the past when my children were out at school all day but now my 16-year-old son is attending sixth-form college and comes back to work at home between lessons. I have asked my ‘treasure’ to leave him undisturbed at this time but she seems not to take the request seriously. She just goes into the room where he works, sits down on the arm of his chair and chats away. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the door has had no effect. We do not want to wreck the

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 6 December 2008

In a recession, head for the mall where you can buy seven Crunchies for £1.49 I was awestruck. As a long-term resident of West London, I had been looking forward to my first glimpse of this emporium, but it was even better than I imagined. I simply had no idea shopping centres could be this good. From now on there would be no need to go anywhere else. It was the answer to all my prayers. I am not talking about Westfield, obviously, but the Oaks Shopping Centre in Acton. The new £3 billion retail park in Shepherd’s Bush may boast a branch of Tiffany, but the Oaks has a

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 6 December 2008

In the last two columns we have considered Barack Obama as novus homo and orator. But what about his mixed race? The racist seeks the cause for the differences between groups of people in either physiological or genetic determinism. The resulting characteristics are unalterable and define them as inherently inferior. But are prejudice, xenophobia and stereotyping ‘racist’ in those terms? If they are, Romans were certainly racist, as probably all people of all colours, ages and backgrounds have been and always will be. A major theme is the contamination that results from contact with foreigners. Romans living in the East, we are regularly told, stood a fair chance of being

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 6 December 2008

Monday A few loose ends I’m still trying to get to the bottom of: 1) If Damian was running the mole — and there’s no evidence to suggest he was but let’s just say he might have been — then who was running Damian? Wonky Tom says it’s Mrs Damian, the nice lawyer lady. Possible the whole idea was Damian’s I suppose, but seems v unlikely. 2) Was I involved in the leaks and if I was, have I done anything wrong? This is tricky. Been racking brains and do remember Mr G once asking me to pass someone something in a brown envelope. But I didn’t look inside so

James Forsyth

Would a fourth term Labour government try and take Britain into the euro?

Gordon Brown has done something great for Britain: he was one of the people most responsible for keeping this country out of the European single currency. As Chancellor, he was a roadblock to Blair’s ambitions on this front. So when the idea of Britain joining the euro was floated last weekend, I thought it was just Peter Mandelson getting too far forward on his skis and being a bit, from his perspective, too hopeful. But Peter Oborne reports in the Mail today that it was actually part of a coordinated plan: “It was as a result of these talks [with Barroso] that Lord Mandelson floated the tragically misguided idea of

James Forsyth

What the Butler saw

Robin Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, gave a most interesting interview to Steve Richards on the Westminster Hour this morning. Butler was Cabinet Secretary between 1988 and 1998 and so was there for the slew of leaks that occurred during the tail-end of the Major government. He admitted that most internal leak inquiries achieved little and that he would often ask the police to investigate. However, he noted that he could not “command” the police to help, he could only ask. The police, Butler said, generally refused to get involved unless there was “prima facie” evidence that a serious crime had been committed. It does appear that this approach has been

James Forsyth

Election timing

One of the overlooked elements of the PBR was the Chancellor’s assertion that Britain would be out of recession by the third quarter of 2009. This offered a metric against which the PBR and the other measures Labour have taken can be judged; if the country is still in recession then it will be reasonable to say that they have failed. This is one of the reasons why some Tories expect Brown to go in 2009. Andrew Grice sums up the early election speculation in the Independent today: “Privately, Tories fret about a mid-recession 2009 election, with the Prime Minister seeking a “doctor’s mandate” to complete the patient’s recovery. Their

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 6 December 2008

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2573 you were invited to submit the synopsis of a sequel-that-was-never-written to a well-known novel. Sequels to books and films have a poor reputation, the assumption being that, with the odd exception (The Godfather: Part II, for example), they will almost certainly fall short of the original. I learned this lesson early having looked forward with rabid excitement to Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which failed to live up to its predecessor. You were all on sparkling form this week. In John O’Byrne’s follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s repressed incestuous desire finds its true expression and he

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 6 December 2008

There’s got to be some direct relationship these days between the bad behaviour of the Twickenham crowd and the feebleness of the English team. When the Twickers faithful launched into an insanely enthusiastic rendition of ‘Swing Low’ as the All Blacks went into the haka last weekend, you knew there was trouble in store. The haka should happen in relative silence, just like the national anthems — though the crowd has taken to booing them as well. Do the Twickers massive think their borrowed slave song has greater resonance than the utterly authentic haka? As the Barbour and hip-flask brigade trundled back to the shires on Saturday evening, they might

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 6 December 2008

Knowledge that a secret exists is half of the secret, and Westminster loves nothing more than guessing what a secret might be. When The Spectator’s website revealed at 6 p.m. last Thursday that a major Conservative story was about to unfold, there was a flurry of frenzied speculation. One Cabinet member even called 10 Downing Street for clues. No one knew. Several theories were flying (George Osborne resigning, Samantha Cameron pregnant) yet none was as bizarre as the truth: a shadow cabinet member had just been arrested by anti-terror police in a leak inquiry. Once, such a development would have sent Conservative central office into spasm. This time, Damian Green’s

Robert Beaumont

City Life | 6 December 2008

At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot ‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has

Matthew Lynn

Is gold still a safe haven?

It would be hard to imagine a worse run of events for paper money. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers have drowned in a sea of subprime debt. Building societies such as Bradford & Bingley, once so dull and safe they made fun of it in their ads, have had to be nationalised. In the case of Iceland, a whole country suddenly went pop. So you might think it would have been a great year for the world’s oldest form of money: gold. Fleeing a bankrupt monetary system, investors would seek the security of ingots and krugerrands. Except, as it happens, they didn’t. Among the many fascinating sub-plots to the

Jonathan Ruffer

The global currency crisis is still to come

Now that businessmen from Kazakhstan to California speak a single language, it’s perhaps not surprising that we endured a Babel of borrowing over the past ten years. And like all towers which reach too high, it fell — and great was the fall of it. So great, in fact, that the financial world was overwhelmed. The debris of dislocation and default rained down upon the fortress of the financial system, smashing it to matchwood. Shocking: but all, it seems, is not lost. With screeching tyres a jeep has come into view. Who’s that at the wheel? Why, it’s King Canute! And with him, Gordon Brown, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 6 December 2008

Plus ça change in the bustling hurly-burly of Westbourne Grove The chill winds are already blowing down Westbourne Grove as the recession takes hold. They would, wouldn’t they? The Grove is a peculiarly fragile and sensitive street, and has been ever since it was set up in the 1850s. At one time it was known as Bankruptcy Alley. The turnover in the shops and restaurants is allegro con brio. When we first came to live in our delightful little street, Newton Road, a quarter-century ago, the Grove was a pretty bedraggled place, only slowly emerging from the near-slummy grime which lasted from the Great Slump, through the war and into

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 6 December 2008

To understand the true nature of history, let us start with the question of Napoleon’s piles Cometh the hour, cometh the piles? Well, Wellington called Waterloo ‘the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’, and on the morning of battle, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. So did piles cost Napoleon that winning edge? Is Alaska part of the United States because in 1867 Tsar Alexander II had overspent on a big naval expedition and was temporarily but acutely short of cash? Is our belief in the potency of spinach due entirely to the misplacing of a

Rod Liddle

The law applies to Damian Green, too

Great news — grooming is now a criminal offence. I’ve always had problems with it, frankly. When about to go out somewhere special for the evening my personal grooming consists of hacking at my face with the blunt Bic razor my wife keeps by the side of the bath for when the waxing business hasn’t quite done the trick, and three strategic squirts of Lynx ‘Africa’ deodorant (a procedure known colloquially as a ‘Glasgow Shower’). I end up at functions heavily bandaged and smelling of Dr Milton Obote, but nobody seems to mind. Grooming, I always thought, was overrated. How nice that the police agree. Damian Green, the shadow immigration

Friday

5 Dec 2008

Alex Massie

DC a State? Why Not Hong Kong II?

Yglesias supports the idea of DC becoming the 51st state. This would be great news for Democrats since the party would be rewarded with a brace of Senators and an additional Congressman. That’s one reason why it will never happen. Still, DC’s lack of voting representation in Congress is a boon for foreign correspondents needing an idea every so often. I reckon you can squeeze a piece out of the matter at least every 18 months. And it’s true that foreigners are astonished to discover that residents of the US capital have no votes in Congress. So yes, it’s nice that DC car license plates carry the slogan “Taxation Without

James Forsyth

The police and politics don’t mix

Sam Coates makes a telling point over at his blog: “The Crown Prosecution Service, who decided it could not bring charges, has torn up electoral law in the process. They have decided Peter Hain was not legally responsible for over £100,000 of late donations because he wasn’t the signatory on the campaign accounts. This has come as a surprise to the Electoral Commission, who thought that as candidate he was the “regulated donee” and therefore should take the rap. So the much hated 2000 donations laws are now officially a complete mess, with the watchdog and police working by completely different rules. That wont sort itself out in a hurry.