Society

Saturday

29 Nov 2008

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 29 November 2008

Monday Tremendous excitement after the PBR. Dave called us into The Cauldron, our inner sanctum, for a top-secret briefing. Felt v privileged to be there, just me and 150 other core members of CCHQ. Dave was wonderful. He completely cleared up any nagging doubts we might have had as to why we are not opposing the rise in the top rate. It’s deeply strategic stuff, but suffice to say he and Mr Letwin, and Gids obviously, have worked out that standing up for the middle classes is precisely what Labour thinks we will do, and therefore precisely what we will NOT do — genius! We are drawing on our hugely successful

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 November 2008

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’. In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’. This was not only, as many have said,

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 29 November 2008

Classlessness means your five-year-old chanting ‘sheepshaggers’ on the terraces According to Ferdinand Mount, a revolution has taken place in upper-class manners in recent years. Where it was once socially acceptable to be openly snobbish, drawing attention to telltale signs that a person was ‘not quite our class, dear’ or ‘HMG’ (homemade gent), it is now strictly taboo. ‘To remark on someone, for example, saying “pardon” where U-speak would use “sorry” is now unkulturny, crass, out of it,’ he writes in Mind the Gap. ‘And when you hear someone — usually an elderly person living in the country — indulging in such old caste talk, you wince and try to change

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 29 November 2008

Q. The art and engineering expertise of the modern corsetière has brought great happiness to men of a more traditional, and red-blooded, disposition. To what extent should one be permitted to address admiring glances at a well-presented embonpoint: in other words, at what stage does healthily lustful and artistic appreciation become a leer? And does the rule change according to the age of the owner of the chest concerned? R.A.P., St Saviour, Guernsey A. It is incorrect to leer directly at an embonpoint of any vintage — even when blatantly display-mounted on the chest of its owner. You should admire it silently from a distance or in a mirror. If

James Forsyth

The blame game | 29 November 2008

Few people write more engagingly about finance than Michael Lewis; Liar’s Poker is one of the best books about Wall Street ever written. In an essay over at The Daily Beast introducing a collection of essays on the financial crisis that he has edited, Lewis writes: “The 1987 stock market crash was blamed on program trading; the Asian currency crisis was blamed on some combination of hedge funds and IMF-induced policies; the Internet bubble was blamed on Wall Street analysts. The subprime-mortgage panic has yet to find its one big culprit, and I’m not sure it ever will.” The question of who emerges as the principle villain will determine what

James Forsyth

The Star of the East will always shine brighter than this ideology of hate

Suketu Mehta’s book about Bombay, Maximum City, has been much quoted in recent days. It is, as Matt says, the best book about this astonishingly complex city.Today, Mehta has an important piece about how best to defeat the fanatics who attacked it in today’s New York Times. “The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips. But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more

James Forsyth

The PBR didn’t work politically for Brown, what’s next?

The ICM poll in today’s Guardian has the Tories ahead by 15 points, their largest lead in it since August. This combined with the Populus poll showing that Brown’s lead on the question of who is best leader to deal with the recession has shrunk dramatically seems to confirm what most commentators thought: the PBR was, to use Iain Martin’s phrase, a political dud. The financial crisis has allowed Brown to present himself as the leader Britain needed and to improve his international standing; even if Mandelson is laying it on a bit thick when he says that “People really do look to him like some Moses figure who is

James Forsyth

Leaks are the least of the Home Office’s problems

John Reid famously called the Home Office ‘not fit for purpose’ and it is still regarded, with some justification, as one of the most dysfunctional government departments. So, it is rather ironic to hear the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office defend calling in the police on the grounds that the leaks “risked undermining the effective operation of my department”. One hopes that he realises that the real problem is not is the leaks but then incompetence and mistakes that they expose. PS Matthew Parris makes the crucial point that the offence that was used to arrest Damian Green is simply too broad. Seeing as the police have clearly developed

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 29 November 2008

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins — the brilliant geneticist Richard Dawkins, that is, not the amateur theologian of the same name. The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable are among the most mind-changing books I have read. I can’t say the same of the atheist stuff. Dawkins seems a much better evangelist than polemicist; more persuasive when exalting Darwin than attacking God. If you want to be a polemicist, it helps to be funny, which Dawkins isn’t (for convincing and witty attacks on non-science nobody beats the late John Diamond). But I also find it annoying that Dawkins picks on such clunking, unoriginal targets. If you want

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 29 November 2008

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2572 you were invited to provide a rugby- or football-style song for another sport. After I’d set the assignment, it occurred to me that it runs counter to the spirit of football chants and rugby songs, which seem to arise spontaneously on the terraces and in the pub rather than being laboriously composed at home by dedicated chant-writers. The best are almost always lewd and often downright offensive — as W.J. Webster commented, they make Jonathan Ross sound prim — and while they are undoubtedly funny when heard in context, they look crass on the page. So congratulations to those of

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your Language

‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. ‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. Here sides simply meant ‘vegetables’, a usage grabbed from America by restaurateurs, because it often enables them to charge separately for meat and two veg. Side is a word that leads a double life, at once fashionable and subterranean. When I was a girl I pondered what could be meant by:

Elisabeth Jeffries

Carbon footprints

There’s a modern myth that food miles are bad. But measuring the carbon footprints of food items produces surprising results. We discover, for example, that bringing New Zealand lamb to our table — according to information collated by Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute — can generate fewer emissions than if the Sunday joint originated in Wales, due to higher emissions from UK feed and rearing methods. And it’s not cool to buy roses from Dutch hothouses. We should fly them in from Kenya, where they grow in the sun. Now Defra, the Carbon Trust and the (independent) British Standards Institute have jointly published a ‘fast-track product carbon footprint standard’ called PAS

Paul Johnson

And another thing | 29 November 2008

There are all kinds of reasons for objecting to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Selfish and often indifferent to the feelings of others (especially young women), while hypersensitive to his own, he was one of those intellectual monsters who think ideas matter more than people. But he was a great poet nonetheless. His ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of my favourite poems and I often think of it at this time of year when the trees are being stripped of their last leaves. ‘O wild West Wind,’ he writes, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale,

The Spectator

Brown bets the farm

The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) was one of the most arresting political events of modern times. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) was one of the most arresting political events of modern times. Alistair Darling’s delivery was as flat as ever, but what he had to say was truly dramatic: it amounted to a bonfire of the government’s own principles of fiscal management, and a colossal bet on the Treasury’s ability to issue undreamt-of volumes of government debt. His package of measures was predicated on a bafflingly confident forecast that the recession will be over by the third quarter of 2009, and growth will return

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 29 November 2008

The Kenyan Highlands The Great Depression hit Kenya hard. European settlers were often as poor as the ordinary Africans they were supposed to lord it over. When commodity prices collapsed there was no money at all. My late father remembered how white farmers survived on a diet of zebra biltong and maize meal. They wore rags and lived in mud huts with old petrol tins and tea-packing cases for furniture. Blackwater fever was rife. Cars were rare and people got around on mules or ox-carts. In 1936 the Kakamega gold rush attracted bankrupt settlers from all over Kenya. I recently visited the old Kakamega goldfields and the land was honeycombed

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 29 November 2008

If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member? I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has all the luck, doesn’t he? I’ve been waiting to be invited into the secret brotherhood of Jews who rule the world for years now. Nothing. Not a kosher sausage. Not a big-nosed sniff. Although I did once have a very weird conversation with Vanessa Feltz. It was at the party after a premiere of some

Friday

28 Nov 2008

James Forsyth

The police are in a pickle of their own making

If it wasn’t for how stupid their actions were, you could almost feel sorry for the police over the furore that has followed the arrest of Damian Green. If you asked any spin doctor what the police should do in these circumstances, they’d tell you that the plod should leak some details of the investigation that cast it in a better light. But, obviously, leaking isn’t an option for them in this case. As it is, we go into the weekend wondering why nine counter-terrorism officers were involved in this investigation when it appears that British citizens might, once more, have been the perpetrators of terrorist attacks abroad. This raises,

The Spectator

The week that was | 28 November 2008

Here are some of the posts made over the past week on Spectator.co.uk: Coffee House has edited a video to highlight Brown’s borrowing binge. Matthew d’Ancona responds to the Mumbai Atrocities, and says that the Pre-Budget report was a thin offering. Lisa Hilton delivers the latest society news, and commemorates another Johnson triumph. Fraser Nelson reports that the Tories have been angered by the arrest of Damian Green, and outlines Brown’s worst nightmare. James Forsyth insists that today’s MPs should stand up for the rights won by their predecessors, and says that the England cricket tour of South Africa must go on. Peter Hoskin asks whether David Cameron is going

Peter Hoskin

Your questions for Grant Shapps

It’s been a few days now since we asked CoffeeHousers to put forward their questions for Grant Shapps. We’ve since picked out the best, which have now been put to the shadow housing minister. He’ll get back to us at the start of next week. Colin “What advice do you have for the individuals who are now deep in debt, after a decade long credit bubble; especially now that the safety net of massive house price rises is not there to save them?” David Preiser “The people who are losing their homes due to mortgage problems can no longer afford to be home owners in the current climate, so would

Lisa Hilton

Kiss me tonight, for tomorrow I may be bankrupt

And still the band plays on, though the chairs are beginning to tilt imperceptibly down the deck. Perhaps there’s only so much wretchedness people can take. Aside from the fact that the jewellery dealers of Hatton Garden now feature boxes of tissues on their counters, like divorce lawyers (turns out diamonds were a girl’s best friend after all), London seems frenetically intent on squeezing out a few last drops of debauchery. Hatchard’s Christmas signing last night was packed with readers swigging wine and lugging green bags of hardbacks, while the usual quota of deranged Gissing characters clustered with their autograph books. Signatures are apparently still sound and one could hardly grab