Society

Wednesday

Dylan Jones

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes. Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention

Nancy Dell'Olio

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out. Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of

Margaret Macmillan

The done thing

The Politics of Official Apologies, by Melissa Nobles George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future. We all call a lot on history these days as the impartial tribunal which will eventually dole out the gold stars and the black marks. We also seem to think that we set past wrongs right by making apologies to groups and individuals. A descendant of that Elizabethan freebooter, Jack Hawkins, has apologised for slavery; post-war Germany apologised and made recompense for the Nazi crimes against the Jews; and the Australian and Canadian

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Hackery

One of the things that distinguishes a good columnist from the ordinary, run-of-the-mill shill is the ability to treat their own party’s failings as severely as they would condemn the blunders committed by the other lot. Similarly, there’s something to be said for the rigour that consistency demands. Polly Toynbee may be correct (though I’d wager she isn’t) that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling played a blinder on Monday, but does anyone imagine that if it was a Conservative government presiding over this recession she would write anything as, I don’t know, cheerful and complacent, as this? Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Letter from a Florida Prison

Conrad Black: The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers’ unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The entire “war on drugs”, by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers’ dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Never mind me mate, what about the other mob?

Commenting on this post Ian Leslie – aka Marbury – argues that we’re on the brink of a new era and that just as Callaghan was right to appreciate that one era had ended in 1976, so Darling and El Gordo may be correct to suppose that another has been shipwrecked now. Maybe. Look, I’m not sure this will work, and if it does work it might be partly by accident and yes I know that Brown hasn’t really earned his authority over the last ten years. This is a gamble. But taking a gamble at this stage is better than doing nothing and hoping things will return to normal,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Quote for the Day

Chris Dillow – always worth your time – casts a weary eye over a number of government policies and concludes: What this shows, I think, is that New Labour’s claim to believe in technocratic, evidence-based policy is a sham. They are not technocrats at all, but either priggish moralists or cowardly panderers to mob prejudice. Quite so. And as he says, we may need a revolution. Lord knows, however, where that might come from.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Sexy Horse Noises!

Another lovely obituary from the Daily Telegraph (of course) that is, as always, written with panache: Nick Mills, who has died aged 54, was a country vet with a practice which took him across the world as an anaesthetist for wild animals, an insurance adviser to the racing industry and a “sex therapist” to thoroughbreds at stud. Among the famous racehorses he examined before they were purchased or put out to stud were Epsom Derby winners such as Galileo and Benny the Dip. When the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem showed a lack of interest in the opposite sex, Mills made several journeys to Japan (where the horse was

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Have Brown and Miliband sold out Tibet for Chinese cash?

Robert Barnett, the Tibet expert, has a commentary in The New York Times that claims that Britain has changed its position on Tibet in exchange for China giving more money to the IMF. Here’s the key part of Barnett’s argument: “Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share. Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys

Peter Hoskin

Put your questions to Grant Shapps

Grant Shapps – the Shadow Minister for Housing, and MP for Welwyn Hatfield – has kindly agreed to a Q&A session with Coffee House. Just post your questions for him in the comments section below.  And, on Friday, we’ll pick out the best ten and put them to him.  He’ll get back to us with his answers a few days later.

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Why Russell Brand so upsets us

While I admire Charles Moore’s willingness to inherit the mantle of Mary Whitehouse, I don’t think he has quite put his finger on the essence of the Brand-Ross business. The large public outcry provoked by the call to Andrew Sachs can’t be channelled into a general war on smut at the BBC. I don’t think there’s a public appetite to see Ross as the personification of BBC smut, who must never be re-employed by the corporation. Though Ross was involved in the incident, it wasn’t really about him. And it isn’t quite right to see it as an acute example of a general smut problem. It was really about Russell

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris v. Brown

The free sheets in London are leading on Boris’s attack on Gordon Brown in his Telegraph column this morning. The column is full of good knock-about stuff but what has attracted the papers’ attention is this passage—the banner headline on one of them ‘Like a drunk’: “He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well. He is like a drunk who has woken to the most appalling hangover, and who reaches for the whisky bottle to help him dull the pain.” One of Boris’s gifts is that he is a politician

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What New Labour would have done yesterday

With The Sun, The Times and The Daily Mail declaring the death of New Labour, it is worth thinking about what a New Labour government PBR would have looked like. For an idea you can look at a PQ that Stephen Byers, someone who has kept and advanced the New Labour faith, asked back in April. Byers wanted to know how much it would cost to lift half a million people, a million and a million half out of income tax altogether. Interestingly, the cost of lifting a million people out of income tax  altogether for one year—by raising the personal allowance by £960—was £11.1 billion. Now, the cost of

Lisa Hilton

Every artist’s favourite conversation topic

Commerce has always deferred conversationally to art.  It’s assumed that painters and writers are fascinating talkers, but from the Mermaid to the Colony room, I think they’ve only ever had one subject: money and their lack of it, or the outrageously unfair amounts of it bestowed on (naturally) less talented peers. The legendary wit of the Algonquin was a myth fabricated to cadge martinis: Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald weren’t doing anything at the Round Table other than slagging off their agents”. One effect of the credit bore though, is to induce a positive perkiness amongst creative types. At dinner at silkmaker Felix Spicer’s  boho-baroque railway arch last week, a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The let them eat cake award

Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian today contains these jaw-dropping couple of sentences: “Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs. Most people will suffer not at all in this recession: on the contrary they will do well as prices fall and the real value of their earnings rises.” Can any Coffee Houser remember any serious commentator dismissing the prospect of mass unemployment so casually before? Hat Tip: Alex Massie

Peter Hoskin

Is Darling backtracking already?

One of the most dangerous elements of yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report for the Government was Alistair Darling’s claim that the economy would start recovering by the third quarter of 2009.  It’s an optimistic prognosis, and gives the Tories an open goal if things aren’t on the up by then.  But has Darling already started backtracking on it, to limit the damage?  I may be reading too much into this, but here’s what he told the Beeb earlier: “I do believe towards the end of next year things will improve.” Now – as James Kirkup usefully points out over at Three Line Whip – the Chancellor’s claim yesterday was effectively that the

Peter Hoskin

Pre-Budget Report: the morning after

Flicking through this morning’s papers, it’s even clearer how much of a flop the Pre-Budget Report was.  Sure, it has some cheerleaders (cf. Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton and Steve Richards).  But the best thing that most of the papers can bring themselves to say about it is that it’s a “gamble” – whilst a few brand it the “The Death of New Labour”.  Gushing praise, this is not. The tone of the newspaper coverage reflects how big an opportunity this is for the Tories.  Osborne performed superbly yesterday, and the public will now be more receptive to what he has to say.  Good thing, then, that’s he’s continued the attack

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Not with a bang but a whimper

Today was meant to be the start of a fiercely contested general election campaign. Last night, the mood in centre-right circles was grim—the feeling was that Brown was about to pull off another Houdini act. But instead today has ended with Labour routed. Tories are striding around Westminster tonight with renewed confidence while Labour MPs look downcast. So comprehensive has been the rout that the news that the 45p rate will raise less than a billion pound just seems like a small detail. The genuine concern in Conservative circles that this tax rise would seem like a plausible way to pay for the borrowing binge has been forgotten. The political

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Could You Go A Chicken Supper, Bobby Sands*?

Exciting fast food wars update: faithful reader MT alerts me to something I should have known myself. Not only is the British embassy in Tehran located on Bobby Sands Street, there is a Bobby Sands burger joint in hip and happening Tehran too. Andrew McKie has also considered the ideological implications – nay, temptations – of the chip shop wars. As he suggests: “Fish supper, chicken supper. A theological and geopolitical minefield. This calls for a book, really.” Quite so. *Explanatory note: During Bobby Sands’ hunger strike fans at Glasgow Rangers and Heart of Midlothian, among, I think, other clubs, would sing, to the tune of “She’s Coming Round the

Matthew Dancona

A thin offering

So what’s left? Bits have been falling off New Labour like body-parts off a leper. Prudence is long gone. Today, as I blogged earlier, we lost the all-important principle that wealth creation is the basis of enhanced social justice. Which leaves the famous statement of ideological eclecticism that defined Tony Blair’s premiership if not his record: What Counts is What Works. And I cannot see how today’s package will work. This was an overwhelmingly political PBR, as one would expect of Gordon Brown: its ideological centrepiece was the fiscal stigmatisation of the well-off and the overt declaration by Alistair Darling that, since these voters had supposedly “done best out of