Nelson v Prescott: now with added video
Actually, the cameras were rolling during my bout with Prescott. It’s on the BBC website – click here and scroll to 31 mins 45 seconds in for all two minutes of it.
Society
Sunday
Purnell’s third way
James Purnell made a fascinating speech this afternoon. It was in some ways a very Blairite speech. He challenged the party to go further, faster. He was cutting about Labour’s self indulgent streak and unapologetic about modernisation: “we changed. because we were tired of being the conscience of a Conservative country”. But at the same time, Purnell went out of his way to explain policy in left wing language, something some Blairites forget—or are reluctant—to do. Defending his welfare reform proposals which are not popular with party activists, Purnell said that they were based on “a founding value of our party,. emblazoned in the name of our party. The right
Jon Cruddas’s conference diary | 21 September 2008
Day one of the Labour party conference was a surprisingly enjoyable, even comradely, experience. The fringe packed; the bars friendly and the Manchester Conference Centre working well. Great speeches, in a super venue, made to warm, receptive groups of delegates. The weather: perfect. On show, the Labour party at its best- a respectful, modern pluralist party. To cap it all, at five past midnight I saw Tom Watson MP embrace Barry Gardner MP, Joan Ryan MP and Shioghan McDonagh MP. Tom was, allegedly, the leader of the 2006 ‘Curry Coup’ against Tony Blair, his colleagues, allegedly, leaders of the 2008 ‘Progress Putsch’. Does this signal the end of the attacks
A temporary lull before the storm
The mood here in Manchester is odd. No one expects a move against Brown this week but most people expect that this will be Brown’s last conference as leader. Talking to folk on the left, it seems that the one thing that could save him with the Labour party is him tacking hard to the left in the coming days. At the same time, no one is quite sure who will succeed him; it really is all to play for. David Miliband doesn’t seem prime ministerial yet. Last night he was at the excellent New Statesman party–he could be seen in a corner briefing some of the most influential commentators
Saturday
Slow Life | 20 September 2008
Are you the driver?’ I asked. ‘No, I’m the owner,’ he replied, and I liked him immediately. It’s a lovely hotel, The Torre Maizza in Puglia, a walled Italian farm converted into a five-star gastro-spa, growing its own food and inhabiting its own time-zone. ‘Vitorrio,’ he said, shaking my hand and asking if I wanted to have dinner with him, and I liked him even more. There were so many things that I’d planned to do, that had nothing to do with being in Italy. I’d bought lots of stuff I had to catch up with, a guitar, coloured pencils, everything. I had plans. I always fail to foresee that
Low Life | 20 September 2008
I can feel a tremendous draught of change affecting me,’ said Dave, waggling his fingers at us as if playing a chest-high piano. ‘It’s the strongest, most noticeable draught I’ve felt for 20 years. You can feel the draught, can’t you?’ The meeting, last Friday night, was entitled ‘The Saturn-Uranus Oppositions of 2008–9 and the Eclipses of 2008’. We’d met in Dave’s study. Listening to Dave describe the planetary draughts he was experiencing, besides myself, were three women called Mara, Hara and Zhiva. Somewhere upstairs in his big old house, teenagers were galumphing about and shouting. I’d seen the meeting advertised on a café noticeboard. Not knowing much about astrology,
High Life | 20 September 2008
Gstaad Walking up mountains is not only healthy, it gives a man time to think. In fact, climbing in solitude offers one marvellous inner adventures, with epiphanies being the order of the day. There are no boulders where I climb, just a lot of green, steep hills separated by gorges, with lots of cows to keep me company. About 15 years ago I tried climbing up steep mountains tied to a rope, but it wasn’t for me. I suffer from vertigo and the way down was hell. But I did manage to conquer the steepest overhang of Videmanette, the highest mountain in the region. Never again. The fact that the
The Turf | 20 September 2008
What a glorious spectacle it was at Doncaster last Saturday. And no, I don’t mean Frankie Dettori launching himself at Sir Michael Stoute like an exuberant four-year-old vaulting into a parent’s arms for a hug, or even the mildly embarrassed trainer, a bonhomous but stiff-backed bear of a man, wiping off the smacker of a kiss that Frankie gave him later. Those were extra relish. No, I mean the triumph of Conduit, trained by M. Stoute and ridden by F. Dettori, in the last and longest of the English Classics, the 1m 6f St Leger. For me, St Leger Day at Doncaster is one of the best days out in
Diary – 20 September 2008
One of the joys of writing a book about authoritarian capitalism is that I am spoilt for choice. My travels have taken me from Singapore to Luanda to Moscow to Rome and in the next few days I am off to the Gulf. Later in the year comes China. Last week I was back in Russia, for the annual Valdai conference, where experts from around the world are given red-carpet treatment. This time we were offered two for the price of one. Vladimir Putin indulged us with a three-hour lunch in Sochi. Not to be outdone, we were given similar treatment by Dmitry Medvedev in the bizarre setting of a
Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 20 September 2008
Monday This is ridiculous. I can’t be expected to understand the Labour leadership rules and off-balance-sheet arrangements. I’ve told Nigel it’s composite motions or derivatives, not both. My head won’t stand it. For the life of me I can’t see how something worth £738 billion can also be worth £36.8 billion. Wonky Tom says it’s simple: ‘The fair value is smaller than the notional amount.’ He may as well be saying ‘la la la la la elephants in pink pants’. It’s days like these I feel sure I should have stuck it out at the gallery and got married. I suppose I could try and keep my head down until
Dear Mary | 20 September 2008
Q. For her wedding present I gave my 28-year-old goddaughter a cheque, about five times the value that I would give to a mere family friend. I have now received a note from her which reads, ‘Thank you for the generous present. I hope you enjoyed the wedding…’ For some reason I feel that not enough gratitude has been expressed. How do I convey this without causing offence to her or to her parents, who are still my very close friends? Name and address withheld A. Some readers will be impressed that you received a letter at all, since so many twenty-somethings suffer from ‘entitlement syndrome’. All that will change,
Mind your language | 20 September 2008
‘Not really,’ replied my husband when I asked if he thought it would be nice for us to have the Gibsons over for supper. If you knew the Gibsons (not their real name), you’d see the force of his answer. Real is a slippery word. I laughed when reading, in Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s new book on parsonages, about mid-19th-century disapproval of stucco for making a building less real. Alfred Bartholomew (1801-1845), a translator of the Psalms and the architect of the Finsbury Savings Bank in Clerkenwell, prefaced his Specifications for Practical Architecture (1840) with a text in Hebrew, from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘One built up a wall, and, lo, others daubed
Status Anxiety | 20 September 2008
It was the call I’d been dreading. Roger Cashmore, the Principal of Brasenose College, phoned to ask whether I would be willing to give a speech on behalf of the alumni at the College Gaudy. It was the 25th anniversary of the class that had matriculated in 1983 and I had already RSVPd. How was I going to wriggle out of it? The reason for my reluctance, obviously, is that it would provoke a tidal wave of resentment on the part of my contemporaries. Thinking about the moment when I got up to make the speech, I could already feel the gamma rays of hatred shooting out of their eyes.
The Spectator’s Notes | 20 September 2008
We are in a financial crisis which has been going on for more than a year. It is remarkable that, in all that time, no political leader has had anything much to say about it. In the United States, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama appears to have any understanding of what is going on. Over here, Gordon Brown’s supposed gift for economic analysis seems to have deserted him. One hears phrases like ‘the fundamentals are sound’, and trembles. David Cameron, pursuing the favourite strategy of keeping his party away from bad news, acknowledges the gravity of the situation without proposing remedies. It may be the right tactic, when in
Letters | 20 September 2008
Reports of my death Sir: I was astonished to read in John Michell’s review of Michael X: A Life in Black and White (13 September) that I died 35 years ago. Michell states that I went to Trinidad to investigate the murder, by henchmen of Michael X, of my sister Gale Benson, and that later I had died in an accident in California. In fact it was my younger brother Greville, Gale’s twin brother, who went to Trinidad at that time, and a year later died in a motor accident. Greville’s accident took place in Morocco, where he is buried. I can hardly blame The Spectator for Williams’s slovenly research.
Cruddas pushes for middle class tax cut
Over on Next Left, Sunder Katwala reports that at a Fabian society fringe meeting today Jon Cruddas said: “There is a big case for a middle-class tax cut too – to remove some of the people who have tripped over into the higher rate tax bands, such as teachers who can now be paying the same rate of tax as the big bankers, We could deal with that, and that would work across our electoral coalition too.” As I blogged the other day, until the Tories start offering tax relief to the middle class they are going to be vulnerable to being outflanked by any new Labour leader on the
The tectonic plates just shifted
Alan Johnson’s interview with Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester changes the dynamics of the Labour leadership debate. By once again making clear that he isn’t interested in the top job and praising David Miliband in such lavish terms, Johnson has made clear that he won’t be a candidate. (Johnson admits that it was his defeat in the deputy leadership contest that “finished the little bit of ambition” he had inside him). As Sam Coates notes, this opens up space for another contender given that Miliband is unacceptable to large chunks of the party. Sam speculates that if there is a contest it will be a straight left-right fight between Miliband
Shared Opinion | 20 September 2008
OK. I’ll be honest. It’s been a bad fortnight, and I simply don’t understand any of the things you might expect me to be writing about. I don’t understand the fuss about teaching creationism in schools, because I can’t see that it would take very long. (‘God did it. Don’t go to the Galapagos. Class dismissed.’) In fact, I don’t understand anything about creationists at all. I don’t understand why there are suddenly so many of them if nobody even goes to church, and I don’t understand whether Sarah Palin is a creationist, or isn’t one, or how it can be possible for this to be in any way vague.
And Another Thing | 20 September 2008
Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it. The distinction
Competition | 20 September 2008
In Competition No 2562 you were invited to write a soliloquy by someone prone to malapropisms or misquotations, or a dialogue between them. The trouble with this comp, as I realised when the entries started to come in, is that the two categories overlap; a misquotation often is a malapropism. Happily this didn’t put too many of you off, and there were plenty of verbal absurdities that would have had ’em rolling in the aisles in 1775. It’s many years since I read The Rivals and I didn’t find it very funny then; even less so now. Too much Sheridanfreude, as Mrs M would have it. Today malapropisms prompt embarrassment,