Society

Sunday

14 Dec 2008

Brown should stop being so petty

In Britain there is no transition period for a new government to bed down in. Instead, the leader of the opposition becomes Prime Minister as soon as they have been to see the Queen after their party has won an election. Since the 1960s oppositions have had discussions with civil servants in the lead up to polling day in an attempt to ensure that they could hit the ground running if elected and to get them up to speed on various issues. These meetings helped mitigate the potentially damaging effect of such an abrupt transfer of power. But Gordon Brown has so far delayed giving permission for these talks to begin even though

James Forsyth

Poll puzzle

Two new polls out this morning suggest that no party can be confident about winning the next election outright. The Tories lead in both, but in the Com Res poll their margin is only one point and their six point lead with YouGov would not be enough for an overall majority on a uniform swing. The puzzle is why the Tory momentum that was developing straight after the PBR, the two polls that were conducted straight after that had the Tories 11 and 15 points ahead respectively, has stalled. Personally, I expected that the Damian Green affair would benefit the Tories in the polls. That does not seem to have

Saturday

13 Dec 2008

Alex James

Slow life | 13 December 2008

A 2,000-year-old thoroughfare, St Martin’s Lane, and certainly one of my favourite places; contender, any time of year, for the world’s most festive location. On Saturday afternoon, a carnival of mad shoppers, confused sometimes, crossing roads without looking; arguing, pointing, dashing this way and that, laden down and worn out or grinning and just holding on to each other, half-drunk and completely in love. In another life I lived at the top end of the lane, at Seven Dials, and it was thrilling to be there again all of a sudden, after a frozen morning as still as a picture in the countryside. Now, all this grime and glamour were

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 December 2008

On our last evening in Cairo we were joined for dinner in the hotel restaurant by a local businessman who liked to socialise with the English tourists. He drew up the chair beside mine. The chair on his other side was vacant. The amplified music was too loud to permit general conversation across the table so the poor man was stuck with just me. Our table was a large one right next to the stage. He was a small, calm, dapper man. Every thought, word and gesture was so carefully measured I wondered whether he might be addicted to tranquillisers. Everything that I said he pondered carefully, as though my

Taki

High life | 13 December 2008

New York A Brooklyn-born rapper by the name of John Forte had a business idea of sorts about eight years ago. It was one of those get-rich-quickly schemes that, alas, work most of the time, hence the reason so many people are out of it most of the time. He flew to South America, bought a large amount of a liquid substance, stuffed it into an expensive briefcase, and flew into Newark airport with $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine. He was obviously hoping to make 10 or 20 times the amount once the haul was hardened by experts, cut up by more experts, and then sold to the small-time

Robin Oakley

The turf | 13 December 2008

The clatter of hooves in the stable yard, the smell of the work riders’ bacon butties drifting in the air. Warmly wrapped trainers and bloodstock agents scratching at their catalogues. Horses breezing in pairs down the Kempton straight in the misty early morning. When CNN sent me out last Friday to see what effect the recession was having on horse-racing I have rarely had such a concatenation of work and pleasure. With some people it is boot sales. Others trot regularly along to Crufts or watch the Antiques Road Show every weekend. In my case, I fear, I am becoming addicted to horse auctions. Which has led to more than

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 13 December 2008

Dot Wordsworth wades through clichés Clichés gather on the tide and stick on the shingle of daily life like tarred bladder-wrack. A curious species of cliché sets a stereotyped pattern, into which words may be fitted to taste. A particularly annoying example, because it has pretensions to humour, is exemplified by: ‘The words door, horse and bolted spring to mind.’ Or, in an online discussion of US relations with Venezuela that I have just stumbled across, ‘The words pot, kettle and black spring to mind.’ This is a sort of double cliché, because it incorporates in its unvarying mould some already well-worn proverbial remark. I’d be interested in any information

The Spectator

Letters | 13 December 2008

Silence over Mumbai Sir: If Britain is still a safe haven for Lashkar-e-Taiba and Deobandi sympathisers (‘The global force behind Mumbai’s agony in our midst’, 6 December), this must place a big question mark on the government’s policy of dealing with home-grown terrorism. The current policy seems to rest on two assumptions: namely that home-grown terrorism can be contained by propping up moderate representatives of the community to which terrorists belong; and that where a community contains both moderates and terrorists, they are implacably opposed to one another. Both of these assumptions have been undermined by the Muslim community’s failure to demonstrate its collective anger about the carnage in Mumbai.

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 13 December 2008

‘Daddy, there’s something I want to ask you,’ said Sasha, my five-year-old daughter, as she was eating her supper. ‘Yes darling?’ ‘Is Father Christmas real?’ This is a question that every parent will be asked sooner or later and my friends are divided about how you should respond. Children will eventually learn that the universe is a disenchanted place — no fairies, no flying carpets and no Santa Claus. Should we try and speed that process along or delay it as long as possible? My own view is that, when it comes to Father Christmas, we should do everything in our power to preserve our children’s belief in him. For

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 December 2008

Q. I am godmother to a dear eight-year-old boy whose parents are separated. Every so often I try to see the little chap by inviting him to lunch in a smart restaurant for a treat. However the last two times that I have done this his father has trumped me by coming too and insisting on paying for the lunch, in fact settling it with the maître d’ behind my back. How can I get around this difficulty, Mary, since the boy’s birthday looms and once again I have arranged to take him to his favourite restaurant? S.L.B., Barnes A. Simply allow the father to do his usual trick but,

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 13 December 2008

Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice. What is it about modern poets that they feel so threatened by the idea of public opinion? Ancient Greeks would have thought them barking. When in Homer’s Odyssey the pigman Eumaeus reported to Penelope the effect that the (disguised) Odysseus’s stories had on him, he says, ‘Sitting in my hut, he held me spellbound. It was like

Alex Massie

The Ingenuity of the British Journalist

Is such that, as you know, there’s no need to bribe the fellow. From Simon Hoggart’s Guardian column today: A colleague of the late Raymond Jackson, “Jak” of the London Evening Standard, had an interesting tale. Jak was famous for including the names of firms – restaurants, pubs, even skip hire companies – in his cartoons. He would then sell the originals to the people mentioned, so getting two substantial fees for each drawing. What I hadn’t realised is that he used to pre-sell the slot. He’d ring up Knight, Frank & Rutley, for instance, and ask if they wanted to appear as the estate agent that day. Then he’d

James Forsyth

Maybe, there should be an inquiry into this

Simon Hoggart is absolutely spot on in his Guardian column about the arrogance of Lord Saville: “Someone else who seems to want plenty of the public’s money is Lord Saville, whose inquiry into Bloody Sunday has been going for more than a decade, and won’t be complete until the end of next year. It has already cost £182m, and counting. Not surprisingly, the Commons Northern Ireland committee wants to know how this remarkable delay and astonishing expenditure has come about. They asked Saville to see them. He declined firmly, even brusquely. He had nothing more to say than he had already said publicly. He had interviewed 2,500 witnesses, and seen

James Forsyth

The £250,000 question

“We estimated that each family was costing something like £250,000 a year from public sector interventions that were not changing behaviour. They need a personal worker who helps them to get up in the morning, get breakfast and get the children off to school.” This quote from Hazel Blears in her interview with Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester in today’s Times suggests that Blears is thinking of a series of radical steps when it comes to dealing with the problem of hardcore worklessness and totally broken families. She also floats the idea of modern-day version of the ‘mother-baby homes’ that used to be run by nuns. Again, the government seems

James Forsyth

Having a Field day at Gordon’s expense

Frank Field takes to the pages of the Telegraph to lend support to the paper’s justice for savers campaign. Field proposes gilts for pensioners and using the state-owned banks to lend to companies who need credit. But this being Frank Field, he also takes several shots at Gordon Brown: “Worse still, few people believe that Gordon Brown’s strategy to mitigate the impact of a mega-recession on jobs is likely to work. The Government has dangerously raised the stakes by borrowing an additional £20 billion to finance its VAT cuts. What is the sense of this policy when firms are rushing to cut prices by up to 50 per cent? A

James Forsyth

Good ink for Cameron

Peter Oborne in effusive in his praise of David Cameron this morning: “Cameron is, of course, right to warn that Gordon Brown’s financial plans are insanely reckless, may lead to bankruptcy and impose an intolerable penalty on future generations. But there are very few prizes for being right in politics, and during the next election, which could well come early next year, Gordon Brown will have much the most comforting message for the British electorate. There is a moment in every rising politician’s life when he or she needs to prove themselves as more than an adroit tactician. After this week, no one will be ever again be able to

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 13 December 2008

It’s not always a good idea to read certain books when you’re too young. At school it didn’t occur to any of us that Brave New World was meant to be a bad place — it seemed like a utopian fantasy world to me. Advice to writers: if you want to alarm teenagers with the nightmarish prospect of a dystopian future, it’s a good idea not to fill it with really cool drugs and high-tech pornography. More mature people, however, do worry about new technology, especially its effects on sex and morality. A tabloid scare a few years ago caused much hand-wringing about ‘Internet Child Adoption’; all that had happened

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 13 December 2008

In Competition No. 2574 you were invited to take a poem, or a fragment of a poem, and anagrammatise it to make a new poem. Some of you were unsure exactly what it was I was after. I was asking you to break down a poem, or part of it, into its constituent letters and rearrange those letters to make a new poem. Judging by the unprecedentedly low turnout, and by some of your comments, this was a daunting assignment. ‘If only one had nothing else to do!’ wrote Mary Holtby; while Basil Ransome-Davies expressed the hope that the comp was as hard to adjudicate as it was to do.

Ross Clark

The threat of deflation

Zero interest rates, record borrowing, printing money; the government has indicated that it is prepared to consider anything to slay the spectre of deflation. But if deflation is really such a bad thing — and I’m not convinced that, in a mild form, it is — then perhaps ministers should look at reining in a culprit whose role in promoting deflation has scarcely been mentioned: the internet. We are forever reminded about the deflationary pressures which have arisen from the huge shift of manufacturing to Asia. But what about the influence of the vast discount store that is the worldwide web? Any author hoping for a Christmas royalties bonus will

Paul Johnson

And another thing | 13 December 2008

A simple explanation for the origins of the universe — and us too Some people maintain that, in the age of the internet and Google, public lectures are an outmoded way of acquiring knowledge. I don’t agree. They demand effort to get to, fighting London’s horrid traffic, crowded tubes, parking problems etc., and that is a prolegomenon to concentration. They also force one to follow an argument with no skipping. An uncomfortable setting is a further stimulus to thought. The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s annual lecture series this winter on religion, organised by Professor Anthony O’Hear, is in a room at University College, a new one since it seems to