Society

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will Hurricane Gustav dent McCain’s hopes?

I’m in Denver airport waiting for what a Republican friend in St Paul has just informed me is likely to be a one- or two-day convention. Even if Hurricane Gustav does not cause the destruction expected, it may yet blow away McCain’s chance of victory. The Republicans are acutely aware that this brings back memory of the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina. Bush and Cheney are the last people the Republicans want on stage, and they have both pulled out. McCain knows he will be judged more by his response to Gustav than what he says in the speech, so even he may not turn up – there’s

Daniel Korski

The East London Carnival?

The streets around my house have now been cleaned, shops have opened again and any trace of the colour-packed, music-filled event that is the Notting Hill Carnival has disappeared. The event was a success. Towards the end, police did fight a battle with about 40 youths and ended up arresting 330 people – up from 246 last year. But overall, the event went smoothly with about 850,000 people enjoying the music, floats and the alluring energy of African-Caribbean popular culture. So why, one week after the event, am I writing this blog? Because I think that the event needs to move on. Rather than plan next year’s event, the organisers

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 30 August 2008

Dimly, I remember the time when you could buy a sandwich as the result of a perfectly normal interaction between two human beings facing each other across a counter. You would ask for something, they would give it to you, you would hand over money. But that was before UK sandwich-buying was standardised. I do not know whose idea standardisation was and no doubt it has brought many benefits for the customer. But you need to have your wits about you. Do not fall into the trap I did when I put my veggie option down on the counter and feebly started trying to ask for tea. ‘Can I have

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 30 August 2008

What rain! And what gales! No wonder sales of thermal underwear have shot up by 50 per cent already this year. I live a stone’s throw from the beach and I haven’t had a dip in the sea once yet, let alone done a stint relaxing on the beach with the kids. And along at the far end of the beach, at the designated naturist section, only the most diehard nudists are sticking it out this summer. The only thing to do in continuously foul weather like this has been to keep indoors and watch the Olympic Games. I watched as much as possible down at the local gym on

Taki

High Life | 30 August 2008

Gstaad I’ve written this before on these here pages: Israel in cahoots with the Americans is going to bomb Iran before the 4 November US elections. How do I know, especially after sitting on a sailing boat for six weeks? That’s an easy one. Over the years I’ve made some pretty good contacts in Washington, and there is such a thing called email, a hard nut I have managed to crack going on ten years. Here’s how the Taki scenario goes: (with a little help from a Washington-based Belgian count). Russia has now shown America to have a loud voice but to carry a small stick. The Americans and the

Sarah Standing

Diary – 30 August 2008

Sarah Standing battles to board a plane bound for Ibiza Needs must and I’ve become extremely skilled at booking cheap, credit-crunching flights on easyJet. The volume of hours, energy, blood, sweat and tears I’ve devoted to acquiring dream e-tickets for my family ought to qualify me for some sort of tenacious travel operator award. This summer I’ve truly gone for gold: four returns to Ibiza, singles to Nice, Corfu and Toulouse and a brace of cancellations to Gibraltar. I’ve come to the conclusion that making holiday arrangements in cyberspace requires real chutzpah. Getting the flights you want is a gamble and not dissimilar to playing the Las Vegas slot machines. The

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 30 August 2008

Monday I wish people would stop sending in complaints about the cost of hotels in Birmingham. I am not the English Tourist Board! But as we’re on the subject, let’s be clear — the point of having conference there is not to save money, or have fun. It’s so we can get out to parts of Britain we would not normally see. And could I just say to Mr Hargreaves from Chipping Norton: I’m not convinced by your claims that in Blackpool you could get a B&B, slap-up meal, bumper pack of rock and still have change from a £20 note. Nor do I believe that we are going to

The Spectator

Letters | 30 August 2008

We did it, not the state Sir: I am not a social historian but surely Liam Byrne fatally undermines his whole argument when he praises the founding of various organisations and movements 150 years ago to deal with the ‘huge change which swept millions from the countryside to the cities’ (‘Give us back our Big Idea, Mr Cameron’, 16 August). Isn’t the whole point that the state did not do this — individuals and groups did? Less state interference allows individuals and groups to help their communities and Britain as a whole rather than being strangled by the red tape, form-filling and box-ticking so beloved by Liam Byrne and New

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 30 August 2008

I am currently in Cornwall where I am spending the last week of August with my family. I cannot claim to have been basking in sunshine — the weather here is no better than the rest of the country — but I am luxuriating in the warm glow that comes from being on an environmentally friendly holiday. As I make my way towards Fifteen, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant in Watergate Bay, I exchange approving nods with the other dads. I had no idea that saving the planet could produce such a powerful sense of wellbeing. Admittedly, this feeling is quite hard to sustain once I have returned to the car park.

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 30 August 2008

Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of the nature of the world led them, inevitably, to quite opposite conclusions. The atomists hypothesised that minute, unsplittable atomoi, below the level of sense-perception, were the basic stuff out of which the world was made. These atomoi grouped themselves in various ways to produce the world we see around us. Since these atoms were infinite

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 August 2008

Your problems solved Q. I have recently moved from New York to London to join my husband who is English and who works here. My problem is that when we are out together at, for example, early evening gallery openings or at the opera we often meet people my husband knows but who are new to me. Sometimes people will invite us to come and stay with them in the country or come to dinner. I am finding it very confusing to know what to say because my husband is always standing beside me smiling in so friendly a manner and nodding as though he wants to accept the invitation,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Glass Ceiling Will Shatter in 2012

If McCain loses in November there’s no guarantee that Sarah Palin will be a front-runner to secure the GOP nomination in 2012 (though I’d guess she will be a contender). But if McCain wins and, as seems possible, serves just one term then, clearly she would be. Equally, if Obama loses this year there’s no certainty that Hillary Clinton will automatically be the prohibitive favourite for the Democratic nomination in 2012 (though that too seems quite possible). But, one way or another, the combination of Hillary’s near-miss this year and Palin’s presence on the GOP ticket makes me think that it is more likely than not that a woman, even

Alex Massie Alex Massie

McCain’s decision making process

A question for the rest of us: Suppose a President McCain approached every problem, dispute or stramash with the same rigour, diligence and sweet consideration with which he seems to have chosen his running-mate? What might this tell us about a President McCain?

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Picking a running mate like it is 2000

At first blush the selections of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin appear to have little in common. Obama went for an experienced Washington insider with a ton of national security experience, McCain went for a first term governor whose previous statements on foreign policy hardly suggest a great deal of knowledge about the subject. But the two picks do have something in common: they’re the picks you would have advised the candidates to make if they were running in 2000. In 2000, with the misguided holiday from history still in full swing, Biden would have answered questions about Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience in the way that Cheney did

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Palin pick

Talking to those Democrats who didn’t get the first flight out of Denver one picks up two conflicting emotions about the Palin pick: relief and fear. They are all happy that McCain has so neutered his attack on Obama’s experience; yes Obama was a state senator just four years ago but the person that John McCain—a 72 year old cancer survivor—has chosen to put a heart beat away from the presidency was the Mayor of a small Alaskan town then. But there is also real concern that John McCain might have finally found a domestic message; that he and Palin will run as reformers who are prepared to fight a

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 30 August 2008

The last time I saw Darren Gough in action was on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas special last December. The ruddy-cheeked stalwart of the Yorkshire and England fast-bowling attack doesn’t look like a natural for the more skinny-limbed athleticism of ballroom dancing, but he won the show with alarming ease, twirling across the floor with a light-footed sureness as if gravity didn’t exist (rather like Usain Bolt at the Olympics, come to think of it, who runs as if the ground wasn’t there). The Dazzler still turns out for Yorkshire (he’s club captain, best recent figures 2-62 off eight overs) but more to the point, he also presides over one

James Young

Competition | 30 August 2008

In Competition No 2559 you were invited to complete a poem starting ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on …!’ with the target of your choice. In a huge entry, Gordon Brown and his crew were by far the most popular destination for your WMDs (you may as well pack your bags now, mate). Other favourite targets of the Spectator-reading and competition-entering community were George Bush and his gang, yoof (especially its clothes), bad smells, graffiti, the Celtic fringe, Geordieland, Disneyland, The Archers, Crewe, Worcester, Kent, Heathrow, Brighton, Bath, Windsor and Eton, people who write nasty things about Slough, Tesco, plastic bags, Men (from a man) and Me (from two women).

Elliot Wilson

City Life | 30 August 2008

The credit crunch reaches the home of the rotten apple and the ‘Rolexo’ watch James Gregory Pool III is an elderly, stooping Canadian with a most un-usual job. Every month he boards a plane from Canada with 200 sedated heifers and flies with them to Almaty to beef up and variegate Kazakhstan’s breeding livestock. He’s the archetypal eccentric foreign entrepreneur one finds in this eccentric Central Asian city. A recent trip threw up several such oddities: a German wine trader trying — and largely failing — to interest the Kazakhs in £100-a-bottle claret; a Norwegian flogging confessedly second-rate salmon to hotels and restaurants; a 19-year-old British geologist so driven to

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 30 August 2008

The spectacular increase in scientific knowledge during the last hundred years tempts me to ask: cui bono? We now live on average twice as long as in the early 19th century. But what does our ability to repair our bodies and fend off fatal diseases do except prepare us for a long twilight of Alzheimer’s and debility, a burden on our families and a reproach on ourselves. I recall a woman in her mid-nineties, who had led a life of duty, saying over and over again: ‘I have lived too long.’ I spend much of my time studying history, especially letters, diaries and biographies, and I see no evidence that

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 30 August 2008

I think I should abandon the world: I am too easily irritated by it. I should follow the example of Xavier de Maistre, brother of the brilliantly reactionary philosopher, Joseph, and stick henceforth to my room. In his Voyage autour de ma chambre, de Maistre tells us that by describing his journey he is offering an infinite number of unhappy persons a perfect antidote to boredom, and that the pleasure of such a journey is proof also against the ceaseless envy of men. Moreover it is cheap, an advantage not to be sneezed at in time of rising prices. No sooner do I leave my house than I meet, or