Society

Saturday

Taki

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

Robin Oakley

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

John Kampfner

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

Tamzin Lightwater

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

Mary Killen

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,

Dot Wordsworth

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

Toby Young Toby Young

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.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

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

The Spectator

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.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

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

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

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.

Paul Johnson

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

James Young

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,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 20 September 2008

I recently saw a photograph of a street vendor’s stall in Argentina. The menu reads simply Orange Juice $5. Jugo de Naranja $4. Here unsuspecting Anglophones are paying a premium of 25 per cent for not knowing Spanish. It’s a practice known to economists as price discrimination — in other words setting a price in proportion to a customer’s propensity (or indeed ability) to pay. There’s a lot of it about — and in the internet age we can expect to see it more and more. How low a price will a website quote you for your new Mini Cooper if it knows you already own a Jaguar? It’s reminiscent

Sarfraz Manzoor

I found an undiscovered country: Great Britain

This summer, as a consequence of the credit crunch, rising air fares and a strong euro, more than half of all Britons chose to spend their holidays in this country. Predictably this was also the summer that proved to be one of the dullest and wettest on record. August may have been, according to the Met Office, the UK’s seventh wettest since records began in 1929, but for me there was a silver lining to the rainclouds. Like many working-class British Asians of my generation, we never went on holidays during my childhood. In recent years I have attempted to make amends by travelling as much as possible, but this

Prue Leith

Pay attention at the back of the class, Mr Balls

When I first met John Abbott 20 years ago he told me a story: as a young teacher at the prestigious Manchester Grammar School he had led several expeditions of boys to study agriculture in rural pre-revolutionary Iran. After a week the village headman felt he knew John well enough to ask him a difficult question: ‘These young men,’ he said, ‘they are so tall, so strong, so beautiful. But what use are they? They cannot reap, they cannot ride a donkey, they cannot make a fire, they cannot even sew or sweep or cook like our girls.’ This stopped young Abbott in his tracks. The Iranian headman had a

The Spectator

Long live capitalism

Detached amusement might describe the reaction of many people to the sight of well-paid Lehman Brothers employees being escorted off the bank’s premises, carrying their personal possessions in champagne boxes tucked beneath their arms. Displaying either greed or financial acumen to the last, one newly unemployed banker managed to buy himself 30 bananas to use up the credit on his girovend card while he still had the chance. But amusement is far from the most appropriate response; we have the right to feel anger at the way bankers have collectively managed to trash their industry. For those who, like this magazine, have been staunch defenders of free markets and light

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Global Crisis Deepens

Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister recognises that these are perilous times. Women wearing mini-skirts, he says, are a danger to public safety, responsible for all manner of traffic accidents. What’s wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally.” He continued arguing that, “if you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving.” According to Foreign Policy: The BBC notes that [Mr] Buturo is seeking to rid Uganda of its many vices, and inappropriate dress is just one of the many indecent items that appear on the minister’s list. Among others

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lance Armstrong: A Sceptic Writes…

More Culture11: I’ve a piece arguing that no-one should be terribly happy about Lance Armstrong’s decision to come out of retirement next season. Snippet: Unlike fans in other sports, such as baseball or track and field, many cycling fans simply don’t see doping as a criminal or ethical offense. In its way, then, cycling is the purest distillation of the logic behind elite sport: Super-human performance demands supra-human resources. It is the cost of doing business. We might more profitably ask why our attitudes to drug-use have changed. Everyone has known for decades that the peloton has been a pharmacy on wheels. Until recently, this bothered few people. These days,