Society

Sunday

14 Sep 2008

Miliband retreats

“I do support Gordon Brown” squealed David Miliband on the Politics Show just now. In an interview which was markedly different in style and tone from his confident performances during the summer after the publication of his Guardian article, Miliband backed away from a challenge, explicitly arguing against a leadership contest. When Jon Sopel challenged him on the ambiguous language he had used on the Jeremy Vine show when he was sending ‘come and get me’ signals to the Labour party, Miliband retreated from his earlier position. Having run his colours up the flag pole over the summer, Miliband now seems to have lowered them. Both stylistically and substantively this

Saturday

13 Sep 2008

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 13 September 2008

Don’t be fooled At last, I’m starting to enjoy the downturn. The key was realising that by buying less of everything I’m annoying people in positions of power and calling a lot of very rich people’s bluff. This is most satisfying. For example, I used to scoff at an advert by the French energy firm EDF which promised that if I used less gas and electricity they would be delighted to reduce my bills. I tended to think that the correct response was to laugh my head off at the silly Frenchies with their statement of the blindingly obvious, based on an eye-watering lie that they would be happy if

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 13 September 2008

I first came across the book Iron John: Man and Masculinity by Robert Bly when I saw it being clutched in the bony old fingers of the man that used to chair meetings of our local Alcoholics Anonymous group. At the end of one of our weekly meetings he held up this book and pointed the cover at us. This man never managed to master the Alcoholics Anonymous principle that we were to depend on a ‘higher power’ for help. He’d overcome his addiction by applying his great intellect to the problem. He said to me once, ‘I wouldn’t argue with me because I had a superb education, you know.’

Taki

High Life | 13 September 2008

Regensburg The mighty Danube begins in the park of the Furstenberg Palace and flows eastward for a distance of 2,000 miles across ten countries on to the Black Sea. Last weekend, Prince and Princess Heinrich von Furstenberg, the titular heads of the family who live in that palace, gave us a little tour of Walhalla, the German Hall of Fame situated further down the river from their park, in Regensburg, the perfectly preserved medieval town where a wonderful party celebrating Maya Schoenburg’s 50th birthday has left me feeling all of my 72 years. Make that 102. But first Walhalla. As everyone knows, it was the dwelling place of the Gods,

The Spectator

Dot Wordsworth on words lost in translation

My husband’s club was closed in August, which meant, paradoxically, that I saw less of him, because he enjoyed the chance to exercise reciprocal rights at other clubs, which I suspect might not have welcomed him as a member in the first place. Sitting in some smokeless smoking-room he took to reading the Financial Times, and there he saw an article by Michael Skapinker on the uses of simplified English. Apparently, Voice of America broadcasts some programmes in something called Special English, which has about 1,500 words, in comparison with an educated Englishman’s vocabulary of 30,000. In response to the FT article, David Gibbons, a translator with a Milan bank

Dylan Jones

Diary – 13 September 2008

There are many things I’ll miss about my year with David Cameron, not least my regular visits to Portcullis House, the ugly upside-down cow’s udder opposite the Commons (it was designed by Michael Hopkins, although it looks as though he did this in the dark, possibly using Plasticine and some peat briquettes). After a while I began to think of its lobby as a current affairs version of the bar in Star Wars, the one peopled by a galaxy of freaks. It is also something of a research assistant catwalk, and while you couldn’t reasonably compare it to the lobby of Vogue House — which, predictably, has the most glamorous

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 September 2008

This column and its readers have just won our first battle in our long war. The BBC Trust has announced that it will investigate the way in which the television licence fee is collected. It wants to know, for example, whether the public think that the methods of enforcement are ‘reasonable and appropriate’. This column has been highlighting the predicament of those (including myself, in my London flat) who do not possess a television. We receive unreasonable and inappropriate letters from TV Licensing, often by the dozen, which assume our guilt for evasion without any evidence and threaten us with inspection and a criminal record. I notice that televisionless households

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 13 September 2008

Monday Look! There is no question of us doing a U-turn on our pledge to match Labour’s spending plans. You can’t do a U-turn if you were never going to go a particular way in the first place. Or if you went for a long drive that brought you exactly back to where you started, you wouldn’t say you’d done a U-turn. You’d say you’d done a circle. Or a curve. Oh dear. Let’s put it this way: we always planned to stop promising to match Labour’s spending plans by the end of this year. So in fact we are on target for fulfilling one of our key pledge reversals!

The Spectator

Letters | 13 September 2008

Taking care of Toby Sir: Kirsten Dunst never insisted that I ban Toby Young (Status anxiety, 6 September) from the set of How To Lose Friends & Alienate People. Toby’s piece stemmed from a recent article of mine in Empire magazine. In his opening paragraph, he says he learned from it that ‘the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it’. But Toby didn’t read my article before he wrote his. For the record, Kirsten told me on set that Toby had given her a performance note. (Toby says she overheard him give a note about her performance to a third

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 13 September 2008

By the time you read this I may be dead. I have been pressganged into taking part in the London Duathlon this Sunday in order to raise money for the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity. A canny young man who works for the charity noticed a reference to the paediatric unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in something I wrote about my son and suggested that this might be a good way to give something back. It was a request I couldn’t refuse. Ludo was born with neonatal varicella, an extremely rare condition that, in certain circumstances, has a 30 per cent mortality rate. Varicella is the Latin word for

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 September 2008

Your problems solved Q. When my husband retired two years ago I was pleased that I would no longer be obliged to be polite to his colleague, Bob. Now my husband says the reason he’s so restless at night is that he keeps having hectic action-adventure dreams featuring Bob. On holiday, Bob managed to infiltrate our room in Corsica. I don’t like Bob, Mary. How can I evict him from my bedroom? D.M., Cannes, France A. The dreams suggest that your husband stepped down too early and that the disturbing figure of Bob has become conflated with his former high-octane activities. He should now take up some part-time low-octane work.

Alex Massie

For God and Ulster and Michigan…

As readers may know by now, I’m hopelessly in love with college football. Within that realm, I follow the University of Michigan. Today, the Wolverines travel to South Bend, Indiana to face Notre Dame. The two most successful programs in college football history go face to face in what is, given their respective recent travails, a Cripple Fight for the ages. UPDATE: Well, that didn’t go as well as it might have did it? Always tough to win when you give the opposition a three touchdown start… I think I’ve said before that I don’t care for the Fighting Irish: It’s often said that the definition of intelligence is the

James Forsyth

Gordon’s formidable opponent

If you haven’t seen it already, do watch Joan Ryan’s pitch-perfect call for a leadership election. She frames the issue, quite brilliantly, as one of party democracy. It will be very hard for the Brownites to depict her as a troublemaker or an egotist or to effectively rebut her argument. She is the one who sounds like she has the best interests of the Labour party at heart. Certainly, Brown is in a weaker position for not having been elected party leader in a proper contest. As Matt has argued, Brown’s uncontested elevation means that he lacks the bond with either the party or the country that a leader needs

James Forsyth

If not Gordon, who?

The plot against Brown is rumbling on, every few hours another MP is publicly joining the call for a leadership vote. It seems that the idea of a crowning a new leader has been abandoned and that there will be a contest if Gordon goes. Given the electoral college that Labour uses in its leadership contests, Alan Johnson would probably be the best placed candidate if he did run. He has appeal among MPs, party members and the trade unions and as a fairly non-ideological politician he would be acceptable to all the wings of the party. He is also seen as someone who ‘connects’ with the public and his

James Forsyth

What will be the next plot twist?

The rebellion does not appear to have taken off yet but neither has it been stamped out. If a senior Labour figure who is not regarded as one of the usual suspects were to join in the call for a contest that could be a trigger for a significant number of Labour MPs to move. One thing that Siobhain McDonagh’s resignation has sparked off is speculation about what John Reid might do, McDonagh was Reid’s PPS. It is worth noting that Reid, who is standing down at the next election, has not sounded off against Brown or the direction of his government in the relatively frequent way that some other

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 13 September 2008

Remember the Wightman Cup? For anyone under 40, this was the annual women’s tennis tournament between Britain and the US, which eventually passed away, largely unmourned, at the end of the 1980s. The reason? Extreme lack of interest. Not just among the audiences, but the players too. We were all tired of Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver coming over and ripping apart, say, Jo Durie, Anne Hobbs and if memory serves the now lustrously big-haired Annabel Croft. Year after year after year. Now I don’t want to sound mad but I think there is a real danger that the Ryder Cup, reconvening next week in Kentucky, could go

James Young

Competition | 13 September 2008

In Competition No. 2561 you were invited to continue in verse or prose the statement ‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows better…’ Another exercise in spleen-venting, this attracted a weighty postbag. The quotation is from Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case written in 1939. In full it reads, ‘In the case of nutrition, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’ (probably the only words for which that gentleman is remembered). His pronunciamento marks the birth of the nanny state, though luckily Jerry came along and put things off for a few years…. The entries

Richard Northedge

The Housing Market

If Britain’s housebuilders really want to sell more homes, they ought to slash their prices rather than lobby the government for packages like last week’s ill-conceived attempt to boost the property market. That’s what the rest of us have done, but while prices of all other houses have plunged, new homes have still been selling for more than they did a year ago. When the Halifax announced that the fall in house prices had reached double digits in the year to July, the figure that failed to catch the headlines was that new homes had gone up by 1.1 per cent over the previous year. Are we really to believe

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 13 September 2008

When is too old? When too young? Almost every day I hear a story of someone, at the height of his power and energy, being compulsorily retired at 60. Or there is a fuss because a girl wants to get married at 15. I recall that Lydia, youngest of the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice, was 15 when she ran off with the miscreant Wickham. She prided herself on the fact that she was taller than her siblings and was obviously precocious. When it came to the point the problem was not her age but getting Wickham to marry her. An underage girl is a moveable feast. I have

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 13 September 2008

In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia. Not that I am any sort of a spokesman. Llamas and alpacas have greater authorities than me to pronounce on their welfare and prospects. Wise and expert breeders in Britain constitute a community in which I’m a very minor player — indeed I fear my subscription to the Camelids Chronicle may even have lapsed. But regular references in national