Society

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Was that Policy Exchange report so wrong after all?

For obvious political reasons, David Cameron had to run a mile from Policy Exchange’s report on northern cities. But as John Rentoul argues in an excellent column in The Independent on Sunday, the report was actually right about certain things:  the striking thing about the Policy Exchange report is that its analysis is broadly correct. It specifically said that Liverpool, Rochdale, Bradford and Sunderland were not “doomed”. (This was reported by The Independent under the headline “Cities in North doomed, says favourite Tory think tank”.) The report went on, however: “We cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city in Britain that has fallen behind. Just as we can’t buck the

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 16 August 2008

My clownfish is clinically obese and agoraphobic. He has been refusing to come out of his bamboo log for three years now, except occasionally to poke his whiskered nose out of the end to snaffle food. I hadn’t seen the whole of him in all this time until it occurred to me the other day that perhaps he couldn’t come out because he was stuck. This has happened to me before. I had an angelfish who took to his bed and eventually had to be mechanically extracted like the subject of an ITV documentary on fat people. I had to go to Travis Perkins and hire a saw. ‘Will this

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 16 August 2008

Under a low oak-beamed ceiling, three middle-aged men were perched on stools around the bar. One of these greeted me, walked around to the other side of the bar and asked me what I was having. He wasn’t the landlord, he said. The landlord was busy out at the back for a moment. There was a small selection of real ales. I chose the Badger’s Todger. He poured me a pint and returned to his stool and rejoined his muted three-cornered conversation. The bar was cosy enough but the quietness was oppressive. A big mistake coming to this place, I thought, as I took a sip. Nice pint, though. Then

Taki

High Life | 16 August 2008

That’s not fair play On board S/Y Bushido As far as I’m concerned, the less said about the goings on in Beijing the better. I know, I know, I’ll be watching the judo and the athletics, especially the former (there are no drug cheats in judo, no money under the table, no money, pure and simple), but competition among chemists does not race my motor, as they say in Detroit. The opening ceremony may have dazzled some people, but it left me cold. There was no humanity to it, just a lot of Chinese animated figures acting as robots. Who invented opening ceremonies anyway? Back in the good old days

David Tang

Diary – 16 August 2008

An immediate rumour after the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games was that an emergency meeting of the British Olympic Committee was convened in order to find an excuse for cancelling London 2012. There might have been even greater panic because Britain is expected to produce a ‘performance’ of eight minutes as part of the closing ceremony in two weeks’ time. Beckham kicking a football was believed to be billed as the British climax, but if that’s all he would be doing, the meaning of ‘damp squib’ might well assume a new dimension.  One could well understand the British alarm, given the phantasmagorical display of brilliance that the Chinese team

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 16 August 2008

Monday Copies of lads mags found lying around leaders’ office: 5 (v bad); pounds shed by Mr Pickles in name of Being The Change: 0 (v bad); inquiries about why we haven’t launched any green taxes yet: 67 (v v bad); pages read of Quick Guide To The Caucasus: one and a half (vg). So stressed, might have to take a second holiday. Am fairly sure it’s party policy to have two. Think I took the memo ordering us to stay in Britain too literally. Tom says it means that you take a week in a dreary boarding house, then clear off for two weeks somewhere sunny for a proper

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 16 August 2008

Dot Wordsworth compares the pronounciation of words in 1928 and in the present day Do you pronounce the ‘l’ in falcon? That civilised Kentish man Mr Eric Brown has sent me an entertaining newspaper cutting kept for 18 years. It is from the Times’s ‘On this day’ column, with news from 27 July 1928, of the first published booklet on BBC pronunciation for the guidance of broadcasters. It cannot have been easy for the pronunciation committee, appointed in 1926, to agree. Its members included the learned phonetician Daniel Jones and the opinionated playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas about language were not always soundly based. Jones was the basis for

The Spectator

Letters | 16 August 2008

Credit where credit’s due Sir: I’m not sure if my colleague Bob Marshall-Andrews is happy to be seen as some kind of showbiz personality (‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour’, 9 August). However wrong Bob was, in my view, in strenuously opposing allied military action which ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, he has undoubtedly contributed a good deal on issues concerning the rights of individuals in this country. As for the proposed 90 days’ pre-charge detention, which the government wished to see introduced in 2005, it was in fact my amendment reducing the figure to 28 which the House fortunately agreed to. Hopefully the Lords will ensure that it

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 16 August 2008

These days, I can’t even afford to rent a trailer on Shelter Island As a young man living in New York, I used to club together with four or five friends every summer and rent a house on Shelter Island. About 80 miles from New York, it is close enough to the Hamptons to enjoy a certain social cachet, but not so close that it is overrun with Porsche-driving investment bankers. A favourite bumper sticker on the island reads: ‘SLOW DOWN — You’re Not Off-Island Any More.’ I spent an idyllic summer there in 1999 with the woman who would become my wife and we have often dreamt about returning

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 16 August 2008

The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues — except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them? It was Constantine the Great, founder in ad 324 of Constantinople as the ‘new Rome’, who encouraged the spread of Christianity without condemning other beliefs. But bishops like Ambrose of Milan were not enthusiastic about tolerating polytheistic cults or pagan intellectual movements, and their influence began to be felt. In 380 the emperor Theodosius I decreed that Christianity should be the official religion of the Byzantine empire,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 16 August 2008

Q. I recently managed to put together a large party for a summer country-house opera at the Grange near Winchester. We decided not to picnic, but instead I had booked one of the private dining-rooms there. However, from past experience, it often happens that some guests will cancel at the last moment for one unforeseen reason or another. To avoid wasting the tickets and the dinners, this year I decided to ask some friends well in advance whether they wouldn’t mind going on the ‘standby’ list in case someone drops out. Most were flattered by my idea and agreed willingly. However, one said this was an insult and they didn’t

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Jobs Rhetoric

Since we’re on the subject of Barack Obama’s economic nationalism, here’s a radio ad airing in Wisconsin in which he suggests John McCain has a treasonous desire to ship American jobs off to nasty, grasping foreigners. You can listen to it here. (Text of the ad is also after the jump).It’s all part of some “Buy American” strategy to be pursued in Pennsylvania and the midwest. Great.  Now, sure, some of this is just campaign rhetoric. But when Obama stokes protectionist fires, when he characterises trading partners as the enemy, when he suggests that there’s something wrong or illegitimate with foreign companies owning properties in the United States he not

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Obama shouldn’t pick a foreign policy expert as his running mate

Barack Obama is widely expected to name his running mate in the next few days. He is now back from vacation and presumably will want to make the announcement before the Democratic convention which begins a week on Monday. The buzz is that Obama is going to go for someone with foreign policy credentials. Obama’s running mate will address the convention on Wednesday, a night billed as a Tribute to Veterans, Active Duty Military & Military Families. National security will dominate that day and it would be odd to have someone with no experience on the subject speak in primetime that evening. Yet, picking a foreign policy expert as his

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Who Putin is

David Remnick, The New York editor who was the Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent during the collapse of the Soviet Union, has written a smart piece about Putin for the latest New Yorker. He concludes: “Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

That was quick

I’m not normally particularly keen on athletics, but Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 metres final was awesome. (If you missed it, you can watch it here.) You don’t expect to see anyone coasting across the line to win the gold in the 100 metres let alone to break the world record. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Report: Labour to re-brand in the autumn, thinking about dumping New Labour label

A friend of Coffee House flags up an interesting post on Labour Matters which reports that as part of its autumn re-launch Labour might drop its “new Labour for Britain” slogan and replace it with “Your Labour, Your Britain”. The thinking is that this would emphasise the ‘on your side’ fairness agenda that will underpin Brown’s attempt at an autumn fight-back. It also suggests that Labour is planning a more populist strategy in an attempt to try and stoke up its base which as recent elections have shown is thoroughly disillusioned with the party. Dropping the ‘new Labour’ tag that Blair introduced would attract considerable comment. But Labour must be

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The ever-shrinking Prime Minister

Gordon Brown’s team decided that they would take the Prime Minister off the airwaves over the summer. The thinking was that when Brown did return in September to roll out his economic plan the public would pay renewed attention. So, apart from an appearance at the Edinburgh books festival, Brown has kept pretty quiet. What the Brown team did not factor in or adjust for was an international crisis that would require the Prime Minister to play the part expected of a British Prime Minister on the world stage. So, Brown has ended up following not leading on the Georgia crisis both at home and abroad. Internationally, this has undercut

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 16 August 2008

You can’t help feeling for Sergio Garcia. At Carnoustie last year, he lipped out on the last hole to throw away an Open title which had seemed his on the last day. And who was waiting for him at the play-off? Why Padraig Harrington of course. And when Sergio lined up his second shot on the fiercely hazardous 16th at Oakland Hills, the US PGA title was again his for the taking. He needed to par the last three and the gutsy Spaniard’s first Major was in the bag. He opted for an insanely ambitious drive to the right of the flag and the ball bounced back into the water.

James Young

Competition | 16 August 2008

In Competition No. 2557 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose with each line or sentence beginning with the letters A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M in that order. I discovered while setting this comp that the longest word you can type using just the QWERTY row of letters on a typewriter is … ‘typewriter’. No doubt one or two of you will prove me wrong; indeed, there is an even longer word if you allow ‘tripewriter’….  Anyway, where was I? The less tripe I write, the more space there is to showcase your wit and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 16 August 2008

Does Medvedev really believe in the rule of law? The fate of TNK-BP is the test Is President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia — who looks and sounds like a liberal-leaning modern technocrat — really his own man, or is he merely the stooge of his predecessor, the sinister, warmongering Vladimir Putin? The mad situation engulfing BP’s Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, is surely the test of this question. Its BP-appointed chief executive, Robert Dudley, has met such hostility from the gang of oligarchs who are BP’s partners in the company that he is now trying to run it by email from a secret address somewhere in eastern Europe. The oligarchs, led