Society

Saturday

13 Sep 2008

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

The Spectator

Fannie, Freddie and Gordon

Last week, at a cost of a billion pounds or so, the Chancellor announced a package of measures to boost the housing market, including a temporary raising of the stamp duty threshold and some tinkering with shared equity schemes and social housing budgets. In response, the pound — already depressed by Alistair Darling’s observation that Britain now faces arguably the worst combination of economic circumstances in 60 years — fell a little further. Lord Lamont, the last chancellor to resort to a stamp-duty holiday in the face of a house-price collapse in December 1991, pointed out that the device did no good at all for the housing market or his

Tom Parfitt

Moscow’s secret war in Ingushetia

Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt: the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and repression Among the first-class passengers who flew into Ingushetia’s Magas airport from Moscow on the afternoon of 31 August were two grey-haired men in suits. The pair avoided each other’s gaze. One was Murat Zyazikov, 50, a former KGB officer and president of Ingushetia, the small Muslim republic which borders Chechnya in southern Russia. The other was Magomed Yevloyev, 36, an outspoken critic of Russia’s brutal rule in Ingushetia, founder of the ingushetiya.ru website, and Zyazikov’s great nemesis. The fates of the

Friday

12 Sep 2008

Alex Massie

Making government “cool”…

What a choice Americcans have! There’s the elderly candidate with precious little interest in domestic policy whose signature legislative achievement was to abridge the First Amendment and whose running mate, for all her charms and freshness, is not someone you’d be terribly comfortable seeing running the country. Then there’s the young fellow who, for all his political gifts and for all his capacity to inspire people, can come out and say something like this: Obama would, he said, “transform Washington” and “make government cool again.” May heaven preserve us all. To be fair to Obama, he was speaking at a youth forum at Columbia dedicated to the notion of national

Alex Massie

Waiting for Glenrothes

So, the conventional wisdom is that Gordon Brown has survived and will not, in fact, face a leadership challenge anytime soon. Why? Because it’s too difficult to get rid of him and, in any case, there’s no obviously more palatable successor. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson put it this morning: Friends of the Prime Minister put it more positively. MPs have come to realise, they say, that it’s not Gordon Brown that’s the problem but “the economy stupid” and he’s the best man to sort it. In this respect, and this one only, the polls are helpful for Mr Brown. The public does not say it wants a change of

James Forsyth

The Blairites have moved, now the left must

Siobhain McDonagh has become the first person to quit their payroll job in an attempt to force a leadership contest. If others are brave enough to follow her example, then the game really will be afoot. The Progress article by a dozen Blairite MPs which is scathingly critical of where and how Labour is being led is also a clear statement of intent. What should worry the Brownites about it though, is that some names are noticeable by their absence; suggesting that there might be a plan for a programme of rolling criticism of Brown in the run up to conference. But as long as the campaign to force Brown

James Forsyth

Neil O’Brien to head Policy Exchange

It is great news that Neil O’Brien is the new director of Policy Exchange. Neil is one of the smartest and most decent people in Westminster and under his leadership Open Europe has been the very model of a modern think thank, brilliantly mixing research and campaigning. With Neil in charge, Policy Exchange is going to go from strength to strength. This is great news for those of us on the centre-right who want to see a bold agenda for addressing the country’s problems laid out.