Society

Saturday

Alex James

Slow Life | 28 June 2008

Brad is cool. He was clearly demonstrating his ability to retain grace under pressure and I suppose that’s what conductors get paid for. The traffic on the A40 was at a standstill at Gypsy Corner and he was due to conduct Verdi’s Il trovatore in Holland Park very shortly. I was much more scared about being late than he was. I gingerly invoked the unthinkable. ‘What’s going to happen if we’re, you know, er, not there in time?’ ‘The conductor is the one person they have to wait for,’ he said, and lit a Marlboro. ‘Have you learnt the words?’ I’m learning how to conduct as part of an experiment

Taki

High Life | 28 June 2008

By the time you read this I will have a pretty good idea whether my 70-and-over judo world title will belong to some Mongolian monster or be retained by yours truly. Unpredictability is to sport what lying is to Clinton and Blair — a compelling stimulus — but my chances in Brussels are beginning to resemble those of the Belgian army facing the invading Germans back in 1940. Having trained hard all spring in the Bagel, it all went down the drain in two weeks living the high life in London and Devon. As good an excuse as any, and fun to boot. Speaking of Blair and Clinton, I am

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 28 June 2008

OK, so they do a good mint julep at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby. There are impressive wonga-mountains on offer for winners at the Dubai World Cup meeting. Outstanding horses patronise the various US venues of the Breeders’ Cup. But this time let’s hear it for Royal Ascot, the meeting that had everything, including a winner for the Queen, Free Agent, on the final day. The Berkshire course has had its problems over rebuilding. Too many of those who attend are an irrelevance, more interested in fascinators than forelegs, more concerned with tinkling glasses than thundering hooves. (Although I will make an exception for the delightful young ladies who

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 June 2008

Q. I travel frequently to Cape Town where I have a house. I always fly in business class or sometimes in first class. I wonder when it is permissible as opposed to rude to put up the barrier between me and a total stranger in the seat next door during the 11.5 hours flight? J.L., London SW10 A. It is generally accepted that all first and business class passengers want mental privacy during the flight but there are two schools of thought regarding the etiquette of achieving this. One frequent-flying über-alpha of my acquaintance holds that, ‘It is always appropriate to put up the barrier. The primary rules of business

Maurice Gerard

Race relations in Zimbabwe

Sometimes the façade cracks. Despite official rhetoric branding white Zimbabweans as everything from ‘traitors’ to (that perennial government favourite) ‘economic saboteurs’, race relations on the ground are quietly healthy. Even, it seems, amongst the shock-troops of Mugabe’s land grab: the infamous war veterans.   The epithet is somewhat elastic. Nowadays a good deal of the country’s self-described war vets today are rowdy teenagers, often when drunk on the local maize brew chibuku, spoiling for a fight or having been press-ganged by Zanu-PF heavies into invading some of Zimbabwe’s last remaining 400 white-owned farms. One long-time Bulawayo resident said: “They get together in gangs and start chant nationalist songs, generally being

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

She was not up to the job

I’m in Edinburgh right now, and read the morning press with suspicion. It’s full of quotes from Wendy Alexander’s friends saying she would not stand down at all. Hmm. What summed it up for me was a brilliant piece by Angus Macleod (my successor) in The Times. After the complaint against Wee Wendy declaring her donations was upheld, he said, “her chances of ever becoming First Minister are next to nil. Until her allies confront that brutal reality and be brave enough to do something about it they can do nothing but await the next Wendy Alexander crisis.” She must have decided the same, and with Holyrood in recess she’ll

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall | 28 June 2008

This week’s CoffeeHousers’ Wall is here. Head over there to have your say on the week’s events and to let us know what you’d like to see on Coffee House. And remember that the CoffeeHouser who makes the best contribution to the wall this week will win a bottle of bubbly.

Jane Ridley

Truth is stranger than fiction

Jane Ridley on a history and a fiction of Leningrad  The siege of Leningrad is the ultimate nightmare: what happens when you push humanity to its utmost limits. The German armies advanced on Leningrad and besieged it in September, 1941. The siege lasted for almost 900 days, but the first winter was the worst. Bread, water, power, fuel all ran out. As the icy winter temperatures fell below minus 30 Celsius, people died of starvation at a rate of 20,000 a day. The streets were piled high with corpses: people were too weak to move their dead, and the ground was too frozen to bury them. Michael Jones, in his

Simon Hoggart

July Spectator Mini-Bar Offer

This week brings a welcome return of The Vintry, a sort of co-operative of wine-lovers who use communal buying to reduce prices. They then hold tastings in their own homes. If you’re lucky enough to live near one, you can sample and buy their wine on the spot, or they’ll deliver locally. Martin Knight, the ringmaster, is giving Spectator readers, wherever they live, free delivery for this offer (fuel prices mean that the cost of carriage is increasingly a nightmare; I only hope that we can offer free delivery for a while yet). And the wines, all French, are very good indeed. The Domaine Rives-Blanques Chardonnay 2006 (1) from Limoux,

Lucy Vickery

Competition | 28 June 2008

In Competition No. 2550 you were invited to submit a children’s story or a poem written in the style of an established author who has never published in that genre. The challenge produced a lacklustre response in the main with a few top-notch exceptions. The entry was split evenly between verse and prose, and it’s hats off to the poets, who triumphed this week. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. George Simmers scoops the bonus fiver. I’ve got infants on the brain as I’m having a baby soon. In my absence you’ll be in the capable hands of James Young. Please note the new email address for entries. His

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 28 June 2008

Once again it’s the time of year when Spectator readers start loading up their cars with Andrex, Gentleman’s Relish and Marmite in anticipation of the annual drive to France. Do I have any advice to give? Unsurprisingly I do. For the first hour across the Channel, I quite like to listen to Nostalgie FM. This is a French Oldies station unintentionally rendered hilarious by some French law (probably by J. Toubon) which requires a proportion of songs on French radio to be sung in French. Hence for the first 50 miles of the A10 you can amuse yourself with classics such as: Son petit itsy bitsy teenie weenie tout petit

Edie G-Lush

City Life | 28 June 2008

Life in America’s prisons is famously tough, but at least it allows one inmate, Jonathan Lee Riches, plenty of time to spend filing lawsuits. In his latest legal complaint, Riches — who happens to be a resident of Williamsburg federal correctional institution in West Virginia — has turned his sights on legendary San Francisco-based venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and is attempting to sue him for $43 million. The complaint, in its entirety, reads: ‘Khosla’s fund invests in prison buildings. I’m suffering from no medical treatment. This is a conspiracy. Bhutto was killed on my birthday. I can’t see outside, this is unconstitutional. I seek $43 million.’ One worries that perhaps

Judi Bevan

The veteran batsman who just hates to lose

Judi Bevan meets Sir Martin Sorrell, the hard-driving Eighties entrepreneur who is still chasing acquisitions for the company he created, the advertising giant WPP ‘Building a company is the nearest thing a man can do to giving birth and nurturing a child to maturity,’ says Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and chief executive of WPP. Judi Bevan meets Sir Martin Sorrell, the hard-driving Eighties entrepreneur who is still chasing acquisitions for the company he created, the advertising giant WPP ‘Building a company is the nearest thing a man can do to giving birth and nurturing a child to maturity,’ says Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and chief executive of WPP.

Matthew Lynn

Pound sold to highest bidder

Matthew Lynn on domain name sales In Amsterdam, on the afternoon of 26 June, the pound is finally being sold off. No, Gordon Brown hasn’t decided to repeat his famous trick of dumping a chunk of the nation’s gold reserves at the nadir of the bullion market. Nor has Mervyn King decided the outlook for the British economy is now so grim he might as well sell what he can before taking himself off to Grand Cayman. Instead, ‘£.com’ is up for sale. The winner of the auction for what its owners, with a lively sense of hyperbole describe as the ‘World’s Most Exclusive Financial Domain’, will be able to

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 28 June 2008

In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan used to say: ‘The three big interests any prime minister should beware of taking on are the Brigade of Guards, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Roman Catholic Church.’ The maxim was true enough in those days but 50 years later makes little sense. The Brigade still has a certain leverage, I concede, at the War House, more so than Gunners, Sappers, Greenjackets, etc., but is of no consequence outside strictly army affairs. When did you last see a Tory MP or the chairman of a big quoted company wearing a Brigade tie? The power of the NUM was destroyed by Margaret Thatcher

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 28 June 2008

If a policy is in crisis, hand it to the Post Office — or the Girl Guides Well I never. You think the government has taken its eye off the ball. You think they’ve got nothing to do except rear up in the Daily Mail to tell us how lucky we all are, or pen little slurs in political magazines because they are jealous that they never get to hang out with Shami Chakrabarti. Then, suddenly, they go and hit you with a move of real, breathtaking political genius. They decide to hand over ID cards to the Post Office. That’s a good one, isn’t it? That’s raw, political cynicism

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 28 June 2008

No doubt a Martian arriving on earth for the first time would perceive little difference between an inhabitant of Great Britain and an inhabitant of New Britain (off the coast of New Guinea), except perhaps that the former showed a greater propensity than the latter to get drunk and scream in public. Similarity and difference are what G.E. Moore would have called non-natural qualities, and are in the eye of the beholder: as a woman was overheard to remark in a Dublin bus, now that the Emerald Isle has become an El Dorado, ‘Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, they all look the same to me.’   It was Freud who remarked on

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Returning to Brideshead

Back to Brideshead! Last month I took a fairly relaxed view of the forthcoming Miramax travesty. The only real question would seem to be whether it is enjoyably or enragingly terrible. The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last suspects the latter and seems particularly aggrieved by the treatment Lady Marchmain has received: Yes, the new Brideshead features a villain–Lady Marchmain. Instead of a pious, if clumsy, near-saint, Lady Marchmain is now ambitious and manipulative. “I hope you didn’t let Julia mislead you,” she sternly warns Charles. “Her future is not a question of choice.”… The bizarre reimagining of Lady Marchmain seems to be a result of the excision of Catholicism from the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Always the Germans…

The New Republic, America’s most football-friendly political magazine, asked me to write something mean about the Germans: Today’s question then, is: Does Germany’s record in international soccer confirm: (a) the absence of God, (b) the capriciousness of justice, or (c) the futility of romance? Or: (d) all of the above? Full piece here. Prieviously, in a more generous mood, I defended David Beckham for TNR here.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

When the Oval Office meets “The Office”…

David Frum has an interesting piece in this month’s Prospect on the lessons Barack Obama (or, I suppose, John McCain, will learn from the structural short-comings of George W Bush’s White House organisation. Frum makes the useful point, often overlooked these days, that though Bush was inexperienced in traditional political terms, he was well-versed in the internal office politics dynamics of the White House. Alas, he drew lessons that made it easier for the White House to function, at the expense of its ability to operate effectively. As Frum puts it: McClellan was not alone in being deficient at his job. George W Bush brought most of his core first-term