Society

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Waste and waste again

Alasdair Palmer’s column in The Sunday Telegraph chronicles how the government makes the same mistakes again and again wasting more and more of our money yet no one carries the can for this. Palmer cites a Public Accounts Committee report into how the Home Office managed to spend £29 million on considering whether to build a centre to hold asylum seekers. Despite spending seven million pounds on consultants, the Home Office managed to sign contracts with the builders before planning permission had been obtained. So when the project was cancelled, the Home Office had to pay out £7.9 million in cancellation fees. What is most frustrating about this, as Alasdair

Saturday

Alex James

Hooked on Beethoven

Stephen Lipson, a record producer, lives in the village up the road. Well, he was very pleased with himself, glowing with satisfaction like someone who’d just finished a particularly abstruse crossword. Back in the parish after a couple of weeks in Los Angeles, where he’d been making the new American Idol record. He didn’t even bore me with playing the record itself like musicians always do, but he told me how he’d played everything on it because American session players are all muppets, and then four hours after he’d finished it, it was number one on iTunes. ‘And it still is!’ said Penny, his wife. ‘And top of the Billboard

Jeremy Clarke

Knock, knock

Three or four times a week I walk down the road and rap twice with the heavy knocker on Margery’s home-made front door. Always twice, with the same force and tempo, so that she and the dog know that it’s me. And the dog, Joe, an old fat collie, always replies with joyful, musical barking because he knows I’ve come to take him out for his walk. Margery moves slowly, so there is usually an interval between my double knock and her opening the door. Since her stroke she’s lost her appetite, and when she finally opens the door she’s always a little more skeletal than when I saw her

Taki

Belgrade belle

I never thought I’d see it, a beauty winning a major title, at least not since the Williams sisters and the ghastly Maria Sharapova came on the scene. But there she was last weekend, an olive-skinned enchantress winning the French Open and charming everyone with her femininity and grace. If only Ana Ivanovic did not use the word ‘guys’ so much, she’d be perfect. But, what the heck, that’s the price you pay for mixing with Americans on the circuit. Will her looks last? Not if she keeps playing they won’t, so let’s enjoy her while she still has them aged 21. Nothing kills beauty quicker than sweating and battling

Robin Oakley

Slowly but surely

You don’t have to be a brilliant rider to make it as a trainer. As jump jockeys, Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs never rose above the middle ranks. Both have since proved to be exceptional at training jumpers. In ten years as a jump jockey Tom Dascombe rode only 96 winners, but as a trainer he is making his mark a lot faster. Unlike Nicholls and Hobbs, though, and despite spending five years with leading jumps trainer Martin Pipe, whom he rates as ‘a genius’, Tom is concentrating on training Flat horses. The explanation lies in simple economics: ‘I started buying all my horses on spec [without having been commissioned

The Spectator

Letters | 14 June 2008

42 days Sir: Thank goodness for Matthew d’Ancona’s clarity of mind on 42-day detention (‘Jacqui Smith’s vote of confidence’, 7 June). People who want to be provoked will always find an excuse. If they are subtle, they will manufacture a grievance based on an issue about which their sworn enemies disagree — and then exploit the difference. Critics who claim that increasing pre-charge detention will be a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for terrorism have fallen into this terrorist trap. Such critics acquired their views in the age of Trotskyism, when the Trots were trying to provoke the establishment into violence in the belief that it would speed up the revolution by exposing

Arpad Busson

Diary – 14 June 2008

Another Ark fundraising dinner has come and gone and I can finally get back to running my business. More importantly I can focus on the programmes that the dinner paid for. The stress started in January as Ian Wace (my partner in Ark) and I planned a thousand details for Europe’s largest charity event. It was worth it. Not only was this year’s dinner at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich the most magnificent and magical to date but we managed to raise £25.8 million in one night. It is a fabulous sum considering that most of our donors come from the financial sector and have been witnessing torrid

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 14 June 2008

Monday Fraught morning. Drew the short straw and had to take Mrs Spelperson her camomile tea but couldn’t find her. Looked everywhere. Under the desk, in the filing cabinet. Nowhere. So I couldn’t tick the chart confirming that she had been checked on and given light refreshments. I expect she’s climbed out of the window to go to choir practice again. Dave still furious and says God may forgive her but he certainly won’t. If it was up to him, he would invent a new commandment, Thou Shalt Not Fiddle Thy Commons Expenses, the breaking of which would be eternal damnation and losing the whip. He was raging: ‘What’s the

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 14 June 2008

Did my wife really mean it when she said I didn’t have to be present at the birth? By the time you read this, I will be the proud father of another baby. That is the plan, anyway. My wife has had enough of being pregnant and has booked herself into hospital to be induced. The actual due date is 19 June, but her midwife says it is perfectly acceptable for the baby to come out a week early. When Caroline informed me of this I was a bit put out. ‘But darling,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lunch date with an important television executive that day. It could take

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 14 June 2008

We are happy that terrorist suspects be held for 28 days without charge. So there is no problem about the principle. But the government now wishes to extend this to 42 days, and all hell breaks loose. But on what grounds? Since the principle of holding without charge has been established, the time-scale is neither here nor there. Or is it? Though there was no such thing as a state-controlled prosecution service in the ancient world — all actions were brought privately — there was intense discussion about what the law was for and how it should be applied. As we saw two weeks ago, Cicero was in no doubt

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 June 2008

Q. I have started receiving regular emails from a very old friend inviting me to avail myself of the services of the wealth management company in which he is a partner. Since I am penniless, and from the uncharacteristically humour-free tenor of these letters, I can tell that I was never meant to be a recipient, and that my email address has somehow osmosed from his personal contacts to his customer database. That other, equally impecunious old friends have received the same letters would seem to confirm this. But we know that pointing out that our respective net worths preclude us from becoming his clients would greatly embarrass him (he

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 14 June 2008

Does it matter when we lose battles as language changes? In Oxford the other day, I saw another piece of evidence that in the High Street has changed to on the High Street. A newsagent’s near Teddy Hall has for some time been called Honey’s of the High. It is now usually called Honey’s on the High. I don’t much like the change, but it seems triumphant. A change of a different kind that triumphed two or three decades ago was in the pronunciation of sonorous. It is now stressed on the first syllable, and that indeed is how I say it. Formerly, it was stressed on the second syllable.

The Spectator

Coffee House is looking for interns

Coffee House is offering internships to students and recent graduates.  Successful applicants will be able to write for Coffee House, work on the website, and experience behind-the-scenes life here at The Spectator.  For more information contact phoskin @ spectator.co.uk

Henrietta Bredin

Arise Sir Mark

Hurrah for Sir Mark Elder. A knighthood richly deserved and, many would say, long overdue. And with splendid timing he’s conducting a revival of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Royal Opera House, opening night this coming Monday. Should be a thrilling evening and his curtain call at the end could be one to remember.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tim Russert RIP

Tim Russert was the finest American political interviewer of his generation. People in Washington used to talk about the Russert primary, the idea that a candidate had only proved they could stand up to the scrutiny of a presidential campaign if they could get through the full-hour long interview on the show Russert hosted Meet the Press. What was so refreshing about Russert was that his interviews were tough but infused with a reverence for the process, a love for democracy. He never sneered at the politicians he interviewed but he did hold them to account more effectively than anyone else on television. Perhaps, Russert’s most memorable moment came on

Lucy Vickery

Hot property | 14 June 2008

In Competition No. 2548 you were invited to submit sales particulars for a property well known in literature in your best estate-agent-ese. It was a capacious entry, which benefited from unrivalled clichés and florid, tautological prose. You aped the estate agent’s way of accentuating the positive well. We all know that ‘bijou’ translates as ‘broom cupboard’ and that ‘convenient for motorway access’ would be more accurately rendered as ‘suitable for the hard of hearing’. I was tempted to put in an offer on St Simeon Stylites’ pillar, described thus by Elizabeth Emerk: ‘Pillars for Pillocks is pleased to offer this unique detached dwelling near old Antioch — effectively a sublimely

Ed Balls

No child left behind

The Conservatives think that education is about selecting the lucky few, says Ed Balls. But there is no reason why excellence and opportunity shouldn’t be for all It’s just over a year since David Willetts made his thoughtful but ultimately fatal pronouncement: ‘academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it’. Those nine words — anathema to most Conservatives — led to a civil war inside the party, a messy U-turn and the reshuffling of Mr Willetts to a new job. The issue of whether the Tories would change the law and support new grammar schools being built — such as the one being proposed in Buckinghamshire — remains unresolved.

David Bosco

‘If we die today, you will be responsible’

David Bosco accompanies the UN Security Council on its visit to Darfur and finds that even meeting the victims of the conflict can’t stiffen the Council’s resolve Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem was holding court last Thursday in the VIP lounge at Khartoum International Airport. Sudan’s voluble United Nations ambassador was accompanying the UN Security Council as it prepared for the short flight to northern Darfur. Many hoped that the Council’s visit to the war-torn region would bring diplomats of the member states face to face with the suffering, and so provoke a strong condemnation of Sudanese war crimes. Instead, all our mission really served to highlight was the lack of resolve among

Simon Hoggart

June Wine Club

A visit to the London International Wine Fair is, paradoxically, a sobering experience. With about 30,000 different wines on show, it is impossible to sample more than a minuscule number — the worst anyone can be accused of is binge-sipping. The stallholders want you to try all their wines, even if there are a dozen of them. My technique: ‘I’m in a great hurry. Let me try your best wine’, was usually met by ‘All ours are excellent. Now, I will start at the beginning…’ I acquired a list of all the best-selling — by value — alcoholic drinks in the UK. You may be surprised to learn that the

Rachel Johnson

Even middle-class children are suffering from neglect

And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends? So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we? Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a