Society

Sunday

7 Sep 2008

You’re ever Alone with a Strand (or a government consultation)

What a shower. From Simon Clark’s Taking Liberties blog, comes this unsurprising element of the government’s latest consultation on smoking: “Question 12: Do you believe that more should be done by the Government to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke within private dwellings or in vehicles used primarily for private purposes? If so, what do you think could be done?” This is, I assume, a consultation that only applies to England but doubtless there’s something just as depressing and invasive being planned in Scotland too. The sad thing, of course, is that the Tories will be little, if at all, better. It’s enough to make one consider moving to the Matanuska-Susitna

James Forsyth

Clegg’s electorally confused tax strategy

Nick Clegg’s interview with the Sunday Telegraph today is a punchy affair. He derides the Tories as “the flaky party” on the economy and tells Melissa Kite that the Lib Dems are looking to go further than the 4p cut in the basic rate of income tax that they have already promised. Now, those of us who support easing the tax burden should be happy about this. A Lib Dem policy of tax cuts means that it can hardly be portrayed as a policy of the extreme right and should encourage the Tories to offer some more before the next election. But it seems an odd strategic decision for the

James Forsyth

The mess that was Iraq policy

Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush administration is being serialised by the Washington Post this week and is a grim reminder of just how badly Iraq strategy was run for so long. This exchange between Condoleezza Rice and General George Casey in Iraq in, presumably, November 2005 illustrates the almost total lack of policy co-ordination: “Excuse me, ma’am, what’s ‘clear, hold, build’?” Rice looked a little surprised. “George, that’s your strategy.” “Ma’am, if it’s my strategy, don’t you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?” To be sure, President Bush deserves credit for deciding on and pushing

James Forsyth

Fear factor

“If GB goes down, he’s going to take everybody with him.” John Rentoul reports, in his column today, that this is what Nick Brown has told various Labour backbenchers. Leaving aside the sub-Godfather nature of the rhetoric, it is clear that the Brownites have decided to fight the enemy they know how to beat: their internal opponents in the Labour party. It appears that there is now a concerted effort on to make Brown’s critics in the Labour party fear him again. Meanwhile, the Tories have a largely free ride. Conservative Home reveals that the Tories intend to use this space to issue a more limited commitment to matching Labour’s

James Forsyth

The dithering party

Andrew Rawnsley hits the nail on the head when he says that a “Prime Minister cannot be on perpetual probation”. At some point soon if it is not to go down to total disaster at the next election, Labour will either have to back or sack Brown. But as Rawnsley points out, Labour is in too much of a shambles to do either. There is, though, a reason other than incompetence preventing Labour from making a decision. Everyone assumes that the Brownites will do all they can, and that is still an awful lot, to stop whoever topples Gordon from succeeding him. So, if you’re one of the non-Miliband possible

Saturday

6 Sep 2008

Tony Parsons

Diary – 6 September 2008

The earthquake wakes me up. One moment I am sleeping and the next it feels as though I am on a waterbed with Hugh Hefner and four Playboy Bunnies. All I can do is hold on. There is an earthquake every day in Japan and most of them feel like mild indigestion. But then you get this kind, the scary kind, and you immediately wonder — is this the big one? When it is happening, you just don’t know. All you can do is go to the window and see if buildings are collapsing, roads buckling and the earth opening up. This isn’t the big one. On the Richter scale,

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 6 September 2008

Monday Everyone’s gone Palin crazy! Poppy, Jenny, Lucy and Ellie all came in with their hair teased into frightening up-dos this morning. I might have to go through Mummy’s wardrobe and see if she’s got any hairpieces left over from the Sixties. Must say, I find this Sarah woman deeply scary. I don’t mind that she thinks the earth is flat — this sort of daring new thinking I find quite refreshing. It’s the picture of her sat in an office draped in dead bears and mooses that worries me. I’m as partial to a bit of fox-hunting as the next Tory Girl, but I’ve never much liked staring at

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 6 September 2008

The Earl of Cottenham’s surname is Pepys. He doesn’t pronounce it peeps, like the diarist, but peppiss, stressed on the first syllable. It’s almost impossible to know how to pronounce English family names. The former deputy editor of this magazine, Andrew Gimson, pronounces his with a soft g. Jeffrey Bernard stressed the second syllable of his. James Michie, the late Jaspistos, rhymed with sticky. Christopher Fildes’s name rhymes with wilds. The BBC booklets on pronunciation published in the 1930s, about which I have been writing this month, had reached number seven by 1939, ‘Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some British Family Names and Titles’, still edited by Arthur

The Spectator

Letters | 6 September 2008

Heartbeats of delight Sir: Few would disagree with Paul Johnson’s view that prolonging the human lifespan is of little value if it merely gives us extra years of Alzheimer’s and debility (And another thing, 30 August). But we do not all live for the average span, and one reason for the increase in average age since the early 19th century has been the massive reduction in child mortality. It is difficult to believe that in his historical studies Johnson has not encountered the miseries caused by the death of beloved children. Numerous books, for example, describe the pain which Charles Darwin suffered as a result of the death of his

Alex James

Slow Life | 6 September 2008

Brad, who has been my constant companion for the last couple of months, was just starting to appreciate the strange power of television. The terrible authority, the ridiculous effects of time on the small screen had taken a while to become apparent. By the time the first show went out, we’d already been filming for a month, shadowed by camera crews, asking us to say things again, do things again, explain how we felt about this, that and the other, and after the first episode he was a bit ruffled. ‘I can’t believe it! Four weeks of cameras and microphones and I was only on screen for three seconds! What

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 6 September 2008

I’m down in the bar underneath the stand at half time and everyone’s exceedingly jolly. The team isn’t playing badly for a change. At least we’re trying. Plus, we’ve got a new bloke who can actually pitch over an accurate corner kick. And the sun’s shining. The police run a tight ship at football matches these days. We aren’t allowed to stand up during the game, or smoke, or consume alcohol. And we have to watch what we say or sing because certain subjects are strictly off-limits. Shirt-sleeved policemen sitting in a control room closely monitor our behaviour on CCTV screens. They are assisted in this task by hundreds of

Taki

High Life | 6 September 2008

Gstaad ‘Goblins and devils have long vanished from the Alps, and so many years have passed without any well-authenticated account of a discovery of a dragon that dragons too may be considered to have migrated.’ So the Alpine Club was informed in May 1877 by Mr Henry Gotch, the secre-tary, and the news set off great celebrations among sporty but superstitious Englishmen. The golden age of mountaineering, as it was then known, began in 1854 and ended with a bang around 1865, the year five Englishmen fell to their death climbing the Matterhorn. Among the dead was Lord Francis Douglas, whose older brother went after Oscar Wilde some 30 years

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 6 September 2008

The one advantage of missing last Saturday’s race day at Sandown, thanks to being encased at the time in a throbbing MRI scanner at St Thomas’s Hospital, was the chance of going Sunday racing instead at Folkestone. Posh it may not be. Trainer George Margarson and I were probably two of only ten people on the track wearing ties around the tree-shaded paddock. But Folkestone knows how to do family fun. There were rugs on the lawn around the goldfish pond, and those who weren’t simultaneously ferrying three gargantuan burgers back to their companions were queueing for the ice-cream van. Everyone seemed to be there with children. And it was

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 6 September 2008

In the current issue of Empire there is a piece by Bob Weide, the director of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, in which he says that the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it. I was not aware of this until now, but I can’t say I’m surprised. On my first visit to the set, I went bounding up to Kirsten and said, ‘So, have you fallen in love with me yet?’ She had been cast as the female lead in the film and what I meant was, ‘Has the character you’re playing fallen in love with the

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 6 September 2008

Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food — ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term — could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been surprised. It is largely to Virgil in the final book of his ‘farming-manual’ Georgics (c. 29 bc) that we owe our understanding of the extent to which the ancients saw in bees a model for human life. ‘I will set out in order for your admiration,’ Virgil explains, ‘the spectacle of a tiny world, with its great-hearted leaders, its customs and pursuits, its people and battles.’ It is as if bees alone shared in the divine

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 6 September 2008

Q. I have lived in Indochina for more than six years but I am still invited to various society weddings, exhibition openings, concerts and parties in London. Here in Cochinchina plenipotentiaries are kind enough to include me to garden parties on their national days and receptions when they have visiting dignitaries. Even my host government extends its welcome on occasion. My problem is, how to display these invitations in a house without fireplaces and therefore without mantelpieces? One doesn’t want it assumed that one has become a social pariah just because one lives overseas and it would be a shame if visiting friends failed to realise that I am a

Alex Massie

Biden Brings It

Joe Biden is good and Conor Friedersdorf is right: “Victories won on style are pyrrhic for political parties, and poison for a nation. Because sooner or later, substance always matters.“ This is true. The Palin Punt is, in some ways, outrageous. In others it’s designed to appeal to a somewhat adolescent view of politics. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world; but nor is it enough. I understand why they want to hide Palin away for a week, so she can hit the books. But sooner or later she’s gotta come out. (It’s possible to like Palin – or the idea of Palin – personally, appreciate the stylistic

Fraser Nelson

The British reaction to Sarah Palin

I’m back in Britain now, and had not prepared myself for the reaction to Sarah Palin. The Guardian has a piece softly sneering at her Christianity (Headline: “This person loves Jesus”) and questioning her experience. In America, the feminists have kept quiet, knowing they can’t question her experience and not Obama’s. Why demand that a woman going for VP needs a longer CV than a man going for the presidency? By the end of her first day as Mayor of Wasilla she had more executive experience than Barack Obama or Joe Biden put together. Yet here, the gloves are off. I’ve just listened to Any Questions with women getting stuck

James Forsyth

A warning shot across Gordon’s bow

In the last week there have been several stories about how Stephen Carter, the PM’s chief strategist, is to be demoted or moved; Brown can hardly bear to look at him any more according to one source. But Patrick Wintour’s piece in The Guardian today suggests that Carter isn’t planning on going quietly. Wintour reports that Carter has apparently also lost the confidence of Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at Number Ten. Yet, Carter isn’t intending to resign. Friends of Carter tell Wintour that: “He is far more effective and intelligent than the people in No 10 briefing against him. He is also a very resilient guy and is not

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 6 September 2008

A friend of mine, a professor at an Ivy League university, specialises in research into transgenic mice, learning how DNA modifications affect intelligence and memory. A few years ago, after some genetic tinkering, he created a batch of mice of quite spectacular dimwittedness. They were useless in the maze, ditzily wandering about with no sense of spatial awareness and incapable of finding the cheese after repeated attempts. This wasn’t the only interesting thing about these mice. Every one of them had a most unusual pigmentation, at least for mice: they were blond. This was huge. ‘You’ve found the blond gene — phone the Sun!’ ‘Um, I was thinking more in