Society

Saturday

Alex James

Slow Life | 9 August 2008

Colin wanted to meet me in Aldsworth. I’d never heard of it but it was only about five miles away, between where I got married and where the reception was. Colin was the guy behind the British Mars shot a few years back — Colin Pillinger, the man who, given half a chance, could do for science what Damien Hirst has done for art: popularise, subvert and sophisticate at a stroke. You may remember his spacecraft Beagle 2 crash-landed on Mars on Christmas Day 2003. Space science is the great adventure of the 21st century. The first man on Mars has been born, no doubt about it. Colin knows that.

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 9 August 2008

As we went in, our hostess mentioned that the restaurant had three Michelin stars, but at 78 years of age the chef felt he would rather live without the daily pressure of living up to three stars and had requested Michelin to reduce it to two. We were shown to our table and I chose to sit with my back to the large picture window, through which could be seen half a dozen mountains and a couple of lakes, and faced instead a blank wall. I thought I’d let others enjoy the view as we ate. But virtue has its own rewards, and after a few moments this blank wall

Taki

High Life | 9 August 2008

On board S/Y Bushido Sailing into Athens, renamed ‘cemento-polis’ by green-loving Athenians, can be a traumatic experience, for one’s crew, that is. Coming in from the west, crossing Pireaus, my German cook Daniel could not believe his eyes. ‘Was ist das? Das ist furchtbar, abscheulich!’ Daniel is young, a very good cook and as good a pick-up artist as I have come across in my travels. His specialities are English and Dutch girls. ‘I know you will not like me because I’m German but you will come on board for a drink…ja?’ Piraeus now looks like the Albanian coast, without a single tree or bush to relieve the eye from

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 9 August 2008

Where there’s a will . . . Observing a short-eared owl beating over the marshes like a huge, predatory moth, an osprey finishing off the fish meal he had snatched a few minutes before from Loch Don, an otter carrying home his supper across a rippling inlet were highlights of a few days on the Isle of Mull this week. But the most illuminating moment was watching a kestrel twisting and diving in aerial combat with a buzzard. The buzzard was three times his size but it was the smaller raptor who performed the aerobatic equivalent of kicking sand in the big fella’s face. Finally the buzzard flapped off with

The Spectator

Letters | 9 August 2008

Part-time heroes Sir: I noted with interest the article about ‘lazy firemen’ (‘Britain’s firefighters are underworked and inflexible’, 26 July). I am Lincolnshire’s Chief Fire Officer with more than 35 years’ service, and though there was much truth in what Leo McKinstry said, what he failed to address was the progress made by many fire authorities with part-time staff who are not represented in the unions castigated in your article. More than half of my fire stations employ part-time staff who respond to the most urgent medical emergencies either in a car or in a fire engine and provide immediate life-saving intervention while the professionally qualified paramedics are en route.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 9 August 2008

Q. My daughter has left her appalling husband and come to live with me while her new house is being made ready. Today a parcel arrived with the usual sort of impenetrable wrapping which needs to be cut through with secateurs. I attacked the packaging with gusto and threw it on to the fire. Only then did I see the delivery note which showed that the parcel was not for me but for my daughter. Inside was a battery-driven ‘erotic aid’. Clearly I cannot mortify my daughter by handing her the device, but nor can I repackage it and put it through the post again as it would then be

Clemency Burtonhill

Diary – 9 August 2008

One of the great adventures of being an actor is filming abroad, when suddenly you have the opportunity not only to visit, but actually to work somewhere else; to feel temporarily part of another city’s fabric rather than floating along its surface. This, then, comes to you from glorious, sweltering Rome, or more precisely from the Cavalieri Hilton, whose view over this ancient, unreal city, is quite breathtaking. I’m here doing costume fittings for The Red Priest, a movie shooting later this summer. Luca, my tailor at Farani, the historical costumiers, is clearly a genius but has perhaps something of the demonic about him. As he laces my 18th-century corset,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 9 August 2008

Those Miliband boys are clever. I was trying to discover what they stood for, and I thought I’d found something interesting in a speech by Ed Miliband. Then I realised I was mistaken. ‘I want a society where there is intergenerational equity,’ he said in a speech to Compass (not the investor and analyst group of that name but the ‘membership organisation promoting left-wing debate in modern Britain’). Perhaps the investment red herring made me think that ‘intergenerational equity’ meant leaving property to one’s children, without having it confiscated by death duties. No such luck. To Ed’s interlocutors, ‘intergenerational equity’ is to do with ‘sustainable development’, global warming and all

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 9 August 2008

At first, I thought the reason the British Consul General in Los Angeles had agreed to have lunch with me was because he knew who I was. Before setting off on my annual pilgrimage to Hollywood, I had emailed Bob Peirce to see if he might be able to squeeze in a quick drink. I was interested in chatting to him about BritWeek, an annual celebration of the Old Country that he inaugurated last year. To my astonishment, he suggested we have lunch at the Four Seasons, the grandest hotel in Beverly Hills. ‘Perhaps he’s read one of my books,’ I thought. It didn’t take long for the scales to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 August 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been rather belittled on his death. Not knowing any Russian, I cannot judge his prose style, but when people complain that he was unrelentingly serious, they are applying the wrong criteria. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic, and obsessed with truth-telling in a world of lies. His mission led him to believe that no time must be wasted, no compromises made. This made him difficult in some ways, in literature and in life, but what of it? His compassion consisted of what the word really means — a suffering with others — rather than an easy friendliness. No doubt Isaiah and Ezekiel were potentially tricky dinner companions, but then they

Peter Hoskin

What price oil?

As Morus writes in an excellent post over at Political Betting, the escalation of the conflict in Georgia will cause more than a few headaches for Western policymakers.  Most of their worries will centre around the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline – a pipeline which carries oil from the Caspian Sea to Turkey, from where it is shipped out to Western Europe and the US.  Problem is, that pipeline runs through Georgia – at points, it’s only 55km away from the South Ossetia region where much of the fighting is concentrated.  The Russians are certainly bombing in its vicinity, and the Georgians are claiming that the pipeline has been deliberately targeted, although not yet hit. But the main worry isn’t that the pipeline might

Daniel Kawczynski

WEB EXCLUSIVE: An apology to Melanie Phillips

Daniel Kawcyznski MP apologises to Spectator contributor Melanie Phillips I am glad to have this opportunity to respond to Melanie Phillips’s criticism of my involvement in the International Development Committee’s report on “The Humanitarian and Development Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” I’d like to apologise to her for my reaction and explain to her and her readers why I responded so passionately to her assertion, “shame on all of them.” It is one of the ironies of our age that as more and more information is available, the less thoroughly it is sometimes read. There are many positives that result from this wealth of information, from the increased oversight of

Simon Hoggart

August Spectator Wine Club

El Vino is the celebrated, even revered, wine bar in Fleet Street. Lawyers and the crustier type of journalist drink there, usually selecting wines from the old reliables: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne. Château Thames Embankment is Rumpole’s soubriquet for their house claret, and very good it is too. But El Vino now has several other branches, and they attract a younger crowd, more likely to go for lively, fruity New World wines. The company now combines tradition and innovation with considerable success. So we can start with the two house wines, the red Velvin (6) and the white Choisi de Boyier (1). They’re not allowed to say so, but I can

James Young

Competition | 9 August 2008

In Competition No 2556 you were invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. They are two of the most popular characters in English fiction, but it’s hard to think of two more disparate ones; Bertie, the chump, always in some sort of soup and needing Jeeves to free him from unsuitable romantic entanglements; Bond, the spook, both gunman and swordsman, in a state of perpetual priapism. Nearly all of you chose Bertie as narrator, which is as it should be; I expect Bond will eventually go the way of the action heroes of my childhood Dick

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 9 August 2008

Toby Young in last week’s Spectator remarked on the peculiar malice, as he saw it, of the online comments posted in response to his articles. He has a point. The people who post comments are not the same reverential folk who form a paper’s traditional print readership. On the other hand, at a time when the Telegraph and the Guardian attract more than 18 million online readers each month, your online readership is no longer a small niche you can safely ignore. Why then do they seem so nasty? Most people who comment on writings on- line aren’t nasty at all. Responses to blog posts are often complimentary and constructive.

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 9 August 2008

So it was 2018 and the government was in trouble. Real trouble. In newspapers and magazines, on Dame Emily Maitlis’s Newsnight and Davina McCall’s Today programme, one question was being asked. Would anybody ever vote Conservative again? At this stage, by-election disasters were not unexpected. The loss of Crewe and Nantwich had been on the cards for years and Enfield, although symbolic, was hardly a surprise. Fulham had been a shock. Henley all the more so. Lord Johnson (of Henley) was particularly upset by the latter. As he said to the Radio Times, ‘to call this lot a shambles would be an insult to other shambles, such as erm…’ Although

Michael Prescott

A film that shows how gutless Britain has become

Michael Prescott — who was a passenger on the King’s Cross train on 7/7 — applauds a movie inspired by the terrorist attacks. But why is nobody keen to distribute it? The world has an estimated 798 billionaires. Thousands more people are each worth hundreds of million. Any one of them is in a position to blow £8 million on a whim. Only one of them has decided to gamble that amount on a film about how Britain views its Muslims in the age of Islamist terror. Aron Govil is an Indian-born Hindu who has lived in New York since 1970, gradually accruing wealth through his activities in industry and

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Temptations of the Leader Page

In an editorial written, judging from its cadences, by Leon Wieseltier, welcoming the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, The New Republic argues that: Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, it is impossible to deny that it has had the effect of delegitimating “humanitarian intervention” for a new generation. This new diffidence must be resisted. It is what the mass murderers and the mass rapists are counting on. You cannot be against the genocide in Darfur and against the use of force to end it. Otherwise your opposition to the atrocity is purely gestural, and merely a display of your admiring sense of yourself. It makes no sense to be

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Notice for Edinburgh Readers

And art lovers… You still have time to pop into the Flaubert Gallery in Stockbridge (opposite The Baillie, an excellent location for a post-purchasing pint) where you will find an exhibition of my sister’s excellent paintings. The show closes this weekend but there are still some fine pictures available for you to purchase… London-based readers should not fret however, as Claudia will be showing some of her work in the big smoke in October.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Trouble in the Caucasus

Far from Beijing, Russia and Georgia kick-off in South Ossetia. I suspect that this is going to prompt people to raise the whole “should Georgia join NATO” thing all over again. Now, perhaps putting Georgia on the road to NATO membership might have cooled tensions in the region. But the opposite seems more likely given Russia’s likely reaction to what it would see as a provocation. And, frankly, it’s a great relief that Germany, among others, stopped the move to make Georgia a member of the alliance,  given the potential for trouble if Russia and a member of the alliance start fighting one another. It’s hard to argue that South