Society

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

National Enquirer (More or Less) Vindicated

John Edwards admits affair with campaign staffer  –  but denies fathering her child – in an interview with ABC News. I remember when this was rumoured last year everyone of my Democratic friends admitted that they believed the story. It just seemed plausible. Doubtless, much of the mud about to be thrown at Edwards will point to the fact that his wife, Elizabeth, was fighting cancer since early 2007 when the disease, which had been in remission, returned. I imagine this is why – perhaps honestly! –  he continues to deny paternity since the child was born this year… Trouble is: his denials don’t cut much mustard. Nor does claiming

Vidhi Doshi

Comparing Cabinets

Just to recommend a great post over on Iain Dale’s blog comparing Thatcher’s 1988 Cabinet with Brown’s 2008 vintage.  Do Brown and Darling rank up to Margaret Thatcher, Nigel Lawson et al?  Or is it, as Iain says, a case of the lightweights against the heavyweights?

Peter Hoskin

Risk aversion therapy

If you want some grisly reading for a Friday afternoon, I’d recommend the National Risk Register, released by the Cabinet Office today.  It outlines the “range of emergencies that might have a major impact on all, or significant parts of, the UK”.  A welcome act of transparency – I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to know what our government’s worrying about, and – by extension – what we should be worried about. Not that we should worry too much, mind.  The aim of the document is to make us more informed, rather than paranoid.  And, for that reason, it avoids providing a straighforward ranking of threats – a terror top-ten, so to speak.  Instead there’s a

The Spectator

Two reminders

Just to remind you that… We’re running a Q&A with Eric Pickles.  Go here to submit your questions. And we’ll be posting our first Sunday Essay this weekend.  For more information on how you can submit an essay for consideration, click here.

Brian Cullen

Brown’s PR people should rein him in

Gordon Brown has written in the literary anthology Wow 366 that he had a boyhood fascination with Antarctic explorers such as Captain Scott.  It surely won’t be long before the cogs start whirring for commentators (in fact it’s already started) on the similarities between Brown’s premiership and Scott’s Antarctic expedition, which ended in his – and his whole party’s – deaths. Brown really doesn’t do himself many favours by proudly telling us his fascination with doomed figures – or how he most identifies with the (questionable) character of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.  Like it or not we live in an age of spin.  It must be hard to spin this

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Australian Summary

Having come-off second-best in our West Indies game, I’m duty bound to suggest (gently) that I’ve had the better of Norm in the Australian leg of the series. In large part, of course, this reflects the luxury of being able to select Don Bradman with the first pick, just as Norm benefitted from choosing Gary Sobers first last time. In each case the player picking first has been able to acquire two players for the price of one. That’s quite an advantage. Having Bradman in my side permitted me to pick Keith Miller second, to provide balance, and my two favourite Aussie fast bowlers with my third and fourth selections.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Simon Gray, RIP

Sad news. Simon Gray, the playwright and memoirist, has died. Just last month I read the latest, and, I suppose, final installment of The Smoking Diaries, a wonderful, funny, poignant set of memoirs that I recommend without the slightest reservation. More importantly, sad because he was one of my father’s oldest friends from Cambridge days way back when. Not many of them left. Booze and tobacco and all that. Telegraph obituary here. The Guardian’s Michael Billington here. And a characteristically good Simon Hattenstone interview here. Understandably Gray rather disapproved of the notion that his memoirs may outlive his plays, but that’s the nature of the respective genres. But I can’t

Brian Cullen

Maybe not so courageous

There is an irony about the arrest of Tibetan freedom protesters in Beijing yesterday. The mother of Lucy Fairbrother – one of those detained – was quoted as saying:  “If my daughter’s going to be put in prison for anything I’m glad it’s for a human rights protest.” Except, of course, that she wasn’t put in prison.  In addition to attracting great attention, the timing of the protest also means that those arrested (two Brits and two Americans) have already been deported and arrived home safely.    Whatever the rights or wrongs of the protest – I’ll leave those to CoffeeHousers to decide – we should consider for a moment how

Kaz Mochlinski

On your marks

The worst place to try to put Beijing’s Olympic Games into context is perhaps actually Beijing. Arrive in the city at present and the overwhelming impression is of a modern, successful, prosperous, happy and western-looking population, greeting the forthcoming sporting festival with a greater pride and joy than it has ever previously been received with. The Games of the XXIX Olympiad will superficially be the grandest in history, staged in venues that are already being seen as architectural landmarks, with every ticket for every event in Beijing sold out in advance. Even the small bore shooting. And yet the International Olympic Committee seems constantly ill at ease and takes immense

The Spectator

Rod Liddle takes on green taxes

In this week’s magazine, Rod Liddle provides a brilliantly acerbic take on the Government’s green agenda.  Here’s the bottom line: “The truth is, I suspect, that you can ‘prove’ almost any old rubbish to be environmentally sound or otherwise — the science is so inexact and so open to manipulation. This isn’t an excuse for doing nothing, but it is a good reason for suspecting the motives of any and all politicians when they use the word ‘green’. It is beginning to be seen as a gigantic con perpetrated against the very people who can least afford it.”. You can read, and comment on, the full article here.

Matthew Dancona

10 years after the US embassy attacks, al Qaeda is winning

Nothing on God’s Earth would persuade me to wish al Qaeda a “Happy Anniversary”, ten years to the day since its simultaneous attacks on US Embassies in the East African capital cities of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, at the cost of more than 200 lives, most of them African civilians. Are they winning? Sadly, I think they are. The operational strength of AQ and its affiliates ebbs and flows – that is in the nature of a global franchise that has moved beyond the old-fashioned IRA cellular structure to something much looser and more organic. But the West has undoubtedly marched into the elephant trap dug by Osama bin Laden.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Paris Hilton’s Energy Policy

Give her publicist a medal. Seriously. Did the entire campaign just jump the shark? See Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad and more funny videos on FunnyOrDie.com See more funny videos at Funny or Die I think it may have. (Thanks for the tip, via Facebook, GFR)

Brian Cullen

Is French reconciliation with Rwanda possible?

Yesterday Iain Dale wrote that the only French response to a new report on the Rwandan genocide – which implicates former president Francois Mitterand and ex-prime minister Dominique de Villepin – would be for Nicolas Sarkozy to fly to Kigali to apologise. He shouldn’t hold his breath.  Ever since the event, France has been wholly reluctant to acknowledge any role in the tragedy – or make any sort of apology.  This has been true regardless of the administration in power, and there’s no reason to think Sarkozy would behave much differently.  The 1994 genocide shames all the western nations who could have wielded influence to end it – regardless of

Peter Hoskin

Riddled with vermin

There are few blunter indictments of this Government’s mismanagement of the health service than the news that numerous hospitals are ‘infested with vermin’. Over £90 billion of public money has been splashed on the health service in the past year alone – in real terms, that’s double what was spent on it in 1999. For all that so-called investment, you’d think we’d get cleanliness and hygiene in our hospitals. Instead, we’ve had rats, maggots and superbugs. The NHS is 60 this year. As a birthday present, Labour’s dragged it through the muck.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

All these green taxes and rules are just witless nods to fashion

The measures on ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, policing of wheelie bins and surcharges on plastic bags are based on scientific fads and, often, the government’s greed for taxpayers’ money, says Rod Liddle. The Third World won’t pay the price, and nor will big business — but we will For one weekend each year every beach in this peaceful part of the world is taken over by gypsies, and the locals (and the handful of Western tourists) steer well clear and lock up their possessions, daughters, etc. I wandered along the shoreline of one previously idyllic cove just as the pikeys were packing up to leave on Sunday evening. And I had a

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 6 August 2008

Splendours and miseries of the Queen’s English in the 21st century The wonderful thing about language, and especially English, with its enormous vocabulary, is the existence of groups of words with broadly similar meanings but each of which conveys something slightly different. Such subtle distinctions add to the richness of meaning, in speech and writing, and to the pleasure of using words. And the sense changes over time, as historic events add moral overtones or undertones to particular words. Take, for instance, the group of words meaning ‘friend’, of which there are about 30 or 40. None is exactly interchangeable. Many have undergone osmosis even in our own lifetime. Some

Martin Rowson

‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious Labour MP for Medway, for a second or two my blood ran cold. As I remembered it, while I’d been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown, socialism, globalisation, MPs’ allowances, the constitution, the judiciary, the media and society at large. But instead of all that my tape started halfway through a long, rambling and very funny anecdote about a hotel where Marshall-Andrews had once stayed in Wales. My contributions, meanwhile, seemed to consist solely of monosyllabic grunts, occasional barks of laughter and increasingly frequent protestations that I must

M R-D-Foot

Letters from the Front

A wide gap has opened up between British military historians who work on the world war of 1914-18 and the mass of British schoolteachers who take it in school history classes. The teachers, impressed by the poetry of Sassoon and Owen, follow what may be called the ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ school of Alan Clark, and regard the war as a colossal waste of men and effort. More and more of the military historians, led by Brian Bond, now appreciate that British commanders in those years contended well with the unprecedented difficulties of industrial war, and deserve credit rather than contempt. Peter Hart, who has soaked himself for a decade