Society

Saturday

19 Jul 2008

Status Anxiety | 19 July 2008

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is a terrible faux pas. The correct response when asked about a bad notice is to pretend you have not read it. But what if the boot is on the other foot? Is it acceptable for critics to write about the efforts that have been made to retaliate against them? Or is that a breach

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 19 July 2008

Although I do not smoke, I find my sympathies drawn more and more to persecuted smokers. Outside Victoria station an aggressive notice says: ‘It is against the law to smoke in these premises including under this canopy.’ Never mind that the canopy, really a porte-cochère, is open to the elements, with a broken roof-pane that lets rain pelt the taxi queue, nor that the welcome Sir Nigel Gresley regularly enters the train shed smoking powerfully. What grates is to be bossed about in bad grammar. Including is a participial adjective. In neither of the ways that it is used can it qualify an adverbial phrase such as ‘under this canopy’.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 19 July 2008

Q. I have edited a selection of letters which is to be published later this summer. It is more than likely that, as part of the promotion process, I shall be asked to sign a copy here and there. However, it is not really my book, but that of the distinguished and, alas, departed correspondent. What is the protocol, Mary? Name and address withheld A. There is no need for you to feel so modest. You have had all the work of deciphering the letters, putting them into context, writing the footnotes. The book is your creation in that you are its midwife. It would be correct for you to

James Forsyth

Labour’s latest record low

John Rentoul breaks the news of the latest ComRes poll for The Independent over at Open House, the Tories are on 45 and Labour on 24—the lowest the pollster has ever had Labour, and the Lib Dems 16. 68 percent of voters agreed with the statement that Labour will lose next time round regardless of who is the leader. However, among Labour supporters that number dropped to 38 percent. It would be interesting to see whether those who voter Labour in 2005 think the party would have a better chance of winning with someone other than Brown in charge. Rentoul is impressed by the fact that a plurality of voters

Fraser Nelson

A guide to Glasgow East

That wee film I presented about Glasgow East – just over 3 minutes long – is now up on YouTube (you can watch it after the jump), It’s based on my political column from a couple of weeks ago and was broadcast last Friday and commissioned by Robbie Gibb, editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics. The BBC team assembled a powerful collection of images, which tell their own story (just as well, as the narration is a bit dodgy). Here it is with my wee guide beneath. 1) Grey skies in the intro (0’40) – We shot this scene at the end, a race against the rain. We had to

Matthew Dancona

Brilliantly Dark

The Spectator’s own Wiki Man, Rory Sutherland, and I spent yesterday evening at the BFI Imax near Waterloo watching a preview of The Dark Knight. Very rarely is it genuinely true to say that a movie is astonishing. But no other word will do justice to this film. To describe The Dark Knight as the latest in the (famously uneven) Batman franchise simply does not explain what this film aspires to be and to do. If the splendid Iron Man was a pitch perfect blend of high camp and high tech – the superhero flick at its best – this is something altogether different. Christopher Nolan uses every technique available

James Forsyth

Not all right Jack

Peter Oborne in his Mail column conducts a telling thought experiment: “Yesterday morning witnessed a summit in Whitehall between Cabinet ministers and the country’s biggest union barons. Top of the agenda was a series of arrogant demands from the unions for control over government policy in return for funding a bankrupt Labour Party through the next General Election. Some of these demands are breathtakingly audacious: abandonment of the public sector pay policy, reintroduction of secondary strike action and the end of private sector involvement in public services. Yesterday’s meeting signalled a blatant return to the kind of old-fashioned stitch-up between union bosses and Labour politicians that dominated British politics in

James Forsyth

It’s bad out there, Darling

Alistair Darling’s interview with The Times this morning marks the start of a new chapter in British politics. Darling makes no attempt to sugar-coat the economic situation. He is frank that “the economic news is going to be difficult for quite some time.” He also does not try and pretend that the economy will have recovered by the next election. Instead, he argues that the election will be a choice about who can best get Britain out of the current mess. (Realistically, it is hard to see how Labour can win unless the economy improves.) Darling tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson that he has informed his Cabinet colleagues that

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 19 July 2008

Grass-court tennis eh? A bit boring? Just serve and volley, ace, serve and volley? Well not any more. And sometimes old-style serve-return, bish-bosh, really did get a bit tedious. Go on, admit it. Obscure studies by people with a bit too much time on their hands proved that once you’ve factored in breaks between games, towelling down, or getting ready to bounce balls, top grass-court players would only spend four or five minutes per hour actually playing tennis. Very definitely not any more. Do you know how many times Rafa Nadal served and volleyed in that quite extraordinary, thunderously brilliant epic of epics in the gloom of SW19 last month?

Matthew Parris

My A to Z of scare stories, from Anthrax to Zion (Protocols of the Elders of)

Matthew Parris provides an A to Z of things that at one point scared us rigid but the dangers of which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated. Britain, says the poet Kate Fox, quoted on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last week, is a country ‘eternally poised between a hosepipe ban and a flood’. Or between fearsome, knife-wielding youth gangs and a teen generation of obese couch-potatoes. Knife crime is a horrible thing; and for offering the list of comparable scares which follows you may call me flippant. But in every case it was for a while true that what would have been thought flippant would have been to

James Young

Scorn not the mistress

You are invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2556’ by 31 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition No. 2553 you were invited to write a sonnet by the Mistress in reply to the author of Sonnet 130. Zounds! Such a pounding unkind Shakespeare took When Rival Poets used the sonnet’s power! But who’s to bring their weighty words to book? T.T., thou shouldst be living at this hour! But ’cos thou art well dead, I’ll sing of those Who gave the Avon Swan such well-earned welly. Seven share

Rod Liddle

If the liberal press is to be believed, nobody has ever been stabbed — ever

An apology to all readers: a couple of weeks ago, in a public-spirited sort of way, I offered advice as to how to go about getting stabbed. Although I hope you will accept that I was well intentioned, the article was clearly deficient and even offensive in two important respects. First, I neglected to explain how one might go about getting stabbed twice — and, since I wrote, the window for that particular opportunity seems to have been closed. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, unveiled an exciting plan to let stabbers loose in hospital accident and emergency wards, where they might joyfully run around stabbing people who are recovering from

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 19 July 2008

These things are sent to try us: I’m speaking now of circular letters from the General Medical Council. I recently received a second such letter about the Council’s Ethnicity Census from the president of the Council: Toward the end of 2007, I wrote asking for your help with an important project designed to help us to understand better the diversity of doctors registered with the GMC. We were hugely encouraged by the response we received and now have ethnicity data for over 60% of all registered doctors in the UK. To complete the picture we still need your support and I would be grateful if you would provide the information

Kate Chisholm

Perfect prose

Chekhov, Louisa M. Alcott, Kafka and co. wrote them for money; thinking of them as a lucrative money-spinner to keep their families in bread and potatoes. Now they usually yield so little money from magazines and book publishers that very few writers devote themselves to perfecting the art of the short story (at least in the UK, though it’s not nearly so true in America or Canada). Of the great British magazines that used to churn out stories by Dickens and Gaskell, Hardy and Kipling, only the People’s Friend is left, published since 1869 by D.C. Thomson of Dundee (also publishers of those great products of the literary imagination Beano

Dinah Roe

Flowers of Scotland

The Lost Leader is Mick Imlah’s first collection in 20 years, following Birthmarks in 1988, and it is well worth the wait. It takes in everyone from Saint Columba to John Knox, with appearances from William Wallace, medieval alchemist Michael Scot, Bonnie Prince Charlie and rugby hero Gordon Brown. But this is no dewy-eyed tribute to national glories past. Like Browning’s poem ‘The Lost Leader’, which lamented the political conservatism of the aging Wordsworth, Imlah’s verse is in no mood for po-faced reverence. Wallace, for example, is drawn and quartered in four lines: This done, the moon went overhead; The bell of Mary Magdalen Struck one; and smartly off he

Friday

18 Jul 2008

Alex Massie

Golf interlude

I was part of the team covering the 1999 Open for Scotland on Sunday – that’s the tournament you all remember more for Jean van de Velde’s collapse than for Paul Lawrie’s victory – and what I remember most from that week was how much the pros whinged about the way Carnoustie had been set up. It affronted their sense of themselves. They had a point in as much as the fairways were narrow, the rough had been watered and a tough course had been protected against benign conditions. But they still whinged, forgetting that they were playing, as they do in every competition, the course not the other golfers.

Alex Massie

Headline of the Day | 18 July 2008

From the Daily Telegraph: Could Helen Mirren’s bikini start a revolution? The usual rule is, as you know, that the answer to any question posed in a healine is almost always “No”. But who knows, perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule…

James Forsyth

Why an Israeli strike on Iran could turn nuclear

Benny Morris’s op-ed in The New York Times is essential reading. He sets out how any Israeli, as opposed to American, strike on Iran could easily escalate into a nuclear war. I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but here are the key paragraphs: “But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power. And, despite the current talk of additional economic sanctions, everyone knows that such

James Forsyth

Livingstone to run again

Ken Livingstone has confirmed to The Guardian that he will run for Mayor of London in 2012. It is hard to see how anyone could stop Livingstone from winning the Labour nomination so we will likely have a reprise of this year’s Ken v. Boris race. Livingstone is presumably betting that it will be harder for Boris to win with a Tory government in power than it was with a Labour one. The thought that he would, provided the Tories win the next election, be the most powerful Labour figure in the country must also be tempting him as well as the thought of being Mayor during the Olympics. The

James Forsyth

The Unions have their strategy right

The Unions have 130 demands that they intend to lay before Labour’s National Policy Forum, Patrick Wintour reports this morning. These range from extending the minimum wage to those under 21 to making union subscriptions tax deductible. This strikes me as exactly the right approach for the Unions to take. Labour is in no financial shape to reject all these demands. Equally, it cannot be seen to cave in on everything. So, Brown will make a big show of resisting a few of the Union’s big ticket demands while conceding on everything else.