Society

Saturday

Oscar Humphries

Diary – 5 April 2008

My dinner parties are an exercise in patience. People used to tell me how much money they’d made buying in Islington when they did. ‘Good for you,’ I’d say, hating them just a little. I’ve noticed that recently my friends have stopped telling me how much equity they’d managed to suck out and try to change the subject whenever I bring house prices up — which I do with increasing pleasure and regularity. The other day I woke up to shouting. ‘Sorry isn’t good enough.’ Her voice was shrill with hurt, anger and profound disappointment. ‘What good is saying sorry? You’re not sorry. Not as sorry as I am.’ Sara,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The meaning of what happened in Basra

The consequences of the fighting in Basra and the subsequent cease-fire are still unclear. Some see events as testifying to Sadr’s strength, others point out that it was him who was forced to sue for peace.   Kimberly and Fred Kagan, key advocates of the surge, have a piece in this week’s Weekly Standard which acknowledges the uncertainty over what happened in Basra—an uncertainty, which as they point out, largely exists because of the British decision to abandon the city—but argues that most coverage is missing the most crucial fact about what went on: “The most important fact about the recent operations has escaped most observers, however. The government of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 5 April 2008

One distinction between the private and the public sector is that the former generally has an incentive to offer customers a variety of levels of service, while the latter doesn’t. That’s why you can get a pizza delivered to your home when you’re feeling fine, but you can’t get a doctor to visit you when you’re ill. (It’s a wonder suspicions weren’t aroused about Dr Harold Shipman ten years earlier when it seems he was the only GP in the country still to make house calls.) Little by little, though, organisations have found that allowing people to choose their level of service need not raise costs, and often reduces them.

Simon Hoggart

April Wine Club | 5 April 2008

The budget has hit wine merchants and drinkers quite hard. Those of us who like a sophisticated slurp are paying the price for those who drink themselves senseless on Friday and Saturday nights, and turn our town centres into a hellish version of the passagio. But it is important to keep standards up. If we can’t drink as much, at least what we do drink should be worth drinking. One way to manage this is to buy wine through a company called FromVineyardsDirect.com. It’s run by an enterprising publisher, David Campbell, who relaunched Everyman Books in 1991 to the same principle — the best, but at affordable prices. His partner

Lucy Vickery

Bizarre books | 5 April 2008

In Competition No. 2538 you were invited to submit an extract from one of the following books: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself; Nuclear War: What’s in it For You; The Joys of Cataloguing. These are all genuine titles taken from the hugely entertaining Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake. I’m with W.J. Webster, who accompanied his entry about talking to yourself with a heartfelt note: ‘This is all horribly close to home!’. As many of you acknowledged, the advent of mobile phones has been a godsend to those of us who are in the habit of chatting animatedly to ourselves in public. I don’t go

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 5 April 2008

Nick Clegg’s sex confession shows why politicians should never try to look normal It was the 14 pints, I always thought, that ultimately did it for William Hague. That was the beginning of the end. There must have been teenagers out there in the 1970s who did, indeed, drink 14 pints a day. It’s just that they probably weren’t the same teenagers who, aged 16, spent their spare time practising a piping address for the Conservative party conference. Hague said he drank 14 pints; Britain thought ‘nah’. Britain thought, ‘Come out to the pub with me, you baldy wee pluke, and I bet you couldn’t handle more than four.’ The

Deborah Devonshire

Death of a Post Office

They shut our Post Office yesterday. For the first time in living memory there is no early morning light in that end of the ancient cottage and the little shop that went with it. The stacks of newspapers and magazines with unlikely titles have disappeared overnight. No longer can a letter be weighed to go to the ends of the earth. No more the postmaster, with one elbow on the counter, turning the thick cardboard sheets with the bright-coloured stamps of all prices lurking between them, painstakingly adding them up to the right amount for a letter to Easter Island or Nizhny Novgorod. No more blue airmail stickers to speed

Taki

There will be blood

Sartre was a far greater fornicator than philosopher, but he did come up with the greatest truism of them all: ‘Hell is other people.’ (The last line in one of his plays.) Mind you, a Greek savant has bettered him by proclaiming Hell is other people speaking on their mobiles inside an aeroplane. Yes, it has come down to this, or, rather, it has gone up to it. Passengers have been cleared by telecoms watchdogs to use the most malignant device since television during flights. The Dubai-based Emirates was the first airline to allow the suckers who fly it to use mobile telephones last week, which I predict will definitely

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 4 April 2008

Monday Head buzzing from v important Economic Strategy meeting. Total reorganisation of our smoothie expenditure, with half the budget to be spent on bran muffins. Lot of discussion about whether we should issue staff with vouchers to spend on either smoothies, or muffins, as they see fit, but in the end decided that we couldn’t leave something as important as workplace snacking to the vagaries of the market. Also decided that while we can’t promise tax cuts, we can promise ‘a new era of economic dynamism’. Which is better than tax cuts, when you think about it. Our new watchwords are ‘prudence’ and ‘stability’. We are preparing an exciting new

James Forsyth James Forsyth

In honour of Martin Luther King

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Here is the end of the last speech by this great man and Bobby Kennedy’s moving words on King’s death which are, as Joe Klein says, some of the finest ever spoken. 

LorraineMullally

Brownie No.2 – The Lisbon Treaty

In its attempts to wriggle out of its manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution, the Government has argued that the Lisbon Treaty is a completely different beast to the document rejected by the French and Dutch in 2005.  Gordon Brown and David Miliband repeatedly insisted that the EU Constitution “has been abandoned.” Brown even brazenly claimed that if it “were the old constitutional treaty, we would be having a referendum”.  This has been one of the most widely disbelieved, but oft-repeated claims in recent British political history. A YouGov poll for the Telegraph in October 2007 showed that 94% of people don’t believe the Government’s argument

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The credit dichotomy

If you haven’t already, do read our latest cover story. The Telegraph follows it today, and Robert Winnett has a good analysis about the problems piling up on these voters Labour had come to rely on.  Some CoffeeHousers have asked: is it so surprising that the sub-prime crisis is concentrated in poorer areas? Of course not, but the Experian data which George Bridges provides for us shows in clear focus just how unevenly it’s distributed. For a while in the credit bubble, you could hardly turn on satellite television without seeing adverts saying “CCJs? Been refused credit before? No problem”. For the middle class, the credit bubble meant cheap lending

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Ken has five kids by three different women story isn’t going to determine the result of the mayoral election

I have very little time for Ken Livingstone but I can’t think that tonight’s revelation about his private life is going to make much of a difference to his political fortunes. I expect the fuss will die down fairy fast as none of the usual ingredients required to keep this kind of story going are present. First of all, Ken can’t be accused of hypocrisy—he is hardly a family values politician. Second, none of the other major campaigns are going to want to go anywhere near this story.

Peter Hoskin

Self-defeating eco-towns

The Government’s released its short-list for ‘eco-town’ sites.  Reading through it, the first thing that struck me was that they’re almost all in the middle of nowhere.   Of course, that’s half the point.  New towns have to be built on unspoilt land, so to speak.  But the problem is that the Government’s also promoting these new towns as a solution to the affordable housing dilemma.  They’re meant to help young, first-time buyers get on the housing ladder.  Yet – without any disrespect intended to to Coltishall, Imerys et al. – young people want to be where the jobs are.  That’s why there’s so much internal migration to hubs such as London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The People Are Sovereign: Be Afraid

A universal franchise is, of course, a Good Thing. Yet, via Kieran Healy, comes news of this Pew finding: There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Reverend Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim. No wonder politicians succumb to the temptation to treat the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Thinking Voter’s Clown?

Another splendid Sarah Lyall dispatch from London, this time on the nonsense of Boris vs Ken in the London mayoral election. It’s a fine, entertaining, breezy read but the best bit is the final verdict on Boris: “He bumbles a lot, but he’s a lot cleverer than you think,” said Lizzie Vines, a 50-year-old Devon farmer. “It’s a very British thing to do, to pretend to be stupid when you’re not.” She said she liked his honesty. What about the adultery? She replied: “Cheating on your wife? That’s a very British thing to do, too.”

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Video of the Day

“It would give me the greatest of pleasure watching non-compliant tax-payers going to jail. That’s the kind of person I am.” Bertie Ahern, then Minister of Finance, 1993.

George Bridges

Welcome to subprime Britain. How scared should you be?

When London radio news is being sponsored by a firm of bailiffs, you know something bad is happening. ‘Helping landlords get what they’re owed’ runs the cheery slogan at the end of the bulletins. As bad as the financial headlines are, this tells a bigger story than anything captured in the headlines — proof that the credit crunch is not an abstraction confined to the financial markets, but a bitter reality, already claiming victims and leaving tens of thousands to wonder if they will be next. All over the country, the borrowed penny is dropping. It dropped on me about 3.30 a.m. on the day my wife and I exchanged