Society

Saturday

James Young

Competition | 2 August 2008

In Competition No 2555 you were invited to write a poem, short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. The line, which I altered slightly to make versification easier, was uttered by General John Sedgwick, a Union general who was shot dead in the American civil war battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, in 1864. Actually, they were his penultimate words (which, according to an eyewitness, he uttered more than once); but he would not have uttered them at all had he known that the enemy had recently acquired much more sophisticated weaponry, thus improving the strike rate of their sharpshooters. Anyway, the

Robert Beaumont

City Life | 2 August 2008

Paul Theroux, in The Great Railway Bazaar, paints a louche portrait of the capital of Laos. ‘The brothels are cleaner than the hostels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco and opium is easier to find than a cold glass of beer,’ he wrote in 1975. When Theroux finally got his beer, the waitress told him sex was on the menu too. Gosh, if only I’d know about Vientiane in my gap year. It might have taught me more about the real world than three months at the British Institute in Florence and a lost week in Fez. These days, of course, Laos is firmly on the gap-year trail, but Vientiane

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 2 August 2008

Until recently I never realised that triangulation had entered theology as well as politics. But listening to Thought for the Day on BBC radio the other day, it struck me that modern churchmen, too, are triangulating the deepest question of all in religion: the question of faith. Faith is now advanced as the triangulation between disbelief and certainty. An idea which has been developing for more than a century is close to becoming the accepted wisdom on faith. The idea is that not only is faith perfectly reconcilable with doubt, but that in some sense doubt is at the core of faith. Doubters are thus encouraged to believe that they

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Mischief making

The Female of the Species Vaudeville Hangover Square Finborough The Frontline Shakespeare’s Globe A first-class Aussie bitch-fight has erupted over a new West End comedy. Joanna Murray-Smith’s satire opens with a famous feminist author, Margot Mason, being held at gunpoint by a deluded fan and forced to explain the contradictions in her work. Margot Mason is of course Germaine Greer, who suffered a similar ordeal at the hands of a former pupil a few years ago. Greer is said to be furious about the play. The bad news for her is that it’s an absolute hoot. Murray-Smith, who is also Australian, has had the sense to portray Mason sympathetically as

Friday

Sean Martin

Free trade is the protectionism the world needs

The post-Doha debate is exemplified by two opposing articles in the papers today.  One’s by Johann Hari in the Independent, and the other is the Times leader.  I’d recommend that CoffeeHousers check them out. Both make relevant points from their respective sides. But neither recognises the political benefit of promoting global free trade, especially to Africa. China has been pouring unconditional aid and ‘soft’ loans into Africa over the past few years, including a $2bn loan to help Mugabe prop up the Zimbabwean economy. It promises another $5billion of loans in coming years to increase its trade influence in the continent. This does not bode well for the spread of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Pakistan problem

Today’s most important news story appears in the Washington Post, here’s the lede: “U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence service provided logistical support to militants who staged last month’s deadly car bombing at the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan’s capital, U.S. officials familiar with the evidence said yesterday. The finding, based partly on communication intercepts, has dramatically heightened U.S. concerns about long-standing ties between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, and Taliban-allied groups that are battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, according to two U.S. government officials briefed on the matter.” Pakistan is the most difficult foreign policy problem to solve: an unstable, nuclear-armed state. But it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The maths doesn’t look good for Miliband

The Miliband camp can easily spin today’s YouGov poll, which Pete blogged earlier, showing that the Tory lead holds steady with Miliband as leader. They can say with some justification that the public has seen Brown doing the job and decided that he’s not up to it while they might warm to Miliband once they get to know him. More challenging for the nascent Miliband leadership bid is Labour’s electoral math. If Miliband has set in chain a series of events that leads to Brown’s departure, then there will be a leadership contest. Huge chunks of the Labour party will not accept a Miliband coronation. At the moment, the talk

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brother against brother

The Daily Mail reported yesterday that Downing Street suspected that Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander knew in advance of David Miliband’s Guardian op-ed.  Today, in The Times Alice Miles, who is close to Ed Miliband, insists that Ed was unaware of it: Ed did not know about the article David wrote for The Guardian this week, which is being read as the launch of a leadership bid by the older Miliband. He loyally says that he believes his brother had no intention of stirring up the excitement that he has. On where he personally stands, he is absolutely clear. Brothers they may be, but Ed is “completely loyal to Gordon”,

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

By September, it might be Harman’s moment

Politics right now is unbelievably macho. Every conversation I’ve had today about the Labour leadership has involved phrases like ‘kill or be killed’, ‘kneecap him’, ‘destroy him’ etc. As this seeps into the coverage, it is going to be distinctly unappealing to voters.  Now, consider that Gordon Brown is only going to be removed from office once much blood has been spilled and that David Miliband will almost certainly face a challenger and you see a real opportunity for Harriet Harman. She can emerge onto the scene after an ugly struggle and offer a less testosterone-fueled politics. Her non-denial of her leadership ambitions on Woman’s Hour shows that she is

Mark Daniell

The Brits to watch out for in the Olympics

At eight seconds past eight minutes past eight in the evening, central Chinese time, on the eighth of August, two thousand and eight, the Beijing Olympic Games get underway. That’s 8:08:08 p.m. on 08/08/08 – so, by my count, only six eights. Two short of the lucky Chinese number. I can think of only one way this shortfall can be remedied: the Olympic committee gets Nena to sing an appropriately rewritten ‘88 Red Balloons’ during the opening ceremony. I’ve looked into it, and to my great disappointment they’ve gone with Celine Dion. Ten and a half thousand athletes, competing in three hundred and two events, will descend upon the Chinese

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miliband approaches the point of no return

David Miliband is not backing down. Listening to him on the Jeremy Vine Show just now, it was noticeable how pleased he sounded when callers rung in to say how awful Brown was and how what Labour needed was a nice young man like him in charge. Indeed, when the final caller launched an assault on the Prime Minister’s character, Miliband offered only the must lukewarm praise for the PM and joked about the caller being his mother. At the top of the show, Miliband delivered the wonderfully ambiguous line, “I’ve always wanted to support Gordon as leader.” Miliband’s performance showed how far he has to go before he can

The Skimmer

Ofcom justice: fine the victims

So Ofcom has fined the BBC £400,000 for multiple fiddles of its various fake phone-in competitions. That would make sense if Director-General Mark Thompson and his bloated boss class at the Beeb had to pay the fine from their over-paid salaries. Or if Ofcom had instructed them to hand over the incredible and unjustified bonuses they’ve just paid themselves (which would come to a lot more than £400,000). Or if those directly responsible for the malpractices were forced to cough up from their own pockets. But none of that is going to happen. Instead, it’s the poor bloody licence-payer who’ll have to stump up. But hold on! Wasn’t it the

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cricketing Replay

Regular readers may not be surprised that I’m sceptical of the benefits of the new referral system being trialled in the Sri Lanka-India series. This morning’s events at Edgbaston demonstrate why. Kevin Pietersen was given out caught in the gully off Jacques Kallis. Replays and the “Snickometer” suggested that he’d hit his pad, not the ball, before it spooned up to Prince. So far so good: refer this to the Third Umpire and he’ll say that Pietersen is not out caught. But he might also mention that he looks as though he is out LBW. But the umpire in the middle can’t really say to Pietersen, “OK, so you didn’t

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What is wrong with England?

A dismal day at Edgbaston that took one back to the grim, hapless days of the late 1980s and almost the entire 1990s. Yes, England really were that bad. Batting first on a calm track they subsided to 231 all out. In reply, South Africa have ambled to 38-1. Now you may say that this is only the first day of five and, for sure, the situation is far from irretrievable. But unless England can bat and bowl with greater discipline than they have shown thus far this summer, then they look more likely to head to the Oval 2-0 down than with a chance to square, let alone actually

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Where’s the beef, David?

Camilla Cavendish’s column in The Times is essential reading about the Miliband leadership bid. She makes the point that for all the talk about Miliband being a big thinker with a firm grasp of policy, the Miliband manifesto is very vague: “His pitch is that a refreshed Labour Party must combine “government action and personal freedom”. But he is shy about saying where the balance should be struck. To be fair, he has been saying for two years that people want more control over their lives, and that Labour must devolve more power to people. He said it again yesterday – but without a whit of detail. The only policies

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Might Miliband move Labour to the left?

In media short-hand Miliband is a Blairite. But after talking to a bunch of folk over the last few weeks, I suspect that he might actually be a more left-wing PM than Brown. The theory goes that Miliband is not an uber-Blairitie, some of them express a certain disappointment in him—they brought him up and they expected great things from him but he has yet to deliver, and the political opportunities for Labour are on the left now. If Brown were to shift slightly more to the left, the commentariat would scream that he had ‘lurched to the left’. However, if Miliband were to do so his labelling as a