Society Archives

Saturday

23 Feb 2008

Spectator’s Notes | 23 February 2008

The United Nations declared last week that, for the first time in human history, more people in the world live in the town than in the country. If true, this feels momentous, though it is not, obviously, sudden. The imagination of mankind has been shaped by rural life more than by anything else, but this has been fading for 200 years in the West, and now is fading almost everywhere. What are its effects? A crisis for the great religions, whose language of elemental truth assumes an understanding of what it is to be a good shepherd, to sow and reap, to have murrains of cattle and crops that fail.

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 23 February 2008

During the martyrdom by the press of Dr Rowan Williams, the Sun carried as its front-page splash headline ‘Bash the bishop’. I was surprised that a sentence of which the demotic meaning must have been familiar to the supposedly ill-educated readers of that paper was completely unknown to a brilliant and highly educated friend of mine engaged in periodical journalism. There are two unreliable but useful lexicons of improper slang easily available on the internet. One is ‘Roger’s Profanisaurus’, based on the foul-mouthed inventiveness of a character (Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly) in Viz, the amusing comic for childish adults. It gives as synonyms for bash the bishop:

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 23 February 2008

It’s a boy! This was the news following my wife’s 20-week scan last week. I know it is infra dig to find out the sex of your baby in advance, but Caroline said she needed to be psychologically prepared just in case it was a boy. She wanted another girl, obviously, and she didn’t want to risk bursting into tears in the delivery suite when the midwife held up the little tyke for her inspection. I take the opposite view. I like girls as much as the next man, but what my wife has failed to grasp is that the entire point of having children is to enhance your social

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 February 2008

Q. I am approaching my 50th birthday and I want to have a party for around 100 people. There is an ideal space near where we live in London. It belongs to a friend, who has kindly offered it to us free, but is only really suitable for 100 people. Since we cannot afford to have more than 100, this suits us fine. Now, having finished compiling my must-invite list, I see it exceeds 180 people. There is no way I can prune this list without causing grave offence. What can I do, Mary? A. Just ensure you have your party on a Saturday night, preferably to coincide with a

James Forsyth

Wil Obama seal the deal on March 4th?

Over on Americano, all the latest from the US elections including reports that Hillary aides are thinking about a dignified exit for her if Ohio and Texas don’t go her way in 10 days time. Plus, thoughts on whose reputation has been damaged most by the New York Times’s story about John McCain’s supposed relationship with a female lobbyist.

James Forsyth

Don’t clobber drinkers

The idea of vastly increasing the tax on alcohol to deal with Britain’s ‘binge-drinking’ problem is gaining ground. The Tory Social Justice policy group was keen on the idea and now the British Medical Association has come out in favour of it. It certainly appeals to the ‘something must be done’ school of thought but it is also grossly unfair as Charles Moore argues in the Telegraph today. As he puts it, “In 2004, 21.6 million adults who drank alcohol consumed less than the recommended guidelines per week, whereas 1.8 million consumed at very heavy levels (more than double the guidelines). So a price rise designed to deter the excessive

James Forsyth

Is Yvette Cooper beyond help?

Iain Martin has a great post over at Three Line Whip about the rather disastrous effect that media training has had on Yvette Cooper’s manner—proof that things can get worse. For the Kremlinologists of this government, the relationship between Alistair Darling and the newly arrived Chief Secretary to the Treasury is going to be fascinating, not least because so many people think that her husband is manoeuvring for her boss’s job.

Fraser Nelson

The original Coffee House

Some people ask why we call this blog Coffee House. The principal reason is that this magazine’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, went around such places picking up gossip and scandal – coffee houses were the 18th century equivalent of blogs, hated by the establishment for irreverence. Reports from the coffee houses filled the 1711 incarnation of the publication you are now reading online. The Times today quotes Charles II describing them in 1675 as “places where the disaffected met and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers.” Our job remit precisely. PS The first 1711 edition was printed every day, on a

Lucy Vickery

Faits divers

In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words. I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or news in brief, published over the course of 1906 in Le Matin newspaper, are the work of a supreme stylist. Fénéon gravitated towards material that was violent, bloody and macabre, which he distilled into elegant, deadpan three-liners. Les Nouvelles en Trois Lignes was published last year as Novels in Three Lines in a translation by

Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 23 February 2008

There was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent… a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, ‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.’ It’s said that the internet promises to usher in a new age of altruism and selflessness but let’s not forget there’s a good side to it as well. Free porn, video piracy, and above all the chance to insult new people. Like the riverboats of Dr Johnson’s London, the online world provides the

Simon Hoggart

February Wine Club | 23 February 2008

Time for our annual offer of Château Musar from the excellent folk at Wheeler Cellars, sister company to Lay & Wheeler. Time for our annual offer of Château Musar from the excellent folk at Wheeler Cellars, sister company to Lay & Wheeler. Once again you have the chance to place your order for the luscious new 2001 vintage Musar red (1), which becomes more popular every year. Old fans will know what to expect; new drinkers will savour that full, deep, leathery, smoky, perfumed richness — and of course the cedar notes — not surprising in a wine from Lebanon. I am also a lover of the white (2), which

The Spectator

Stealth tax cuts

History may not judge the Northern Rock fiasco to be Labour’s Black Wednesday. Instead, the banking saga might yet become to Gordon Brown what ‘sleaze’ was to John Major. The potential symmetry is one of form, not content (there is no hint of personal corruption in the saga of the collapsed bank). Just as ‘sleaze’ became the ubiquitous shorthand for the aura of jadedness, selfishness and obsolescence that clung to the Major regime, so the words ‘Northern Rock’ could easily become a catch-all means of expressing the sense that this government has lost the plot, squandered its reputation for competence and planted itself firmly on the back foot. This week,

Taki

The lying game

Why do children lie? asks a boring headline in an even more boring Big Bagel magazine article. According to the bores who wrote it, children are encouraged to tell white lies, hence they get comfortable with being disingenuous, and insincerity becomes a daily occurrence. ‘Many books advise parents to just let lies go — they’ll grow out of it — the truth, however, is, kids grow into it.’ Dr Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at McGill University, is a leading expert on children’s lying behaviour. She tells the bores that lying is related to intelligence. ‘A child who is going to lie must recognise the truth, intellectually conceive of an

Aidan Hartley

Ambushed in Somalia

As we entered the old city, the heat shimmered off coral towers half reduced to rubble by cycles of war. We had just exited Mogadishu’s presidential palace after a morning’s filming. Gemaal was at the wheel and Duguf rode shotgun. Cameraman Jim and I were in the back chatting. Then came the bang. Except I recall no ‘bang’, only a shock wave. It sucked the air out of my lungs so hard that I tasted blood in my throat. Through our car’s rear window I saw black smoke and debris enveloping our escort vehicle 30 metres behind. ‘There’s wounded,’ said Jim. Gunfire erupted. Everybody abandoned the car. As Jim ran

Robin Holloway

Teenage kicks

Curious to see how the old whore (103 this year) is faring, I tuned in eagerly to Radio Three’s broadcast of a concert performance of Salome (13 February) — the live event already reviewed appreciatively here by my opera colleague. Utterly besotted in early teens with this ultimate product of French/Anglo–Irish/Bavarian decadence, I have over the decades ‘put away’ pubescent thrills, not out of puritanism so much as in pursuit of more solid joys and lasting pleasures. The glamour wears thin, the precious transmutes to base; and the shock value sharply diminishes. The erotic attraction/repulsion, the provocative striptease, the necrophiliac climax, all sumptuously served up with pomegranates and sequins, no

Ross Clark

Don’t let them kill off the cheque

Next month I will break the habit of a lifetime and wait until the red reminder before paying my telephone bill. I will do so because BT has decided to charge me £33 a year for the audacity of paying my bill by cheque. BT is penalising people who pay by cheque because it wants us all to pay by direct debit. As it happens, I’m happy enough to pay by direct debit for some things: namely bills which are for a fixed amount of money every month. I would be perfectly happy to pay my telephone bill online, too, so long as I was in control of the transaction.

Matthew Lynn

Was ABN Amro a deal too far for Fred the Shred?

The title of the worst deal in British corporate history is hotly contested. Glaxo and SmithKline were worth £107 billion on the day they announced their merger: eight years later, they’re worth £57 billion, and they’re not quite the ‘kings of science’ their chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier said they would be. Getting on for a decade after it paid £75 billion for Mannesmann of Germany in Europe’s largest hostile bid, Vodafone still hasn’t recovered. Capping both of those, Lord Simpson’s foray into the American telecoms industry after he took over at GEC and renamed it Marconi is always going to take some beating for the speed and thoroughness with which

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 23 February 2008

In the end, they may have to auction what’s left of Northern Rock on eBay When the nationalisation of Northern Rock was announced at the beginning of the week, commentators queued up behind the shadow chancellor to declare a return to the dark days of the 1970s and to dance on the ashes of Alistair Darling’s career. It took a little longer for us all to work out what a horrendous task faces the new management duo of Ron Sandler and his chief financial officer, who rejoices in the name of Ann Godbehere. Let’s hope He is, because they’re going to need a miracle to rebuild a profitable business out

Friday

22 Feb 2008

Peter Hoskin

Groundhog Day

With the prison population reaching an all-time high of 82,006 (only 21 places short of full capacity), Jack Straw once again begs judges to consider more non-custodial sentences. Of course, it’s embarrassing for the Justice Minister. His line is wide-open to opposition attack, and he’s condemned to repeat it until those Titan prisons are finally completed. Not that we should feel sorry for him. Straw should have made the right, forward-looking decisions during his time as Home Secretary between 1997 and 2001. Yet, somewhat masochistically, he’s reluctant to take the proper steps even now. The result? Numerous tragedies waiting to happen.