Coffee House is offering internships to students and recent graduates. Successful applicants will be able to write for Coffee House, work on the website, and experience behind-the-scenes life here at The Spectator. For more information contact phoskin @ spectator.co.uk
Hurrah for Sir Mark Elder. A knighthood richly deserved and, many would say, long overdue. And with splendid timing he’s conducting a revival of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Royal Opera House, opening night this coming Monday. Should be a thrilling evening and his curtain call at the end could be one to remember.
Tim Russert was the finest American political interviewer of his generation. People in Washington used to talk about the Russert primary, the idea that a candidate had only proved they could stand up to the scrutiny of a presidential campaign if they could get through the full-hour long interview on the show Russert hosted Meet the Press. What was so refreshing about Russert was that his interviews were tough but infused with a reverence for the process, a love for democracy. He never sneered at the politicians he interviewed but he did hold them to account more effectively than anyone else on television. Perhaps, Russert’s most memorable moment came on
In Competition No. 2548 you were invited to submit sales particulars for a property well known in literature in your best estate-agent-ese. It was a capacious entry, which benefited from unrivalled clichés and florid, tautological prose. You aped the estate agent’s way of accentuating the positive well. We all know that ‘bijou’ translates as ‘broom cupboard’ and that ‘convenient for motorway access’ would be more accurately rendered as ‘suitable for the hard of hearing’. I was tempted to put in an offer on St Simeon Stylites’ pillar, described thus by Elizabeth Emerk: ‘Pillars for Pillocks is pleased to offer this unique detached dwelling near old Antioch — effectively a sublimely
The Conservatives think that education is about selecting the lucky few, says Ed Balls. But there is no reason why excellence and opportunity shouldn’t be for all It’s just over a year since David Willetts made his thoughtful but ultimately fatal pronouncement: ‘academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it’. Those nine words — anathema to most Conservatives — led to a civil war inside the party, a messy U-turn and the reshuffling of Mr Willetts to a new job. The issue of whether the Tories would change the law and support new grammar schools being built — such as the one being proposed in Buckinghamshire — remains unresolved.
David Bosco accompanies the UN Security Council on its visit to Darfur and finds that even meeting the victims of the conflict can’t stiffen the Council’s resolve Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem was holding court last Thursday in the VIP lounge at Khartoum International Airport. Sudan’s voluble United Nations ambassador was accompanying the UN Security Council as it prepared for the short flight to northern Darfur. Many hoped that the Council’s visit to the war-torn region would bring diplomats of the member states face to face with the suffering, and so provoke a strong condemnation of Sudanese war crimes. Instead, all our mission really served to highlight was the lack of resolve among
A visit to the London International Wine Fair is, paradoxically, a sobering experience. With about 30,000 different wines on show, it is impossible to sample more than a minuscule number — the worst anyone can be accused of is binge-sipping. The stallholders want you to try all their wines, even if there are a dozen of them. My technique: ‘I’m in a great hurry. Let me try your best wine’, was usually met by ‘All ours are excellent. Now, I will start at the beginning…’ I acquired a list of all the best-selling — by value — alcoholic drinks in the UK. You may be surprised to learn that the
And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends? So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we? Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a
The image of women in Victorian times veered between that of madonna and whore, but nowadays in Britain it veers between harridan and slut. This is only natural in a country where vulgarity is not only triumphant, but militant and deeply ideological. The men, of course, are just as bad. Recently, I flew to an Aegean resort now much favoured by our permanently bronzed proletarians. I was going to a conference of intellectuals there. The pudgy tattooed women en route to paradise had diamonds in their navels; the shaven-headed men, lager made flesh, had skimpy vests stretched painfully over their beer bellies, gold chains and an earring to prove their
Bjørn Lomborg, the controversial Danish economist, tells James Delingpole that it is better to spend our limited funds on saving lives than on saving the planet Gosh, I do hope Bjørn Lomborg doesn’t think I was trying to pick him up. I’ve only just learned from his Wikipedia entry that he’s ‘openly gay’ which, with hindsight, probably made my dogged insistence that we conduct our interview in his cramped hotel bedroom look like a cheap come-on. Not to mention the way I sat there throughout, mesmerised and sometimes lost for words under the gaze of the handsome, trim 43-year-old blond’s intensely sincere Danish blue eyes which never leave yours for
Christopher Fildes on international accounting standards How gratifying. One set of rules for the whole world, and all of them springing from a fountainhead in Cannon Street, London EC4. There will have been no such display of global authority since the sun set on the British empire. Washington is warming to it. Brussels is restive. These are the rules that set the standards for companies reporting on their financial affairs to their shareholders. They come from the International Accounting Standards Board, and they are accepted in more and more centres where shares are traded, from London to Beijing. The world’s biggest economy is the outstanding exception, but now the Americans
In eight years in venture capital, my partners and I have met only a handful of female applicants for capital. Yet we receive 500 to 600 business plans every year. It seems remarkable when you consider that women figure prominently in almost all walks of life — over 50 per cent of medical-school graduates, for example. Indeed, there have been so few that each encounter stands out. Our firm had been going for about a year when we were approached by a very imposing lady with plans for a software company. She was introduced by our accountant, but a little background digging revealed a history of bad debts — including
How times change: the ECB has become the very model of a modern central bank I don’t suppose many of my readers took part in the European Central Bank’s tenth birthday celebrations last week — but if I’m wrong about Jean-Claude Trichet’s taste in columnists, then bon anniversaire, monsieur le président, though I can’t quite bring myself to add beaucoup des retours heureux. It is remarkable how the standing of both the ECB and its French boss have risen in recent times: it makes me feel sorry for Trichet’s late predecessor Wim Duisenberg, the world-weary chain-smoker who bore both the brunt of market scepticism about the fledgling euro and the
The Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs is already making excuses, so I think it’s all over. As a friend, who voted Yes because Sinn Fein were Nos, texted from Dublin: ‘The Nos to the left and the Nos to the right have it.’ This is from Breaking News at the Irish Times at 12.39: Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin today blamed a perceived lack of information for the poor showing of the Yes vote as indicated by early tallies. Asked where things went wrong, Mr Martin, director of Fianna Fáil’s referendum campaign, said: “People were on the doorstep were saying ‘I still don’t know enough about this treaty’.” This
The ‘No’s have won it, according to Iain Dale. Expect further Coffee House coverage shortly.
It seemed yesterday like a No, but I’m not so sure now. While the taxi drivers were still resolutely No voters (mostly because they resent taxi deregulation and immigrant drivers), everyone else I met yesterday in Dublin was either firmly on the Yes side or was tilting in that direction on the grounds that the No side was fronted by cranks. Libertas, a group which I regard as sane but which has been damaged by rumours about a connection with US armaments manufacturers, has funded 15,000 of the 100,000 posters on Irish lampposts and was quietly confident until now, but is now admitting it fears its campaign peaked too early.
My old friend Gerald Warner has, I’m glad to discover, a blog at the Telegraph entitled Is It Just Me? (sometimes, yes, Gerald, I’m afraid it is…). In his most recent post Gerald reports that the health industry has opened a new front in the Tobacco Wars. Not content with persecuting smokers, the unco guid are preparing to take aim at snuff aficionados. Seriously. As Gerald observes, this is no surprise: Of course, it had to happen. The health fascists, having overrun the cigarette, cigar and pipe-smokers, are now advancing on the snuff-takers. We have been here before. Persecution of snuff-taking began in the early 17th century when Sultan Amurath
Janet Daley writes on Ed Balls’ latest initiative: So what Mr Balls is proposing is effectively merging local secondary moderns with grammars. And what do you call a grammar school that is merged with a secondary modern? Why, a “comprehensive school” of course. It was precisely that sort of “take-over” (or merger) that produced the first generation of comprehensives – and which resulted not in the raising of all schools to grammar standards, but to the collapse of the grammar school ethos and its tradition of academic achievement. Having failed to extinguish the remaining grammars by traducing them, Labour had to find another way of removing this embarrassing bastion of
Don’t ask an African elephant to show you his cardiograms I can’t help liking elephants, and I was delighted to receive from India a silk tie with a pattern of these huge and benevolent beasts, raising their trunks in the traditional gesture which means ‘Good morning and good luck’. I once had a beautiful alabaster elephant, made in Benares in the early 20th century, coloured golden yellow and red. Originally in its howdah had reposed the stately squatting figure of Lord Curzon, when viceroy. But time and tide had removed his Lordship, and in due course a dusting fall broke the saluting trunk. Finally, a riotous Old Etonian, while admiring