Society

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama’s lead down to three points

We should be wary about getting overexcited about a single opinion poll but the new Newsweek poll will be causing some heartburn among Obama supporters. Last month’s Newsweek poll put Obama ahead of McCain 51 to 36 but in this month’s poll the gap has closed to Obama 44 McCain 41. The McCain camp can take further encouragement from the fact that 85 percent of undecided voters are non-Hispanic whites and the vast majority of these voters do not have a college degree; Obama has had real difficulty in gaining traction among this demographic. Obama’s lead in the RCP average is now less than five percent. Considering that the incumbent

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour need a message but not Ed’s one

One of the problems besetting this government is that it lacks a narrative; Cabinet Ministers cannot put their policies into context and voters cannot tell what you the government is for. In The Independent today, Andrew Grice argues that a message and a messenger are prerequisites of a Brown recovery and it is hard to disagree. Ed Miliband’s interview in The Guardian hints at one possible message for Brown. Miliband talks about the importance of showing there is a “Labour way of getting through the downturn.” But what Miliband means by that is just old fashioned governmental solutions. As he says about the new challenges that have emerged since 1997:

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The UN is not designed to be moral

The decision by Russia and China to veto sanctions against Zimbabwe should finally remove the scales from peoples’ eyes about the role and purpose of the United Nations. The UN’s founding purpose, at which it has been effective, was to prevent great power conflict. That is why the UN cannot act without the consent of every one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Two of the Council’s members–Russia, a ‘managed democracy’, and China, a Communist dictatorship—have no interest in embedding in international affairs the idea that internal repression and the failure to hold free and fair elections justify the international community taking action against a country. Those

Simon Hoggart

July Spectator Wine Club

There is something wonderful about this time of year, when fairly often the sun is shining. We make British, mock-rueful remarks to each other: ‘Yesterday was summer, I suppose!’ or ‘Well, if this is global warming, let’s have more!’ Sometimes we even have spells when we find it uncomfortably hot, days when there is no greater imaginable treat than getting home from work, sitting outside and pouring a glass of something cold and delicious. And there are some delicious wines here from the admirable Adnams of Southwold. I’ve chosen several because they’re perfect for outdoor summer drinking, though I hope you’ll try them all. I’ve also popped in two more

James Young

Competition | 12 July 2008

No. 2555: Last words You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked eggs boiled for the duration of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and spice up a cookery column with similar cultural references. Unfortunately Bernard did not tell us who was conducting while he was boiling; a Toscanini egg, for example, would be a much softer thing than a Klemperer one. W.J. Webster observes that

Tristan Gareljones

I feel for Ingrid Betancourt — I was kidnapped, too

I was once kidnapped and held hostage by political terrorists in South America. My ordeal only lasted about an hour — but it was rather frightening. Like Ingrid Betancourt, it was partly my own fault for ignoring obvious security advice. Unlike her, I was able to talk my way out of it. It is hard to imagine the six years of continuous terror and abuse this doughty lady experienced at the hands of the Marxist terrorist group, FARC, in Colombia. Her release, in a bold exercise by the Colombian Armed Forces, is, rightly, a matter of universal rejoicing and a triumph for President Uribe. This remarkable rescue sends an encouraging

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 12 July 2008

Alongside the vast fuel tank which powers the Space Shuttle into orbit are two spindly tubes known as Solid Rocket Boosters (or SRBs). Their shape is not ideal: their manufacturer, a firm called Thiokol, had intended them to be fatter, but was constrained by the width of a horse’s rear end. It appears that Roman chariots arrived at a standard axle width of 4’ 81/2” for the simple reason that this width could accommodate two horses’ bums between the shafts. Standardisation of axle length was vital, as on muddy roads your wheels formed ruts that set solid in dry weather. A vehicle with a non-standard axle can become fatally cross-rutted,

The Spectator

The Glasgow Doctrine

In an unexpected plot twist, David Cameron and Gordon Brown are fighting over a woman: not, we hasten to add, as suitors, but as public moralists. The Prime Minister has long been a fan of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the American intellectual best known for her studies of the Victorian era. Now, Mr Cameron has paid homage to the great conservative sage too. At the heart of the Tory leader’s fine speech in Glasgow on Monday was the declaration that ‘there is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth any more about what is good and bad, right and wrong’. This — as Mr

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 12 July 2008

Martin Vander Weyer’s thoughts on the world of business Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era. Both pursued non- racial business practices as far as they could, but both endured years of disrupted shareholder meetings and flak from the student Left. Shell stuck it out — and shortly after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela declared, ‘We’re glad you stayed.’ Barclays bowed to the protesters and abandoned its network of 900 branches in 1986; when the bank returned in 1995 to open one office in Johannesburg, Mandela told the men from Lombard Street, ‘You should never have sold.’ British

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Private education

School fees: a luxury you can’t afford The credit crunch is taking a terrible toll on the middle classes. They’ve started to give up their organic boxes (sales are down 10 per cent at some companies), their foreign holidays (can the new fad for camping really be a choice thing?), their Chelsea tractors, and even their privacy (their second homes are now available as holiday lets). So what’s next? Probably their children’s private education. School-fee inflation is running at well over 6 per cent a year, the average day school costs £3,000 a term, and top schools such as Eton and Wycombe Abbey charge £9,000-plus. Fifty-one schools in the UK

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 12 July 2008

One of the most moving stories in the history of animal life is the racing career of Red Rum. This little horse won the Grand National in 1973 and 1974, came second the next two years and then, amazingly, won it again in 1977. This third victory, the only such in the history of the race, left the hard-bitten racing crowd in tears. The horse had a proud habit of cocking his ears as he passed the winning post ahead of the field — he knew he had won. He lived to the ripe old age of 30 and is buried beside the starting gate at Aintree. No one can

Charles Leadbeater

The web is the most conservative force on Earth

Archiving is not regarded by most people as sexy, glamorous or even interesting. Odd then that most of us, and especially the young, hip and trendy, seem to have become avid archivists without even realising it. My archive, which I keep on the web, and in my computer, mobile phone and iPod, is neither particularly extensive nor interesting: several thousand digital photographs, play-lists of songs, endless dull policy reports, papers and presentations, some internet postings, Facebook friends and connections. Teenagers, however, are archiving their lives as they happen through blog entries and photos taken on camera phones, much of which they organise collaboratively, in semi-public, on the web. We have

Martin Rowson

I fell helplessly in love with Christine Hamilton

Scotland had the Macbeths and Romania had the Ceausescus. But while Tony and Cherie made a pretty good stab at it, in the annals of notoriety in British politics no husband and wife team can compare to the Hamiltons. Or at least it seemed like that in 1997, when allegations about cash for questions in brown envelopes catapulted Neil Hamilton, the relatively obscure MP for Tatton, into the eye of the storm about to overwhelm John Major’s government. The decision by the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell, in his white suit, to stand as an ‘anti-sleaze’ candidate in Tatton drove Hamilton’s wife Christine to confront him during a press conference

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 12 July 2008

As ever, the great disappointment of Jerusalem is the lack of swivel-eyed loons wandering around believing themselves to be Jesus. Or Solomon or David or Mohammed. Or Elvis, even. You come to Jerusalem, you want to see Jerusalem Syndrome. Isn’t that part of the deal? It’s like Amsterdam without the drugs, or London without the Beefeaters. Where are the portly men from Idaho I was promised, standing on upturned dustbins and preaching hellfire in the nude? Read up on Jerusalem Syndrome, only a little, and you might start to feel you are going that way yourself. According to an analysis in the British Journal of Psychology, back in 2000, clinical

Molly Guinness

Gilding the lily

Molly Guinness on Allan Mallinson’s latest novel Allan Mallinson’s hero, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey, returns in Warrior with his usual mixture of courage and kindness, his talent for friendship and a military instinct that is second to none. The first scene shows us, with some high quality gore, that there is trouble in the Cape Colony: ‘He fired the carbine point-blank, taking off the top of the spearman’s head like a badly sliced egg.’ We are then transported to London, where Hervey is tied up for a few days with some complex administrative tasks; he has to organise a funeral, have conversations with a nun, his wife, a bishop, his former

Michael Bourdeaux

Through a chink in the Iron Curtain

Michael Bourdeaux on  Owen Matthews’s family biography. Reconstruction of one’s parents’ love story is a rare enough undertaking; success to this extent puts Owen Matthews’s family biography into a special category. Mervyn Matthews and Lyudmila Bibikova fell in love in Moscow in 1963, when he was studying there and she was a brilliant graduate of Moscow State University, then working at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. They were prevented from marrying the next year when Lyudmila was already in her wedding dress; Mervyn was deported. Their painful attempts, eventually successful, over the next six years to obtain an exit visa for her became one of the causes célèbres in

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Two Scotlands

This post by my old friend Fraser Nelson is the best thing I’ve read so far about the Glasgow East by-election: It is tragic comic to see Labour taking such a philosophical attitude to the scandalous deprivation in Glasgow East during this election campaign as if they were talking about the weather. “Oh, its heartbreaking and very complex” they say and use phrases like “multiple deprivation” to make it sound so complicated that government cant do anything about it. What’s happened is that Labour’s remedy to poverty – more money – has made the problem worse. As they recommend, read the whole thing.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ian Bell

What is it about Ian Bell? By which I mean, why does the poor fellow arouse such animosity? No other player in the current England team sees his failures magnified and successes downplayed to such an extent. Even when he bats well, his critics use this as evidence that, damn it, he should be batting like this all the time. Perhaps today’s splendid 199 against South Africa will quieten the critics. But if so, I suspect it will do so only temporarily. A friend suggests that Bell is the victim of the “Henman effect”. That is to say, he’s a nice, middle-class public schoolboy (Rugby in Bell’s case) whose demeanour

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Jack Russell

That’s the wicket-keeper not the misanthropic terrier. In the light of my defence of Ian Bell, a reader asks if I could write something about Gloucestershire’s Jack Russell. Certainly! Jack Russell was a blazing beacon of excellence. He was, in his pomp, the best wicket-keeper in the world. Obviously, he was traduced by England and the people who claimed to know what was best. For neither the first, nor the last, time they were wrong. In a better, more seinsible world Jack Russell would have spent a decade being the first name on an England team-sheet. For quite some part of that time – an uncomfortably large part in fact