Obama’s perfect weekend
Americano has reaction to Barack Obama winning all five of this weekend’s contests and the news that Hillary Clinton has appointed a new campaign manager.
Society
Monday
Sunday
Today’s picture
If I could bring myself to contemplate the wreckage – nay, the horror – of Scotland’s Six Nations campaign I might blog about it. Meanwhile, here’s a picture taken today of boys playing on the back fields at Selkirk rugby club on a misty Borders morning:
A false dawn?
Gordon Brown has a comment piece in today’s Observer. It rehashes the usual statements about skills, schools and the global economy (“in a globally competitive national economy, there will be almost no limits to aspirations for upward mobility”). And outlines the Government policy relevant to these areas – more academies; an expansion of the Teach First programme; raising the school leaving age to 18; and giving an apprenticeship to “every qualified young person who wants it. Nothing particularly surprising, then, but a couple of paragraphs at the end of the article really stand out: “We must take the reform of public services to the next level, at all times seeking
Wanted: Leadership
A new motto – “uncertain times call for uncertain leadership” – could apply right now to the Church of England, the government and parliament. In my News of the World column today, I say that the Williams fiasco fits a depressing trend. 1. The Church of England is in crisis. Its own figures show a fall in attendance which, if left unabated, would leave it empty within about 25 years. Williams’s response to this seems to be embracing what he wrongly sees as modernity. 2. Governments weather global economic downturns with low debt, building up surpluses in the fat years. Brown already had an outrageous deficit and has stumbled into
Obama gains an edge
There’s full analysis of last night’s results in both the Democratic and Republican primaries over on Americano. Also, do check out Rory Sutherland’s piece on why if Hillary loses she should blame the Welsh.
Saturday
Diary – 9 February 2008
David Tang reflects on the storms in China, and on being ‘Googled’ My daughter telephoned to say, to my disbelief, that she was snowbound in Hangzhou, where it never snows. The city is regarded as the most beautiful in China, with swaying willows surrounding an old lagoon on the edge of which Mao Tse-tung loved staying. I always asked for the same bedroom that Mao chose at the West Lake Guesthouse — until one night in the same bed that he slept, I saw, standing by the window, a ghostly figure of a woman in white. It wasn’t quite Wilkie Collins, but enough to put me off ever returning. My daughter
The Spectator’s Notes | 9 February 2008
Derek Conway maintains his position. ‘I still believe I have done nothing wrong,’ he told the Mail on Sunday. To understand why he could possibly think that, one has to dig deeper into British class feeling. In wanting to become a Conservative MP, Mr Conway, a working-class boy from Gateshead, seems to have believed not only that he could serve his country, but that he would become posher. He exclaims that ‘An MP is paid less than a sous-chef in the Commons’, as if this were a self-evident absurdity. He says everything would be fine if only MPs were given ‘the salary for the job’, which he thinks would be
Letters | 9 February 2008
Nip terror in the bud Sir: Correlli Barnett would have us believe Con Coughlin is suffering from paranoia and describes George Bush’s ‘war on terror’ as stale rhetoric (Letters, 2 February). One wonders what ailment Correlli Barnett suffers from — perhaps ‘paranoiac denial’ is a fair diagnosis. Could he inform us which countries, if any, with sizeable Muslim minorities are free of religious conflict? The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, India, the Middle East, Western Europe, all are in turmoil to a greater or lesser degree. As he says, in Britain there have so far been only ‘occasional acts of terrorism’. This is thanks to the efficiency of our security services,
Status Anxiety | 9 February 2008
As an angry young man in the 1990s, I used to get extremely irritated when I read articles by left-wing intellectuals in the London Review of Books about football. To my jaundiced eye, it was a feeble attempt to shore up their credentials as men of the people. Back in those days, football was still a predominantly working-class sport and, as such, was frequently hijacked by middle-class poseurs in the hope that its ‘authenticity’ — key Nineties word — might rub off on them. How distant that period seems now. Today, if a middle-class novelist wrote about his unswerving devotion to Arsenal — about how he had gone to every
Dear Mary | 9 February 2008
Q. We are lucky enough to be lent a chalet in Verbier. My wife invited her niece and boyfriend who is showing signs of becoming a fixture. He is not blessed with a great intellect and has been brought up in a household where shared meals are a rarity. He has little in the way of table manners. Chalet breakfasts often consist of croissants and honey. He used his knife to help himself to honey so, ensuring I was observed, I placed some on my own plate using a teaspoon. He then emulated this by using the spoon to spread the honey on his second croissant, thereby transferring crumbs, butter
Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 9 February 2008
I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will. They’ve always been terrific on unknown France, but they’ve branched out into the New World, especially Chile and Argentina where, with the low US dollar, they managed to secure some gorgeous wines at great prices. None are particularly cheap, but I’d hazard that if you bought these varietals from the classic areas of France you would pay twice as much for the same quality. South America makes much good, gluggable wine,
Changing values
Fifteen years ago a state-of-the-art recording studio would have cost well north of a million pounds. Mix consoles were vast and needed continuous maintenance by ex-NASA scientists. Even a pair of the requisite two-inch tape machines with Dolby could cost more than a house. Mind you, houses were quite cheap back then. Studios featured endless corridors of doors that led to specially designed rooms housing reverb plates, power supplies and air-conditioning units. A/C was essential to offset the heat generated by miles of hot circuitry buzzing in the heavily insulated soundproofed chambers. The cost of investing in all that equipment — allegedly more than a million pounds on doors alone
Lighting up
What a depressingly sunless month January was, here on this rainswept Devon peninsula! No sun, and purple sprouting broccoli for lunch every day as there’s a glut of it and not much else. The entire village is suffering from seasonal affective disorder and tortured by flatulence. And we’ve still got February and possibly March to go before we can even think about casting a clout. On Saturday, though, this interminable succession of dark days was punctuated by a Christian festival; 2 February was Candlemas Day, when candles are lit in the Anglican, Catholic and Greek churches to commemorate the 40th day after the Nativity, when Mary went to the Temple
Secrets and lies | 9 February 2008
Gstaad In the good old days of the Cold War, Athenian hacks used to say that there were only two countries where secrets were safe: China and Greece. In the former nobody talked. In the latter everyone did, hence no one believed a word. I thought of the saying during a chic Gstaad dinner party when people were heard to complain about an article that had appeared in Tatler. ‘How can they get it so wrong?’ was the gist of it. ‘Who has ever heard of these people?’ So out I went and bought a copy of the magazine and read the offending piece. Written by a nice woman, Vassi
Motoring | 9 February 2008
Big, lazy V8 engines, powerful and durable, are as American as Coca-Cola and Stetsons. Europeans, with smaller cars, shorter distances, dearer petrol and high-taxing governments, have traditionally gone for fewer cubic centimetres and higher revs, which usually meant more stressed engines but better handling cars. There have been many exceptions, of course, particularly those manufacturers who imported big Americans and adapted them. Best known is surely the Buick 3.5 alloy V8 that General Motors considered too small for the American market. Rover’s managing director, William Martin-Hurst, spotted it powering a friend’s fishing boat while holidaying in America in the mid-1960s. He took out a manufacturing licence and Rover re-engineered it,
The Turf | 9 February 2008
My favourite, though almost inevitably apocryphal, story from the US elections so far: Hillary Clinton, on a school visit, invites pupils to question her. ‘OK, Mrs Clinton,’ says Benjamin, ‘why did you vote for the Iraq war when now you oppose it? Why did you achieve so little on healthcare reform? And why didn’t you do more about your husband’s philandering?’ As the would-be presidential candidate gulps, the school bell goes off loudly, signalling break, and everybody departs. When they reassemble it is Elmer’s turn. ‘Why, Mrs Clinton, didn’t you vote against the Iraq war? Why didn’t you do more about Bill’s philandering? Why did you achieve so little on
Mind your language | 9 February 2008
Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect phonetically. In fact it is a product of the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament lists ‘Scottish citizen languages’ as ‘Arabic, Bengali, British Sign Language, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Scots and Urdu’. Polish does not get a look-in. The delusion under which the Parliament labours is that Scots is a different language from English. In reality it is
Department of Niche
Alan Jacobs at the always-splendid American Scene: Here’s my Little Surprise of the Day: I was reading this blog post about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo, and saw in the chart at the bottom of the post that Yahoo Mail has over fifty percent of the American email market while Gmail has less than six percent. Less than six percent? Are you kidding? Three-quarters of the people I correspond with (or so it feels) use Gmail. How did my experience get so skewed from the norm? Are we Gmail users a bunch of weirdos? And, if so, just what kind of weirdos? (And, whole we’re at it, how could
Canterbury Tales
And so, with his job now on the line, the Archbishop’s fightback begins. It is, predictably, the Prufrock Defence: that wasn’t what I meant at all. On his website, he insists that he was not proposing ‘parallel jurisdiction’ of sharia and British law. No indeed: the phrase he actually used was ‘plural jurisdiction’ which is much further-reaching and more radical, implying a smorgasbord of legal traditions from which the modern citizen can pick and mix. Charles Moore is – as ever – a must-read in the Daily Telegraph, as is Matthew Parris in The Times who advances the fascinating thesis that the practical implications of the Archbishop’s thesis are not
Reasons for Barack Obama to be cheerful
Super Tuesday was meant to be the decisive day in the Obama–Clinton contest. Instead it was an indecisive super-muddle. Both candidates did only what they needed to do and no more. After California was called for Clinton, Missouri ended up going for Obama — a turnaround which ensured that the evening ended in a score draw but with Obama leading on away goals. It was meant to be the night that Hillary Clinton was anointed as the Democratic nominee presumptive. The Clintonite establishment — which played such a crucial role in setting up a schedule where more than 20 states voted on one day — did not believe that any