Society

Saturday

Taki

Gross greed

Gstaad The fat cats were all over Davos last week, greedy bankers, self-important bosses of publicly owned multinationals, craven hedge funders and shameless publicity-seekers such as Bono and others of his ilk mixing freely with Gordon Brown, Al Gore and Bill Gates. No, Carla Bruni did not attend, nor did Amy Winehouse, who had better things to do. Like being filmed smoking crack. Some 20 years or so ago, while in my cups, a lady who used to chauffeur me around suddenly came up with a pipe and offered it. I like to think myself a chancer, but I drew the line at that one. Crack will get you nowhere

The Spectator

Letters | 2 February 2008

Phoney war Sir: I was sorry to see that Con Coughlin (‘Agent Brown’s new plan to smash terror’, 26 January) has now joined the likes of poor William Shawcross on the pottier side of paranoia in asserting that the occasional acts of Islamist terrorism in the United Kingdom over recent years mean that ‘we are a nation at war’. Coughlin even justifies George W. Bush’s now stale rhetoric about ‘the war on terror’, and reckons that Gordon Brown ‘is not a man who fits easily or naturally into the role of a wartime leader’. All this goes to demonstrate a dangerous loss of proportion. The last time the United Kingdom

Tony Parsons

Diary – 2 February 2008

As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a black medicine ball on my abdominal muscles. ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he screams, his favourite catchphrase. Fred is a boxer and so going to the gym no longer means sitting around watching Pimp My Ride on MTV. A boxer doesn’t exercise. He trains. The excess weight produced by your soft, affluent life just melts away in the presence

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 2 February 2008

As a father of three small children, I find myself constantly baffled by what is known in our household as ‘the boredom paradox’. Why is it that my four-year-old daughter considers a trip to Loftus Road to watch QPR battle against relegation ‘boring’, while her enjoyment of the same six episodes of Numberjacks can never be diminished, no matter how many times she watches the DVD? The idea that small children are open-minded and imaginative is completely ridiculous. They resemble nothing so much as members of the provincial, middle-European bourgeoisie — petty little martinets who view any change in their routine as an act of unconscionable aggression. Men may be

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 2 February 2008

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliché. It is generally a deal or settlement that is brokered, according to correspondents on radio and television. The cliché is not unconnected with the need for an ‘honest broker’. Yet there is a perfectly good word to broke, literally and metaphorically, which has served for hundreds of years. Originally a broker was one who dealt in wine au broc, in other words from a broached barrel,

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 02 February 2008

Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word ‘change’ was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure. Romans reinforced this perspective by using the past to act as a guide to the present. The technical term for any particular instance was exemplum. Romans had always seen the old Roman family as the great exemplum, reliable, solid, held together by bonds of affection, the foundation of the stable society; and the key to that bonding was pietas, the respect for man and god that created those bonds and the duty that nourished them. That is why Aeneas, mythical ‘father’ of the Roman

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 2 February 2008

Monday Dave says we are absolutely not withdrawing the whip from poor Mr Conway. If we do such a thing, where will it end? Which MP hasn’t at some point given their son a Saturday job answering the phones at the family home? Whose office is not stuffed full of family and friends, all working their socks off for the Great Conservative Victory? It’s what we Tories do, you see: pull together in times of national need. DD furious at the very suggestion that we might humiliate a former whip and his oldest ally. He put forward a lot of forceful arguments during a special huddle. ‘Blood’s thicker than water;

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Marriage à-la-Francaise

Lieutenant George: Look what I got for you sir.  Captain Blackadder: What?  Lieutenant George: It’s the latest issue of “King & Country”. Oh, damn inspiring stuff; the magazine that tells the Tommies the truth about the war.  Captain Blackadder: Or alternatively, the greatest work of fiction since vows of fidelity were included in the French marriage service. I never quite got this joke until I read how Sarko read out those French wedding vows to Cécilia, his second wife, when as Mayor he officiated over her marriage to her first husband. Some years later he made off with her (leaving his wife and two kids). Anyway today he has got

Peter Hoskin

Stopping the rot

There’s an essential interview with David Freud in today’s Telegraph.  Freud wrote a review of welfare for the DWP, and many of its reforming proposals are being adopted by the two main parties.  Now, however, Freud wants the policymakers to go further, particularly on incapacity benefit: “When the whole rot started in the 1980s we had 700,000 [people on incapacity benefit].  I suspect that’s much closer to the real figure than the [2.6 million people] we’ve got now… …If you want a recipe for getting people on to IB, we’ve got it: you get more money and you don’t get hassled.  You can sit there for the rest of your life.  And it’s ludicrous that the disability

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The nature of the enemy in Iraq

If you want to know the nature of the enemy in Iraq just consider yesterday’s bombing where two mentally disabled women were used to carry bombs into two pet markets before being remotely detonated. Their tactics tell us all we need to know about the mindset of the terrorists and what they would do to Iraq, and the Middle East more broadly, if given the opportunity. The defeat of these terrorists is the most pressing issue of our time. However, much people might have disagreed about whether or not it was right to go into Iraq in the first place, victory is now imperative. 

Mary Killen

Dear Mary  

Q. I wonder if you can give me some advice. My parents have agreed I can have 20 people to a party in our house in Balham. I am 16 but very responsible so they agreed to go out between 7 p.m. and 11 when the party is taking place, though they would only go somewhere a few minutes away so they could come back in an emergency. The problem is that now they have found out that all their friends who live in Balham will be out on the night of the party and my father is diabetic, so he doesn’t like to eat later than seven. He does

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport

First Serb Like this journal’s esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal levels of thrills, shocks, gut-wrenching excitement and great grace in victory and defeat. For most people in Britain, tennis tends to be something they think about over a couple of weeks in mid-summer. Damn shame, that. I was watching Roger Federer’s synapse-stunning third round victory over Serbia’s Janko Tipsarevic a few days back — Federer won 10-8 in the fifth against Janko, who with his specs and beard looks like a

Tim Walker

Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives

In a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just around the corner from Euston Station, Roy Dotrice is doing a reading as John Aubrey under the watchful eye of the director Patrick Garland. The bitchy 17th-century writer and antiquarian is a character that both men have come to know very well over years. The relationship began in 1967 when Brief Lives — Garland’s adaptation of The Memoirs, Miscellanies, Letters and Jottings of John Aubrey — was first staged at the Hampstead Theatre. On the West End, Broadway and around the world, Dotrice went on to play Aubrey for more than 1,700 performances which still warrants a mention in the Guinness Book of

Lucy Vickery

Just like a woman

In Competition No. 2529 you were invited to submit a poem describing what women are like. It was Wendy Cope’s funny and poignant poem ‘Bloody Men’ that prompted the comp. There was no obligation to mimic her style, though several did. A disturbing if familiar image emerged from some, though by no means all, of your entries of women as gossipy, ball-breaking, capricious shopaholics obsessed with the size of their bottoms — with increasingly good reason as the years pass.  Those who steered clear of cliché, or who leavened the unpalatable picture with an added twist of some kind, stood out. There were wise words from W.J. Webster, who railed

Christopher Fildes

The disappearing bezzle

My friend Herbie from the Last National Bank of Boot Hill understood about rogue traders. When another hapless bank owned up to losses ‘due to unauthorised trading’, he added: ‘They mean nobody authorised the guy to get it wrong.’ Now that a French trader called Jerome Kerviel has set a new record by losing £3.6 billion, Société Générale, whose money it was, is left to wonder how it happened and to search for some deep, dark conspiracy. It looks more like a familiar story with extra noughts on the end. A swashbuckling trader buckles when he should have swashed, and then tries to double up and cover up. The money

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 2 February 2008

The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is the woman herself, a true princess of delight and fantasy. She was a wonderful example of a certain type of gifted woman, the epitome of whom is Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost. She always insisted that she was uneducated (though her handwriting was excellent) and far from intelligent — ‘thick as two planks’ was the expression she used. But I have never met anyone, male

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice

This January Prometheus paid our era a call. Scientists (it was reported at the end of the month) have ‘announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of the final hurdles to building the world’s first artificial life form’. In Maryland, at the institute of an American biologist and entrepreneur, Craig Venter, a team are now working on the final step to ‘create’ life. They aim to transplant into a cell the synthetic DNA they create, in the hope it will ‘boot up’ the cell and take control of its growth and reproduction. At last. The breathing-into-clay of the Promethean fire; the insertion of the ghost into the

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 2 February 2008

There is no building so hideous that it is beyond the powers of any modern architect worth his salt to design something even worse. This important truth of the science of aesthetics was borne out recently when I visited Paris and went for the first time to the Musée du Quai Branly, on the banks of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Until then, I had not thought it possible to build a museum more ugly than the Centre Pompidou; but I was greatly mistaken. Moreover, it did not even need a British architect to do it: the French have found one all of their own. The

Stanley Johnson

Forty years on from Tet: how the US won Vietnam

For the last few days they have been putting the flags and bunting up in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in preparation for the nationwide celebrations which will mark the Lunar New Year or Tet. Forty years ago, on the night of 30–31 January 1968, the Liberation Army, as it is now known here, launched its famous Tet offensive with a series of co-ordinated surprise attacks on a wide range of targets south of the 17th parallel. In and around Saigon, mortars pounded the US airbase at Tan Son Nhut, as well as the US embassy, the Presidential Palace, the General Staff Headquarters of the South