Society

Sunday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Some people’s votes are worth more than other people’s…

Barack Obama wins big in South Carolina. But here’s what National Review’s David Freddoso has to say: He was clobbered with white men and white women. He came in third among both groups. Obama showed in Iowa and New Hampshire that he can win white votes. But the exit polls suggest that this victory in South Carolina is about race, plain and simple. UPDATE: That is to say, except among the youngest voters (who backed Obama first regardless of race). Well. I thought black people’s votes counted too. But apparently not if a victory on such a crushing scale can be so easily discounted.  The numbers suggest Obama won 80%

Peter Hoskin

The democratisation of culture 

Another interview caught my eye in today’s Observer – this one with the new Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham.  In it, Burnham outlines his plans to inject ‘punter power’ into the top sports and culture organisations across the land: “I’m a big believer that those who invest passion, energy and commitment in an organisation, whether that’s their football club or local museum, should help run it.  It’s a good principle to have artists and practitioners on the boards of arts organisations and to have representatives of supporters in the boardroom at every football club.” He also discusses the introduction of “free weeks”, during which tickets for performing arts events would be distributed to members of the

Saturday

Alex James

Staying cool | 26 January 2008

I was outside the Wolseley smoking after dinner, just lighting up my second and peacefully contemplating the relative merits of banana splits and chocolats liègeois. It was raining in fine speckles, not enough to spoil things, just enough to add a glamorising shiny glow to the brightly lit business end of Piccadilly. I was in a good spot. The whole situation was perfect. There were no further requirements. Then a Bentley drew up and a doorman practically fell over in his rush to cover the area around the opening rear door with a huge umbrella. Bob Geldof sprang nimbly out, smiling, brushed the umbrella aside and sashayed across the pavement

Jeremy Clarke

Secrets and lies

Jeremy Clarke reports on his low life The Methodist church hall could have been a bit warmer. I chose a seat at the end of the row. Because I’d been kept awake for most of the previous night by rats scratching in the attic, I felt slightly more paranoid than usual. Scratch, scratch, scratch: whatever it was the rats were doing up there they were very determined about it. I’d lain awake staring up at the ceiling torn between indignation and profound admiration for the work ethic. About a dozen had turned up on a wild night to hear ex-MI5 agent David Shayler promote his 9/11 Truth campaign. According to Mr

Taki

Serbian siren

Gstaad I’ve been watching the Australian Tennis Open on the telly and boring myself to sleep. The modern game is too one-dimensional, the players too predictable. The pumping of the fist after a winner is now de rigueur, as is the tapping of the ball five, ten, in the case of Nadal 16 times before serving. And the rallies are much too long.The only relief from the utter boredom is Ana Ivanovic, probably the prettiest young woman ever to play on the circuit. She has beautiful green hooded eyes, high Slavic cheekbones and a figure which is feminine and to die for. Long before my time, Gussie Moran was the

Marcus Du-Sautoy

Diary – 26 January 2008

It’s said that vampires suffer from a syndrome called arithmomania or an obsessive love of counting, so much so that to escape a vampire you just need to throw loads of cloves of garlic on the floor and the vampire can’t resist counting them, allowing you to make a hasty exit. It was this obsession with counting that inspired my favourite Muppet character, the vampire Count von Count. But I’m actually not in Transylvania to track down vampires but another local inhabitant who was obsessed with mathematics: János Bolyai. At the age of 21 this brilliant mathematician discovered that Euclid’s geometry was not the only possible geometry. He constructed a

The Spectator

Letters | 26 January 2008

Have a heart Sir: I was longing to disagree with Rod Liddle that organ donation should continue to depend upon a positive act to opt into the programme (‘Hands off my organs’, 19 January). However, Mr Brown’s plans include New Labour’s usual targets and tick-boxes. This means that hospitals would be allocated funding according to the number of organs that they harvest, making life-and-death decisions the property of accountants and commissioners. It would be a matter of time, for example, before families of ‘vegetative’ patients were reminded of their duty and encouraged to let their loved ones’ organs be used to save others, despite the fact that the science of

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 January 2008

Charles Moore’s reflections on the week President Sarkozy has made the right decision by avoiding the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The global titans of banking and politics are not looking good: to be photographed having fun with them would be a provocation. Not since the oil crises of the 1970s has there been less confidence in the people in charge. In normal times, one may not think very much about the astronomical sums made by money men, but one’s acceptance of their rewards depends on the idea that they run risks. Now it turns out that they don’t. There is a well-known saying that if you owe

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 January 2008

It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like avian influenza’, but my husband tells me that bird flu is a virus and viruses don’t grow in petri dishes.) One of them is the construction exemplified thus: ‘It is to his own benefit that he [should] understand how to mend the car.’ The word should does not always occur, and the general supposition is

Robin Oakley

Newmarket rarity

Entering The Trainers House at Moulton Paddocks is a reminder that preparing racehorses is not a job but a way of life. In the cheerfully cluttered lobby and kitchen, framed pictures of Lucy Wadham’s winners vie for wall space with those of jodhpured infant Wadhams, either exhilarated or grimly determined, soaring over obstacles. Step up to admire the group photo of horses like Aspirant Dancer, Tealby, Pagan King and Triple Sharp, whose impressive strike rate won the yard the National Hunt Stable of the Year award for 2001–2, and you find yourself squelching in the paper loo just vacated by the latest puppy, who prefers the Racing Post to the

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 26 January 2008

Monday Am engaged on top secret mission — the accidental snapping by a tabloid photographer of Sam nipping out for late-night essentials on the mean streets of west London! We first planned for her to be caught buying fair-trade mozzarella in Partridges on Gloucester Road but Jed said this wasn’t gritty enough. So she’s going to go somewhere really downbeat in North Kensington — with security to make sure she doesn’t get mugged, of course. We can’t leave safety to chance. Not with London in the grip of a crime wave, and all of Britain beaten down and driven to acts of desperation by the lash of recession. Must say,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Executive Problem

In its way, this anecdote – culled from AN Wilson’s touching eulogy for the great Hugh Massingberd is a very telling illustration of how, regardless of technological changes, newspapers have got themselves into such a mess: Part of the secret of Hugh’s overwhelming charm was in his vulnerability. He played up the moments when he had been humiliated, and made jokes about them. But he also really did mind. Just when he thought the new obituaries page had got off to a flying start, a thrusting ‘exec’ on the Telegraph complained to him that there were too many heroic brigadiers with absurd nicknames, and moustachoied wing-commanders. ‘Why’, asked this person,

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Among the many pleasures of The Spectator – greatly improved under Matthew D’Ancona’s watch – few are greater than Charles Moore’s weekly column. Having edited the Speccie himself Mr Moore knows how to write a notebook-style column. Ranging over acres and acres of ground – an archive of the column is here – it’s classic Toryism of the finest sort. Some recent snippets of common sense, wry humour and insight. Proof of the column’s excellence is that one need not agree with it to appreciate it. For instance: The working week began with what the press call ‘Blue Monday’, the day in January when all the worst things about being

Peter Hoskin

The dangers of a lifestyle culture

On the day that the Treasury Select Committee skewered the FSA for its role in the Northern Rock crisis, the Telegraph features a thought-provoking article by Charles Moore – suggesting that consumers join the financial regulators in taking a long, hard look in the proverbial mirror.   Moore places Northern Rock’s downfall in a societal and historical context; characterising it as a symptom of lax Western attitudes towards borrowing and spending.  There’s no totally innocent party here – companies peddle a “lifestyle”; consumers buy into it; and banks fund them.  As Moore puts it: “The consumer dream is summed up in that advertisement for the cosmetic company – ‘Because you’re worth it.’ For the banks, the task has become to

Oliver Hartwich

Budget Backgrounder: No room for manoeuvre? 

Thinking about Parliament, it is easy to miss the wood for the trees. While it is often associated with party political exchanges and topical debates on issues of the day, its core function could be reduced to just one thing: the determination of how government is funded and how the money it raises should be spent. All other policies, whether on policing, education or health, follow from the decisions made in the Budget. Without a budget there could be no army, no hospitals and no schools. In fact, there would not even be a Parliament, let alone a Prime Minister. It is thus really hard to overestimate the role that

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 26 January 2008

Theodore Dalrymple issues a global warning Thank goodness I retired in time from the National Health Service: it has cut down enormously the number of forms I have to fill in. The latest proto-genocidal form sent out to employees by my erstwhile employers was called ‘a data cleanse’, though it soon became known as ‘an ethnic cleanse’ since it related, inter alia, to the staff’s ethnic group. Each member of staff was asked to choose one of 17 ethnic groups to which they belonged, one of six marital statuses, five sexual orientations and nine religious affiliations. Oh for the simple, clean lines of apartheid, when there were only blacks, whites

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

WEB EXCLUSIVE:  Meet the minister for selling the unsellable – uncut

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first tip for stardom. Throughout his twenties, Jim Murphy suffered this affliction. Before Tony Blair led the Labour party he was starting a Blairite revolution in the National Union of Students. His slogan, ‘realism, not revolution,’ made a cover story in the Sunday Times magazine. No list of young talent in the mid-1990s was complete without him. Yet only now, 11 years after his election, is he beginning to blip on the national radar. The 40-year-old minister I meet in the vast Foreign Office room is a lot quieter and more bashful than the student firebrand I once saw shouting down far-left

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Scrabbling to save the monolines

Martin Vander Weyer on the next thing to cause heartburn in the financial markets.  The current market crisis sometimes feels like a Scrabble championship between financial pundits, in which most of us hesitate to challenge dubious words and strange jumbles of letters for fear of showing ignorance. First came ‘subprime’, which we learned to define as a category of mortgage borrowers so uncreditworthy they cannot even afford the hyphen the Spectator’s learned sub-editors would prefer to insert between the ‘sub’ and the ‘prime’. Then came a rash of acronyms encapsulating both the science of subprime lending and the alchemy of securitisation by which its poison has been spread around the

Dan Collings

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Will the special relationship prevail?

As the US presidential race gathers steam, Westminster is abuzz.  Like the Derby Trials, MPs across the political spectrum are watching their horses anxiously.  Some are seasoned observers.  They know the trainers and even the thoroughbreds themselves.  Others are more recent spectators, but with no less passion.  The outcome of the presidential election matters in Westminster, for the course of US policy certainly, but also for UK domestic politics. As the US presidential race gathers steam, Westminster is abuzz.  Like the Derby Trials, MPs across the political spectrum are watching their horses anxiously.  Some are seasoned observers.  They know the trainers and even the thoroughbreds themselves.  Others are more recent

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man

Following last week’s article, someone wrote asking me to dissuade them from buying the new ultra-thin Apple Air laptop, to which they had become curiously attracted. Delighted to help. In fact anything I can do to deprogramme you from the Apple cult will be time well spent. With luck you may end up devoting yourself to something more purposeful and constructive, such as Scientology. It’s not that I don’t like Macs. My problem is with what we marketing chaps call user-imagery. Your typical Mac-owner belongs to that class of people which believe the greatest pleasure to be derived from life is to spend it feeling quietly superior to everyone else.