Society

Saturday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 12 April 2008

Blizzards have been sweeping the country, so it must be the start of the cricket season. And sure enough MCC play Sussex, the champion county, in the annual throat-clearing match at Lord’s today: thermals at the ready please. Though quite why that has always opened the season is beyond me. And ask yourself where would you rather be: in St John’s Wood or flying out to Jaipur, to see Graeme Smith, Shane Warne and Younus Khan take on Chennai’s M.S. Dhoni, Matthew Hayden and Muralitharan in the Indian Premier League’s Twenty20 series which starts next week? In truth, though, for all its stately flummery, cricket has been very nimble in

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 April 2008

The opinions of the Sun newspaper are not noted for nuance, so it has been interesting to follow its unusually careful choice of words about the Olympic torch on its way to China. On Monday, under the headline ‘Freedom Wins’, the leading article called the fact that the torch managed, though with difficulty, to continue its relay through London ‘a triumph for democracy’. It claimed that the British government was speaking out for human rights in China and Tibet, and ran a line presumably planted by the government about how Mr Brown would meet the Dalai Lama next month. It declared that the torch stands for ‘peace, friendship and unity’.

Christopher Michael

From despot’s PR man to Surrey salesman

When he talks about North Korea, Jean-Baptiste Kim still looks wistful. ‘They treated me like a prince,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I wish I could go back.’ He can’t. If he did his life would be in serious danger, because for 11 years Kim was a spokesperson for the Kim Jong-Il government. For 11 years, he was a public defender of a despotic regime that, human rights groups say, tortures its citizens, denies them freedom of information and incarcerates many of them in gulag-style prison camps; a regime that is responsible for the famine that looks set to sweep North Korea this year. But on New Year’s Day 2007, Jean-Baptiste Kim

Molly Guinness

Too much remembrance of things past

Remember Me . . . is the story of a ten-year love affair, which begins in the early 1960s when Joe, an undergraduate polymath from the north, persuades Natasha, French, artistic, mysterious and slightly older than him, to trust him and finally to fall in love with him. Melvyn Bragg ensures that we see their life together at every stage along the way, and from every point of view. The consequence is that the novel details not only the many nuances that affect the relationship, but the excitement of young professional success at the BBC, of gaining a circle of trusted friends and of learning to write novels. Nearly all

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Weightless babblefest

Bliss Royal Court Peter Pan, El Musical Garrick The Last Days of Judas Iscariot Almeida The Royal Court’s anointed one, Caryl Churchill, has translated a new play, Bliss, by the Canadian writer Olivier Choinière. Bliss goes like this. Four shelf-stackers dressed in supermarket fatigues stand in a communal lavatory. They narrate a long dreary tale about Céline Dion, her family and some journalists. After half an hour, there’s a new story. A pregnant woman, whose body lacks genital or cloacal apertures, is forced to give birth by firing the foetus through her sealed rectum while she explodes. At least I think that’s what it was about. When their tales end

Simon Baker

The magic lingers on

At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists, is his nephew. At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists, is his nephew. The claim of kinship seems implausible, but Akbar’s older relatives admit that there is a family secret involving a pale-skinned, mythically beautiful princess named Qara Köz, who was born 100 years earlier

Graham Stewart

No need to panic — probably

When there is so much data suggesting the world’s climate is heating up, some may find it presumptuous of Nigel Lawson, who is not a scientist and has undertaken no original research, to hope to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Would we take seriously an appraisal of his time as Chancellor of Exchequer written by someone whose only expertise was in oceanography? When there is so much data suggesting the world’s climate is heating up, some may find it presumptuous of Nigel Lawson, who is not a scientist and has undertaken no original research, to hope to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Would we take seriously an appraisal of his time as

Friday

Diary – 11 April 2008

Gwyneth Williams on delivering the World Service Monday: the nine o’clock meeting. I have measured out my days with BBC meetings, and none rivals this. It is the queen of meetings, a jewel; a crisp attempt to order the world coupled with a dark humour acknowledging the absurdity of the task. This is, after all, the World Service newsroom at work: driven by a deeply felt mission to unpick and explore, decode and analyse, above all tell our 40 million weekly English listeners and the 143 million in other languages what is going on. It is parody and irony, occasional brilliance, wit and wisdom, daily and all in 40 minutes. I

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Guinness is Good For You; Government Is Not

In the past nine months four pubs in Selkirk, my home town, have closed. It would be simplistic to presume that the liberty-quashing smoking ban was the sole cause of this regrettable trend; it would be idiotic to suppose it didn’t play a part. Still, that’s only one part of legislators’ attempts to run publicans out of town. Consider this latest wheeze, for instance, as told by the Southern Reporter: Pub licensees, who currently pay £172 for a three-year licence to sell alcohol, will have to fork out up to £1,600 just to register their premises under the new [licensing] system. An annual fee on top of that has yet

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Who says the culture wars are over?

This is probably the dumbest thing Barack Obama has said all year. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That Obama was speaking at

The Spectator

Tread the Trading Floor

Head over to Trading Floor for the latest on the credit crunch, including: Fraser Nelson on the UK’s shaky economic framework. And Michael Millar on why it’s not all doom-and-gloom in the housing markets.

Peter Hoskin

Give Balls a kicking

Some computer-whizz at CCHQ has knocked up a Jack Straw vs Ed Balls online fighting game.  It hardly spells the end to “punch and judy politics”, but it might help CoffeeHousers while away a Friday afternoon.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Essential viewing on Iraq

This episode of Charlie Rose with John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (full video below) is by far the most informative thing I’ve seen on the Petraeus and Crocker testimony and the whole state of the war in Iraq. Both Burns and Filkins stress that things are precarious but equally they are both sure that things are improving in Iraq and there is a real possibility of a positive outcome although there is a long way to go—as Filkins puts it, it is ‘the bottom of the third innings’ in a nine innings game. Notably, Burns sees the recent events in Basra as a net positive

Peter Hoskin

Surveillance society

There’s a worrying story in the papers this morning – Poole borough council has used anti-terror powers to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. It crystallises the idea that cracking-down on terrorism could mean cracking-down on personal freedom. And with the debate over detention times still raging, incidents like this are hardly going to help the Government’s cause.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Read All About It: Readers Resist Porridge

Glenn Greenwald, elitist scourge of the modern media’s cosy elitism, has been on a tear lately. He complains that the media focuses too much on trivial froth and not enough on serious issues. Why, he asks, does the media, ignore (relatively speaking) John Yoo’s now-infamous (and rightly so) “Torture Memo” while devoting acres and hours of attention to Barack Obama going ten-pin bowling in Pennsylvania? The crux of Greenwald’s argument is: And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Stuff Readers Like

Further to this post on the media and What Readers Want, it’s always useful to have a gander at the New York Times’s most emailed stories. For sure, this is no infallible guide but it is a useful snapshot of reader opinion in as much as it’s a list of the stories readers most frequently recommend to their friends. Here’s today’s list. In Shift to Digital, More Repeat Mammograms Latest College Reading Lists: Menus With Pho and Lobster Equestrians’ Deaths Spread Unease in Sport Magazine Preview: The Aria of Chris Matthews Findings: And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw Maureen Dowd: Toil and Trouble Well: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will borrowers be spared?

Don’t breathe easily. Apart from the lucky minority with mortgages linked to Bank of England’s base rates, today’s rate cut won’t alleviate the mortgage industry misery. The city expected this cut and many expected a larger one, so the all important Libor interbank lending rate remains sky high. As Anatole Kaletsky says today, the pain is just starting. For the mortgage brokers take on today’s cut, read here. For more business news and analysis head over to Trading Floor.

Peter Hoskin

Fractured relations

There’s a shocking finding in today’s Times, and one that could permanently undermine relations between Britain and Iraq. The reason British troops weren’t involved in the early stages of the recent Basra offensive? It wasn’t because Iraqi forces could “cope on their own”. Instead, it was down to a deliberate snub on the part of Iraqi officials: “The Times has learnt … that when Britain’s most senior officer in Basra, Brigadier Julian Free, commander of 4 Mechanised Brigade, flew into the city to find out what was going on, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who was orchestrating the attacks on militia strongholds, declined to see him. Brigadier Free flew

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How can all be lost? Wisden has arrived.

One of the great annual treats is upon us: yes, the 2008 edition of Wisden arrived this morning. As always, the obituaries provide some of the best reading. To wit, Mike Brearley’s father, Horace who died last August aged 94. He was: A batsman who played once for Yorkshire before the war, and twice for Middlesex afterwards…Mike himself tells the story of his father’s only game for Yorkshire, which was against Middlesex: “He batted an No. 5, and faced a side that contained three leg-spinners. Horace had never, or almost never, been confronted by a googly bowler, and here were three all at once. But he was a typical Yorkshireman,