Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 5 January 2008

Hoggartian paradox The result has been the Hoggartian paradox of programmes that managed to be both, in Simon’s words, ‘scaringly revealing’ and largely covering ‘old and well-travelled ground’. Hoggartian paradox The result has been the Hoggartian paradox of programmes that managed to be both, in Simon’s words, ‘scaringly revealing’ and largely covering ‘old and well-travelled ground’. I am sorry that he was so disappointed and, of course, I am as sure that he would have done a better job of interviewing Mr Blair as I am that his criticisms are utterly unmotivated by envy. David Aaronovitch By email In defence of Ms Gibbons Mr Liddle might also care to reflect

Toby Young Toby Young

I may have to get divorced: this happiness stuff makes time go too quickly

What happened? Where did 2007 go? Come to think of it, where did the last 10 years go? It’s as though there’s an egg-timer on my desk that measures how much time I have left, only it isn’t working properly. When I keep my eyes on it, the sand trickles through at a steady pace, but whenever I look away the hole opens up and vast quantities of sand fall through at an alarming rate. How else to explain the fact that there’s so little left? I’m reminded of one of John Cleese’s soliloquies in Fawlty Towers: ‘Zzzhhoom. What was that? That was your life, mate. Oh, that was quick.

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 5 January 2008

It’s that time of year again My Fellow Compassionates! So here they are, my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008! 1.) Go easy on the policy. I don’t know about you but I’m suffering a major hangover in this department. Not that I haven’t enjoyed being at the cutting edge. I was as surprised as anyone when Dave adopted all 26 of the ideas I scrawled down on Pony Club notelets during one particularly gruelling emergency manifesto writing session. But enough is enough. If we’re not careful someone is going to dig out all these promises and hold us to them when we’re in government! 2.) Get on the right side

Tim Rice

Diary – 5 January 2008

My daughter has just got married and a beautiful and lively event it was, moving from her local church in St James’s Gardens to the Dorchester via Routemaster buses. I took the opportunity in my speech to thank many for their efforts to be present but reserved my principal praise not for those who had journeyed from Australia, America and South Africa, but for those who had travelled just a few miles from other parts of London. When you have flogged through hideous traffic at the end of another ghastly working day to attend a wedding in your home town it is always extremely annoying to sit through praise showered

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 05 January 2008

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian

James Forsyth James Forsyth

McCain rallies his band of brothers

After the Obama rally, I headed up to Peterborough for a John McCain town hall. The population of the town is 6,000 yet McCain had 600 at his event with the police blocking more people from entering. It is awesome, in the proper sense of the word, how seriously New Hampshire primary voters take their first in the nation role. Talking to them afterwards, one couldn’t help but be struck by their knowledge of the candidates’ records and the sheer number of events they’d been to. Interestingly, a couple of people I spoke to had previously been for Bill Richardson, the Democrat who came fourth in Iowa, but were now

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Obama has the wind at his back

Nashua, New Hampshire There’s little doubt that Obama is the candidate with the big ‘mo. Half an hour before his event was due to start here at Nashua North High School there was a mile and a half long queue of cars trying to get into the car park. The event eventually started an hour late once the campaign had set up an overflow room. There must have been at least a couple of thousand people there and encouragingly for Obama at least a quarter of them were undecided voters. If you’re Hillary Clinton, or John McCain who is competing with Obama for the votes of independents in the state,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hillary’s last best chance

Tonight, both the Democrats and the Republicans debate here in New Hampshire. The Democratic debate represents Hillary Clinton’s best chance to push back against the surging Barack Obama. Hillary has little choice but to make her move tonight, with the primary on Tuesday she has to change the story fast. If Obama wins on Tuesday, he would become the overwhelming favourite to win the nomination.  There is, though, still no sign that the Clintons have come up with a compelling reason for voters to back Hillary. As The New York Times reports this morning, the campaign is still searching for a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond inevitability and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

<strong>Are markets becoming part of the problem?</strong>

‘Should we blame it all on City spivs?’ I asked a managing director of a famous investment bank at a pre-Christmas party. He had just told me – with the smile of a man who can look forward to yet another seven-figure bonus in a few weeks’ time – that his firm was still doing very nicely thank you. It was doing so, he continued in the same breath despite the fact that the economy was going to hell – and his forecast for the state of the nation’s, rather than his own, wealth in 2008 was as startlingly downbeat and bluntly phrased as any I have yet heard in

Lucy Vickery

Annus Mirabilis

In Competition No. 2525 you were invited to submit a poem in which the opening of Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was adapted so that ‘two thousand and seven’ was substituted for ‘nineteen sixty-three’ and ‘sexual intercourse’ replaced by whatever you considered appropriate. Many of your entries had a Larkin-esque bleakness and grim humour. Here’s William Danes-Volkov, man of few words: My writing career began/ In two thousand and seven/ And ended. At the other end of the spectrum Alan Millard’s verse about the joys of retirement was a drop of golden sun, with some nice Larkin references but an effervescent, celebratory tone which contrasts starkly with the mounting fear and

The Spectator

1828 and All That

The year 2008 marks the 180th anniversary of The Spectator. The original Spectator, founded by Addison and Steele, ran only briefly from 1711 to 1712, although its spirit lives on in our Coffee House blog. Today’s Spectator was founded by Robert Stephen Rintoul, in 1828, and we shall be inviting readers to a series of events this year to celebrate. In the year of this magazine’s foundation, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister; Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States; Goya, Schubert and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool died; and Jules Verne, Ibsen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tolstoy were born. Agitation for parliamentary reform became ever more

Paul Johnson

A cheer for the quetzal, a sigh for the heron

By far the most entertaining show in London is the comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Millais at Tate Britain. In addition to his genius for creating an image which remains in the mind — the surest sign of a great painter — Millais had a wonderful knack of portraying interesting subjects and objects and took immense trouble to get the details right. The most riveting item in the show is ‘The Ruling Passion’, originally called ‘The Ornithologist’, showing an old bird-fancier on his deathbed, surrounded by children mesmerised by his collection of exotics; it is one of the finest bits of painting Millais contrived to pull off. On the left

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 5 January 2008

It was part of the convenience of modern life that information about agents in the area should have been immediately accessible to me at the touch of a few keys on a keyboard. Shortly thereafter, however, a rather less pleasant aspect of modernity made itself manifest: most of the agents charged their callers for calling them. No doubt some will applaud this as evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit that has seized the whole nation. But it seems to me that this misses something about the modern British spirit. At first, I could not quite put my finger on what it was that it missed, and then it came to me

Michael Gove

An act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS

Seldom can a New Year have dawned so bleakly as 2008 and rarely can a news story have spoken of evil so starkly as the New Year’s Day report from Kenya of children being deliberately burnt alive inside a church. The calculated, heartless wickedness of the act recalls one of the most notorious atrocities of the second world war, when the SS herded the women and children of Oradour in France into the village church and then set the building alight. And there are more recent echoes from another genocide. The principle that the Church should provide a sanctuary from violence and hatred was breached by the actions of individuals

Deborah Ross

Just get over it, love

Closing the Ring 12A, Nationwide It would be good to be able to think of something nice to say about this movie, if only out of respect and affection for Richard Attenborough, who directed it, but what? Nope, it’s just not possible. This so badly stinks. It is just so, so awful. After the screening I attended, the press were most generously invited to enjoy a glass of champagne with Lord Attenborough at a venue around the corner, but I could not go. Usually, I’m spectacularly up for a free glass of champagne. Ask anybody. But what if I were asked what I thought, and I could not think of

Christina Lamb

Pakistanis now fear that anyone who speaks out will be silenced

Benazir Bhutto’s son has none of his mother’s glamour, says Christina Lamb, but he must now do his dynastic duty in a country cruelly deprived of its only pro-Western, liberal leader and in which no one feels it is safe to criticise the establishment On top of the bus carrying Benazir Bhutto from Karachi airport last October, at the start of the journey that had been planned as her triumphant return from exile but was to end so tragically, I fell into conversation with her amiable cousin Tariq, who told me his wife had begged him not to board. As we waved at the cheering crowds holding banners of Bhutto

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

<p><strong>The shape of the Republican race</strong></p>

Manchester, New Hampshire Mark Halperin over at The Page poses perhaps the most important question about the Republican race post-Iowa, “Do Huckabee and Giuliani rely on Romney to stop McCain (or do they realize that that might be a huge mistake?)?” Up until this point, all the Republican candidates had an interest in taking Romney down a peg or two. Huckabee needed to weaken him to win Iowa, Romney was—and is—McCain’s main competitor in New Hampshire and Giuliani feared a Romney sweep of the early states that could have derailed his Florida and February 5th strategy. But now the calculus has changed. If McCain wins New Hampshire he’ll have effectively ended

The Skimmer

Britain’s out of touch elite is shocked by reality

Fleet Street seems staggered to hear that half a million under-35s are on incapacity benefit – as publicised by the FT yesterday. Even Xinhua, the Chinese government newswire service, follows up the report (socialism, but certainly not as they know it). The Daily Mail’s leader refers to “shocking new” figures – shocking yes, but hardly new as I pointed out yesterday. These figures have been printed quarterly, for at least a decade. No journalists took note. And today’s count is the lowest since the current data series started in 1999. So our press is not startled because the figure is new. It’s just that no one seems to have noticed

James Forsyth James Forsyth

<strong>On to New Hampshire</strong>

The US  papers are stuffed with analysis of last night’s result. Of the stuff that I’ve seen waiting for my flight to New Hampshire, two pieces are absolute must reads:  David Brooks on two ‘political earthquakes’ in The New York Times and EJ Dionne in The Washington Post on what the caucuses suggest about the shape of this fall’s presidential election. Also do check out Mark Halperin’s typically smart take on what we know now and what we are about to find out.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is there a way for Hillary to recover from this defeat?

To understand how deep a hole Hillary Clinton is in following Barack Obama’s crushing victory in the Iowa caucuses, think what you would advise her to do. Going negative on Obama would likely rebound on the Clintons: the Democratic primary electorate do not want to see the first serious black contender for the White House kneecapped. They have no policy trump card to play—the argument about the differences between the health plans of the two candidates is too wonky to really resonate. While the electability argument went up in smoke last night as independents flooded into the Democratic caucuses to support Obama. Just to compound Hillary’s difficulties, John Edwards is