Society

Saturday

26 Jan 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Toby Young

Status Anxiety

‘So,’ said the television interviewer, fixing me with an inquisitorial stare, ‘why are you so desperate to be a celebrity?’ This was last week on BBC2, but the question comes up in virtually every television interview I do. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m the only member of the chattering classes foolish enough to admit I want to be a celebrity. Indeed, it’s more or less the sole topic I’m asked to comment on. Whenever it hits the headlines, the 22-year-old researchers employed by news and current affairs programmes flick through the ‘celebrity’ category on their Rolodexes, starting at the top with ‘A-listers’, then gradually work their way down until

Lucy Vickery

Take Five

Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528 In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll punctuated by picnics and bicycle rides, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America, what Raymond Chandler calls ‘a world gone wrong’. Your entries bore many hard-boiled hallmarks: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and liberal use of simile; though there was a tendency to overdo it. The winners,

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business

Network Rail’s performance is poor enough to test an archbishop’s patience, writes Martin Vander Weyer The archbishop and I — not having been formally introduced — confined ourselves to an exchange of despairing glances. We were at Doncaster, in the buffet car of the 19.13 from York to King’s Cross, listening to a series of apologetic but hopelessly uninformative bulletins about how long we might be delayed by a signal failure at Finsbury Park. ‘The driver says it’s a waiting game, there’s trains queuing in front and behind,’ was the announcer’s best shot. To add insult to injury, the buffet could not even provide the saintly Dr Sentamu with his

Matthew Lynn

A paragon of Britishness reinvented by Germans

Matthew Lynn visits the Bentley factory in Crewe — where Spitfires were once built — and discovers how Volkswagen’s engineers and marketing men have revived the classic marque Turn right as you step into the plush foyer of Bentley’s Crewe headquarters and you find yourself in the company’s museum — a display of gorgeously preserved vehicles from Bentley’s prewar heyday, all gleaming brass and steel, all with their tax discs up to date so they can be taken out on the road at any time. For most companies, the museum might be tucked away somewhere. Not at Bentley. Since the almost-forgotten brand was bought by Volkswagen of Germany a decade

Cosmo Lush

Coming soon to a screen near you

Vegas, baby. Ask any self-respecting geek what’s the hottest thing in this town and it isn’t lap-dancers or crapshoots but gadgets and gizmos. Las Vegas is the venue for the gadget squad’s annual get-together, the Consumer Electronics Show. This year’s was the biggest ever: 150,000 specialists from all over the world in town for a week in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center, with almost 3,000 exhibitors displaying their wares. Televisions, computers, hi-fis, cameras, in-car entertainment systems, robots to make the tea: you name it, if it’s new and shiny, you’ll see it first at CES. Only Vegas could host a show on this scale. Like the casinos down the

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinions

Last week, in my digital dealings with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, I experienced something truly fascinating. Yes, I know. Subjective. Dangerous sentence. Bear with me. It was an epi- phany. The right time of year for it, I am told. In a few weeks’ time I have to hire a car. A few weeks ago I lost my wallet, which contained my driver’s licence. With exactly the sort of organisational forward planning that normally escapes me, I had considered these two details in tandem, and acted to prevent the wife and me ending up on one. So, I trotted along to the DVLA website and I applied for