Society

Saturday

Linsey Mcgoey

Betrayed by their disciples

It’s rarely encouraging when a book apologises three times on the first page for its content. First, Tim Congdon regrets that his latest book, a history of monetary policy in post-war Britain, has no proper chapters, but is simply a loose compilation of academic essays and journalistic vignettes. Second, he’s sorry for skipping between the first-person ‘I’ in his journalism, and the avoidance of personal pronouns in the more academic pieces. Finally, he’s contrite about the repetition that could have been reduced ‘with harsher editing’. Congdon is a polemicist, and one of his rhetorical tricks is to apologise for his own deficiencies before a rival has the chance to point

Richard Bradford

On the road with George

Stories abound of figures for whom the allure of the Left is eroded by cynicism and honest self-interest. Most treat their previous affiliation as a species of deluded immaturity; going Right is a natural consequence of growing up, albeit in early middle age. Alan Sillitoe is different. He too in the early Sixties was a radical leftist but his views changed incrementally and, most significantly, as the result of his private ordinance that opinions must be based on personal experience. His first visit to the Soviet Union is documented in Road to Volgograd (1964), and in his latest book he tells of trips he made at the end of the

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Bowling, Shane!

Warning: Cricket blogging! Via Norm, I find that The Guardian asked Phil Simmons and Gary Kirsten to debate the question, Is Shane Warne better than Muttiah Muralitharan? A superficial analysis of the numbers might suggest that Murali has the edge. But then you need to remember that Murali’s figures are padded by the fruits of no fewer than 25 tests against hapless Zimbabwe and Bangladesh (Warne has a total of three tests against such feeble competition). Secondly, Wanre’s record away from home is just as good as his record at home; Murali is less effective away from the comforts of Sri Lankan wickets. Thirdly, their records when they confront the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Has Gordon got the solution?

Gordon Brown has come out of hiding to give Adam Boulton a quick interview, and his (belated) take on the Queen’s Speech. It’s all about setting out long term views, apparently, and “unlocking the potential” of young people (an admission that it remains locked for millions?) Ten years ago, he said, the question was ‘can we get away from mass unemployment’. (The answer, apparently, is yes – we just let it mutate into mass joblessness – 5.4m – and let immigrants take/create most of the new jobs). He says the question now is: does this government have the long-term solutions? Coming up with some short-term solutions on issues like immigration

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Signs of the Times

Deroy Murdock’s remarkable National Review Online column saying Americans should be “proud” of waterboarding prisoners was bad enough. In response Ramesh Ponnuru suggested that the logic of Murdock’s argument was that the Bush administration should be waterboarding more prisoners. Murdock now tells Ponnuru that: [T]he whole point of my piece is that I AM complaining that we do NOT waterboard enough. Yes, we need to waterboard more. At the moment, waterbaording appears to have been banned by both the CIA and the Pentagon. As I say pretty directly in my piece, Bush should reinstate waterboarding publicly and proudly, and I called him deluded for thinking he would gain anything by

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Man of the Year

Time magazine are inviting people to vote for their person of the year. The shortlist is Al Gore Hillary Clinton Hu Jintao Steve Jobs Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Barack Obama General Petraeus Vladimir Putin Condoleezza Rice JK Rowling. To my mind, it has to be Petraeus. At the beginning of this year, Iraq looked like a lost cause but now thanks to his strategy there are real grounds for optimism. When you think of the consequences of failure—an emboldened Iran, a weakened America, a base for terrorists in the heart of the Middle East, the real risk of a region-wide sectarian war—you realise what a difference Petraeus has made.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why so green?

I regularly enjoy Camilla Cavendish’s pieces, but to keep doing so I have to skip over anything she writes about the environment. It spoils it. How can a commentator who normally penetrates conventional wisdom be so taken in by it on this subject? Today, she’s wondering why people aren’t more worked up about climate change. Because so much said about it is demonstrable nonsense, I’d humbly suggest. Now I don’t doubt the planet is warming, but I have five problems. 1) Inevitability The driver behind the IPCC’s projected rise in greenhouse gas emissions is not by people jetting to France but the poor world getting rich. Not much we could,

Clemency Burtonhill

Politics regained?

Joe Klein, the legendary American journalist and author of Primary Colors was in town last night to talk about the US election. TimeWarner threw a champagne-soaked gathering with the great and the good at Soho Hotel, and a very lively panel discussion – with Jim Naughtie, Bronwen Maddox and Trevor Phillips – ensued. Unsurprisingly, the consensus was that, with twelve months to go, the presidential race is still wide open. While the Republicans are practising ‘Cinderella’ politics, quipped Klein, squeezing right-wing religious policies into glass slippers, the Democrats are more like ‘Goldilocks’: ‘too much heat’ on John Edwards, the ‘coolest’ candidate he’s ever written about in Barack Obama, and Hillary,

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hillary Abroad | 7 November 2007

Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers. Lovely to have you here. Hope you have a nice stay. Feel free to wander around the blog… Hillary Clinton makes a great deal of her experience as First Lady, suggesting that the eight years she spent in the White house constitute an ideal training programme for the Presidency. Where Hillary was not actively involved in making decisions, she had the opportunity to see how the White House operates in good times and bad. Those lessons, she says, have been digested. Doubtless there is something to this, even if it’s not he traditional apprenticeship. But how are we to know how Hillary the First Lady would

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Imagine how confused they must be in Liverpool?

A sign of the times. Hell in a hand basket and all that. The Manchester Evening News reports: A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it. The Cool Cash game – launched on Monday – was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won. To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing. But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Talking Brown

Poor Liz. After ten years of being used to regurgitating Blairite language in the Queen’s Speech, she now has the Brownite argot to contend with. “My government will meet the rising aspirations of the British people” she says, as if reading the subtitle of last month’s pre-Budget. All the old Brown favourites are there: all “children to have the best possible start in life” (from his conference speech), to “reduce regulatory burdens on business” (from a speech last December), to “respond to the challenges of globalisation” (from his 2005 Mansion House speech). At least there were no Bob Shrum catchphrases this time. As for giving taxpayers’ money to parties –

Monday

Luke Honey

Bonfire Night Drinks

I love Bonfire Night, with its promise of bangers in the sky, and on the plate.  There’s just something about that evocative smell of cordite; the taste of charred sausages and hot jacket potatoes cooked in the embers of a dying fire, and the general anarchic bonhomie that the Fifth of November encourages, year in, year out. My American friends are bewildered by our November fire festival. I admit that from their perspective on the other side of The Pond, it could look (dare I say it) a trifle pagan.  Especially with all those rum goings-on down in Lewes, with its cliquey Bonfire Societies, Wicker-Man type effigies, and night time

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The view from the frontline

The speech by Jonathan Evans, the Director General of MI5, to the Society of Editor’s conference is well worth reading in full. Iraq and the dodgy dossiers mean that it has become impossible for government ministers to talk about the terrorist threat without been accused of scaremongering or trying to win public support for an extension of the period of detention without trial, ID cars or the like so speeches from Evans and his colleagues are the best information we have on how the security establishment see the situation. Sadly, the extent of the threat facing this country is not some piece of Blairite spin. As Evans says, “You may

Sunday

The Spectator

The Great Iraq Debate | 4 November 2007

On December 11th, the Spectator is hosting with Intelligence Squared a debate on the future of Iraq at Central Hall in Westminster. The speakers include Liz Cheney, Tony Benn, Sir Christopher Meyer, William Shawcross, Rory Stewart, and Ali Allawi. If you want to be in the audience and have your say on the most pressing issue of our time you can buy tickets here or by calling 020 7494 3345. Tickets cost £25. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The danger in Pakistan

Pakistan’s constitutional crisis is the biggest problem the world has faced since 9/11. It is not alarmist to suggest that there is a possibility that a nuclear power could either end up being run by radical Islamists or as a failed state.  This Washington Post story shows how volatile the situation is. Xenia Dormandy, who was the Bush administration’s National Security Council director for South Asia until August 2005, tells the paper that she “would be very surprised if [Musharraf] lasts even six months.” Stephen Cohen, perhaps the pre-eminent Pakistan expert in Washington, is blunt that he doesn’t “know what’s going to happen” and warns “I don’t think any Pakistan expert knows

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 3 November 2007

Q. We live in a small flat and when we have visitors for a weekend or a few days we arrange for them to sleep in a spacious bedroom made available by a neighbour, who is also a good friend. She charges only a nominal amount, which so far we have preferred not to mention to our guests. But because it is at least partly a commercial arrangement she finds herself embarrassed by the gifts left her by grateful visitors. And then come the cards or letters, and even Christmas cards. How can we make it clear to our visitors that they need not overdo the effusions of gratitude —

Toby Young Toby Young

‘Yes,’ I said, punching the air. ‘Daddy got the highest score’ — and other triumphs

What are the two words guaranteed to fill any parents of young children with terror? School fees? Chicken Pox? Gina Ford? The answer, I’m afraid, is half term. My daughter, Sasha, only started going to ‘big school’ in September so I wasn’t anticipating too many problems. What I hadn’t factored in is that my wife gave birth to a third child this year, which meant she already had her hands full with a three-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. The fact that our au pair resigned a couple of months ago didn’t help, either. How could I cope? The answer, said my wife, was to cram in as many activities as possible.

Richard Sennett

Ethical eating

Since I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the ‘Say no to foie gras’ campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to animals. Partisans of foie gras accuse me of being a ‘vego-fascist’; more interestingly, several of my Sybarite correspondents have observed that the European legislation banning force-feeding is really a kind of class warfare waged against a delicacy enjoyed mostly by the well-to-do. And my friend Paul Levy, Britain’s most knowledgeable foodie, says I’ve got the facts wrong: artisan

Melissa Kite

Love thy neighbour

The curtain of my upstairs neighbours’ flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair’s legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which includes a clampdown on this sort of thing. If the nanny state stands for anything it must stand for minimum standards of household drapery. A socialist administration so authoritarian that it can oversee the baking of cakes at village fairs can surely enforce interior décor regulations in the smarter parts of south London as a way of

Jeremy Clarke

Never trust a lady

The estate agent was hopelessly late — stuck in traffic, she said — so I gave the couple the tour of our home instead. It was clear that they had no intention of buying: they lived nearby and were just being nosy. What’s more, I caught them exchanging superior glances, first at the framed portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, and again at the stuffed cuckoo at the top of the stairs. He was embarrassed at being caught out; she was shameless and haughty. I whipped them around in record time. On their way out, they paused in the conservatory to pass a patronising comment on the bougainvillea and the