Society

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past. You could have spent the whole week at Labour’s conference in Bournemouth without realising somebody called Tony Blair had ever existed. His face, his ideas, his legacy had all but vanished from the official and fringe literature. He may have

Norman Stone

Turkey is right to fight for an end to the PKK

Istanbul Turkey at the moment is being swept by a great wave of patriotic rage. In the past several weeks a dozen or more young soldiers have been killed in the borderlands of Iraq, and even the most sober television channels again and again show their faces, their funerals, their weeping mothers and sisters. There have been vast demonstrations in Ankara and even in provincial towns, bringing the traffic to a stop for hours on end, and there is enormous pressure on the government for something to be done. The problem is a Kurdish terrorist organisation, the PKK, which had been dormant for several years. Its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was

Tim Walker

A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

Patrick Kielty says that there are three ages in a comedian’s life. ‘He starts off as the young Turk who is angry about the state of the world and wants to put it right. Then comes the age of hypocrisy — when he is still quite angry and still quite young, but quietly goes home after the show is over and puts his feet up at his nice pad in Chelsea. Then there is the final age when he is well into middle-age and making jokes about the goo-goo noises his children make. That is when he should, if he has any sense at all, give it all up.’ At

Harry Mount

Better always to be late than selectively so

‘Mr White Man’s Time’ would be a pretty racist nickname if it hadn’t been invented by black Africans. In Ivory Coast, though, it’s a term of some distinction. The nickname belongs to Narcisse Aka, a legal adviser aged 40, who has just won the country’s hallowed Punctuality Night competition — and a £30,000 villa — after he consistently turned up for work on time while his compatriots took a more relaxed attitude to punctuality. As the slogan of the competition goes, ‘African time is killing Africa; let’s fight it.’ Mr White Man’s Time might be a little surprised, then, if he came over to Britain for an urgent appointment —

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 27 October 2007

At last somewhere in Europe as filthy and littered as almost the whole of Britain! If we can’t make ourselves better — and of course we won’t, so long as the final purpose of our public service is to employ the people employed by the public service — we can at least rejoice in the degradation of others. Indeed, in one respect Marseilles was worse than anywhere I have seen in Britain: for I have never seen so much graffiti anywhere in the world. Every concrete surface — and, to adapt the words of a well-known song slightly, there is an awful lot of concrete in Marseilles — was covered

Martyn Gregory

Of course there was no ‘flash before the crash’

The heavyweight legal collision between the coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker’s evidence-driven inquests into Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s deaths, and Planet Fayed’s evidence-free legal and media circus, had always threatened to be messy. Last week was the first full week of witness evidence from Paris and London, and it produced ominous signs. Planet Fayed’s three QCs are his performing elephants — already dubbed ‘Hugefee QCs’ by Private Eye. Three heavyweight legal teams support the Hugefees — representing Fayed, his hotel and his dead driver’s parents. Planet Fayed’s objective is to secure an ‘open’ verdict from the inquest jury; any other outcome would see the eclipse of Mohamed’s fantasies. Planet

Frank Keating

Club before country

Widespread focus of national passions on the conclusion of Lewis Hamilton’s dash for the chequered flag on the Formula One racetrack and rugby’s compelling World Cup muted much of England’s hostile recriminations over its inept football team’s almost certain elimination from the 2008 European championship. The diversions, however, only delayed the deluge of derision, and the buckets of whitewash will be teetering for some time yet on every doorframe lintel of the Football Association’s swish Soho offices. England are doomed unless Russia lose their last two group matches against a weak Israel and even weaker Andorra next month. From his uneasy understudy’s Act 1, Scene 1 entrance on to the

Lucy Vickery

Nonsensical

Competition No. 2520: On the road You are invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’ (maximum 16 lines). Entries to ‘Competition 2520’ by 8 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2517 you were invited to submit a nonsense poem with the first line ‘They went to see in a Sieve, they did…’, the opening to Edward Lear’s ‘The Jumblies’. This was an opportunity to leave reason behind and to make merry with verbal inventiveness, incongruous juxtapositions and distorted spelling. One of appealing things about nonsense verse is that the surreal, topsy-turvy worlds conjured up have their own internal logic, and I especially liked entries that managed to get

The Spectator

Not-so-little Britain

It is almost 40 years since Enoch Powell delivered his notorious speech on immigration to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre on 20 April 1968. ‘As I look ahead,’ said Powell, ‘I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ That Virgilian prophecy has not come to pass, but the effect of Powell’s incendiary speech — combined with the restrictive power of town hall ‘multiculturalism’ in the 1980s — was to make level-headed discussion of immigration all but impossible. That discussion is now, at last, beginning — better late than never — and it

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 27 October 2007

Monday Great balls of justiciable fire! If one more person asks me to write a memo about ‘opt-outs’ I will explode. People are talking in fluent Alphabetti Spaghetti. It’s all ‘IGC mandates’ this, and ‘QMV’ that, as if anyone had the faintest clue what they were on about. And what are ‘justiciable rights’ anyway, when they are at home? Clearly a made-up word or a mistake by the silly Belgian translators. Disgraced myself this morning by asking if The Passerelle Clause was a book written by Robert Harris. How was I to know it was another bit of the beastly Constitution, or whatever they are calling it now…. Stole a

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why I am sceptical about global warming — and a convinced green-energy convert

Last Sunday a group from Winster, a lovely nearby village in Derbyshire, had invited me to open their roadshow at 11 a.m. The group, Sustainable Winster, had organised a Climate Change Awareness Day. The area climate-change bus had arrived for the occasion, there were displays, posters, free linen bags containing packs of expandable chips to put in the cistern of your loo so it uses less water, a Morris Man, two rangers from the Peak District National Park, bright sunshine and an atmosphere of friendly evangelism. The turnout was small but enthusiastic, and as I dipped my bared foot into a tub of charcoal-water to make a carbon footprint on

Paul Johnson

Nothing to beat a garden full of wildfowl and historical memories

My favourite spot in London is the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like to sit there, preferably early in the morning, and watch the waterfowl. They are of three kinds. The swans are rulers of the pond, as they must be. I once counted no fewer than 90 of them on the water, but the last time I held a census there were only 22. Swans flying over London, as they constantly do, can see the pond from many miles away, and know it to be a friendly water with plenty of donated food, so they decide to alight there for a spell. They do no harm and are

George Trefgarne

The making of Ronald Reagan

I have a new hero. He is called Lemuel Boulware, of America’s General Electric Company. According to a fascinating new book by Thomas W. Evans*, Boulware should be credited not only with a role in defeating the intellectual apparatus of communism, but with the creation of one of the most successful US presidents of all time: Ronald Reagan. History has largely glossed over the fact that Reagan spent eight years from 1954 as GE’s ‘ambassador’. He was employed by America’s biggest company to go round its plants giving pep talks, and to present General Electric Theater, a popular television chat show. Reagan was hired by Boulware, who was GE’s head

Lucy Beresford

The double-edged symbolism of Mbeki on the shoulders of white rugby victors

South Africa is buzzing — and not just in the afterglow of victory in the Rugby World Cup. Johann­esburg, built in the 1880s on the back of mineral excavation, is experiencing a contemporary form of gold rush. At the gleaming international airport, yuppies of every hue shape deals on their laptops. A ride into town takes you past shopping malls almost as large as the gold dumps on the outskirts, into a city of building sites. Another sports fixture, the 2010 soccer World Cup which South Africa will host, is often touted as the trigger for this construction boom, but much of it would clearly have happened anyway. Parts of

Taki

Breach of trust

New York While on the tennis circuit from the mid-Fifties to 1965, it was an open secret that there was a lot of hanky-panky going on in the women’s locker rooms. Mind you, lady players were much older than they are now, but there were still some pretty young and impressionable girls competing who took ‘coaching’ from older female players. Competitors back then chose not to know, although in late-night bull sessions and poker games the subject would inevitably be joked about. Actually, I bring it up because of the tennis coach who is facing jail after being convicted of having a year-long lesbian affair with the 13-year-old she was

Jeremy Clarke

Spectator sport

The first thing me and my boy do when we go to the car auction is to head for the burger van and order a cheeseburger each. The burger bar is called CJ’s. We jokingly call it CJD’s because we say the burgers consist of cartilage, udder and compacted sewage. Sometimes we pretend to identify bone or dental enamel. Smothered in brown sauce, however, they’re not bad. The purveyor of this unpretentious fare is a cheerful middle-aged woman called Peggy. ‘With or without, my lovers?’ she says. (We’re always her lovers, her bucks or her handsomes.) She means fried onions, rather than spinal cord. ‘One with and one without, please,

Graham Stewart

Catch me if you can | 27 October 2007

It is a brave man who attempts to uncover the truth about George Galloway. One slip, one factual infelicity, one unguarded opinion and the biographer can expect to get his head bitten off. For, when it comes to receiving rather than dishing out abuse, the Respect MP and onetime Celebrity Big Brother contestant is no pussy cat. Perhaps therefore it is fortunate that David Morley is a seasoned documentary maker for radio and television who has no known links with the Republican party, New Labour, the security services, the Daily Telegraph or, indeed, any of the numerous entities that Galloway seems to believe are out to get him. Rather, Morley

Philip Hensher

This splendid, brave, mad imagination

The last letter in Ted Hughes’s collected letters is to his aunt Hilda, recounting the way in which the Queen awarded him, two weeks before his death, the Order of Merit. It reads like a dream of wish-fulfilment: Then I gave [the Queen] a copy of Birthday Letters — and she was fascinated. I told her how I had come to write it, & even more so how I had come to publish it. I felt to make contact with her as never before. She was extremely vivacious & happy-spirited — more so than ever before. I suppose, talking about those poems, I was able to open my heart more

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Laffering all the way to the Revenue

Lots of talk about the Laffer Curve these days as folk argue over whether it a) exists at all and b) under what circumstances it might be applicable if a) is true. But it seems odd to me that fiscal conservatives in either the US or the UK would seek to make the argument that tax cuts are good things because they increase government revenue. As Milton Friedman, I think, once said, if you’re increasing government revenue by cutting taxes you’re not cutting taxes by enough. Broadly speaking,the case for – or for that matter against – tax cuts in developed economies such as the US and UK that don’t

Thursday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The real abortion figures

One of my favourite themes is the power of metrics. The party who chooses the right yardsticks shapes the debate: something Labour understood early on, with their specific definition of “child poverty,” hospital waiting times and unemployment. An example jumps out at me today with the abortion debate. The Times strikingly visualises what we’re talking about, with a picture of an unborn child below a graph of how many of them are being aborted. But the graph shows the sanitised Department of Health graph of “abortion rate per 1,000 population”. This means nothing to anyone. Turn to page 33 and Tommy’s advert has it right – a vivid image with