Society

Saturday

Robin Oakley

Double tragedy

It was as if we’d never been away for the Flat season. On Paddy Power Gold Cup day at Cheltenham Tony McCoy, implacable in his concentration, pale-faced as a cadaver, wearing about him an aura of resolution the way others trail clouds of aftershave, rode the first two winners. As if to remind us what we’d been missing, the double took him to his century for a season which only now starts to get full media attention. Foolishly I suggested to a couple of jumping friends that for once the National Hunt scene would be hard put to it to compete with the drama and excitement provided by the duel

The Spectator

Letters | 24 November 2007

Build on the past Sir: Simon Thurley (‘Britain is being demolished’, 17 November) calls us to think again before politicians, short-term financiers and architects repeat all the mistakes we made after the war. I well remember as a student in the 1950s being exhorted by duffle-coated and starry-eyed tutors to ‘change the face of Britain’. Sadly, we have. And still we have not learnt the lesson. Simon Thurley asks ‘will we get anything better than we did in the 1960s and ’70s?’ and, ‘Will old and new be blended successfully to make beautiful places?’ It isn’t really a question of style or of consciously making a beautiful place. A Modernist

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 24 November 2007

Monday Ugh. Have been in Tranquillity Room all day. Was meant to be briefing Mr Gove’s new policy of making all children geniuses by age of six but got migraine. Told Jed I would be lying in the dark thought-storming. Wondered a lot about how our proposal to end mixed-ability classes and bring in ‘setting’ might be applied to the shadow Cabinet. Obviously Mr Letwin, Mr Willetts and Mr Gove would be in the top set. Gids, Mr Hague and Foxy would be in the middle. Spelman, Lansley, May, Villiers and little Grant Shapps would be in the bottom, might even qualify for extra tuition. DD and Mr Mitchell would

Miranda Sawyer

Diary – 24 November 2007

I ’ve seen my fair share of films-turned-into-live-shows over the past couple of years. All About My Mother, The Producers, The Sound of Music, Dirty Dancing: I’ve endured or enjoyed them all. Live performance can be the most transformative, exhilarating experience, or it can kill you, drip by drip, clonking metaphor by clonking metaphor, wasted minute by wasted minute. Desperately Seeking Susan, the flick-turned-musical I saw last Tuesday, was like an exclusive audience invitation. To commit hara-kiri. Blondie’s songs, kidnapped and forced into hard labour because Madonna wouldn’t license the original music, butchered by rawk arrangements and a bellowing cast; charmless leads; cheap costumes; tacky tacky tacky. And what is

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 November 2007

Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf or into anything too energetic, such as a hare. There are strong hints in the poem that Beowulf is a shape-shifter or skin-changer too. They’ve made a film of Beowulf, which is strange, because hardly anyone finds the poem of any interest whatsoever. And one gets the feeling that whatever good things there are hidden

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 24 November 2007

Time, now, for a slightly different tack, to point out another great advantage of the Athenian model towards which Prime Minister Brown might even appear to be groping. It has to do with the party system. When Athenian male citizens over the age of 18 gathered on the Pnyx to take decisions about whatever matters of state confronted them, they must have brought with them a raft of prejudices on any number of matters, including their bias towards one or other of the influential, big-name speakers (like Pericles) who would be almost certain to address them. But what they did not bring was any preordained commitment to a party line

The Spectator

Black Tuesday

Just as some remote tribesmen fear that cameras and mirrors have the power to steal their souls, so the people of the modern world have come to fear that computers have the power to misuse and misdirect their most private data. Identity theft is a potent nightmare of the digital age, and it is with deep foreboding that we part with personal information even to departments of government that should, in a well-ordered democratic society, be the most secure of all repositories of it. For HM Revenue & Customs to allow the National Insurance number and bank account details of a single citizen to fall into unknown hands would be

Matthew Lynn

Shock and ore: the fight for the world’s mineral riches

Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than a month, he’d pressed the button on an audacious £67 billion bid for BHP’s mighty British-based rival Rio Tinto. The prize: a £170 billion conglomerate that would be far and away the world leader in its sector, with mines everywhere from Brazil to Australia and control of vast reserves of mineral riches. If successful, the

Brian Marber

Markets are emotional, not cerebral

I have been a technical analyst — or chartist, if you prefer — for 55 years, since reading that the stock market is the nearest thing to the classical economists’ definition of the perfect market, where price is determined purely in accordance with the law of supply and demand. More buyers than sellers, price rises; more sellers than buyers, it falls. Shares frequently lead separate lives from the companies they represent. Buying and selling is guesswork, but can be educated or uneducated; technical analysis being the former. Short on theory, technical analysis is long on empirical observation. Freed from unreliable intellectual and emotional preconceptions, the technician is well qualified to

Richard Northedge

Half a million rooms to choose from

Most hotel-group bosses like to be at the opening of each new property in their chain. Some claim to have slept in all of their establishments or even to have spent a night in every room. Not Andrew Cosslett. His company is the biggest hotel group in the world. It has 572,000 rooms in more than 3,800 properties and is opening a new hotel every day of the year. Cosslett, the 52-year-old chief executive of InterContinental Hotels, has not yet visited all of his existing estate. ‘I couldn’t even keep up with the ones we’re opening,’ he admits. And the task will get harder. ‘We’re opening one a day and

Robert Cottrell

How Prince lost the plot — and why the next episode may be Sachs and the Citi

I hazarded here in February that it would probably be a good idea if the world’s largest bank were to be run, every now and again, by a banker. At last the board of Citigroup has come round to my point of view, though it might have saved shareholders a few billion dollars by doing so sooner. Charles Prince has gone as chairman and chief executive after announcing a loss of perhaps $11 billion on mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be neither backed nor secure. Robert Rubin has been left holding the fort as chairman and Sir Win Bischoff as chief executive, pending the arrival of somebody new with

Matthew Dancona

The mighty should quake before the Wiki man

As Robert Lindsay demonstrated unforgettably as Wolfie, leader of the Tooting Popular Front in Citizen Smith, anyone who shouts ‘Power to the People!’ can end up looking a prize idiot. So let me throw caution to the wind and say that this is precisely what the web, new media and mobile technology offer us, if we choose to seize the opportunity: democratisation on a new and unprecedented scale. This, at least, is the conclusion I have drawn making two Radio Four programmes on politics and the internet. First, there is what you might call the direct impact of new media upon political practice: its basic instrumentality. As D-J Collins, one

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The Intelligence2 Debate

The motion: Britain Doesn’t Need Trident Harrowing stuff. Helena Kennedy QC began by invoking the memory of Hiroshima. ‘Peeling skin, melting eyeballs. People on pavements vomiting and waiting for death.’ Though she made the pacifist argument Lady Kennedy wasn’t suggesting that to scrap Trident was ‘some wild left-wing peacenik plan’. She cited conservative figures like Simon Jenkins and Lord Bramall, a former defence chief of staff, who both oppose renewing the nuclear deterrent. The opposition was led by Sir Michael Quinlan, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. The lovable mandarin elaborated his urbane arguments in a rapid, fluting delivery. The £20 billion cost of replacing Trident is cheap

Martin Gayford

There is a great deal to be said for living in a tip

In 1864 a Talmudist named Jacob Saphir arrived at Cairo. He made his way to the district confusingly named ‘Babylon’ after a Roman fort. There he visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra, and after complex negotiations he gained access to the Geniza, or treasury. The keepers provided him with a ladder and he climbed up to the roof of a room, two and a half storeys high. Wriggling through a hole, he landed on an enormous mound of parchment, papyrus and leather bindings. He was sitting, as it later turned out, on the greatest archive surviving from any mediaeval society — letters, petitions, contracts, accounts. The Jews of Old

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens

There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank account numbers and sort codes for every child benefit recipient, had been put on two computer discs which were sent from HM Revenue & Customs in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London a month ago, and lost in the post. The personal details of every parent in the land are on the loose.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

The Annapolis Middle East summit won’t produce anything more than a commitment to hold another meeting. But the real worry is that Condoleezza Rice’s intense focus on the Israel Palestine question could distract her from more pressing matters in Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea. It must all have been so different in their dreams. Scroll back to January 2005, the aftermath of the Iraqi elections and the beginning of President George W. Bush’s second term: if, back then, Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice had contemplated a Middle East peace summit to be held in late November 2007, they would surely have dared to imagine a Thanksgiving Peace to match the

The Spectator

The Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards

The Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards Last Thursday the 24th annual Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch was held in front of a roomful of the great and good at Claridges, and — this being the first ever live ‘vodcast’ award ceremony — in front of thousands of web-watchers worldwide as well. Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, welcomed the Rt Hon John Reid MP to present the awards, saying: ‘As Home Secretary, he showed that the spirit of The Sweeney is not dead, metaphorically hurling substandard officials on to the bonnet of his Cortina, investing the words “not fit for purpose” with new and chilling meaning.’ NEWCOMER OF

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The 28 days debate is a red herring compared to this attack on free speech

Samina Malik may be cretinous, but shouldn’t be criminalised Eeny meeny miny mo Catch a kafir by the toe, If he hollers, chop his head off, And put the video on YouTube. I’d better be quick, because I assume the Old Bill will be around any moment now. The little verse quoted above is my poetry debut for The Spectator and before you point out its many deficiencies of feet, metre, scansion, rhyme — not to mention its strictly limited breadth, semantically speaking — let me assure you it was intended as a pastiche. You shouldn’t take it at face value. With any luck, that will get me off the

Lucy Vickery

Tall tale

No. 2524: Condensing Jane You are invited to condense a Jane Austen novel into a limerick (maximum three entries each). Entries to ‘Competition 2524’ by 6 December or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2521 you were invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim, ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway.’ When Jaspistos was in hospital earlier this year one of his fellow inmates liked to ensnare nurses in a vice-like grip and subject them to dull and lengthy anecdotes, one of which culminated in this triumphant final flourish.  The nurses no doubt had better

Frank Keating

Words of Wooldridge

Sportswriting lost a glistening luminary when Ian Wooldridge died at 75 last spring. In four decades he produced more than seven million words for the Daily Mail which, aware of his unmatchable worth, rewarded him and his expenses chits with grateful generosity. It was never necessary for Ian, as it was for his impoverished peers, to bolster the weekly pittance by recycling the tired old stuff in book form. For their part, his employers, no mugs, guarded the Wooldridge byline with severity. In the1970s a publisher annually produced a few ‘best of the backpages’ anthologies, This Sporting Life, the ‘buy me’ potency each year ruinously diluted by a routine preface