Society

Thursday

The Spectator

Balls doesn’t get the the broken society agenda

One of the most infuriating things that Ed Balls does is try and claim that every mention of youth crime today is an attempt to demonise an entire generation of children. Take his response when Jackie Ashley asks him about the Tory talk of a broken society: “Most kids come out of school, walk home and do their homework, and most kids are probably a member of a club, or play in a sports team, or might do some volunteering. Every generation has always had kids that get into trouble. I got into trouble at school from time to time, like everybody did. There are always going to be some

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why can’t we have a better cable service?

Woo hoo! The Rugby World Cup is almost upon us. Once upon a time – ie, during the inaugural tournament in 1987 – this would have meant that those of us exiled in the United States had almost no chance of following the tournament live. So, three cheers for the internets and satellite television and all the other accoutrements of the global telecommunications revolution. The world is a smaller, better place. So why-oh-why-oh-why – and in the name of the wee man – are Versus showing games with a 24-48 hour delay? Seriously. The tournament kicks off with France vs Argentina on Friday, but it will be shown on Versus

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Judging Arthur Miller and Gunter Grass

That wise owl Terry Teachout responds to the brouhaha over the revelation that Arthur Miller “deleted” his Downs-syndrome son from his life, by digging into his vast archive to retrieve the column he wrote when Gunter Grass’s youthful service in the Waffen SS came to public attention. Mr Teachout reminds us of five important principles whose application is by no means confined to artists in trouble: 1. Judging the sins of the past by the standards of the present can be a shortcut to self-righteousness. Make sure you have all the facts–and that you understand their historical context–before passing sentence. 2. Don’t lose your sense of proportion. 3.Remember the Golden

Alex Massie Alex Massie

What I loved once and what I love now are two different things.

Matthew d’Ancona makes a pretty sweeping claim this morning. Sir Michael Caine is, he writes: almost certainly the Greatest Living Englishman. My first reaction was that this was pretty strong mustard. But then again, now that Bill Deedes has gone, who are the other contenders? Your nominations please… And if Sir Sean Connery can be labeled the Greatest Living Scotsman, perhaps it’s appropriate that his old partner from The Man Who Would Be King be accorded the crown south of the border. In the light of recent developments in Scotland and England, readers are also invited to speculate, as wildly as possible, upon the potential political consequences and significance of

The Spectator

Bill Clinton can still turn a phrase

No one in modern politics is better at coming up with a pithy sound bite that sounds like a piece of home-spun wisdom than Bill Clinton. Just take this line of his from a TV interview when asked about the criticism of Hillary that says she is too much of an insider to change things:  “”They often use…Cheney and Rumsfeld and they say…well, ‘if experience counted’…they say this to Democratic audiences…that’s like saying because all malpractice is committed by doctors, next time you need surgery, you should go to an auto mechanic…” It is this ability to deflect an attack without sounding like he’s engaging in politics that makes Bill

The Spectator

Terror arrests in Germany

News is coming through that a huge terrorist attack on US interests in Germany has been foiled. Generally, the best place to follow these things is on The Blotter, a blog from the investigative team of ABC News.

The Spectator

Bush’s attempts to coach the Iraqi PM

This account of how George W. Bush has tried to mentor Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, is fascinating. Bush sees his role as giving Maliki the confidence to lead. He tries to gee the Iraqi PM up by both giving him support and through some frat-boy ribbing. The whole approach is summed up by this exchange between the two just before Bush announced his new Iraq strategy:  Then, challenging Maliki, the president said, “It’s looking like al-Sadr’s gonna run your country.” Maliki grew solemn. “I swear to God,” he vowed, “al-Sadr will not run this country.” Bush took that in. “Well,” he said, “I’ll put my neck out if

Monday

The Spectator

What Britain owes southern Iraq

Given that Tony Blair misled Britain on the way into war in Iraq, Gordon Brown had better be very careful not to mislead us on the way out. Are Iraqi forces really able to take on the militias of the warring Sadr and Hakim families? That’s what we’re told, but look at these two quotes from a New York Times piece Hakim al-Mayahi, provisional council member in charge of security portfolio in Basra: “We have a huge defect in the equipment and the arming of our security forces. The tribes and locals have better weapons than our security forces, who weren’t provided with more than the usual Kalashnikovs and RPGs

Saturday

Roy Hattersley

Strained relationship

There was, the architect said, no hope of getting planning permission for an extension. So I had the ingenious idea of solving our bedroom shortage by building what amounts to an annexe on the ‘footprint’ of the dilapidated potting shed on the other side of the orchard. The plans which we submitted to the Peak Park Authority were headed ‘guest accommodation’ — an anodyne description which I barely noticed. The same could not be said of my neighbours. As soon as the bright-yellow statutory notice was nailed to a door in our garden wall, half the village assumed that we were proposing to go into the bed-and-breakfast business. Anxious not

Jeremy Clarke

Happy families | 1 September 2007

My boy’s mother and Adolf Hitler share the same birthday… My boy’s mother and Adolf Hitler share the same birthday, and, as an astrologer might expect, their personalities are in many ways similar. She can make a long-term plan and stick to it; she’s intensely loyal; and if you get on the wrong side of her you do so at your peril. I’d paid her no child maintenance for five weeks when I called round to see her last week, and I felt ashamed. I was expecting a row about it. But she was unaffectedly pleased to see me. ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said. ‘Sit down for a moment. Tea?’ Since

Taki

Man of mystery

OK. It is early 1964, the Profumo scandal has proved beyond reasonable doubt that English men can also be swingers (and with women, to boot), and my friend Yanni Zographos and I have just had a big win upstairs at Aspinall’s and are taking the circular inside staircase that connects Annabel’s with the casino. Suddenly two nuns block our way. My first thought is a prurient one. Both nuns are great lookers. Then, out of the blue, one of them begins to undo Yanni’s fly and quicker than you can say Monica Lewinsky she services him. I am in my twenties, I am shocked and appalled that a nun would

Robin Oakley

Making the switch

Rider Mick Fitzgerald was asked by his careers master when still at school what he wanted to be. ‘I’ve half a mind to be a jump-jockey,’ he declared. ‘Good,’ replied the laconic pedagogue, ‘because that’s all you’ll need.’ Fitzgerald is actually one of the brightest men in the saddle, but though the thrills of the sport are uncontestable and the weighing-room ‘craic’ is better than in any sport you can name the teacher had a point. Jump-racing careers have a limited time span. The winners’ percentages produce less than on the Flat, and a sport which brings a fall on average every 13 rides in company with half a ton

Dylan Jones

Diary – 1 September 2007

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope, woke up with Philip Roth, had an affair with Tom Bower’s Conrad Black biography (principally because I felt I had to) and spent several days by the pool in Banyuls as the cicadas blithely scratched away in the olive trees with Rupert Everett. I even spent an afternoon with James Patterson just to see what all the fuss is about. But what mostly captured my attention was

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 1 September 2007

A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. Very pretty. They have posted up some examples from famous writers free at www.optimumcomms.co.uk. ‘Surviving words from Old English have a special power to communicate,’ says their introductory blurb. ‘Great writers, especially poets, have always understood this.’ By Optimum’s analysis, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four takes 74.2 per cent of its words from Old

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 1 September 2007

What would Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, the coolest of heads, have made of poor William Shawcross’s overwrought emotional plea that we must stay on in Iraq as a kind of act of faith (‘Britain must stay in Iraq’, 25 August)? A menace of our making Sir: What would Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, the coolest of heads, have made of poor William Shawcross’s overwrought emotional plea that we must stay on in Iraq as a kind of act of faith (‘Britain must stay in Iraq’, 25 August)? Well, the Duke once opined: ‘The real test of a general is to know when to retreat and dare to

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 1 September 2007

Q. A very good and loyal friend of mine has just had two operations and recently she rang and asked if she could come and stay for the weekend. I immediately said yes. However, two days later, I opened an email from a boyfriend who lives abroad and saw that he would be visiting the UK that weekend (the first time for two years) and wanted to stay the weekend with me. For reasons I cannot go into here, there is no way that these two can meet. Do I have to bite the bullet and tell my gentleman friend that he cannot come? My woman friend does have a

The Spectator

Can McCain comeback?

This is the last weekend before the US presidential primaries kick into top gear. At the moment, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton are comfortably leading their respective fields. But a subway series is far from certain. Hillary might find that the electorate develop an acute case of Clinton fatigue if tawdry scandals begin to dominate the headlines once again. Or, the charismatic Barack Obama could catch fire. While on the Republican side, Giuliani is a particularly vulnerable frontrunner as Matthew Continetti points out in this Weekly Standard piece. One of the things to watch this fall is if the onetime Republican frontrunner John McCain can fight his way back into

Steven Berkoff

‘Kill him, Jimmy!’ A night at the cage fight

So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called ‘cage fighting’. So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called ‘cage fighting’. The reason for this being, of course, that the combatants go to war in a rather large cage. The cage is bound in with a net of the kind of wire you might use for a chicken coop. There are no seats for the weary gladiators to rest on between their violent bouts, and so they stand or lean against the wire. Their seconds come into the cage through an opening in one of the sides

David Tang

Mark Birley: a man who was right in everything

We had arranged to see Mark Birley at noon on the day he died. But my wife Lucy and I were just too late. He had suffered a stroke that morning. We missed him by a couple of hours and now, forever. I heard confirmation of the terrible news as I boarded a plane for Hong Kong. Not a good time to be pensive, as stewardess after stewardess interrupted my memories of the man with silly patters and wash-bags and pyjamas. Mark would have appreciated the incongruities. He had a Saharan sense of humour, especially when travelling on commercial. Even when he was confined to a converted bedroom on the