Society

Saturday

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

Spectator Reviewers

Books of the Year | 24 November 2007

William Trevor Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, £8.99). This is a classic biography, gracefully written, driven by a perception that never falters. The contradictions and lingering mysteries in Hardy’s life, both as a man and a novelist, are investigated fruitfully but gently, without gratuitous or prurient curiosity. Speculation is offered with well-mannered diffidence when there is doubt; with the certainty of exemplary research when there isn’t. A worthy addition to the best of Hardy’s novels, A Time-Torn Man often reads like a particularly good novel itself. Equally a treat is Eleven Houses by Christopher Fitz-Simon (Penguin Ireland, £18.99), a memoir of a confused childhood in ‘Ireland,

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 24 November 2007

Name to a Face (Bantam, £14.99) is Robert Goddard’s 19th novel. With characteristic brio, he combines the Black Death, the wreck of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s flagship off Scilly in 1707 and the theft of an 18th-century ring with adulterous shenanigans in modern Monaco, a drowned journalist, near-identical twins and major-league EU fraud. Tim Harding, a world-weary landscape gardener, is drawn into a lethal quest to connect these disparate elements. It takes him from the Riviera to Penzance, from London to Munich, and in the process forces him to confront not only a ghost from his own past but also what he really wants from the present. The plotting in this

Helena Drysdale

Urge to be first

It’s an alien species. Its habitat is scorching deserts or polar wastes, its diet Smash potato reconstituted with snow melt, and a concoction called ‘pre-stress’ drunk from a bottle that is also used to collect its own urine. Its pastimes include running marathons, writing books and climbing mountains. This is the Sir Ranulph Twistleton Wykeham Fiennes. Just reading about his exploits is exhausting. The first circumnavigation of the world via both Poles was succeeded by frequent attempts at other ‘firsts’ in both Arctic and Antarctic, mostly by dragging laden sledges over ice using nothing but man power. He discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman’s Empty Quarter, and fulfilled

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

There’ll Always Be an England…

Not to intrude into private grief or anything, but how can you children not be amused by this? Croatia rose to the occasion in their crucial Euro 2008 defeat of England – after an apparent X-rated gaffe by an English opera singer at Wembley. Tony Henry belted out a version of the Croat anthem before the 80,000 crowd, but made a blunder at the end. He should have sung ‘Mila kuda si planina’ (which roughly means ‘You know my dear how we love your mountains’). But he instead sang ‘Mila kura si planina’ which can be interpreted as ‘My dear, my penis is a mountain.’ UPDATE: Commenter Damir suggests a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The shape of the race

As America tucks into turkey sandwiches now seems as good a time as any to assess the state of the presidential race. The first contests are now only a little over a month away with the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd and then the New Hampshire primary five days later. Iowa will determine the shape of the nominating contest for both parties. On the Democratic side, if Hillary wins Iowa then she’ll cruise to the nomination: the combination of momentum and a national poll lead will make her unstoppable. If she fails to win, she’ll be in a real contest—albeit one in which she’s still the favourite—as the sense of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

One offer of support that Clinton will find easy to refuse

Hillary Clinton received another endorsement for the presidency today and it came with an offer to stump for her, “And if I can be of any use to her somewhere in the campaign, I’m available. I’d like to go with her and I’m going to suggest it to her.” Somehow I can’t see Hillary inviting Bernadette Chirac, wife of Jacques Chirac, out on the trail with her. France might be less toxic politically than it once was in the States thanks to Nicolas Sarkozy, but a Chirac on the campaign trail wouldn’t go down too well. (Although, in the lead off primary state of New Hampshire one in four of

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Turkey Day Blogging Forecast: Light

Happy Thanksgiving, people. It’s a testament to the enduring optimism – and essential good-nature – of the American people that they should schedule (or have scheduled for them) two family holidays within a month of one another. Thanksgiving wounds barely have time to scab before the Christmas blood-letting is upon us…

Luke Honey

Cooking up a storm

Not so long ago, in a futile attempt to foster the Special Relationship, I once offered to cook a Thanksgiving Dinner for my then girlfriend’s family in Los Angeles. The Americans tend not to eat turkey on Christmas Day itself, as they’ve already had the whole shooting match at Thanksgiving.  As well as roasted turkey, the dinner can include cranberry sauce, candied yams, corn-on-the cob, peas, carrots, and pumpkin pie. It didn’t go as planned: jetlagged (my luggage whisked away by Security at Ontario airport), suffering from the delayed shock of a car crash on the San Diego Freeway (some sort of a moustachioed creature in black leathers and wrap

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Set the people free

Amidst this Black Tuesday excitement, we’ve missed the real intellectual headway the Tories are making in education – as Iain Martin says in the Telegraph today. The Gove v Balls debate yesterday was brilliant: in these days of faux theatricality it’s a pleasure to see two guys who genuinely hate each other go at it. What strikes me is how Cameron and Gove are using the language of the left to sell this – in my view, the only way to get this flying. And not just by calling these “co-operative schools”. At the end of Cameron’s video on schools (here on PlayPolitical) he has this to say: “Why should

James Forsyth James Forsyth

This failure won’t obscure the government’s failure for long

The failure of Steve McClaren’s England team last night has knocked the HMRC debacle off some off the front pages but it is certain that this story will be back. First, blaming some idiot junior member of staff—as Brown and Darling have been doing—just won’t cut it as a senior manager appears to have known that the full set of data was to be sent to the National Audit Office. Second, there has been a pattern of carelessness with people’s personal information at HMRC that the press are now turning their attention to. The Times reports this morning, The HMRC has a history of losing sensitive information on unencrypted CDs.

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Huckabees Chuck Norris Ad (Video)

Via Garance, here is by far and away the best advertisement of this interminable presidential election campaign: UPDATE: Daniel Larison makes the good point that Huckabee’s two word plan for securing the border (“Chuck Norris”) is an admission that Huckabee doesn’t really have a border policy at all (or at least not one likely to appeal to discontented Iowa Republicans). Best – or at least most amusing – reaction to Huckabee’s ad comes, of course, from our old friend Witless Fred Dalton Thompson whose campaign spokesman complains that “Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy.”