Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters | 17 November 2007

Lord of works Sir: Your profile of Lord Malloch-Brown was grossly unfair (‘Labour’s lord of the perks’, 10 November). I have known him since 1979 when, at the age of 26, he built and ran the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand. Over 100,000 Cambodian refugees had reason to be very grateful for his superb work. Since then he has had a large number of significant international assignments, at the World Bank, the United Nations and elsewhere. He has enormous experience, particularly of the problems of poverty and international development. In recent years he has been very critical of US policies, including towards Iraq. I disagree with these views

Melissa Kite

Women’s ways

Silly really. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time. A girls’ poker evening. I forgot that trying to persuade a group of women to do anything involving a certain absence of men is like trying to get them to turn up to their own funeral. I’ve tried to organise these sorts of escapade before and it has inevitably been like pulling teeth without gas. Everyone spends the night looking at their watches and fiddling furiously with their mobile phones under the table. You can hardly hear the sighs of despair above the frantic tapping of text messages to real people, i.e., men. At 10.30 p.m. sharp the

Jeremy Clarke

Paying through the teeth

I’m in agony. I’m in agony. Toothache. Upper left molar. The pain is shooting up the side of my face and stabbing through my left eye socket. On the plus side, the world is suddenly less complex. My idea of future happiness has been reduced to nothing more ambitious than a pain-free existence. No longer has it anything to do with ameliorating the suffering of others. If a genie made me choose right now between his making the pain go away and making poverty history, I’d probably have to think about it. Two years ago I went to the dentist for the first time in years. She was appalled; I

Taki

Mailer and me

New York Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since the second world war, a country full of ‘50-storey high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous

Alan Judd

Confessions of a tyreophile

At Oxford I had a clerical friend, a mature postgraduate and student of 19th-century evangelism, who developed a temporary but consuming passion for car tyres. Unlike his more lasting passions for tobacco, alcohol and (I believe) cannabis, his enthusiasm for tyres was as great as his ignorance; he didn’t know a cross-ply from a radial. His fundamental ur-passion was really for easy ways of making money, and for two terms he thought tyres were the answer to life. He had been greatly taken by a probably apocryphal story about some Cambridge undergraduates who imported tyres from Holland and allegedly made £14,000 in one year (a great deal then) without having

Ursula Buchan

Mellow weedlessness

The party is almost over. One of the best autumns for many years is coming to an end, the leaves finally seared off the trees by stormy weather. Even people who do not generally notice these things have been moved to comment on the richness and variety of the colours of trees and shrubs, in woodland, parks and gardens and along bypass embankments. Not only have the reliable beeches, field maples, bird cherries and birches been magnificent, but many trees which do not colour vividly every year, such as poplar, willow and hornbeam, have also turned well. My fruit trees, in particular apricot and mulberry, but also pears and apples,

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 17 November 2007

Q. A dinner-party guest rang me three hours before the dinner for ten I was giving as a thank-you to her and her husband to say that as soon as she arrived at my flat, at 8.30, she would have to use my computer to bid for some curtains on eBay. How should I have dissuaded her, Mary? E.S.W., London W11 A. You could have insisted on sparing her the nuisance of having to undertake this chore. ‘I’ll get a friend’s au pair to come round and sit at the screen for you,’ you could have cooed maternally. ‘She won’t charge more than about £20, but it would be well

Toby Young Toby Young

I have become precisely the kind of wine bore that I used to humiliate at dinner parties

I cannot remember when I became a wine bore. It could have been when Majestic opened a branch in Shepherd’s Bush — or it might stem from the first time I saw Sideways. Perhaps it is just a sign of growing old, like the realisation that you can no longer get away with wearing Converse. But there’s no getting around it: I have become a howling wine snob. Take the birthday dinner I attended last week. The host had very kindly agreed to pay for everyone and, as you would expect, he had chosen the wine in advance. Unfortunately, it was Sauvignon Blanc. What to do? I stole a glance

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 17 November 2007

Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out of him. ‘I fear that the Prime Minister now cuts a rather sad figure,’ he began. ‘He was introduced to us a few months ago by his predecessor as the great clunking fist, but the boxing story has gone completely awry.’ But Dr Cable pronounced awry as OR-ee. Fellow MPs, like so many schoolboys, mocked

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 November 2007

Politicians find it impossible to say they are against Freedom of Information because it sounds as though they must be hiding something if they do so. But the way FOI is now being used means that government will become more and more secretive. When David Cameron suggested in Parliament last week that Gordon Brown had not been contemplating changing the rules on inheritance tax until the Conservatives proposed doing so, the government used FOI to try to refute this, publishing document-based accounts of what had happened. This was opposed, I gather, by Treasury officials who could see that if recent government documents get dragged into party political games no one

Norman Stone

Diary – 17 November 2007

Istanbul I had a medical in Ankara not long ago. The doctor was a good sort, looked over her spectacles and read out the list: blood pressure all right, weight OK, cholesterol a little high, heart no problem, kidneys no problem Liver? No, nothing — but, Professor Stone, the lungs. Ah, I thought, at 66, and after nearly 50 years of heavy smoking. She told me that I have less lung capacity than would be usual for a man of my age. What is it? I asked. Seventy per cent. What is normal for a man of my age? A twinkle: 73. Thank the Lord for sensible doctors. Obviously if

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Nation Dares to Dream

‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome tae your gory bed, Or tae Victorie! ‘Now’s the day, and now’s the hour: See the front o’ battle lour… Scotland vs Italy, Hampden Park, 1200 (EST), 17/11/07. Game on. UPDATE for DC readers: The Lucky Bar on Connecticut Avenue and N St NW is showing the game.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t bank on it

With Alistair Darling coming under increasing pressure after the loss of the personal data of twenty-five million people by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Martin Vander Weyer reviews how Darling and Gordon Brown have also moved into the firing line in the whole Northern Rock debacle. They along with its employees and shareholders now have the most to fear from the crisis. No one seriously argued, ab initio, that the Northern Rock fiasco was the government’s fault. Not even Gordon Brown’s worst enemy (a title more hotly contested than Strictly Come Dancing) tried to claim he was the evil mastermind behind US sub-prime mortgages, or the vast growth in the securitised

Matthew Dancona

An audience with the wise woman of Whitehall

You may not have heard of Janet Paraskeva, but she is one of the most important people in Whitehall and also one of the most highly regarded. She is private both by temperament and by design, enjoying the freedom this gives her to get on with her job as First Civil Service Commissioner: head of the independent body that reports directly to the Queen to ensure open and fair recruitment to the Civil Service and investigate appeals from officials. This week, however, her term of office was extended to the end of 2010 and, with a Constitution Bill in preparation that will have huge implications for Whitehall, she has decided

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 17 November 2007

Monday This Aitken business is all v confusing. Has led to heated debates about some extremely odd-sounding things that happened ten years ago. I thought Mr Blair invented ‘sleaze’! But it seems there were all sorts of shocking goings-on in the 1990s under poor Mr Major. Poppy knows all about them, of course, and thinks it terribly amusing that I don’t. Well, excuse me if I wasn’t reading Parliament Today under the duvet in my chalet in Switzerland when I was 18! I guess I just had too much fun to be getting on with — not to mention upmarket catering. (It’s not easy helping large groups of people to

Amelia Torode

New York comes to London in a nursery queue

New York is a city of superlatives. It’s a point of pride. New Yorkers believe that their city and their city alone holds the mantle for being the place with ‘the most. . . ’ â” the most crazy folks, the most intense lifestyle, the most fashionable restaurants â” you get the picture. There’s a belief that nothing can compete. Nowhere else on earth could possibly come close. Cindy Adams, the famous New York Post gossip columnist, always ends her articles with the celebrated phrase: ‘Only in New York, kids, only in New York’, and people believe it. I’m just not so sure that this is true any more. It

Simon Thurley

Wake up: Britain is being demolished under our very noses

Something very important is going on out there, and I’m not sure that anyone has really noticed. Just look out of your window and you are likely to see fundamental changes happening to the place where you live. Cranes are out in force, a great metallic forest of them; our roads are populated by concrete mixers and lorries full of demolition waste; white vans full of electricians, plumbers and carpenters clog the streets, and their skips are two-deep on the roadsides. Everywhere you look there is scaffolding. This is not just the Olympics â” although the size of the construction programme there is breathtaking â” nor just the construction of

Jonathan Ruffer

The debt crisis is far from over

There is a lot of borrowing around these days. How can we judge this? Last year, total securities issuance came in at $11.5 trillion, about 25 per cent of world GDP according to IMF estimates. This statistic is every bit as batty — and as true — as the tabloid headline in 1989 that the Japanese Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth the same as California. The proximate cause of the unprecedented growth in debt was the interlocking but very different priorities of two empires at different stages of their development. China has needed to head off the social unrest brought about by the urbanisation of its population at a

Allister Heath

Darling is out of his depth

For a man who has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for just over four months, Alistair Darling has certainly made some powerful enemies. In fact, it’s hard to think of anybody important with whom he hasn’t fallen out. Sir Ronald Cohen, the private equity king who is one of Labour’s most prominent business supporters, has criticised Darling’s proposed increase in capital gains tax. Cohen is not alone: Darling has managed the unprecedented feat of uniting all of Britain’s business lobby groups against this destructive, ill-thought-out measure. He has been chided by Mervyn King of the Bank of England over his mishandling of Northern Rock. And there is no love lost

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s not go to Angola: a glimpse of the costs and benefits of prison reform

Is prison reform an economic issue, as well as a moral and social one? Well, if it’s uppermost in my mind and this column, then it must be — and it holds both of those positions this week not so much in response to the news that ex-jailbird Jonathan Aitken is to head a Tory ‘taskforce’ on the subject, but because I too have recently spent time inside. In fact I spent last Saturday morning in HM Prison Kirklevington Grange in Cleveland — where I was startled to find half the inmates had gone out for the day. Kirklevington is a Category C closed prison, which means it has a