Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The view from the frontline

The speech by Jonathan Evans, the Director General of MI5, to the Society of Editor’s conference is well worth reading in full. Iraq and the dodgy dossiers mean that it has become impossible for government ministers to talk about the terrorist threat without been accused of scaremongering or trying to win public support for an extension of the period of detention without trial, ID cars or the like so speeches from Evans and his colleagues are the best information we have on how the security establishment see the situation. Sadly, the extent of the threat facing this country is not some piece of Blairite spin. As Evans says, “You may

Sunday

The Spectator

The Great Iraq Debate | 4 November 2007

On December 11th, the Spectator is hosting with Intelligence Squared a debate on the future of Iraq at Central Hall in Westminster. The speakers include Liz Cheney, Tony Benn, Sir Christopher Meyer, William Shawcross, Rory Stewart, and Ali Allawi. If you want to be in the audience and have your say on the most pressing issue of our time you can buy tickets here or by calling 020 7494 3345. Tickets cost £25. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The danger in Pakistan

Pakistan’s constitutional crisis is the biggest problem the world has faced since 9/11. It is not alarmist to suggest that there is a possibility that a nuclear power could either end up being run by radical Islamists or as a failed state.  This Washington Post story shows how volatile the situation is. Xenia Dormandy, who was the Bush administration’s National Security Council director for South Asia until August 2005, tells the paper that she “would be very surprised if [Musharraf] lasts even six months.” Stephen Cohen, perhaps the pre-eminent Pakistan expert in Washington, is blunt that he doesn’t “know what’s going to happen” and warns “I don’t think any Pakistan expert knows

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 3 November 2007

Q. We live in a small flat and when we have visitors for a weekend or a few days we arrange for them to sleep in a spacious bedroom made available by a neighbour, who is also a good friend. She charges only a nominal amount, which so far we have preferred not to mention to our guests. But because it is at least partly a commercial arrangement she finds herself embarrassed by the gifts left her by grateful visitors. And then come the cards or letters, and even Christmas cards. How can we make it clear to our visitors that they need not overdo the effusions of gratitude —

Toby Young Toby Young

‘Yes,’ I said, punching the air. ‘Daddy got the highest score’ — and other triumphs

What are the two words guaranteed to fill any parents of young children with terror? School fees? Chicken Pox? Gina Ford? The answer, I’m afraid, is half term. My daughter, Sasha, only started going to ‘big school’ in September so I wasn’t anticipating too many problems. What I hadn’t factored in is that my wife gave birth to a third child this year, which meant she already had her hands full with a three-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. The fact that our au pair resigned a couple of months ago didn’t help, either. How could I cope? The answer, said my wife, was to cram in as many activities as possible.

Richard Sennett

Ethical eating

Since I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the ‘Say no to foie gras’ campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to animals. Partisans of foie gras accuse me of being a ‘vego-fascist’; more interestingly, several of my Sybarite correspondents have observed that the European legislation banning force-feeding is really a kind of class warfare waged against a delicacy enjoyed mostly by the well-to-do. And my friend Paul Levy, Britain’s most knowledgeable foodie, says I’ve got the facts wrong: artisan

Melissa Kite

Love thy neighbour

The curtain of my upstairs neighbours’ flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair’s legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which includes a clampdown on this sort of thing. If the nanny state stands for anything it must stand for minimum standards of household drapery. A socialist administration so authoritarian that it can oversee the baking of cakes at village fairs can surely enforce interior décor regulations in the smarter parts of south London as a way of

Jeremy Clarke

Never trust a lady

The estate agent was hopelessly late — stuck in traffic, she said — so I gave the couple the tour of our home instead. It was clear that they had no intention of buying: they lived nearby and were just being nosy. What’s more, I caught them exchanging superior glances, first at the framed portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, and again at the stuffed cuckoo at the top of the stairs. He was embarrassed at being caught out; she was shameless and haughty. I whipped them around in record time. On their way out, they paused in the conservatory to pass a patronising comment on the bougainvillea and the

Taki

Crowded country

‘Nobody would be happier than me if, in 50 years’ time, the Prime Minister, the Archibishop of Canterbury, the Poet Laureate, the Lord Chief Justice, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford and the editor of the Times were all non-white.’ So wrote Stephen Glover last week, just in time to further embarrass James Watson, the Nobel laureate and renowned co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. My first reaction was to wonder how thrilled, say, Kenyans might feel if someone were to write how happy they would be if Kenya’s President, Chief Justice, editor of the Kenya Times and Archibishop of Nairobi were all white in 50 years. The irony

The Spectator

Letters | 3 November 2007

Gregory and the inquest Sir: We read once again an attack on Mohamed Al Fayed by Martyn Gregory over the inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed (‘No “flash before the crash”’, 27 October). As it happens, Mr Gregory has rarely appeared at the inquest, which goes a little way to explaining his skewed views. But he was present on Monday, and collared me to ask about the evidence relating to a white Fiat Uno. ‘It will be front-page stuff,’ he volunteered. Mr Gregory would barely notice if it was ‘front page’ or not. His article demonstrated that he has ignored the entire output

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 3 November 2007

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case. The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 3 November 2007

Charles Moore’s thoughts on the week This week, Policy Exchange, of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, of literature found on the premises of more than 100 mosques. In about a quarter of the mosques, often ‘mainstream’ ones, some blessed by a visit from the Prince of Wales, the researchers found what could fairly be described as ‘hate’ literature — books with titles like Women Who Will Go to Hell (for, among another things, cutting their hair short), invitations to kill anyone who abandoned the Islamic faith, attacks on Jews, etc. Much of this material, about half of it published in English, comes from

Michael Winner

Diary – 3 November 2007

Can anyone lend me quid or two? For the first time in my life I’m borrowing money. Mortgaging property. Scrabbling around for cash so I can live my lavish life-style. In case any of the firms I have accounts with are getting worried, please don’t. I have many, many, many millions of pounds in what is laughingly known as a rollover fund. Mine’s in Guernsey. This turns cash into shares but your money is only put on the money market so there’s no risk. Instead of interest you get extra shares. When you eventually sell you pay around 25 per cent tax because it’s reckoned you’re cashing part of the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Times on ‘The Petraeus Curve’

Today’s editorial in The Times on the improvements in Iraq is well worth reading in full. The key point is that the political debate about Iraq on both sides of the Atlantic no longer reflects the reality of the situation. Things have improved to an extent that it is no longer absurd to start thinking about what might be achieved in Iraq rather than just in terms of preventing all out defeat. 

The Spectator

How to save the Union

When Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Ex­chequer, he liked to say that the problem with tax simplification was that you always end up complicating tax, too. The same is true of much constitutional reform: any attempt to remove an anomaly will often create another. New Labour’s devolution experiment responded to the desire of the Scottish and Welsh people for greater autonomy. In so doing, however, it has created new and growing grievances among the people of England. It is this sentiment that Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s deposition to the Tory party’s Democracy Task Force is meant to address: Sir Malcolm proposes that an English Grand Committee be established in the

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 3 November 2007

Monday Dear me! How are we supposed to have a grown up argument about immigration when silly Lithuanian ambassadors can’t see the funny side of a little joke about one-legged dance troupes? If you ask me, people with names that look like the last line of the optician’s testing chart shouldn’t be allowed to start rows. It creates an awful lot of press releases which the spellcheck on the word processor can’t handle. Jed says we’ll only stop it by sending Mr Hague to Vilnius to eat humble Cepelinai, whatever that means. Thank goodness am getting out of office to help Dave do Sky News . . . Later: What

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness

St Petersburg The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women’s clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don’t see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don’t see much of either, either. In the Hermitage, I saw a girl in thigh-high boots and leopard-print hotpants gazing up at a Canaletto. Had she simultaneously been frying blinis on an leaky gas stove, I think I would have taken a photograph. There. That’s it. That’s Russia. I am here as part of the Liberatum Jewel of Russia Festival, one of

Elliot Wilson

Slums for the masses, fortunes for the few

Hu Bin is your archetypal Chinese real-estate entrepre­neur. Built like a bull, with a huge, moon-shaped head, a permanent grin and tiny, nicotine-blackened teeth, he is also the embodiment of Beijing’s sudden determination to use its huge capital reserves to buy the world. Despite an estimated £5 billion fortune, Hu Bin would normally have remained a low-key figure, even in China. His company, Shanghai Zhongzhou International Holding, is the unlisted owner of isolated packets of high-end residential property dotted around Shanghai. But on 17 October he did something guaranteed to attract the attention of the world’s press, splashing out £15 million on a 40,000 square metre artificial island off Dubai

Irfan Alalawi

The Saudis are in the global saddle

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom. The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan

Tim Walker

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades — Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay’s prospective father-in-law in Citizen Smith, among many others — but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his face. His performance as the Alzheimer’s sufferer Felix Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North and his wonderful turn as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day were the parts that finally did it for him. ‘They were my favourites,’ says the 84-year-old actor. He adds, however, that he has another film now that is every bit as special