Society

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 7 July 2007

Could do without the sort of nonsense I had to deal with this evening. Phone rang in middle of the big announcement and the operator said: ‘Call from Newcastle. Will you accept the charges?’ Monday Could do without the sort of nonsense I had to deal with this evening. Phone rang in middle of the big announcement and the operator said: ‘Call from Newcastle. Will you accept the charges?’ Not so much as a thank-you when Bev from Labour came on the line. Just one insult after another about our ‘sad little reshuffle. Caroline Spelman to rally the grassroots? I don’t think so! George Osborne, election supremo? Oo, we’re scared

Robin Oakley

Much missed

We had been through so much together. Racing not just on the domestic scene but also in Melbourne, Mauritius and Maisons-Lafitte. Together over 15 years we had been bird-watching in Venezuela, Costa Rica and the Gambia, Madagascar and the Isle of Mull. But at Newmarket last Saturday somebody relieved me of my long-cherished Zeiss binoculars. Bombed out perhaps by too many 18-hour days lately in the television job, I either left them on the roof of the car as I retrieved an umbrella from the boot or I put them down when writing out a bet. Either way, somebody chose to help themselves. One should not become attached to inanimate

Taki

Favourite dates

To the Carlton Club for an oversubscribed dinner moderated by Michael Binyon with Liam Fox and yours truly speaking about the Middle East. When my turn came I shyly pointed out that I was honoured to be invited because the usual subject I’m asked to discuss is Paris Hilton or jail. ‘Why don’t you do just that?’ yelled someone from the audience. Oh well, not everyone is as polite as Sergei Cristo, the big shot at the club who had the temerity to invite me. Unsurprisingly, the Middle East seems to be on everyone’s mind nowadays, everyone except Paris Hilton’s, that is. I suppose 2001 will go down as a

Jeremy Clarke

Down and out

I open my eyes. It’s morning. I’m lying on a sofa in a sitting-room I don’t recognise. This’ll have to stop. Apart from anything else, it’s getting boring. I’m reflecting on this when Tom charges in. ‘Jerry!’ he says urgently. ‘Does my face look different?’ It does. Even from several feet away it looks radically altered. His thin, strong, angular face, with the four-times broken nose as the centrepiece, has been replaced overnight with a fatter, more fleshy, almost circular one. He kneels by my sickbed and shows it in profile. ‘Jerry, my lower jaw’s receded by about half an inch as well,’ he says. It has. His normally thrusting

Roy Hattersley

Class conflict

The garden which came with the house was far too small. Buster — clearly a martyr to claustrophobia — regularly burst through the hedge into what used to be The Hall’s orchard. Then, unable to burst back again, he howled in frustrated rage until I rescued him. So, in a fit of uncharacteristic extravagance, I made an irresistible offer for the orchard and the kitchen garden which adjoined it. I dimly remembered that an extortionate price — paid for a specific piece of land, because no other piece of land would meet the purchaser’s needs — is called Ricardian Rent. As I made out the cheque, remembering that useless fact

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 07 July 2007

Grammar schools? Comps? Sec. mods? City academies? Faith schools? Selection by race? Background? Locality? The argument about education is now, in fact, an argument about the social mix of schools for children between the ages of 11 and 16. What has this got to do with education? In the ancient world, education was run not by the state — though Aristotle thought, in principle, it should be — but by teachers offering their services to anyone who had the leisure and could afford the fees. Since childhood was seen not as an end in itself but a transitional stage leading to manhood, the purpose of education was not to develop

The Spectator

Gore’s message is confusing, can Geri be clearer?

Al Gore’s message to the planet is that the cavalry are not the cavalry: the American Indians are the cavalry. An Inconvenient Truth? More confusing than inconvenient, I would say. Never mind: Al looks the part in earth tone polo shirt. One might be forgiven for thinking the man was planning another run at the presidency (see James’s piece in this week’s magazine): that would be one way for the world to recover from the Bush presidency, simply by pretending it never happened. Meanwhile, the Black Eyes Peas are rocking the house at Wembley: ‘Let’s Get It Started’ was especially funky today. Their female singer is called Fergie – a

The Spectator

Al Gore’s musical past

Al Gore has done a Q&A with Independent readers ahead of today’s Live Earth concerts and while most of the exchanges are rather predictably about carbon offsetting, food miles, Gore’s political future and the like, this one rather stands out: You shared a room at Harvard with the actor Tommy Lee Jones. Of the two of you, who got the girls? Mike Barber, Bristol Gore: We both tried to, with variable levels of success. At one point, we became part of a travelling minstrel band to visit girls’ colleges in the Boston area, and perform country music numbers … terribly.

The Spectator

Hearts and minds

‘Among all criminals and murderers, the most dangerous type is the criminal physician.’ ‘Among all criminals and murderers, the most dangerous type is the criminal physician.’ So said Dr Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz who acted as pathologist to Josef Mengele. The unspeakable depravities of the Nazi doctors were catalogued at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, which led to the conviction of 15 German physicians and scientists. The discovery that those arrested in connection with the planned car-bomb attacks have links with the NHS, as doctors, medical students and technicians, and that the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley appears to have been the headquarters of the cell, is deeply

James Young

Nobody lives

In a large entry you divided almost exactly equally between Pepyses and Pooters. I suppose that one of the differences between the two diarists was that Pepys was a ‘somebody’ who generally got things right while Pooter wasn’t and didn’t. Basil Ransome-Davies was spot-on — with Pooter flattered by lots of letters inviting him to become ‘a valued customer’ and offering him loans: ‘it is gratifying to know that I have a trustworthy reputation’. I also liked Peter Meldrum’s Pepys asking at the Admiralty about ‘our sailors captured in Persia’ — were they much hurt? ‘No, Sir, they are writing their diaries for publication.’ The winners below get £25 each

Vernon Bogdanor

Two cheers are quite enough

The 20th century saw the triumph of democracy; by its end, 140 out of the world’s 189 states held multi-party elections. Yet this triumph was greeted, not with enthusiasm, but with apathy and indifference. Democracy appeared to be valued more by the rulers, who had become its cheerleaders, than by the ruled, more by the elites than by the people. The elites, indeed, were tempted to blame the people for being insufficiently appreciative, and for failing to turn out to vote or join political parties. The people, however, did not reject democracy as an ideal; what they criticised were its practical short-comings. Nevertheless, the consequence may be that democracy is

Christopher Esher

Boom and bust in Sarawak

On stage at Wyndham’s Theatre just now, the curtain for Somerset Maugham’s The Letter is a map of South-east Asia, circa 1920. In the middle lies Sarawak, a slab of northern Borneo about the size of England. This is appropriate because Sarawak, which he visited frequently, was the mise-en-scène for much of Maugham’s work. Less appropriate is the fact that, along with Ceylon, Burma and Malaya, Sarawak is picked out in red. But Sarawak wasn’t a colony or a British possession; it belonged to a single English family, the Brookes. The last king of that land, known as the White Rajah, was Vyner Brooke who married an Englishwoman called Sylvia

Saira Khan

We are up against 20 years of planning

Saira Khan recalls the moment she met relatives in  the hijab for the first time and one of them told her:  ‘We are not British, we are Muslim In July 1989 I had an experience that scared and alienated me, but also made me realise who I was and, more importantly, who I was not — and would never be. I was 18 and in my first year at Brighton University, where I was studying for a BA in Humanities. I was meeting new people — people of different religions, cultures, ages, sexual orientation, experiences and interests. I was growing up, realising for the first time that there was a

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes

It is not possible to speak of a terrorist incident as being a good thing, but if it were, these latest would qualify. First, no innocent person was killed in London or Glasgow. Second, information was immediately collected by the authorities, thanks to the would-be killers’ bungling, and more will follow. Often when terrorists are captured they do not break under interrogation because they have been trained as ‘soldiers’. But I gather from experts that failed suicide bombers are in a different category. They were trained only to die, and so they have not been trained to live. Having survived, they start blabbing. There is good reason to hope that

Hywel Williams

Please can we have our Enlightenment back?

It must be odd being God these days. Revealed religion generally — and the Christian God in particular — are often in the dock, screamed at by literary types with a name to make or a reputation to uphold. Christopher Hitchens, in the latest of a series of pamphlets presented in book form, thunders in his title that God Is Not Great. For Richard Dawkins, rather famously, He is delusional. While A.C. Grayling ventures in What Is Good? that ‘religious morality is . . . anti-moral’ as well as being, apparently, ‘inimical to modern interpersonal relations’. The modern apostles of ‘reason’ constitute a thriving business, and it’s the war on

Paul Johnson

And another thing

A MasterCard survey shows that London is now the most important and efficient city in the world — financially that is — and another reveals it is also the most expensive, Moscow alone excepted. The two are connected no doubt. Certainly a lot of successful people live here: over 10,000 of them, I hear, earn more than £1 million a year. I have lived here 52 years and expect to die here, for I like my house despite its 52 stairs. People pour into London from all over the world, in greater numbers and variety than ever before. I now come across tourists from Sri Lanka and India, as well

Friday

The Spectator

The Tour de France starts here

Yesterday, I rode up the Ballon d’Alsace, a mountain in the Vosges range that was the first hill ever included in the Tour de France, which starts this Saturday in London. By the standards of the Tour, it’s a minor climb — just five miles uphill, with an average gradient of seven percent — nothing like the monsters of the Pyrenees and the Alps that riders will be grinding up in a few weeks. It was unseasonably wet and cold, with heavy winds and driving rain, but I hadn’t come all the way to France to sit in the hotel. In happier times, I would have been excited to ride

The Spectator

We have an answer…it’s Charlie Kennedy

Earlier in the week Coffee House asked who would be the first public figure to fall foul of the smoking ban and it appears we have an answer. BBC News 24 is reporting that Charlie Kennedy, the former Lib Dem leader, has been spoken to by police for lighting up on a train.

Thursday

The Spectator

Cameron takes on the broken society agenda

The Spectator last week ran a piece by Andrew Neil saying “Memo to Gordon: it’s the Broken Society, stupid.” Was his memo intercepted? Because David Cameron has today given a speech entitled “Empowering local communities can heal our broken society.” It’s setting the stage for next week’s IDS report. Here’s my take on his speech. 1. “You cannot mend a broken society with the clunking fist of state control”. A powerful line – keep at it. 2. Cameron stresses that “power” as well as money need to go to the poor. The word “empowerment” should be right at the top of is vocabulary. It will put clear blue water between

The Spectator

Our news from America

British police are infuriatingly tight-lipped about terror investigations. But they do talk to American counterparts, who are less guarded with American journalists, so often the US media is first with the British anti-terror news. So this report from ABC News is worth reading.