Society

Saturday

6 Oct 2007

When Morons Attack

It’s the baseball play-offs. Hurrah. Let’s Go Yankees! But that also means it’s time for America’s sportswriters to be even dumber than is customarily the case. For the sake of your sanity as well as for proper hilarity, trot on over to the lads at Fire Joe Morgan. Recent highlights include: how your mother probably has a better understanding of the value of “wins” than the average Hall of Fame voter, why yes of course you’d be better off packing your team with people who aren’t very good at baseball come the play-offs because, hey, they’re plucky! And gusty! and, today, yet another welcome takedown of America’s worst gasbag, Mr

Alex Massie

Picture of the Day | 6 October 2007

I trust that Steve Clemons, pride and joy of the New America Foundation, won’t object if I thieve this adorable picture of his dogs, Oakley (left) and Annie. I grew up with spaniels and have no idea about Weimeraners at all. Are they loopy and excessively highly-strung? Or are they as beautifully melancholy as they look? Explain, people, please. PS: Now that I think of it, the Weimeraner is a cousin of the (regal) Vizsla, is it not?

Alex Massie

OK, let’s talk Turkey…

Andrew Sullivan says Turkey may be the United States’ “most important ally” (really?) and condemns “myopic” Europe for not immediately welcoming a non-European country into the EU. Easy for him to say of course. So does Andrew support the resolution coming before Congress that would (finally) recognise the Armenian genocide? Or does he line up with the American foreign policy establishment and think this is a subject best left under the carpet? I think I can recall Andrew being pretty vociferous about the horror of western indifference to Darfur and I doubt he’d be quite so friendly towards anyone who denied the Jewish (and gypsy and homosexual) holocaust so where

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s Black Saturday

This is Brown’s Black Saturday. He could have won even on these polls, but it would have been a fight rather than a massacre. And this is what he balked at. He has shown himself to be a graduate of the Scooby Doo school of conflict: he saw danger, yelped “yikes” and skedaddled. Fleet Street will not forget this in a hurry.

Martin Vander Weyer

A chastened City

Can we make a link between the chopping of 1,500 jobs, mostly in London and New York, by the Swiss banking giant UBS, and the news that the City of London Corporation has come up with a £300 million contribution to the financing of Crossrail, the long-awaited Heathrow-to-Docklands transport link? Well, connecting unrelated news events on any given day and extracting lessons from them is what columnists are supposed to be for. So let me have a go. The jobs lost at UBS Investment Bank, which include that of its chairman and chief executive Huw Jenkins, are the tip of the iceberg of City redundancies to come this autumn. Not

Frank Keating

While you were away

This corner has already broken its fundamental annual rule not to get worked up about football till the clocks are altered at the end of this month — there is ample time ahead to concentrate on soccer’s unending imbroglio of speculation, satisfaction and scandal — and any number of faraway correspondents write to say they relish the seasons being topped and tailed with some shafts of basic information. In providing a few for you distant Spectator subscribers, I’m warmed by the memory of the late Peter Cook telling me how, as a schoolboy on summer hols from Radley at his father’s distant colonial service outpost in West Africa, the Times

Simon Hoggart

OCTOBER WINE CLUB

This is a cellar that looks like a cellar, with stacks of wine in wooden cases, some of it covered in dust and cobwebs, the finest stored in a locked cage with a creaking door. In spite of that, they have a modern approach to pricing. The business has an enormous turnover, and the inevitable consequence is that they overstock on some wines, which have to be priced to clear. These are absolutely first-rate bottles, but some are a little unfamiliar and won’t sell off the page; others are so good that Averys’ people bought them in vast quantities. The result is that once again we are offering some terrific

Lucy Vickery

Taking the rap

In Competition No. 2514 you were invited to recast a fairy tale as a rap. I thought that fairy tales might translate well into the language of rap. After all, violence is a dominant theme in both genres (especially in the Grimms’ original x-rated versions, which featured scenes of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that would make Stephen King blanch). The winners this week, printed below, were outstanding. Convincing raps, like successful Mills & Boon romances, are not easy to pull off. So it’s a well-deserved £30 each. Natural-born rapper Bill Greenwell nets the bonus fiver. Felicity Powell didn’t enter this week’s comp but, driven to despair by the

The Spectator

A man worthy to be Prime Minister

Ten years after New Labour came to power, it is remarkable that the unions can still hold us all to ransom. This issue of The Spectator has gone to press a day earlier than usual, to minimise the risk of disruption to our readers from the threatened postal strike. It is depressing that such precautions should still be necessary in 2007. So much for strong, Thatcher-esque leadership in No. 10. Those who ask why the country needs a fresh start need look no further than this petty display of Jurassic union power. In Blackpool this week, David Cameron confounded those who said that he is incapable of leading the Tories

Hugo Rifkind

The Tory conference made me feel like Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral

Hugo Rifkind on the party conference season Are we sure that party conferences are good things? Are we convinced that they do the job? Certainly, they are great fun. That, I would never dispute. The booze. The talk. And the rooms. Any connoisseur of weird, shabby, out-of-town hotels with ominously crumbly ceilings and carpets that suck would have been thrilled by my temporary berth in Blackpool last week. Five damp beds in my room for one, and two cold taps that only ran hot. An actual karaoke bar, through which I had to pass to get in and out. The ever-present smell of cigarettes and that other familiar tang which, after

Paul Johnson

The countryside should be a place of life, not of death

This is the time of year when I am irritated by the pop-pop of shotguns near my house in Over Stowey. Not that West Somerset is a great county for shooting. It is a place for hunting. I have counted up to 13 packs of hounds in the neighbourhood. Most of them are foxhounds, and there are staghounds too, of course, but also beagles and harriers not so far away. I favour hunting as the best way of solving difficult problems — keeping down foxes which kill chickens for fun, and dispersing the red deer, which otherwise congregate in scores and can kick to pieces a big field of turnips

Matthew Lynn

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate arbiter of commercial influence, Forbes; the fifth best female executive in Europe, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sarkozy, like all modern politicians, is obsessed with symbols and narratives. In Lagarde, he had his storyline made flesh. Look, he’s saying — we’re changing. This is not the old, closed-for-a-four-hour-lunch, anti-globalisation France. This is the new,

Elliot Wilson

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil ‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Biofuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on the planet right now — not enough to fulfil 5 per cent of Europe’s energy needs, let alone any of the huge demand in the US, China, India or anywhere else.’ If Leiman doesn’t believe that biofuels are a viable solution to our energy needs, one wonders why anybody does. As chief operating officer of

Martin Vander Weyer

As the party games turn nasty, Sharapova shows bankers the elegant way to lose

When I bumped into Barclays chief executive John Varley at Wimbledon one mid-week afternoon in July, I thought he looked remarkably relaxed for a man locked in a potentially career-breaking takeover battle with his deadliest rival. We had just watched Venus Williams make mincemeat of Maria Sharapova, and perhaps Varley was cheered by the thought that it was possible to lose elegantly and still be loved by the crowd. Certainly I think he must have decided early in the ABN Amro game that he could do no more than play his best shots and pray for his formidable opponent, Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, to be stricken

Simon Rae

Inheritance

A poem Inheritance It glinted on your finger all my life, Clicked on your whisky glass or the steering wheel. You used to twist it off to wash your face In restaurant Gents before we had a meal. The seal’s a warlike claymore in a fist — Though you were the most peaceable of men, Relaxing with The Bookseller and your pipe. It could though, at a glance, look like a pen. And that’s how I prefer to look at it, A great, plumed, ink-primed quill, Although I always type, and my first book Was published just too late for you to sell. Simon Rae

Peter Phillips

Teaching shifts

Wherever I go, I hear that music in schools is not what it used to be. By this it is not meant that the music which used to be taught is now taught according to different principles, but that the music which used to be taught is now not represented at all. School choirs no longer sing Christian music because the schools themselves aspire to a non-denominational atmosphere. The resources which used to go into maintaining an orchestra are now split among ethnic bands of every sort, because the Western orchestral tradition has been marginalised probably with the stigma that it is elitist. When I sat the other day listening

Aidan Hartley

Blot on the landscape

Malindi I watched a nest of baby turtles hatch on the beach in front of my mother’s house recently. What a hellish start to a life, I thought. You burrow up through sand and plastic rubbish discarded by tourists. On the race towards the sea everybody wants to eat you: ghost crabs, herons, crows and monitor lizards. If you make it to the waves, the predatory fish are waiting to gulp you down, nets to snare you, pollution to poison you. With enemies like these, who needs Naomi Campbell? The supermodel says that she and her ex-boyfriend Flavio Briatore, boss of a Formula One team, are going to build a

Fergal Keane

The sweet contagion of freedom will outlast the bloodshed in Burma

Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma’s story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. Mae Sot, Thai-Burma borderThe family had come from one of the villages along the border and their story of life and death came from the heart of Burma’s tragedy. They had crossed to Thailand because they did not have the money to buy medicine in Burma. Under the Generals’ rule healthcare in Burma exists only for the rich or the friends of the regime. The country has more malaria deaths than India, whose population

Douglas Davis

We came so close to World War Three that day

A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved. Even more curious is that far from pushing the Syrians and Israelis to war, both seem determined to put a lid on the affair. One month after the event, the absence of hard information leads inexorably to the conclusion that the implications must have been enormous. That was confirmed to The Spectator by a very senior British ministerial source:

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 6 October 2007

When we were students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public gaze. Crossing Belgium recently, at a time when it had had no government for several weeks, I could not help but notice that it looked very much the same as when it did have a government. Obviously the crisis would have to be resolved sooner or later because otherwise people would realise the redundancy of