The latest from Brussels
Mark Mardell has a useful post on the progress of the European Treaty negotiations. His blog will be essential reading over the next few days.
Society
Wednesday
What we shall do with the deputy PM?
The Times today comes up with some new sea shanties for our times. My favourite is The Guardian’s ditty about John Prescott – click here if you haven’t seen it. Priceless.
Tuesday
The reality behind the slogan
Power to the People! Or not? The unmissable Steve Richards has a good piece in today’s Indy about “people power”. Every politician says he is in favour it: how could they say otherwise? But what does it actually mean in practice? An important question, as both Brown and Cameron are fighting for control of the populist beret.
Monday
No laughing matter | 18 June 2007
I must admit that I disagree with Matt about Bernard Manning. The man was a deeply unpleasant bully and while others who ‘say the unsayable’—Borat, for instance—are actually ridiculing racism, Manning was endorsing it. Consider his performance at an event in Manchester back in the 1990s that was secretly taped by World in Action. Manning turned to one of the very few black guests and asked, “Having a night out with nice white people? Isn’t this better than swinging from the trees? Do you think it makes any difference what colour you are? You bet your bollocks it does” The same night, he also came out with this comment about
Why we laughed
The death of Bernard Manning marks the end of an era in comedy and will force liberals once again to wrestle with the question: why was a man who ought to have been offensive so bloody funny? Answer: Because he was bloody funny. That’s it. That’s all there was to it. Those who think he was obsessed by race – his prejudice, such as it was, reflected his age, rather than his inherent nastiness – simply underestimate the comic brilliance and range of the man. Try: “I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a note on it saying, toys not included.” Or: “I went to
Throwing the baby out with the bath water
It seems that as part of the Cameroon mid-course correction, they’ll no longer be talking about being the heir to Blair. I think this is a big mistake, but I accept that I’m probably the only person outside W11 to believe this. Gordon Brown will ruthlessly demagogue any Tory plan for public service reform as really a scheme to privatise /disband / eviscerate the NHS/ state schools / the welfare state (delete as appropriate), the heir to Blair rhetoric provided crucial insulation against these charges and mitigated against the fact that the electorate still don’t really trust the Tories on these issues. It also put the ball firmly back in
Sunday
Campaign Literature
This essay by the US political commentator Michael Barone does a cracking job of explaining why 2008 presidential politics is so dynamic compared to the predictable politics of polarization that have dominated the last few elections. Also worth reading on the US front is this entertaining piece from the New York Times magazine about the candidates to be the next first family and what they tell us about modern American family life.
Saturday
Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 16 June 2007
Monday Disaster. Dave’s big policy announcement on illegal logging totally ruined by rogue spelling error and I’m to blame. Can’t believe I could be so stupid as to add a letter ‘b’ by mistake. Nigel says I must have done it on purpose. Jed says my ‘Inner Moderniser’ did it subliminally. Either way we now have a v. draconian policy on illegal blogging which is going to cause all sorts of upset to the men who live in the chatrooms. That nice Mr Dale sits up half the night deleting swear words as it is. Hope no one tells them it was me who came up with new regime of
The Spectator’s Notes | 16 June 2007
Anyone who believes British Muslim hostility to the war in Iraq is the big motivator of terrorism should read the fascinating cover piece by Shiv Malik in the latest edition of Prospect. Investigating the background of the 7 July London bombings for a television drama (which the BBC, of course, eventually rejected as ‘anti-Muslim’), Malik found how Wahhabist Islamism did its work. Ten years ago, it took hold of the young Mohammad Sidique Khan. It was he who eventually led the suicide plot. What emerges from Malik’s inquiry is that Islamism, far from being a ‘mediaeval’ doctrine, as it is often described in the West, can be seen by its
Diary – 16 June 2007
Global publishing is a confusing business. Because my book on Princess Diana is being published simultaneously in America, England and Germany (the French, in their languid way, are doing it in September, après la rentrée), the challenge to the author is to be Zelig. One nice surprise is that the Germans are mad for Diana — Die Biographie. My esteemed German publisher, Droemer Knaur, brought me to Berlin two weeks before publication, ensconced me in a room in the Hotel Adlon, and marched the publications in and out as if I was Julia Roberts on a Hollywood junket. Is it the typefaces and the polysyllables that make the cornucopia of
Dear Mary… | 16 June 2007
Q. My wife has always had a wide network of friends, many of whom she makes contact with each day as they bring her up to date with how things are going in their lives. She is a good listener and always sees the point of things. She very much enjoys being abreast of all gossip as it ‘breaks’. This would be fine but she is now on the telephone for, I estimate, around four hours a day, two of them with an earpiece while she is doing the school run. I would not mind if the emotional traffic were two-way but it always seems to be my wife who
Enchanted wood
My sister was round at our house at the weekend, trying to give up cannabis after 35 years. It’s her idea but she was absolutely furious about it and her mouth was twisted with vexation, even when she lay asleep on the sofa. On Saturday afternoon me and my boy thought it best to be well out of the way should the volcano erupt again. So we drove up to Dartmoor and sat in the shade of a small primeval oak wood for the afternoon. Wistman’s Wood is a rare and unusual remnant of the kind of oak woodland that used to cloak the moor. It has survived because it grows out of
Letters to the Editor | 16 June 2007
Blair’s conscience Sir: Charles Moore may be correct that Mr Blair wishes to become a Catholic on relinquishing office (The Spectator’s Notes, 9 June). Whether this is appropriate or not is another matter. Throughout his time in Parliament Mr Blair has failed consistently to follow the unequivocal teaching of the Church — on the protection of the unborn child, for instance, on experimentation on human embryos and on civil partnerships. His government was particularly vicious in handling the hierarchy and Catholic adoption agencies over the Sexual Orientation Regulations. As a convert to the faith, Mr Moore knows that after professing the Nicene Creed, those being received into full communion with
A smacker with a spook
I kissed a top FBI agent flush in the mouth while in my cups at Elaine’s last week, and lived to write about it. And it was a stolen kiss, at that. They’re the best kind, now that I’m old enough to see how corny a prelude to a kiss is at my age. I was on my way to the loo when I saw Elaine, the proprietor, talking to the agent. I was introduced and I used a variation of the old Mae West joke, ‘Is that a gun you’re carrying, or do you like my girlfriend?’ Then I grabbed the G-man and kissed her. Special agent Anne Beagan
JUNE WINE CLUB
Here’s a very exciting offer. We start with two wines which are phenomenal value. They are from the Pierre Henri estate in southern France. This is a big enterprise (they have just taken an order for 50,000 cases from Royal Thai airlines) and you might expect the wines to be bland and mass-produced: alcoholic grape juice. Not so. The Syrah 2006 is plump and fruity, and the Chardonnay 2006 is fresh, lively and packed with flavour. There’s perfume provided by the 5 per cent Viognier that M. Henri adds when nobody is looking. These wines are sold under a different label in one of our best-known chains for £5.90 a
Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
One of the secrets of the universe is buried in the word rubbish. The word itself is secretive: no one knows its precise provenance. The big OED says: ‘Of obscure origin app. related in some way to rubble.’ But if you look up rubble, it says: ‘Of obscure origin, app. related in some way to rubbish.’ Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Rubbish is matter in the wrong place but on a larger scale. Getting it into the right place is beginning to perplex governments as never before. The earliest general attempt in English history to deal with the problem can be found in the Parliament Roll for 1392–93:
A choice of first novels
American Youth by Phil LaMarche (Sceptre, £12.99, pp. 221) is a sparsely written, penetrating tale of a boy who finds himself in a moral dilemma when he abets the accidental killing of a neighbour. Fourteen-year-old Ted LeClare tries to impress the Dennison brothers by showing them his father’s rifle, but when he leaves the room briefly the brothers squabble over the loaded gun and the elder one accidentally shoots the younger. Ted’s mother coerces him into denying that he loaded the gun, leaving him in a legal and ethical quandary. When he starts high school, moreover, he finds that he has become the poster-boy for a sinister, right-wing group of
The bonny Falstaffian
Here’s a singular cricket team, well balanced, hard to beat: Dick Spooner, Geoff Cook, Colin Milburn, Tom Graveney, David Townsend, Peter Willey, Alan Hodgson, George Sharp, Alex Coxon, Jim McConnon, Bob Willis. No-nonsense openers, some glistening strokeplayers, a mean and hostile pace attack, two Test match off-spinners, and Spooner and Sharp can share the gauntlets. A clue to provenance: at Chester-le-Street’s Test match this weekend I’ll be reverently downing a stiff one in the Milburn Lounge in fond memory of that bonny Falstaffian which the bar honours — good Colin, 17 years dead this year, still grievously mourned. It is hard to believe that Durham weren’t even a first-class county
Psychobabble
In Competition No. 2498 you were invited to submit a speech by one of our newly ‘emotional literate’ politicians unveiling a piece of legislation and incorporating the following words: ‘dysfunctional’, ‘narrative’, ‘empower’, ‘co-dependent’, ‘holistic’, ‘self-actualisation’, ‘closure’. The traditional ministerial waffle of government policy documents now has a new ingredient as politicians vie with each other to feel our pain, threatening to drown us in an ocean of empathy. David Cameron’s much-mocked ‘Hug a hoodie’ slogan is but one example. To my list you added some horrors from the ever-expanding self-help lexicon: ‘proactive’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘intuitive’; and this one, a corker from Alan Millard, ‘endemic idealistic adherences to institutionalised norms’. Curiously,
How cyber-crime became a multi-billion-pound industry
Imagine you’re the finance director of a quoted financial services company. You receive an anonymous invitation to a ‘Party of a Lifetime’ in the form of a USB memory stick. Hopeful of some welcome distraction, you plug it into your office computer. But unbeknown to you, the stick has been sent by a criminal gang seeking a way into your company’s IT system. The stick searches your directories, sends private files to the gang, inserts a ‘keylogger program’ which records your keystrokes and passwords, and sets up a way for the gang to attack your network. Farfetched? No, it isn’t. Earlier this year 500 UK finance directors received memory sticks