Society

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

I fell for Piers

I think I have fallen victim to a cunning and captious new publishing ploy to get hopelessly vain creatures like me, who love seeing their names in print, to buy books. Let me explain. Back in mid-April sometime I was reading a review by Lynn Barber of Piers Morgan’s new autobiography – the second in about three years – when my eye rested on my own name. My stomach did a nervous flutter. How on earth did this get here?  “One day Piers receives a phone call from Rachel Johnson (sister of Boris),” writes Lynn, “who tells him she is writing an article called “Does size matter?” They chat about it for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Sarko clears the last hurdle

Nicolas Sarkozy survived last night’s French presidential debate. Opinion seems divided on who actually won but Sarko didn’t throw it away, as many feared he would, by flying off the handle. Ségolène Royal kept trying to rile him, to get him to display the side of his personality that scares so many voters yet Sarkozy stayed studiously calm. He even got in a shot at Royal for being too quick to anger. The result: a draw–which is almost certainly good enough for Sarkozy who is up by about 4 points in every poll. What struck me most, though, were the viewing figures: 20 million plus for a two and a half

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

Britain, my Britain

Why do the Scottish elections make me uneasy? Because the performance of the SNP, which is certain to be strong, is bound to stir up a reciprocal nationalism south of the border. England’s moment is undoubtedly drawing closer. And I am not sure that is such a good thing. In his masterly book, England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton describes a country that is, above all else, a home, defined by what he calls “enchantment”, expressed in ritual, culture and the laws which are a gift of the land rather than a mere compilation of decrees. Scruton’s England is restrained, eccentric, civilised: it is an appealing and dignified place. But it

Sarah Standing

Londoners: The country’s personal shoppers

The entire Kate Moss Topshop collection has ended up on ebay. This morning I noticed there are over 5,000 items for sale. It seems London-based fashionistas just act as personal shoppers for the rest of the country who (understandably) can’t be bothered to join the scrum.

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 28 April 2007

MONDAY Phew! We’re back to just the one good-looking, charismatic David. All I can say is thank goodness for that! My mental health will be all the better for it and no doubt poor Mr Miliband’s will be, too. What a kerfuffle! He can bang on about his ‘I can’ philosophy all he likes, but when it comes right down to it he just so obviously jolly well can’t. Still, at least the soon-to-be-disbanded ‘Kill Mil’ unit has been useful. Am off there now to change into my Kate Moss for Topshop off-the-(left)-shoulder cocktail dress, ready for swanky Policy Exchange five-year anniversary celebration tonight at the Four Seasons. Everyone who

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 April 2007

‘A conflict of interest’ is now almost the worst thing known to modern theories of governance. It is considered disgraceful, for example, that the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, who is a government minister and was made a peer by Tony Blair, will be the man who decides whether or not there should be prosecutions in the ‘cash-for-peerages’ affair. But it is a strange fact that attempts to sort out such conflicts can make matters worse. Who can doubt, for example, that the Church of England is so scrupulously moderate because it knows that its position as the established Church conflicts with modern ideas of freedom of thought, not to mention the

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 28 April 2007

In thick of whistlestop tour of the US to promote Notting Hell, so the dateline above this diary should read ‘New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Chicago, Denver, L.A, San Francisco’ which would be a first — for me, anyway. In the taxi to the airport, I compare schedules with the novelist and leggy beauty Santa Montefiore (also touring some cities with me promoting her book The Gypsy Madonna, on our Great British Blondes roadshow. I love it!). I leaf through the bumf and then decide it hasn’t been put together by my fab team at Touchstone Fireside of Simon and Schuster without a map (NY–Dallas–DC??), but by a sadist. There

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 28 April 2007

Q. I have a close, dear girlfriend of many years standing. She is extremely glamorous and quite youthful but is nevertheless a Suffolk housewife, the mother of five children and the wife of an extremely conservative and highly respected member of White’s. My quandary is how to confront her about her reckless and inappropriate pursuit of ancient rock stars and her attempts to turn herself into a rock-chick diva. Wearing eye-wateringly tight crotch-skimming shorts with bovver boots, she ‘grooves and boogies’ in the VIP areas of rock concerts. Her uncoordinated arm waving and hip swivelling in ‘man in drag’ lip and eyeliner while shouting ‘yeah!’ throughout each set rather ruins

Taki

Going for gold

Miami Bragging goes hand in hand with failure. I’ve met a lot of stars in my life — sporting and literary ones, and not a small number of film stars, too — and I’ve yet to come across a successful one who boasted. Sure, there was Muhammad Ali, but his was a jig, a publicity stunt to make up for the years of white man forced-down-your-throat humility. Writers, athletes and actors, in fact all artists, have one thing in common: Insecurity with a capital ‘i’. Athletes have short careers, writers and actors longer ones. One loses the facility for words as one gets older, but makes up for it through

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 28 April 2007

Shot in the dark Sir: Just a thought. Has anyone ever considered the possibility that, if all citizens were armed, the Columbine and Virginia Tech perpetrators would have been shot long before they killed so many (Leading article, 21 April)? Moreover, the 9/11 perpetrators would also have been shot before taking control of the aircraft — 130 armed passengers must trump four armed terrorists. Are proposed gun laws not just a vain attempt at treating an effect rather than stopping the cause? If a murderer knows he will be shot if he steps out of line, he will think twice. Ray HattinghCape Town, South Africa Sir: There is something else

Frank Keating

Cups runneth over | 28 April 2007

A vibrantly challenging final in Barbados today (Saturday) might at least — and at last — put a smile on the face of cricket’s dismally tedious World Cup. The England team will doubtless be watching at home, behind closed curtains. Let’s hope their new coach has more oomph and isn’t such a stubborn sourpuss as his predecessor who allowed the rot to set in on top of that Trafalgar Square bus 19 months ago. Enough said; except don’t say you hadn’t been warned in this corner even before the gruesome Ashes winter began. Meanwhile, hooray for a languidly normal olde-tyme summer, but don’t doze off at the back there because in

Lucy Vickery

Metamorphosis

In Competition No. 2491 you were invited to submit a piece of prose describing what happens when you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed into an insect but not a beetle. Beetles were outlawed so that you weren’t scribbling quite so much in Kafka’s shadow. But in fact, the correct translation of Ungeziefer is vigorously disputed. In his lecture on The Metamorphosis Nabokov insisted that Gregor Samsa’s new incarnation was not as a cockroach, as it is sometimes rendered, but as a ‘big beetle’ with wings, capable of flight had he but known it. The more generous than usual wordcount means fewer winners. G.M Davis’s ant-with-attitude went down

Jonathan Davis

Oxbridge investors fail to win glittering prizes

Jonathan Davis says that if Britain’s ancient universities want to remain world-class, they should take tutorials from Harvard and Yale in how to invest their endowments Devotees of the diaries of Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark will feel that they know the cramped apartments at the Albany in Piccadilly as a vicarious second home. It was there that both men would repair after dining and gossiping in clubland; there also, the reader is led to assume, that their extramarital assignations would be consummated. But how many of the millions who pass the Piccadilly entrance to the Albany have ever stopped to wonder who owns the elegant building in which these

Richard Northedge

Aux armes, actionnaires!

French democracy is in full swing, but the spirit of Revolution is alive and well sous la Manche. Eurotunnel’s small shareholders, having seized control of the company, are prepared to go down — and determined to go down fighting. Their weapon is the private investors’ right to be irrational, voting on prejudice and putting the questions at shareholders’ meetings that pension funds are too polite to utter. In other companies, their holdings add up to little, leaving sober institutions to impose reason — but at Eurotunnel the big funds sold out long ago to cut their losses. The small fry are in charge. Mostly French, they own 94 per cent

Elliot Wilson

Why come to Kazakhstan?

Russia may have set the bar pretty high, but Kazakhstan still has to be one of the most extraordinarily business-unfriendly places on the planet. A visit to this vast Central Asian state is like a modern reworking of Malcolm Bradbury’s satire Why Come to Slaka?, which catalogued the dubious attractions of a fictional East European state in the Cold War. On the surface, this giant, underpopulated nation is doing remarkably well. From being virtually bankrupt a decade ago, the two main cities — Almaty in the south, and the northerly capital of Astana — now brim with confidence and cash. Mercedes and Bentleys jostle for road space with Ladas and

Lucy Beresford

Shoppers think fresh – and think less of products endorsed by World Cup losers

Middle-class Delhi-ites have fallen in love — with supermarkets. The ‘Organised Retail’ concept has exploded here, as mini-chains such as Big Apple, Food Bazaar and Reliance Fresh seek to get a head-start over the likes of global brands such as Wal-Mart and Tesco — both rumoured to be looking for sites in the capital. Big Apple (slogan: ‘Think Fresh’) consisted in 2005 of just one store employing 30 people; by August 2007, the group hopes to have opened 300 stores. Analysts say the market is growing at over 25 per cent annually. At six o’clock on a Sunday evening, the Reliance Fresh outlet on Rani Jhansi Road in north-east Delhi

Paul Johnson

It is the imagination which links man to God

We are imprisoned in space and time and there appears to be no obvious way of escaping from them. Indeed if, like Richard Dawkins and other neanderthals, you do not believe in a non-material world, there is no escape at all. You, as an individual, have no more significance, no more meaningful past, present or future than a piece of rock or a puff of dust. Nobody else is significant either, and nothing matters. When we die, darkness closes in and we go out like the light on a switched-off television set, dwindling and then vanishing utterly, for ever. But what does it mean ‘When we die’? What is death?

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

New Labour’s final collapse

Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power? When locals give chase in a deprived Glasgow housing estate, it is normally a signal to run. The woman who started coming towards the Scottish National Party campaigners I was with on Tuesday certainly seemed angry: perhaps we’d blocked her driveway, or sullied her carpet with separatist literature. But her gripe was with Labour. ‘I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the Health Service really suffer under

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning

This week Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column — on globalisation, moronic technology and modernity in general.Whenever I read the French newspapers I come to a strange conclusion: that I hate anti-globalisation as much as I hate globalisation. What, then, do I stand for? I don’t know, really. But it seems to me clear that, just as the globalisers are the party of the triumphant corporatists, so the anti-globalisers are the party of the French train drivers who want to retire at the age of 50 at the expense of all the people unfortunate or foolish enough not to be French train drivers. I think I must be what a

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Democracy may die

A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar; Putin’s a practical politician.’ But who, I asked was the more lovable? ‘Putin,’ he replied, ‘because he’s always direct and he keeps his word.’ His words returned to me when I heard on Monday that Yeltsin had died. Yeltsin’s style of tsardom — impulsive, bombastic, secretive, drunken — meant inconsistency and insecurity for even his closest