Society

Saturday

Paul Johnson

The man who took a PhD in Happiness Science

Lady Diana Cooper used to relate that, at a dinner she gave in the British embassy in Paris, not long after the war, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to now her husband had left office. To the consternation of the table she replied, ‘A penis.’ Whereupon the General spoke: ‘No, my dear, you are mispronouncing the word. You mean “appiness”.’ Yes: but what did the lady really mean? What does anyone mean by happiness? It is the most subjective of all emotional states. As Kant said in his Ethics, ‘Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.’ Nevertheless, public-spirited people, wishing to ‘do

Tessa Mayes

Stars in their eyes

To download a podcast about Tessa Mayes’s experiences with the celebrity Scientologists, click here. ‘A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists,’ wrote L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre in 1969, 15 years after he formed the church itself. So, in a sense, the Scientologists have only been true to their founder’s intentions in the ever greater emphasis they now put on the famous. If you’ve seen the ordinary-looking Scientology shopfront on the Tottenham Court Road, the London Celebrity Centre comes as a pleasant contrast: it is an impressive, six-storey, cream Victorian building in Bayswater, adorned with

Richard Sanders

Hello, sailor!

Richard Sanders recalls the exploits of Bartholomew Roberts, a swashbuckling 18th-century buccaneer to match Johnny Depp — except that he drank tea, and was probably gay The Pirates of the Caribbean films, the third of which has just been released, have revived the age-old interest in all things piratical. But the average Victorian schoolboy would probably have choked on his porridge if he’d known the real nature of the men whose adventures he so avidly devoured. If anyone deserves the title ‘the real pirate of the Caribbean’ it was the Welshman Bartholomew Roberts, who captured an astonishing 400 ships in a brief two-and-a-half-year career between 1719 and 1722 — a

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How the public get stitched up by the professionals

The Tory health policy – such as it is – is based on the Kinnockite principle of “trust the professionals.” A story in GP magazine shows what naïve nonsense this is. It suits GPs to get through patients as quickly as they can, rather than explaining to them the government’s choice agenda and talking them through their rights to select different hospitals for surgery. In a survey, the magazine has found that 42% of GPs “have dropped Choose and Book in response to the pay freeze”. The government’s “choice” policy is useless if GPs refuse to implement it. And despite being paid on average £106,000 and not working weekends, they are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What the CIA was up to during the Cold War

Next week, the CIA will release its records of its activities up to the end of the 1970s. The Washington Post reports that Michael Hayden, the CIA Director, has confirmed that documents on the CIA’s overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping, infiltration of leftist groups, surveillance of journalists and “unwitting” drugs tests on U.S. civilians are all included in this declassification exercise. The CIA is, obviously, hoping to win brownie points for transparency. But, I fear, that if anything the CIA is suspected of doing is not included in this document dump it will just be written off as an elaborate cover-up. Anyway, brace yourself for a whole slew of stories on the

Thursday

Tamzin Lightwater

DD goes berserk

Well, they can’t say I didn’t warn them. DD has finally lost it. Why did Dave have to go and put him in charge of this stupid social mobility thingy. Now he has a mini empire and is behaving like a power crazed dictator. Today he had one of his poor girls frog marched from the Commons in a military style “counter-coup” operation. By all accounts it was absolutely chilling. One minute he was promising to take her to the National Tank Museum, the next he was ranting about insurgency, ordering her about by her surname and demanding her badge back. Accused her of leaking stories about how capricious and

The Spectator

A nice middle class boy

I have always had a theory that within the anarchic millennial Byron that is Pete Doherty, there lurks an incredibly well-behaved middle-class boy. Doubtless it was the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” pop poet that first appealed to Kate Moss. But it is surely the well-concealed Jekyll within that has persuaded judge after judge to let Doherty off with a mild telling off (“you young scallywag”). Now, there comes proof in the Times’s serialisation of the former Libertine’s journals. Here, for instance, are Pete’s “Things to Do” for February 10, 1999: He only forgot to mention buying a new orange folder for his Physics revision notes. This is the

Wednesday

The Spectator

Rebellion is in the genes

Like father, like son: my old friend Malcolm McLaren’s son, Joe Corre, has rejected his MBE, accusing Tony Blair of being “morally bankrupt”. As manager of the Sex Pistols, Situationist art student and all-round subversive, Malcolm revelled in such acts – famously releasing the single God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee. I gave him a tip or two over lunch when he was running for Mayor of London, a glorious venture that fizzled out at just the right moment (he didn’t take my advice to run as a Tory). His son knows how to pull a stunt, too: he accepted the honour and then had a change of

Tuesday

Matthew Dancona

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

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

The Spectator

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

The Spectator

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

James Forsyth James Forsyth

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

Tamzin Lightwater

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

Charles Moore Charles Moore

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

Tina Brown

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