Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

A Doctor of Culture

Further to my post on John Simm, it seems to me that Doctor Who, once the home of Daleks and wobbly cardboard scenery, is now becoming the nation’s cultural showcase of all the talents. The news that Kylie is to feature in the Christmas special could be dismissed as a one-off gimmick to drive up ratings at the most competitive time of year. But the recruitment of the preternaturally wonderful Catherine Tate to the show as a full-time assistant to the last surviving Time Lord – well, that is something else entirely. I was amongst those who thought that Tony Blair’s sketch for Comic Relief with the comedienne in her

The Spectator

The odds MI5 is working against

“As many as four of the NHS terror cell suspects were already known to security services, it emerged last night,” reports The Daily Mail this morning. This revelation is bound to set off a debate about whether MI5 has bungled or not. But before you jump to conclusions, consider what Fraser Nelson wrote after it became public that Sidique Khan had crossed MI5’s radar before 7/7:  “When the next terrorist attack hits Britain (and everyone who assesses the risk speaks of ‘when’) the names of the attackers will probably be found on an MI5 database. If the service is doing its job properly, it will have logged every young person who visits a

The Spectator

Don’t blame foreign policy, blame the world view

Asim Siddiqui has a powerful op-ed in the Guardian today on the futility of blaming foreign policy for terror attacks. As he writes: “And once we’ve left Iraq, will they be satisfied? Of course not. Their list of grievances is endless: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Burma … so long as the world is presented as one where the west is forever at war with Islam and Muslims there is nothing we can do to appease the terrorists and those who share their world view. Instead it is this extremist world view that must change.“ Do read the whole thing.

Subitha Subramaniam

One day, the dollar will no longer be almighty

At the end of the second world war, 43 allied nations gathered at Bretton Woods to reconstruct the global financial system. The result was an economic version of Pax Americana: a liberal trading and financial regime centred on US strength. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency and the free world fixed its exchange rates to the greenback. Europe and Japan proceeded to rebuild their economic base, in large part by exporting to the US and accumulating international reserves. While it lasted, Pax Americana had great symbiotic benefits for the US and its allies. Fixed exchange rates jump-started postwar trade and finance. Over time, however, the dollar’s hegemony was gradually

Tuesday

The Spectator

It’s not good out there

It’s a bit rough out there. Every day brings a flood and dry cleaning bills. Anglican bishops taking time off from gay-obsessions tell us the rain is all our fault and God’s judgement on our careless ways. For which relief much thanks go to Bishop Jones of Liverpool (and the Mersey Delta). But it was an ostentatiously Anglican poet, T S Eliot, who told us in the Four Quartets that the river was a ‘strong brown god’-one of those implacable and unappeasable forces which just recur in cyclical fashion. Shit happens-and moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. Usually it arrives in Bangladesh rather than Britain- but it’s all

The Spectator

Who’ll be the first to fall foul of the smoking ban?

Today’s Sun report on the after party for the Diana concert, says that: “Harry became one of the first people in the country to break the new smoking ban—as he lit up in the indoor VIP arena less than 24 hours after the law came in.” All of which begs the question, who will be the first public figure to be done under the draconian smoking ban? Personally, my money is on Pete Doherty.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The new religion

What I love about the climate change “debate” is that when the public show themselves unconvinced about its wilder claims, the media talks patronisingly about a need to “educate.” This goes to show that environmentalism has become a religion with no tolerance for dissenters who must either be converted or burnt at the cross. Iain Dale has shown us how Greenpeace are so keen to close down debate that they only come on TV if they are guaranteed they will encounter no opposition. Given the Royal Society’s proud history, it’s a real shame that it is going the same way. That’s not the scientific way. There is huge amounts of

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Bush does the right thing

President Bush’s decision to commute the prison sentence of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, will attract criticism. But it’s the right thing to do, as I tried to explain here. 

The Spectator

Salmond takes centre stage

Not much detail about those arrested over the last few days in connection with the failed Glasgow Airport and London attacks – but Alex Salmond’s administration has been keen to say they’re not “born or raised here in Scotland”. More detail than he should have given, it turns out, but he’s keen to kill off the backlash which Mohammed Sarwar, the Muslim MP for Glasgow South, says has already started in a small way (abuse, graffiti, threats etc). Salmond has always been very strong on race relations and what he calls “New Scots”, saying there are “many threads in the tartan of our society”. He’s evidently anxious to stop these

The Spectator

What motivates them?

So, how much—if at all—does the Israel/Palestine conflict ‘cause’ terrorism? Matt argued yesterday that it is a “great error” to think that there’s a “causal link between the growth of Islamism and the Middle East conflict.” To which, Anthony Barnett over at Our Kingdom responds: “Of course there is a causal link between the growth of Islamism and the Middle East conflict. Even if Israeli policy had nothing to do with the origins of bin Ladinism, the latter’s appeal feeds off the continued violence and injustice of the Middle East.” I doubt very much if any of the people involved in the various Islamist terror attacks we’ve seen these past

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 30 June 2007

Q. My wife and I have just given a summer party to which we invited around 200 people. Correction — we posted invitations to 200, 20 of whom rang up on the day to say they had not received their invitation, but could they come anyway? Now that the party is over we wonder about 30 other people who neither RSVPd nor manifested on the night. How can we find out if we have been the victims of a mass snubbing or if, more likely, the inadequacies of the west London postal system has led to these friends mistakenly thinking that we have snubbed them? W.S., London W14 A. The

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 30 June 2007

The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895). Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian, was 61, and dead within a year. I think the joke is still funny, and so is one from seven years earlier, of the couple on a park bench, next to an old gent reading his paper: Edwin (suddenly, after a long pause): ‘Darling!’ Angelina: ‘Yes, darling!?’ Edwin: ‘Nothing, darling. Only darling, darling!’ [Bilious Old

Taki

One voice

When a lame-duck draft dodger pardoned a major crook and fugitive —along with his very own drug-dealing half-brother — American public opinion was righteously outraged. It was par for the course for Bill Clinton, but at least he didn’t saddle the country with anything worse than having to put up with a ghastly person like Mark Rich walking freely around in polite society. His buddy Tony Blair has done better. Even lamer than Clinton was when he handed out the pardons, old Tone has burdened this country with a nice ‘High Representative’ who will decide when and if the British Lion will roar. How’s that for a long goodbye? Mind

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 30 June 2007

Monday Horrid, horrid. It’s all election war footing and aggression and shouting round here. Jed has decided we are ‘too nice’. Says he is going to toughen us up and turn us into ‘attack dogs’. (Am prepared to do almost anything for Dave. But the concept of turning me and the girls into dogs, ‘attack’ or otherwise, is — well — just not very nice). Our lifestyle guru Sherwood has been sent on decorating leave, the positive energy murals have been taken down, Die Hard With a Vengeance is playing on a loop on the TV monitors and the Tranquillity Room is being used for kickboxing. Suzie from Events says

Tony Parsons

Diary – 30 June 2007

Hong Kong They have moved the Star Ferry. How could they move the Star Ferry? The view of the harbour from my room at the Ritz-Carlton should be one of the great sights of Asia. But it is a building site of land being messily reclaimed and another corner of the ‘perfumed’ harbour getting paved over. I was here only six months ago but now Queen’s Pier has gone, the Star Ferry Pier has gone and those iconic green-and-white ferries have been shunted out to where you catch the boats to the outlying islands. Visitors to Hong Kong will never again ride the Star Ferry looking for the ghosts of

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 30 June 2007

A partisan presentation Sir: Last week Melanie Phillips attacked the West’s approach to the Palestinians as deluded (‘Gaza: another front in Iran’s war’, 23 June). But if her analysis carried sway it would only reinforce the hand of those who see no point in negotiations. Phillips’s view is based on a partisan presentation of history. The ‘international agreement’ she refers to is the formal assumption of Mandate Palestine by Britain under the auspices of the League of Nations. Article six of the Mandate set terms of Jewish immigration ‘while ensuring that the rights and position of the other sections of the population are not prejudiced’. This echoed the Balfour Declaration

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

All aboard the Bada Bing Bus

‘Can anyone name Tony Soprano’s horse?’ says Marc Baron, our tour guide, standing in the aisle of a leaking coach at the start of The Sopranos Bus Tour of New Jersey. The answer of course is Pie-O-My, and because we’re all addicts of the TV series, The Sopranos, we all know the name and shout it out. The Sopranos are New Jersey gangsters with suburban issues. The show finished its US run a few weeks ago and the adventures of Tony Soprano, an obese but strangely sexy Mafia boss, are now sleeping with the fishes — but the fans take longer to die. The last episode will air in Britain

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Vis-à- Vis

A decent beach should not be too decent. An overload of litter is of course disgusting, but a light scattering — a crisp packet here, a Fanta can there — pleasingly negates any pretentious fantasy of being at one with nature. The Croatian Tourist Board has struck the right balance on the island of Vis, 30 miles south of Split on the Dalmatian coast. The beaches are magnificent: great sweeps of pretty white pebbles that tickle the rocky toes of the hills. The little clumps of corrugated plastics somehow emphasise the beauty of the shores. Inadvertently, I started a clean-up operation by taking home swabs of tar on my back,

Lucinda Baring

Ibiza undiscovered

There’s nothing like a free holiday. Thanks to a banking ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ brother, a girlfriend and I jumped on a plane and headed to his empty finca in the hills of Ibiza. Our mission was to give it a lick of paint in return for a fortnight’s free board. The pool was green and fetid and there was no electricity or running water, but it was hot during the day, cool and mosquito-less at night and we could happily cope with an ancient generator and the odd pee in the garden for two weeks of such sun-soaked serenity. Call me a hippy (I’m not), but there really is an element