The race to be the next John Prescott is getting serious with the six contenders debtaing on Newsnight last night, watch it here. So, who won? Here is Martin Vander Weyer’s ranking of the form, let us know what you think in the comments. Hazel Blears (she may be small but she’s hot) A length ahead of Hilary Benn Several lengths ahead of Alan Johnson And in the far distance Jon CruddasHarriet HarmanPeter Hain
The great Google debate shows no sign of abating (see my earlier post). Some of the comparisons between the search engine company and Big Brother have been plain daft (can we please ration the use of the word “Orwellian”?). But the ever-readable Maurice Saatchi has a very interesting piece in the FT today in which he argues that the crooked timber of humanity cannot be understood by even the most sophisticated search algorithms.
If the rumours are to be believed, Sarah Ferguson will be a judge on the next series of the US reality TV show Project Runway. Maybe, Rod was right: Kate was just too posh for the Windsors. Hat Tip: New York Magazine
What a difference deportation makes. On the right is a picture of Sheik el-Faisal, the Islamofascist who was finally sent back to his native Jamaica last weekend after serving time in Britain. Here, he dressed in a Muslim skullcap and robe – but as soon as he stepped off the plane in his native Jamaica, he was down to tracksuit bottoms and a shirt. Why? Because his real name is Trevor Forrest, and people like him seldom get away with their mad mullah act in their native countries. As Olivier Roy explains in his superb Globalised Islam, the jihadi menace is spread when crackpots like Forrest go abroad, don a skullcap
Entertaining to read in today’s Standard more details of the row between Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair over the forthcoming Campbell Diaries. This relationship has had its ups and downs in the past – most spectacularly over Cherie’s connection with Carole Caplin and Peter Foster. But Alastair, I imagine, will be delighted. It was becoming dangerously orthodox that he had cut a deal with Gordon to keep the really good stuff out of his memoirs, due out in July, days after Brown takes over. Boring political books sell no copies. The spat with Cherie at least encourages the impression that Volume One will be juicy after all. Or is that
It’s Memorial Day in the United States today, the official beginning of summer. Fierce Americans mark the day by beating their war drums; gentle Americans by beating their breasts. The newspapers, as usual, are full of improving homilies and exhortations. But this year there is something different, something inspiring and humbling. In the Washington Post the anti-war conservative Andrew J. Bacevich has marked Memorial Day with a tribute to his son, who died earlier this month in Iraq. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University and is the author, most recently, of The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. A graduate of West Point, he
We have enjoyed, or not, a certain amount of hoo-ha about whether Scotland should be independent. But independent from what? What is this country called? In 1604 James VI of Scotland was proclaimed ‘King of Great Britain’, as well as of France and Ireland. The geographical term ‘Great Britain’ thereupon assumed a political unity, although two kingdoms continued to exist. The proclamation also spoke of England and Scotland as ‘nations’. According to the Act of Union passed in England in January 1707, ‘the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name
Sunday Most exciting day ever: had to activate the Early Warning System! First time it’s been done!! I knew as soon as I saw the headlines on grammar schools that I would have to do it. I panicked at first, but remembered my training. I broke the glass on the Emergency Point and took out the Guidance Pack. The cover note said, ‘You are reading this because a Negative Story has been in the news for five days. Stay calm and follow the procedures below. Above all: remain civil and compassionate.’ ‘1. Call Jed. In the event of Jed being unavailable call Sam, Francis or George B. DO NOT call
This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good
Q. I will be celebrating a ‘milestone’ birthday this summer and marking the event with a cocktail party for 60 one evening and a dinner for 100 on another. Having lived in various parts of the globe over the years (now New York), a large number of guests are flying in from far-flung lands to join in the celebrations. My dilemma, Mary, is how best to word my invitations regarding the delicate matter of gift-giving by well-meaning friends. Here are some of the concerns with which I’m presently struggling. At this point in my life I am fortunate enough to have all the material possessions one could reasonably want or
New York The funny thing about Sarkozy being president of France is not his size, but his family. His father, Pal Sarkozy, used to frequent the same nightclubs as I did back in the early Sixties. Of the ‘beau monde’ he was not. Pal was sort of sleazy, and sort of a conman, and sort of a playboy. None of us knew what he did, and by that I don’t mean to suggest he was dishonest, but there were always rumours about him. An inveterate womaniser, a good thing for a father of a French president to be, his women, alas, were a pretty lousy bunch. Except for one of
Sadly the racing season both for pure-bred Arabians and even for camels was over when I was in Qatar last weekend. But I did discover that Arab mums, like British trainers, tend to wear rose-tinted spectacles. ‘To an Arab mother,’ the Gulf saying goes, ‘every donkey is a gazelle.’ I do rather like, too, the way angry Arabs don’t tell someone to ‘go and jump in the lake’ but to ‘go and tile the sea’. I can only hope, after the traumas of seconditis that we suffered with our winter Twelve To Follow, that I don’t get too many end-of-season invitations to go aquatic tiling. And hope was resurrected over
There are two invaluable rules for a special correspondent — Travel Light and Be Prepared …remember that the unexpected always happens. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop Huge potholes scar the road from the Keda mountains to the Black Sea port of Batumi. My driver cannot see them for the snow, and I can’t feel the bumps because I have been anaesthetised by lunch. I have fallen victim to traditional Georgian hospitality: a meal that ends in toasts drunk from clay horns shaped so that they can’t be put down until they are drained. I raised mine to my driver, to my translator and to the two strangers who led us to our
I think you can rate the success of any trip abroad by how relieved and happy you feel to be home as your plane makes its final approach to land you back in Britain. Flying into Heathrow last month I was pretty much off my head with joy. Gazing down as we circled over a rich tapestry of scruffy fields and housing estates stitched together with arterial roads and gravel pits, I felt a rush of affection for the landscape, coupled with a surge of relief to be home. It takes a lot to make a person’s soul sing out at the sight of Hounslow. In my case, it takes
Is it right to aspire? Sir: According to your leading article, ‘The Tory party is a party of aspiration or it is nothing’ (19 May). If this means that the Tory party is a party in the interest primarily of that ambitious minority which wants to rise in the world, then I should like to disagree, if only because the great majority of the nation, thank God, are not social climbers. By which I do not mean that the great majority of the nation do not have aspirations — to lead good and decent lives, for example — only that they do not necessarily have aspirations to join the rat
Well, after his innings of 226 today, there’s only one player who has scored more runs than him in their first twenty five tests and that’s Don Bradman. Pietersen might actually be as good as he thinks he is.
When I became Editor of the Spec, I mentioned to one interviewer that “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols was my favourite pop record. This, most entertainingly, was declared by some in the blogosphere to mark, definitively, the death of punk. Last night’s Ten O’Clock News included an item on punk’s 30th anniversary, including an interview with a very cuddly Johnny Rotten looking back on the mayhem he caused in the late Seventies with wry amusement. These days, he’s a prosperous property developer and quite likes the Queen. Fiona Bruce’s indulgent smile at the end of the item said it all: if there was any life left in punk, Fiona
A large portrait of Mark Elder hangs backstage at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. It’s not a flattering representation; in it the Hallé’s music director looks tired, haggard, old. Interestingly, the picture is positioned so that the conductor doesn’t have to go anywhere near it as he passes through the corridors from his dressing room to the concert platform. On 2 June, the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth, Elder turns 60. He could pass for a man 15 years younger. We meet outside his north London home. I arrive early, and he catches me loitering round the corner as he marches down the street after a haircut. Even though
An officially commissioned company history: recipe for yawns! Most such hardly amount to more than an exercise in corporate piety with surreptitious window-dressing. But let me ‘declare an interest’ (which I’ll hope to convey and share). Boosey & Hawkes have been my publisher for even longer than I’ve been writing Spectator columns — 32 and 19 years respectively. And this, by Helen Wallace (published for the firm this month), really is different — not merely for the absorbing saga of vision, audacity, happy accident, brilliant timing, an unlikely yet successful match of old-style wariness with slick newstyle entrepreneurial flair, yielding gradually via galvanising play of vibrant personalities to a downward
The Daily Telegraph estimated last month that roughly a third of the bosses of FTSE 100 companies use a personal coach — ‘and not the guy who tells them to do more press-ups in the company gym’. But you would be hard-pressed to find a newspaper feature anytime soon in which any of those business leaders recommended their coach, any more than they would their psychoanalyst. Despite its growing ubiquity, consulting a coach is still regarded by senior businesspeople as private and absolutely not something to declare openly. Although good ‘executive coaching’ is something which devotees regard as potent and effective, it often earns a sniff of disapproval from the