It’s official: Sarkozy has won, probably by around 53.5%-46.5%. In the earliest ever concession speech in a French election, it took only until 8:03 French time for Sego to concede defeat. It sounded almost like a victory speech – although Sego’s fake smile and especially the look in her eyes gave the game away. But a very combative performance nevertheless, where, a little like Arnie, she pledged to be back.
It is now almost certain that Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected France’s next president, in a stunning victory for the centre-right candidate. This is great news for all of us who believe that France must urgently reform if it is to reverse years of relative decline and extricate itself from the dark pessimism which it has being gripped by for far too long. Sarko is far from perfect and displays worrying anti-capitalist and protectionist tendencies; but he was France’s only hope and should now be given the benefit of the doubt. The latest estimates from exit polls published on the website of Le Soir, the Belgium newspaper, are that Sarko
Q. My best friend is widely admired by those few men who have the opportunity to meet her. She wants a boyfriend but her work brings her into contact with virtually no single heterosexual men and she has exhausted the potential in our social circle. Her brother and I want her to change her job so she comes into contact with more single men, but she is understandably reluctant to move away from her current office which offers idyllic surroundings in which to work, not least because she is allowed to bring her dog in. We are keen for her to try speed-dating but she has turned her nose up
My friend Nick — OK, he’s not exactly my friend, he’s my brother’s friend, but my brother lets his friends be mine, as he knows I’ve always struggled to make any of my own. Anyway, Nick says he’d like to take me to what is possibly his favourite restaurant in London. I like Nick. I trust Nick. Nick knows his food. Nick has eaten in all the top places not just in London, but in New York, Tokyo, Paris. Nick knows his wine and doesn’t just order the second cheapest bottle on the list to spare him the embarrassment of ordering the first. And, really, what follows is Nick’s review,
Strange kind of love Sir: Liam Byrne’s breathless panegyric (‘Rise up, Englishmen’, 28 April) on the glories of being British must have left some of us pretty punch drunk. This is a man who eagerly serves a government that has spent a decade transferring the rights of the British to govern themselves out of Britain and assigning them to an EU government in which his own country has 8 per cent voting stock. Most of this has been done covertly, out of sight of a sycophantic House of Commons and without a referendum. This is a man who has been happily destroying what was once Europe’s finest constitution and calling
The curious case of the cup has been gripping traditionally minded Catholics for a few years now. I mention the question because a secret text of the new translation of the Mass has been bouncing about the internet for a few weeks now. People who seldom go to church often get more annoyed about the banality of the language of the prayers than regulars do. As for the word cup, its use in the English version of Mass, instead of the word chalice, did not please Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, head of the curia’s congregation for divine worship, one bit. ‘The translators avoid the use of specifically sacral terminology, and
Monday Jed in terrible mood. He’s been like it since last Wednesday when his bicycle broke down on the way to Stamford Bridge. I must say, I can’t quite work out how a bicycle can break down. I mean, what happens exactly? He had to keep texting the people waiting for him in the corporate billionaires’ box to ask what the score was as he dragged his bike along the street. He never did get there. Bit like a nightmare. Nigel says that sort of thing could turn a less message-focused man against bicycles for life. Scary! Wonky Tom reckons Jed turned up in a taxi this morning, but nobody
The telephone rang at 7.45 a.m. It was a journalist I know. She sounded tense. ‘Gyles,’ she said, ‘do you want to come out?’ ‘It’s a bit early, isn’t it, darling?’ I replied. ‘I mean, “come out”,’ she said with emphasis, adding, with a little laugh, ‘Everyone knows you’re gay.’ ‘Do they?’ I asked. ‘Am I?’ ‘Oh, come on,’ she persisted, ‘Frankie Howerd made a pass at you once, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you knew Ted Heath?’ ‘Er … yes.’ ‘Well?’ she said. I put the phone down. What is this bizarre obsession we have with the sexual orientation of others? Frankie Howerd was certainly promiscuous (and, oddly, in the
New York It’s been a hellish week for Pug’s Club. A week in which I was unable to lend my good offices against the violent outbreak of disapprobation and impropriety. What has been until today a relatively smooth path to the great and most exclusive club in the world was threatened by a member or members unknown, although there are only seven of us. Let me begin at the start: Pug’s was founded by Leopold Bismarck, Nick Scott and myself last summer. The club was named after the main character in Herman Wouk’s book The Winds of War, who was played by Robert Mitchum in the eight-hour-long mini-series. Pug Henry
Thursday wasn’t only election night here, but also the first Republican primary debate of 2008. Over at Comment Central Daniel Finkelstein has a typically astute post on whether Republicans shouldn’t have an abortion litmus test for their presidential nominees keying off the trouble Rudy Giuliani got in to when asked about whether he supported the repeal of Roe v. Wade. I agree with Danny that the Republicans shouldn’t have one but Giuliani needs to find a better way of expressing his position. Saying it would be OK for it to be repealed, when the guys next to you on stage are using phrases like a “glorious day of human liberty and
If you’re enjoying Coffee House, I do hope you’ll take a look at Stephen Pollard’s new blog and Clive Davis’s—which come complete with a photograph by PooterGeek.
Good news from Paris. No, not the capital of France which, it seems likely, will tomorrow crown Sarkozy its President. I mean the Hilton heiress, who was sent to jail yesterday for 45 days for driving while disqualified. There are so many cheap jokes one could make about the new Los Angeles Hilton and the standard of the rooms. But since this is an interactive site I shall leave it to others to crack them. Suffice it to say that the news of Paris’s imprisonment shows that, after 24 hours of spin and counter-spin, Friday was definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a very good day.
Here’s a conundrum as we leave the Blair years behind us. Never has so much faith been placed in the idea of a society open to social mobility; never have so many politicians’ speeches been delivered in praise of a more classless society and the need to promote ability, regardless of background. Yet their rhetoric isn’t matched by the facts. Britain is becoming far less socially mobile. On the present indicators, we can only argue about whether it has stalled or is going backwards. What no one can convincingly argue is that it is going forwards. One of the oft-cited pieces of evidence is that of a celebrated study of
John Grieve, the long-time head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, observed shortly after the conviction of the IRA men who bombed South Quay in 1996: ‘It’s great — but every time we have one of these long trials, we give the men of violence a free masterclass on how we go about protecting the public and how they can try to get around us next time.’ On the day after the triumphant conclusion to the ‘Crevice’ trial, I asked Peter Clarke — Grieve’s lineal successor — about this in his 15th-floor office at New Scotland Yard. Clarke takes the point. But the pluses of taking this case through the
It was pretty barmy ten years ago but now it’s downright insane. When I last dabbled in the London property market, prices were rocketing and there were half a dozen buyers for every property. These days it’s a whole lot worse but I’ve got no choice. My wife and I have a toddler nearing his first birthday and it’s becoming impossible to lug everything up the 58 steps to our top-floor flat: baby, toys, pushchair, Cow & Gate formula, books, food, wine, beer. And it’s really not healthy. I could easily have a heart attack watching her doing all that carrying. Our home, in which I’m writing this piece, went
A Tranquil Star is a collection of 17 expertly translated short stories by Primo Levi, written between the 1940s and the 1980s. None has appeared in English before. They are presented by the publishers to mark the sad anniversary of Levi’s death 20 years ago; and also as a taster for a full new English edition of Levi’s complete works promised for 2011 or thereabouts. The stories belong not to Levi’s best-known vein of writing, on the Holocaust and his time in Auschwitz. This is instead the other Levi, the eclectic teller of science-fiction and fantasy tales, familiar from The Mirror Maker or The Sixth Day — with one or
For almost two years, Westminster has been abuzz with what many MPs believed to be an explosive secret. The ringleader of the 7 July London bombings, Mohammed Sidique Khan, was not a so-called ‘clean skin’ who came out of the blue. Instead, he had been bugged, photographed and followed during an MI5 investigation into a thwarted fertiliser-bomb plot more than a year earlier. ‘When this gets out,’ one shadow minister told me last summer, ‘it could bring down the government.’ Well, it got out on Monday, when five men were sentenced to life over the fertiliser plot intercepted in what police called Operation Crevice in March 2004. Arguably, it was
There is a thing that many Scots do when they meet with other Scots. They start to sound more Scottish. Their consonants either grow jagged or fade away all together, their vowels twist, collude and extend. They start to say ‘aye’ in place of ‘yes’. They may even, if among friends, be tempted to risk the odd ‘och’. I wonder if this ever happens in Cabinet. I can see Gordon Brow kicking it off, perhaps with a modest, Fife-ish, slightly extended ‘r’. John Reid might retort with a competitive Lanarkshire ‘gonny’ or ‘canny’. Pricking up his ears, the Glaswegian Douglas Alexander might decide to get in early with an ‘aye,
In his measured, softly spoken way, Sir Michael Bishop is furious with the Conservative party for its plans to ration air travel. ‘There are few things less edifying than watching politicians jumping on a passing bandwagon,’ says the proprietor chairman of BMI British Midland, which holds the second largest number of take-off and landing slots at London Heathrow. Bishop is a Conservative and he sees proposals by David Cameron and George Osborne to curb air travel through punitive taxation as betrayal. ‘I felt it was a crass and clumsy response and against all Conservative principles,’ he says. Bishop is the quietly flamboyant elder statesman of the British airline industry; gracious,
If you have a long-lost Continental lover, you have a little under six months to arrange the perfect reunion under the clock at St Pancras on 14 November. That is the date when Eurostar will commence its new service along the full length of what is now called High Speed 1, the much-troubled fast link to the Channel Tunnel. Most importantly, it’s the day Eurostar trains will cease to arrive at Waterloo, and instead make their way from Ebbsfleet under the Thames and across east London to Stratford, and at last to the refurbished Victorian terminus on Euston Road. But beware that your clinch is not spoiled by the distractions