Society

Wednesday

Jaspistos

As the bishop said to the…

In Competition No. 2449 you were invited to provide an Alice in Wonderland-style conversation between two chess pieces, either in prose or in verse. Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de piqueCausent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.It was this wonderful image of Baudelaire’s that suggested to me the notion of a conversation between chess pieces. Among those of you who gave your entries a contemporary slant, I particularly enjoyed Tim Raikes’s lines: ‘But is that a man by the shrubs I can seeHaranguing a blooming camellia tree?’‘Now that…,’ said the Queen as she fingered her ring,‘That is my son, and he wants to be King.’The prizewinners, printed below,

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 June 2006

As a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the ever-growing burden of coursework and, naturally, by revision. As soon as the pupils finish their exams they are sent home, since no power on earth can make them stay. For those of us who pay boarding fees, this early departure means that the cost per child of time actually spent on the premises is now

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 June 2006

Age of innocence? From Mrs Sam JettubreckSir: Having lived in the same street for many years and seen the area gradually taken over by feral youths, I wonder what Peter J.M. Wayne might suggest I do to stem the rising tide of crime in my street? ‘These are children …for goodness sake,’ wrote Wayne in his review of David Fraser’s A Land Fit for Criminals (Books, 17 June). So that makes their vile insults, burglary and aggression to the community acceptable? When a 14-year-old boy next throws a brick at my windows, and smashes glass in the nearby park so that my grandchildren cut their feet, or when next I

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 24 June 2006

Q. One of my husband’s best friends is married to someone who, we know from past experience, is too demanding and controlling to be good company at a house party.  The couple often go their separate ways on holiday and might well not object if he were to come without her to our house in France — but it seems a bit crude to invite him to come on his own. Can you suggest a tactful way in which we can get him alone?  Name and address withheld A. Go through the list of fellow guests you might also invite. Choose someone Mr P has never met — let’s call

Taki

Bright young things

Suleiman Khan, son of Imran and Jemima, got me out late last Saturday, after a fast-bowling Ben Elliot had failed to do so despite employing all sorts of tricks against the poor little Greek boy, who only took up cricket aged 64. There was only one thing wrong. Suleiman is nine years old and less than five feet tall, whereas I am 69 and 5-foot-nine. The little blighter is a spin-bowler and he confused me enough to ensure that I was caught out. Mind you, the Hanbury team, which I play for, won over Zac Goldsmith’s Eleven with some brilliant cricketing by Mark Shand, Dave Cottrell, Harry Worcester and others

Frank Keating

TV loves tennis

The Wimbledon tennis begins sharp at 2 p.m. Monday and, as has often been the case, competes with a haughtily oblivious lack of concern against the football World Cup in Germany. The tennis will make for far better telly, and see if I’m not right a fortnight today when what Wimbers still refers to as ‘the gentlemen’s singles final’ will serve as afternoon overture to the evening’s clamorous soccer climax in Berlin. I find it hard to believe now that some years ago when the two championships coincided I had to fly back and forth to cover the pick of the matches in the so incongruently different games. Other times, assigned

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 23 June 2006

MondayAm contemplating a serious hissy fit. On phone this morning briefing Dave’s family speech, dutifully telling a v. rude journalist that ‘this is all about traditional Tory values’, when suddenly I hear Poppy on the other line, in full mockney accent, saying: ‘Yeah, that’s right, this spells the end of traditional Tory values.’ This is outrageous! Why is it me who gets lumped with the boring ‘core’ briefing whilst Poppy gets to spin the opposite line about tax breaks for gays?! Is it because she wears drainpipe jeans to the office? I can be daring and street too, actually. Beneath this perfect blow-dry there’s a liberal slacker just fighting to

Diary – 23 June 2006

Every year, under the terms of a 17th-century benefaction, Jesus College, Cambridge must hold a feast (the Rustat Feast) and invite three College guests. An invitation comes out of the blue from the Vice-Master, Stephen Heath, and — since my husband is an old Jesuan and fancied a trip down memory lane — we accept. All the Fellows are free to invite one person along. Looking down the list of guest biographies before dinner, I am thrilled to think of the convocation of specialists that is about to materialise and more than a little daunted at the prospect of making conversation. Will I be tongue-tied before Ullrich Steiner, professor of

Wednesday

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Wine Club June Offer

Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. It has a short but choice list, almost all coming from the Loire or southern France. Robin Yapp, who is now retired, used to select all the wines by touring vineyards, some in appellations so small that few outside France, or even in France, had heard of them. Deals to buy the produce of a tiny property would be secured over a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and a bottle. The results were as far away from mass-produced supermarket plonk as it is possible to imagine.

Brian Power

The forecast is disaster

The oracle bones in Peter Hessler’s book were discovered in the 19th century, near Anyang in the North China Plain. They were the shoulder blades of oxen and deer and the carapaces of turtles. Archaeologists dated them to about 1300 BC in the Bronze Age. The bones had been used for divination. Questions in ancient Chinese were inscribed on them; they were then heated with a live coal, and the replies of the gods were indicated by the shape of the cracks produced. The replies were brief; ‘disaster’ was a favourite word. Peter Hessler’s account of his fascin- ation with archaeological finds is inter- woven with his writings as a

Dominic Midgley

Is that a bug under your boardroom table?

The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still a role for that sort of operator, but as the commercial investigation game gets serious, a growing number of private investigators have a background in investment banking or the law. Indeed, one security industry analyst, Equitable Services, has predicted that the global private security market could be worth £150 billion by 2010, fuelled by mushrooming

Simon Nixon

Say no to protectionism — and let’s get down to business with Claudia Schiffer

The World Cup is not really my bag, but already it’s done its bit to pep up my GWB (that’s ‘general wellbeing’, for those not yet fluent in Cameron-speak). Eleven giant posters have been plastered around Bank station featuring Claudia Schiffer draped in a German flag. They’re part of a campaign to encourage investment in Germany and feature saucy slogans such as ‘Want to get down to business?’ and ‘Come over to my place’. Schiffer is an ideal ambassador for Germany. With her hairless armpits and winning smile, the supermodel is a world away from those moustachioed shot-putters who used to fly the flag for German womanhood. In fact, the

Interconnect

Watches? Not for me

When I was seven my father gave me a duty-free Timex, my first watch. I loved it, wore for it years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped ticking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t need one. I have a mobile phone and a laptop and I’m always near someone with an iPod or a Blackberry. All these devices display the time — which is why, if you look around, you’ll see loads of empty wrists: sales of watches to young adults fell 10 per cent in 2005. But while the sensible have realised that they don’t need them, others — apparently including distinguished Spectator contributors — are

Edie G-Lush

Rupert Murdoch’s cool new thing

Rupert Murdoch is probably the last person in the world who would use an online social networking service, but he may be the first to make serious money out of the concept. MySpace, which he bought for $580 million in 2005, is one such service, and it may or may not be the coolest thing on the internet. It has about 70 million users, but is already being squeezed by an upstart website called Bebo which is attracting a greater share of UK visitors. Nevertheless, Murdoch-watchers see MySpace as the next big weapon in his relentless battle to maintain global media dominance. But what exactly is an online social networking

Allister Heath

‘You can control crime’

Allister Heath talks to a deputation of US police chiefs drafted in to help John Reid in his do-or-die battle to restore faith in the criminal justice system. Is this New Labour’s Dirty Harry moment? It was as if the two men had suddenly burst out of nowhere. ‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them growled as they pounced on Caroline, grabbing her by the arms and starting to drag her down a dark side alley. It was the early hours of Saturday morning in central Durham, about a mile from the cathedral, a part of the city which is never deserted; so my friend, a 22-year-old medical student, lashed

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The real father of Cameronism

Any attempt to trace the intellectual origins of today’s new Conservative party leads fairly quickly to the space between David Willetts’s ears. For the best part of two decades, he has been arguing for the need for a softer-focus social agenda which would resonate with voters who were convinced that hard-edged Thatcherism had nothing to offer them. In the early 1990s he called this ‘civic conservatism’ — yet it was lost in the messy decline of the Major years. Now, it is called Cameronism and is universally lauded. But rather than be fêted, Mr Willetts must watch like an inventor without a patent as his ideas are put to use

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Killing a gay man is no worse than killing a disc jockey

Sarah Porter may turn out to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer of recent years. Right now, she is behind bars. Porter contracted HIV from a lover and, when she discovered her predicament, set about passing on the virus to as many men as she could, by ‘encouraging’ them to have unprotected sex with her. When caught by the police she refused to co-operate, naming no names. The police believe that the number of men it is known for a fact that she tried to infect — four — is ‘only the tip of the iceberg’. The life expectancy for someone with HIV/Aids is, mercifully, much improved on what it

Jaspistos

The weather in the streets

In Competition No. 2448 you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘A Description of a City Shower’. The poet of rain is undoubtedly Hardy. His titles fairly drip with it — ‘A Wet August’, ‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’, ‘Rain on a Grave’ and, more to the point, ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’, which charmingly features a snatched kiss inside a hansom cab. I can’t resist quoting the last three lines from Swift’s poem with our title:Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.I expected ‘a City shower’ to be interpreted by some as a mob

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 17 June 2006

Q. I recently celebrated my CP (civil partnership), having been with my boyfriend for almost 21 years. I had planned it for months and arranged a flamenco evening at a smart venue in St James’s in London. We were restricted by the number of people we could ask, so I expected that all those who RSVPd in the positive would definitely show up. Can you imagine how disappointed I was when several people didn’t show up? Some had illnesses, and I could fully understand those, but one or two had lame excuses about baby-sitters and missing a train. Should I forgive them, as not only did I have to pay

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 17 June 2006

Al-Bashir’s immunity From Ralph Blumenau Sir: Peter Oborne’s powerful piece about the ethnic cleansing in Darfur and eastern Chad (‘Darfur’s terrible export’, 10 June) has only one strange omission. Here, as in almost all media reports, we are told that ‘the Sudanese government’ is actively helping the murderous Janjaweed, but the dictator who heads that government, Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir, is not named. It is as if one had never referred to the crimes of Saddam Hussein, but only to those of ‘the Iraqi government’. Why is al-Bashir being given this cloak of relative anonymity by our media? For the genocidal misery he has inflicted upon his people for years,