Society

Saturday

Edie G-Lush

The rich West must stop grabbing the profits but ducking the costs

Heroes of anti-capitalist protest don’t usually hang out at the Savoy. But Joe Stiglitz is different: the establishment figure who turned on the establishment. He’s a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate. He chaired Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and he’s not afraid to tell you about it (‘When I was in the White House…’). He wears a nice suit and a tidy salt-and-pepper beard. He doesn’t even wear Birkenstock sandals, and he looked well at home amid the comforts of the de luxe London hotel when I met him there. But beneath the professorial façade is a combative mind and an inability to

Jonathan Davis

Happy birthday, index funds

What has been the single most successful and socially useful investment innovation of the last 30 years? Although paradoxically few investors will know what it is, or why they should be grateful that it exists, my nomination is the index fund. On 31 August this year, largely unheralded in the media, this dull but remarkable invention celebrated its 30th year in existence. An index fund, also known colloquially as a tracker fund, is a fund that does nothing more exciting than set out to mimic the performance of one of the market indices that are regularly featured in media reports about the day’s events in the stock market. Most of

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Do dreams come true? Will Hornby save Airfix? Will I be chairman of Barclays?

Can there be a middle-aged man in Britain whose heart did not beat a little faster last week at the news that Hornby has expressed an interest in acquiring Airfix? This would be a merger that might have been dreamed up in a 1960s toy cupboard. Ailing Airfix is owned by Humbrol, which makes the little pots of enamel paint we used to use on our Airfix model aeroplanes, and which also produces Plasticine. Hornby is the great model railway company that also happens to make Scalextric cars. To complete the set, all we need is a deal-structure modelled in Meccano (also originally a Hornby product) by a suave young

David Rennie

What you can pick up in Iceland

It is no mystery why British Eurosceptics love Iceland. A bracing visit to Reykjavik is all it takes to see what the European Union could have been, if Brussels had stuck to the path of free trade and shunned ever closer union. Like pilgrims to a shrine, British Tories come to observe how Iceland enjoys the best of all worlds, thanks to its membership of the European Free Trade Association and — equally vitally — its stubborn non-membership of the EU. Iceland enjoys the great prize Brussels has to offer: access to the EU single market. Yet Iceland is not a member of the Common Agricultural Policy. Iceland can strike

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

You shouldn’t be arrested for …

Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’Leviticus xx 13 Britain’s most energetic and entertaining bigot, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, has at last managed to get himself arrested. His crime was to hand out leaflets, which quoted the above passage from the Bible, in a park in Cardiff. Stephen believes that Leviticus

John Reynolds

Gordon will do the job very well

Michael Foot and I are sitting in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, north London. Outside in the garden a red ‘Labour’ rose blooms in the afternoon sun; inside, the house is crammed with books: they’re in piles on the kitchen table, on shelves on every wall: William Hazlitt, William Blake, John Keats, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Paine. Upstairs there’s a whole roomful of books on women’s suffrage that belonged to his late wife, Jill Craigie, then another room where an entire corner is devoted to Irish writers: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift. Mr Foot believes that politicians should have a love of great literature (he has written

Frank Keating

Just the one

This week they named the men to defend the Ashes. The trumpets of 12 months ago are muted, the martial drumbeats muffled. It has not been a good year. I fear the worst. England’s batting now looks fitful, the bowling feckless. Of the three champions, the flighty daredevil Pietersen might win you a Test match, but not a whole series; ditto the moody fast bowler Harmison; and the dynamic Flintoff’s fitness will be a worry all winter. After a few one-dayer warm-ups in India, the first Test match begins in Brisbane on 23 November. We shall see what we shall see, but I fancy the Australians are feeling more smug

Wednesday

Jaspistos

Inaction man

In Competition No. 2460 you were invited to submit a short story with the title ‘The Man Who Did Not’. This assignment gave you the opportunity to step into the shoes of the doomed young writer Konstantin in The Seagull (though, given his fate, you’d perhaps have chosen not to). Konstantin’s Uncle Sorin suggests the title of a short story which reeks of frustrated dreams and failed lives. In the Martin Crimp version now running at the National it is rendered as ‘The Man Who Did Not’, while Michael Frayn, in his adaptation, translates it as ‘The Man Who Wanted To’, which strikes me as marginally less bleak. The standard

Tuesday

Interconnect

Beneath every spire a cellar

Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own. Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities. Their wine cellars are correspondingly as diverse and different as they are, and they might be compared to a large extended family,

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 September 2006

Last week I discovered that I have to have two separate checks made on me by the Criminal Records Bureau. One is because I am a trustee of a charity which works with children. The other is because I sometimes serve at the altar at Mass and therefore come into contact with children who do the same. In both cases, I have to produce documentary evidence of who I am and where I live to people who know these facts already, and I have to fill in forms in black ink with my National Insurance number and my unspent criminal convictions (none) on them. I have to do two forms

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 2 September 2006

Nothing but the truth From Peter Clarke Sir: Rod Liddle suggests that the public are losing confidence in the police because Scotland Yard ‘has developed a tendency, as night follows day, to change its story repeatedly and shiftily’ (‘Passengers won’t mutiny on planes if they are made to feel safe’, 26 August). Why should I bother to change my story when Rod Liddle has already spared me the trouble? I am the only police officer who has made any public statements about the evidence uncovered in the recent case. Just for the record, I have never said, as Mr Liddle suggests, that martyrdom videos were found in a wood, that

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 2 September 2006

Q. Sharing my name with a well-known property tycoon and philanthropist, I frequently receive invitations for dinners and other fund-raising events from organisations expecting a substantial contribution to their cause. I am not tight-fisted, Mary, but a minimum donation of £100,000 is something I can ill afford. The problem is that such amounts are rarely stated on the invitations themselves and organisers are not prepared to divulge anything on the telephone. No doubt some invitations are meant for me, but I tend to decline them all for fear of embarrassment. How can I work out whether invitations are truly intended for me or for my wealthy namesake? D.R., address withheld

Frank Keating

A summer of shame

There occurs next week (8–12 September) a sobering little anniversary. Remember 12 months ago and that heady aura of innocent joy and optimism all around? At the end of an enthralling Ashes cricket series through the summer of 2005, England and Australia were locked in a riveting decider in south London. A celebration of cut-and-thrust endeavour and good fellowship ended with a tumult of national mafeking in Trafalgar Square, the second one in the three months since London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end …and at least sport had shown itself a cause for good, and

Friday

Diary – 1 September 2006

Inevitably, at this time of year, it has been a fortnight dominated by cricket. It began in extraordinary fashion. The Oval, where I was working, became the scene of a unique event in the sport: the first time that a Test match had been forfeited by one team refusing to take the field. The team was Pakistan and the umpire who sparked off the row was Darrell Hair, after he accused the Pakistan team of cheating. In the commentary box we scoured hours of footage to try to find any visual evidence of ball-tampering, but we couldn’t find a thing. Since then I have not changed my opinion: if there

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 1 September 2006

MONDAY Sawubona! And what terrific feedback from our South African adventure. Although it was touch and go at first. The poor guy was obviously extremely nervous about meeting such an iconic figure. But Dave put Mandela immediately at his ease by asking him whether Robben Island had a House system. Soon they were chatting away like old chums, swapping stories about the deprivation and hardship of their youth. (Reading between the lines of the summary notes, I think it was obvious that Eton in the Seventies was a bit tougher than de Klerk’s penal system but I don’t think Dave laboured the point.) Anyway, the upshot is we’re all friends

Thursday

Anthony Daniels

Seeds of wisdom and dissent

George Orwell was deeply hostile to vegetarianism. Vegetarians were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. And before the days of South Indian restaurants in London, one had only to go to a vegetarian eating establishment to see that he had a point. It wasn’t only the beards that wilted (to quote Orwell again): it seemed that nut rissoles had an existentially wilting effect on those who subsisted on them. Of course, one might have mistaken cause for effect. Tristram Stuart’s very, indeed excessively, long and somewhat shapeless history of

Jaspistos

Breaking the silence

In Competition No. 2458 you were invited to disprove Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. I meant disprove by your own efforts, not disprove historically, but either approach was acceptable. Belloc waxed lyrical on the subject in an essay, ‘In Praise of Cheese’, and the American writer Clifton Fadiman happily described it as ‘milk’s leap towards immortality’, but it was left to you to represent the poets. Among your recommendations were some strangers to me: Havarti, Geitost, Caboc (a double-cream cheese wrapped in oatmeal) and, most romantic, ‘the truckle from Appledore’. Commendations to Doris Davies. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and

Wednesday

Geoffrey Riley

‘To My Friends Pictured Within’

Dedication of Elgar’s Enigma Variations    The faded, grainy photographs reveal   A late-Victorian decent openness.   These were his friends: with them he could express   His candid self, indulge his whims and feel   That there was nothing that he need conceal.   Their loyalty assuaged delayed success,   Keeping at bay the hurt of bitterness   No future accolades would ever heal.    ‘Enigma’ made his name and changed his life.   Honours and fame made him a traveller;   He roamed the world, was fêted, made new friends.   His amour propre guarded by his wife,   He kept his wounds, sensitive to a slur.   The music, nobilmente, made amends.

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading

The Trailor Murder Mystery (1846) by Abraham Lincoln In 1841 the young Abraham Lincoln was working as an attorney in Illinois. He became the defence counsel for three brothers named Trailor, who were accused of murdering an odd-job man for his money. No corpse had been found: the odd-job man had simply disappeared, and the brothers seemed suddenly wealthy, which was enough for the good folk of Springfield, IL. Then the odd-job man turned up alive and the case collapsed. Lincoln, unpaid for his services, tried to recoup something by writing an account of the affair for the newspaper The Quincy Whig, which splashed it as ‘A Remarkable Case of

George Trefgarne

Are these Spanish builders really fit to run Heathrow?

After the chaotic scenes of the past few weeks, with probably more than a million travellers caught up at Heathrow alone, it is surely time to rebrand BAA. In the fashionable corporate way, those three initials no longer actually stand for anything, but everyone thinks they still signify the British Airports Authority. This unloved operator is, however, no longer either British or an authority. In fact, it is a private company controlled by a secretive family of Spanish builders. A consortium led by Grupo Ferrovial, a Spanish construction giant still controlled by its 85-year-old founder, wheelchair-bound Rafael del Pino, launched a hostile bid in February for BAA and finally completed