Society

Wednesday

Judi Bevan

Selling a different kind of capitalism

During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint of northern origins. ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do; I still think working in government service is extremely important.’ Now the chairman of the iconic John Lewis Partnership, where the staff owns the company, Hampson retains a strong sense of that early virtue. Tall and clean-cut, with a steely gaze, in

Allister Heath

Don’t mention house prices to the Japanese

It was a typical west London dinner party, of the kind where the guests agree not to talk about house prices but then do so anyway. One smug homeowner was in the middle of explaining why buying property makes sense when my usually placid Japanese friend Takashi suddenly jumped up in anger. ‘That’s nonsense,’ he shouted. ‘I know what it means to see house prices collapse. You British know nothing about that.’ Like many other young Japanese professionals, Takashi remains traumatised by his country’s experience. Property prices in the Land of the Rising Sun have so far fallen by 54 per cent since peaking in 1990. In some parts of

Stephen Vines

Old habits die hard in the former colony – but there’s a new tax on food and books

The Valhalla which is Hong Kong’s low and simple taxation system is set to be demolished. The government of the Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic has come up with the bright idea of getting its people to share the festering sore which in Britain goes by the name of Value Added Tax and does so much to detract from the sum of human happiness. Hong Kong plans to introduce a Goods and Services Tax to be levied at a modest 5 per cent, compared with British VAT at 17.5 per cent. But these evil schemes always begin modestly and have a way of becoming less modest as time

Fergal Keane

‘See dogs eating bodies in the rubble’

Qana There was no smell of death. The dying had taken place too recently. When I arrived they were still pulling corpses from the collapsed building. The first I saw were two young brothers of the Shalhoub family. If you have ever watched sleeping children carried to their beds late at night, you will have some idea of the scene. The dead children of Qana looked as if they were in a deep slumber. The shock waves of the explosion had collapsed their lungs, suffocating them in the rubble. I saw one whose mouth and nose were stuffed with sand. The only sign of the violence done to them was

Michael Beloff

Oxford needs inspiration

Three days ago I demitted the presidency of Trinity College to which I had been elected exactly 30 years after ceasing to be a short-term college lecturer there. Oxford then, Oxford now? Tempora mutantur, but plus c’est la même chose. Oxford University is an association of independent colleges with a distinctive tutorial system or it is nothing special; but the college community and tutorial system are both under strain. The dons of yesteryear, who lived not only in but for the college, are all but extinct. College offices are no longer shared out among the Fellowship, but have become the province of professionals. The younger Fellows are forced to prioritise

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 July 2006

As the conflict deepens in the Lebanon, the word on many lips is ‘proportionality’. Israel keeps being told that her actions are ‘disproportionate’. Proportionality is, indeed, a key moral concept in wars, but how is it to be calculated? The question becomes more complicated in an age in which opponents often prefer terrorism to formal military engagement. The regular army fighting the irregulars can almost always be made to look like a sledgehammer taken to crack a nut. In this case, it is probably right to argue that Hezbollah does not, as a fighting machine, pose a threat to the territorial integrity of Israel. But it can and does train

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 29 July 2006

Lebanon: who’s to blame? From Nicholas MillmanSir: It was refreshing to read your editorial (22 July) after a week of witnessing the rest of the British media sadly misrepresent the Middle East crisis. In typical fashion Hezbollah has manipulated the journalists on the ground to the point where, for example, Channel 4 News must now be considered an effective extension of Hezbollah propaganda. The constant talk here of a ‘disproportionate’ response by Israel is baffling. A gang of nasty thugs, with only a tenuous claim to represent a sovereign state, violate the border of a neighbouring sovereign state and kidnap her soldiers. In the meantime they continue to rain rockets

Taki

Green peace

On board S/Y Bushido We’re sailing off Fiscardo, Kefalonia, a corruption of the name of Robert Guiscard, the Norman invader who met stiff resistance when he attacked and took Kefalonia in 1082. Guiscard died of the fever on board his ship off the town which bears his name in 1085. Fiscardo is the best-kept secret among the Greek isles. It’s a charming little port, cleaner than a Swiss clinic, friendly and very, very green. It lies among lentisk bushes, cypress and pine trees, and is on the northern tip of the island. In my 50 years of sailing, I have yet to see such clean and isolated beaches and so

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 29 July 2006

Q. I wonder what is the correct etiquette when one notices that a friend has something unattractive and highly visible in their nostril? I have a bit of a phobia about this. Obviously, one can be straightforward if it is a close friend, but I am shortly taking a house in Trebetherick for the John Betjeman centenary celebrations, and we’ll be with a gang of people I don’t know very well. I have noticed that the problem is always much worse when people are in and out of the sea. T.M., London W8 A. You are correct. Incompletely evacuated sea-water seems to promote the generation of veritable bouquets of nasal

Frank Keating

The very good old days

Barbados promises a hectic carnival jump-up this weekend in celebration of Sir Gary Sobers’s 70th birthday. I trust the island takes it easy on the literal backslapping of their favourite son. When the Queen knighted him at Bridgetown racecourse that heady day in 1975, the jubilations became too hearty even for the convivial new knight himself, so with the fireworks popping and the calypsos hammering on, the good fellow himself had to steal away unnoticed and duck for sanctuary into a dingy sidestreet bar. Outside, the celebrating son et lumière still raged but inside, nursing a beer, was just one Brit codger, alone on his winter break. Adjusting his eyes

Friday

Dylan Jones

Diary – 28 July 2006

It’s been a busy week. There was Charles Finch’s dinner for Cate Blanchett at Drones (Jack Nicholson as louche as ever; Juliette Lewis surprisingly normal); a Calvin Klein dinner at Locanda Locatelli, the YSL Serpentine party and the BSME party at the Ritz. Everyone has Cameron Tourette’s these days, and you can’t go anywhere without being bombarded with opinions about the Vigorous Young Leader. Having done more fieldwork than is strictly necessary, I’d say that six out of ten people I meet want to vote for him, with, on the one hand, people like Links chairman John Ayton saying, ‘His world is bigger than politics’, and those on the other

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 28 July 2006

MONDAYDave, give me strength! If I get one more phone call from Foxy asking me to write press releases about his trip to Afghanistan, I’m going to make an official complaint. Thought DC looked v. handsome in his war casuals (Howies recycled polo shirt v. dashing). But Jed says we’ve been let down by sweat control. He’s been screaming at Nigel all day. (‘If I see one more bead someone is getting transferred to Ashcroft’s marginals team faster than they can say “general well being”!’) It’s a difficult time. Everyone nervous about ambitious Mr Fox being so close to Dear Leader with all those guns and explosives about. Dave’s ideas

Thursday

Anthony Daniels

Sorting out the selves

There are few pleasures more reassuring than that of disagreement with some of the contents of a book that is closely argued, extremely well-written and clearly the work of a highly civilised, cultivated and decent man. Such a pleasure is reassuring because, in a hate-filled world, it reminds us that identity of opinion, which makes for dullness, is not necessary for the establishment of high regard. In this short and bracing book, Professor Sen inquires into the question of human identity, and the practical consequences of the various answers that may be given to it. The question is of the greatest possible urgency in the modern world for obvious reasons,

Wednesday

Lewis Wolpert

Practising the impossible profession

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and these 27 essays, relating to lectures and reviews, have a strong psychoanalytic focus. In the preface Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis has got over its honeymoon belief that it is a universal panacea, and can now enjoy its relish of sexuality with amusement, as well as the straddling of conflicts rather than their resolution. It will be, he says, as useful as anyone finds it to be. This view sets the tone of the book. It is heavily based on Freud but there are occasional references to Lacan, Winnicot and Bion. There is little reference to the unconscious or the id and superego. On the

Jaspistos

Fill the frame

In competition No. 2453 you were given beginning and ending words and invited to supply a short story within them. The given words were the opening and closing sentences of a story by V. S. Pritchett entitled ‘The Evils of Spain’, with one small difference: owing to a misprint, Pritchett’s ‘Angel’, a male, became our ‘Angela’.  It contains a delightful moment: ‘The proprietor said: “M’sieu, whether you were drowned or not drowned this morning you are about to be roast. The hotel is on fire.’’’ Commendations to Alanna Blake, Patrick O’Byrne and Richard Ellis. The prize-winners, printed below, get £25 each and the bonus fiver is awarded to G. M.

Matthew Lynn

A win for Arsenal, but extra time at Wembley

From a distance, the new Wembley Stadium looks like a stately cruise liner forced by rough seas to dock in some tatty West African port. With its gleaming surfaces and huge vaulting arch, the stadium is all glamour, yet it is moored in a desolate landscape littered with kebab shops and second-hand car dealerships, with the muddy waters of Neasden and Dollis Hill lapping at its hull. Even as you walk closer, appearance and reality keep clashing against one another. It looks magnificent. Yet across the dazzling expanses of metal and glass, there are also little yellow dots swarming like ants. In their hard hats and yellow jackets, the builders

Jonathan Davis

Farewell to the Harry Potter of stock-picking

Twenty-seven years ago, a shy 29-year-old engineering graduate from Cambridge University left his job as a trainee fund manager at an obscure South African investment company in London. In a move that some of his colleagues regarded as foolhardy, he had accepted an offer to join a little-known private American firm that had never sold an investment fund over here before, but thought that Britain under Margaret Thatcher — who had been elected just a few months earlier — might be a good place to try to break into the European investment market. At the time few people had any idea that this seemingly intemperate career move would help change

Paul Johnson

The genius of verse and song whose life was a Book of Job

As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to it rhythmically, so I call her the Cairo belly-dancer. The period 1880 to 1914 was the first golden age of popular songs, most of them British, the best of which my mother used to sing to me when I was tiny. I used to know all the words of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, though that of

Denis Macshane

We should have intervened in Spain

Granada The papers have been full of the Suez story. Both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph have zeroed in on Eden’s adventure of 50 years ago to try to draw parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is another anniversary that so far has gone all but unnoticed. It also has lessons for contemporary history. Seventy years ago this month (July) a British pilot took off from Croydon airport. On his Dragon Rapide aeroplane were a Spanish newspaper man, an MI6 officer and two pretty young women for cover. They flew via France and Portugal to the Canary Islands. There they picked up a no-nonsense conservative general called Franco. The

Toby Harnden

Gays have the right to be miserable too

Lubbock, Texas The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law. ‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise