Society

Saturday

28 Jun 2003

Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn’t really go for jazz mags or blue movies. I found them tedious, repetitive, absurd and very embarrassing to buy. There was also a certain bleakness about the harder, nastier porn videos: all those sad and sorry women; all those contrived and silly poses. And as for the guys with mullets and thick moustaches: ugh! In 2001 I went online.

Ross Clark

Public scandal

To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of ‘Mondeo Man’, a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour’s six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person. That antihero of Chekhov, the white-collar government employee, is emerging as the hero of Blair’s Britain. Forget the corporate fat cats supposedly draining the British economy dry through their self-rewarding of failure; it is the public sector that is enjoying the explosion in pay. Between the first quarter of 2002 and the first quarter of

Rod Liddle

Back to basic instincts

Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected [by love]; it is a species of insanity that assails them, and it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all the other countries put together.William Cobbett, 1829 What on earth is the Conservative party going to do about sexual intercourse? People are having it off all over the place, willy-nilly, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one day Hell may swallow them up and devour them for such libidinous recklessness. Even Church of England bishops, who are meant to refrain from sexual intercourse by and large, or at least partake of it quietly, within a monogamous,

Saturday

21 Jun 2003

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 21 June 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, tried to abolish the Lord Chancellor overnight by ukase, and to reassign his powers. But Lord Irvine of Lairg disagreed and was sacked. Lord Falconer of Thoroton was made Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, but it was discovered that the Lords could not sit without a Lord Chancellor, so Lord Falconer had to take the Great Seal, dress in gown and wig and sit on the Woolsack. Lord Strathclyde, the leader of the Conservative peers, said, ‘If it is true that the Queen was not informed, then this is yet another example of discourtesy.’ The hoo-ha overshadowed even the mysterious resignation of Mr

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 21 June 2003

To Gateshead to appear on Question Time last Thursday with Nick Brown, Tom Strathclyde, David Steel and Janet Street-Porter. Until the show is filmed at 8.30 p.m., Nick Brown, the Minister for Work, hasn’t been told that he is being sacked in the reshuffle. He certainly doesn’t seem to betray any nervousness as we wander over the rather splendid Millennium bridge there, discussing Rupert Everett’s excellent portrayal of Charles I in the otherwise dire new movie To Kill a King. Did No. 10 wait until Question Time was safely over before they broke the news? And, if so, why did they specifically ask for him to go on the show

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 21 June 2003

A kind-hearted reader wondered whether Chinaman might not be a derogatory term. I used it the other week. If you believe the Encarta dictionary, it is not just derogatory – it is offensive. But then, the (mainly Zulu) Encarta (as I like to think of it, in memory of the BBC World Service’s invariable phrase each time it mentions the homophonic South African party Inkatha) opines that Montezuma’s revenge is offensive, to the shade of Montezuma for all I know. The thing itself can certainly offend. It is hard to know why Chinaman should be offensive. There seems to be a general reluctance to call foreigners by anything too concrete.

Taki

Party peak

How quickly one forgets! The sweetness of life in London, come June, that is. Let’s start with the good news: Fort Belvedere. It was built as a folly in Windsor Great Park in 1755 by the second Duke of Cumberland, and enlarged by George IV who lent it the appearance of a fort. Edward VIII used it as a refuge to parry prurient types looking into his…er, sex life with Mrs Ward and Mrs Simpson. Just as well. Those were the good old pre-Murdochian days, and the less dirty minds knew, the better. More about Murdoch and privacy laws later on, but now for the party which I’m afraid has

Jeremy Clarke

The Prince and me

I hope Prince William enjoys studying Kiswahili. I certainly did. In my mid-thirties I jacked in a job as a binman, did two A levels in a year, passed both, then studied Kiswahili for three years at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury as part of an African Studies degree. I went to all that trouble because I was fed up with being rained on and broke all the time. A university degree, I imagined, would be a passport to a job, if I wanted one, that paid more for doing less, and doing it indoors. At the time, however, I saw going to university as ‘selling

Petronella Wyatt

Revealing yawn

Please excuse my returning to the subject of teeth, but I’ve had molars on my mind. Since my trip to America where my British teeth were looked upon with horror, I have been examining them day and night. It would be fair to say that this has become an obsession. In restaurants with friends and colleagues I will lose my train of thought and start thinking of teeth. Instead of asking the waiter for some hollandaise sauce with my asparagus, it will come out as, ‘Could you please bring me some hollandaise teeth.’ When I excuse myself to go to the loo it is invariably my intention to open my

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 21 June 2003

Dear Mary Q. My new wife, I have discovered, has a disturbingly communal disposition. From a large, somewhat boisterous family, boarding-school bred and a once committed Girl Guide, she thinks nothing of barging into the bathroom during my ablutions. Worse still, she seems intent on conversation with me, particularly when I’m on the loo. Without appearing neurotic, and being careful to avoid offence, how might I go about breaking her of such habits before the glow of an otherwise promising coupling begins to fade? H.B., Mudgee, NSW, Australia A. You do not mention whether your wife performs her own ablutions in front of you, but, in any case, whether hailing

Clive Davis

Clive Davis – full blogroll

Media Time Newsweek 18DoughtyStreet Al Jazeera English BBC News France-Amérique Le Monde New Statesman New York Times Sign and Sight The Economist The Guardian The Times The Weekly Standard Wall St Journal Editorial Page Washington Post Washington Times Persuasive James Fallows George Packer Gideon Rachman Faith Central Faith World A Don’s Life Assertive Andrew Sullivan Normblog Harry’s Place Pickled Politics Alex Massie Belgravia Dispatch Iain Dale Comment Central Dave Hill Artistic About Last Night Serious Popcorn Arts & Letters Daily Bookslut Blogcritics Cinematical Architecture and Morality The Playgoer Lunettes Rouges Paper Cuts Melodic The Well-Tempered Blog The Rest Is Noise RightWingBob Rifftides On An Overgrown

Mark Glazebrook

Chaos in Venice

A couple of vaporetto stops in the direction of the Lido, from near Piazza San Marco – fortified, perhaps, by a cold glass of wine and some lively light music from the immaculately dressed band outside Florians – and you are in the merciful shade of the public gardens, where some of the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale have stood, designed like temples, for a hundred years or so. Here, every two years, you can be sure that, in the form of chaos, all hell will break loose. ,img>It will break loose quite soon during your passionate search for a glimpse of up-to-the-minute visual delight or significance. Visual art

Aidan Hartley

Home thoughts

Laikipia Claire came face to face with a leopard last night. She was walking between our office, a thatched mud hut at the bottom of the garden, and the house. It’s a distance of only about 30 paces, but it can get dark out there. Instinct kicked in before she even glimpsed the predator and she froze. Then she saw it. He was purring in the way that leopards do, a noise like sawing, and then it jumped over the garden wall. When Claire called out I was in the house with the children watching The Sound of Music. Something about the tone of her voice made me load up

Stephen Glover

Eurosceptic newspapers are too competitive to work together on a referendum

Polly Toynbee of the Guardian believes that the Daily Mail is responsible for most of what is wrong with this country. When she learnt that the paper was intending to hold its own referendum on the new European constitution, the streets of Clapham, where Polly has her house, began to tremble. ‘Who runs the country?’ she demanded to know in her column of 21 May. The answer was that the ‘right-wing press barons’ with their ‘raucous bullying’ want to. The Daily Mail was naturally the worst offender. Its decision to have its own plebiscite was ‘a crude usurpation’. Polly seemed to think that the paper was asking the citizens of

The Spectator

Fetish for Fatherhood

It is now a week since Alan Milburn seriously inconvenienced his patron, Tony Blair, and threw the reshuffle into chaos by announcing that he was quitting the Cabinet to spend more time with his children. In the interval, the entire resources of Fleet Street have been deployed to uncover the truth behind this extraordinary move. Spend more time with his children! That was what Norman Fowler said when he left the Home Office, when he really ended up spending more time with a lucrative series of directorships. What on earth, we have asked ourselves, can have actuated the quiffed and plausible Milburn, a man until last week talked of as

Angela Ellisjones

The year aliens became alien

Uncontrolled immigration? A burden on the taxpayer? Terrorists in our midst? The current immigration crisis echoes events of 100 years ago which led to the passage of Britain’s first piece of immigration law. From the 1880s onwards, increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews sought refuge from pogroms in their homelands. With its long tradition of admitting refugees, Britain was a favoured destination. Germans, Americans and other nationalities also came in their thousands. Between 1891 and 1901, Britain’s alien population grew by nearly 70,000, to reach a total of 286,000. Of these, 135,000 lived in London. At this time, there was no British legislation on immigration. Britain was the only

Christopher Howse

Piano-player in a brothel

Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world – but rebelled against it Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of 50 years, he had to drive across a fast main road, down which articulated lorries careered. Without slowing down he continued straight across, looking neither to right nor to left. This Russian roulette driving, like his tolerance of curious visitors to Park Cottage, betrayed an underlying trust in an unknown providence that he had spent

Mark Steyn

Others can do the caring

New Hampshire On Monday the Daily Telegraph gave a big chunk of its comment-page real estate to Mr Will Day of something called Care International. I’ve never heard of it myself but doubtless that’s because I’m a fully paid-up member of Don’t Care Unilateral. Anyway, the headline on Mr Day’s column read: ‘Things Are Getting Worse In Iraq, So Give The UN A Chance’. You can guess how it went from there: ‘Something in Iraq is going fundamentally wrong…. Did the coalition planners think things through..? They can’t have …Nobody is safe …complete breakdown in security …making their lives a misery …almost total lack of basic services…’. I didn’t see

Tim Butcher

How shellfish is that?

Hermanus You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller. Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world’s most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads. The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation

Simon Heffer

Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. ‘The idea,’ he went on, ‘that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.’ He also said that he didn’t care too much whether anyone studied the classics any more, and even added it might not be such ‘a bad thing’ if there were to be a decline in highbrow subjects at university altogether. So, nearly 150 years after Charles Dickens invented – and pilloried – Mr Gradgrind, with his ‘facts, facts, facts’,