The Battle for Britain – 18 January 2018
Society
Thursday
Macron charms, but won’t give ground on the City
Emmanuel Macron is revelling in his new status as the preeminent politician in Europe. In his joint press conference with Theresa May, he turned in a charming performance highlighting the ties between Britain and France and urging the two countries to ‘make a new tapestry together’. However, there was a sting in the tail. When Macron was asked about financial services and the single market, he emphasised that Britain’s choice was between Norway—full involvement in the single market but paying into the budget, accepting ECJ jurisdiction and free movement—and Canada, a much more limited free trade deal. Interestingly, though, he said he didn’t want to exclude any sector from the
What next for contemporary art auctions?
With auction houses in the news following record-breaking sales, I sat down with Ralph Taylor, Global Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Bonhams, to discuss how the contemporary art market is shaping up for 2018. Are auction houses getting too close to emerging artists and damaging their careers through speculative sales? How difficult is it to lure young collectors into the unfamiliar world of the saleroom? And how can an auction house like Bonhams compete with the big two of Sotheby’s and Christie’s in this competitive field? You can listen to our conversation here: Thomas Marks is the editor of Apollo. Bonhams sponsored the Apollo Awards 2017
The Spectator Podcast: The truth about plastic
On this week’s episode, we investigate the truth about plastic, the environmental enemy du jour in 2018. We also try to find a compromise on tuition fees (if there is one) and ask whether the Church of England are the most ruthless property tycoons in the country. First up: Whilst terrestrial TV was busy doing battle with its streaming nemeses for prestige drama supremacy, the single biggest televisual hit of 2017 was something rather different. The David Attenborough narrated Blue Planet II smashed to the top of the ratings chart like a marlin cresting a wave, but it also spawned a national outpouring of anti-plastic sentiment. Can we do anything
Emmanuel Macron’s charm offensive is paying off
Summit? What summit? Coverage of today’s Anglo-French tête–à–tête at Sandhurst can best be described as low-key on the French side of the Channel. And that’s being kind. To say the French don’t care may be a slight exaggeration, so let’s settle for Gallic indifference. None of the newspapers cover the summit on their front pages and it was the seventh item on France’s equivalent of Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, sandwiched between a report on the Woody Allen allegations and the latest news from the Australian tennis Open. No analysis, little interest, just a brief mention that the president of the Republic will be in England for talks with
A nice, cuddly NHS would be bad for us
Recently the NHS postponed a large number of non-urgent operations to cope with what is known as the ‘annual winter crisis’. Naturally, this outcome was treated as a scandal in the press, and there were predictable calls for Jeremy Hunt to resign. But the fact that non-urgent operations are postponed is not by definition bad. It might be evidence that the NHS is working well. Or at least that it is doing what it is supposed to do, which is to deploy necessarily finite resources on the basis of patient need, rather than some other criterion — such as profitability or ability to pay. Making people wait for less urgent
A vintage in retreat
We were pondering the relationship between military history and wine vintages. It is extraordinary to think that the French managed to make wine throughout both world wars. In the late 1980s, Alan Clark had David Owen and me to lunch at Saltwood, his castle near Hythe. It is a proper castle; the stones are still marked by the rust of medieval warfare. According to legend, the knights who slew Thomas à Becket made their final preparations there. How appropriate for a future Clark residence. There was some dispute as to whether Alan went over to Rome on his deathbed, but during the years of swaggering health his sympathies would have
Wine Club 20 January
Well, I don’t know about you but I found the recent festivities somewhat challenging. I didn’t draw a sober breath between 8 November and New Year’s Day which, as my wife Marina kindly pointed out, was neither big nor clever. She’s no slouch herself when the corks are popping so for her to call me a lush is a bit rich, but I took her point and hopped meekly on the water wagon on 1 January. As the days of sobriety turned to weeks I began to feel rather smug, especially since so many mates fell by the wayside. One chum lasted all of two days; another barely a week
I recycle – and lie to myself
‘I just want to say one word to you, just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.’ That iconic punch line from The Graduate, when a businessman gives Dustin Hoffman career advice at a cocktail party, has been circling my head ever since China announced that, as of 2018, it will no longer act as the West’s giant blue wheelie bin. Back in 1968, that businessman was righter than he could have known: ‘There’s a great future in plastics.’ We’re in that future — with dire consequences for aquatic life. Let’s review: what is recycling for? To reduce landfill, whose toxins can leach into groundwater. To diminish litter. To create a
Bolshevik mischief
From ‘The Bolshevik negotiations with Germany’, 19 January 1918: We think that the fact is fairly emerging from the negotiations that the Bolsheviks are not, as some people supposed, the pliable tools or even the agents of Germany, but are idealists genuinely inspired by their mania. Of course, a great deal of harm may be done by a mania, however intellectually sincere it may be, and we can set no precise limits to the mischief that may be done by the Bolshevik leaders before they have finished. The habit of preferring the shadow to the substance, and rating the sound of words as more important than the realities implied by
Red sunset, red dawn
Last year, more than 15,000 communists gathered in the Russian seaside town of Sochi for a week-long commemoration of the centenary of Lenin’s revolution. Nearly every nation was represented. Stalls manned by party members from Zimbabwe, Greece, Cuba and India lined the narrow concourse of the event’s main piazza. Under the eye of the Russian police, celebrants staged rallies, meetings and marathon seminars. The daughter of Che Guevara was there. After giving a lecture on the legacy of her father, she received a standing ovation that lasted more than five minutes. ‘It feels like 1959 again,’ someone said when the cheering had finally died down. Along with a few thousand
Amazing grace | 18 January 2018
Last week, Peregbakumo Oyawerikumo, aka ‘The Master’, was finally caught and shot by the Nigerian army. Oyawerikumo and his Egbesu Boys had styled themselves as local Robin Hoods, taking riches from oil companies in the Niger Delta, but they won’t be much missed. In the remote swamp town of Enekorogha, their demise will be celebrated, because this was the scene of their most notorious crime. It was here, last October, that the Egbesu Boys kidnapped Ian Squire, an optician from Surrey who was working at a clinic, and three fellow Britons: Cambridgeshire GP David Donovan and his wife Shirley, and optometrist Alanna Carson, from Northern Ireland. On their first day
A star is born
Last Sunday night a capacity crowd of mainly young people packed into the Emmanuel Centre in London. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood at the back of the hall. When the speaker entered, the entire hall rose to its feet. It was his second lecture that day, the fourth across three days of sold-out London events. For an hour and a half the audience listened to a rambling, quirky, but fascinating tour of evolutionary biology, myth, religion, psychology, dictators and Dostoyevsky. Occasionally a line would get its own burst of applause. One of the loudest came after the speaker’s appeal for the sanctity of marriage and child-rearing. Yet this
Steamy encounters
With my friend Maurice, I have long frequented the Ironmonger Row baths behind Moorfields Eye Hospital. As married men, we appreciated the circumspect and respectful behaviour; for a few quid one felt properly laved and rejuvenated. Nakedness is a great leveller. City traders mingled with taxi drivers; a High Court judge might ‘testiculate’ (talk bollocks) with Maurice, a Labour peer. Afterwards in our robes we relaxed in the cooling-room over cups of tea; the steam induced a state of blissful lassitude. In 2012, after an ill-spent £16 million refurbishment, the baths were reopened as the Old Street Spa Experience. At a stroke, the local community was priced out: only transient
How the Rat sniffed out £15,000 down the back of my virtual sofa
It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as my girlfriend’s six-year-old boy, then became my stepson and featured here quite often over the years because, being a scaly-tailed creature of evil, he was always good for some copy. This new year, with his agreement, I upgraded him to full son status. Let me explain why in a way that I hope you’ll find charming, rather than one that makes you want to throw up. The first reason is purely mercenary. During Christmas, while over with his wife Chloe from Hong Kong, the Rat managed to find about £10,000
Padel
When we arrived, we discovered that our villa had a padel court. Few of us had seen one before and no one knew the rules, so we invented them as logically as we could and got on with it. Within a couple of sets we were hooked. Some people started to get up early to practise; others began watching matches on YouTube. Specialist websites were consulted to establish the basics, such as how many underarm serves you get (the answer is two) and whether the ball is out if it hits the back wall without bouncing first in the court. (Absolutely). What a game! It’s a cross between real tennis,
Holy lands
Holy smoke! The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon. This month, it emerged that since 2010 the church has laid claim to minerals under 585,000 acres of land, including territory it doesn’t actually own. Its current holdings amount to only 105,000 acres, but it retains the underground mineral rights to vast areas that used to belong to the church. And it’s making damn sure it retains those rights. The church has sent letters to thousands of people, telling them they don’t own the gilt-edged minerals below its land. In its defence, the church says it’s just doing its statutory duty in registering the rights. But
Carillion’s crash is not a parable of the evil of outsourcing
Carillion is a disaster on all fronts, but my sympathies go first to the fallen contracting giant’s sub–contractors. Upwards of 30,000 smaller firms were already facing 120-day payment delays and may now have to fight court battles to get paid at all, driving many hard-pressed entrepreneurs to bankruptcy. But the political spotlight won’t help them, because Labour spokesmen who despise small business as well as large will merely use the case to attack the concept of outsourcing public services for private-sector profit. And that debate will continue to miss the central point that Carillion has not crashed because it held too many school-meal contracts, but because of delays and cost
Let’s abolish parole
The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unwork-able in practice. The only thing that it is good for is the employment of large numbers of officials engaged in pointless or fatuous tasks who might other-wise be unemployed. The system is predicated on the ability of experts to predict the future conduct of convicted prisoners. Will they or will they not repeat their crimes if let out early? It is true that, using a few simple statistical measures, such as numbers of past convictions and age, you can predict
Rude food
In Competition No. 3031 you were invited to provide a review by a restaurant critic that is tediously loaded with sexual language. I have had this comp up my sleeve since reading a piece by Steven Poole in the Observer in which he laid into the relentless sexualisation of food in our culture: ‘Everyone revels in the “filthiness” of what they are naughtily pleased to call “gastroporn…”’, he writes. And Jamie Oliver ‘describes pretty much everything he is about to cook as “sexy”, as though not quite sure whether he would like to shag it or eat it …’ With the recent return to our screens of the