Latest from Coffee House

There have been precious few people able to make sense of the crash. The main commentators didn’t see it coming — and so have focused their energies stressing how no man born of woman could have predicted it. But Nassim Taleb did. He has been a voice of sense, originality and common sense throughout, and David Cameron has been listening. The respect is mutual: Taleb even described Cameron as ‘the best hope we have left on this planet’ because he understood the dangers of deficits. If CoffeeHousers haven’t come across Taleb’s books, such as Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan, I can’t recommend them enough. I met him recently, and

The Sunday Times lists the ‘Top 500 Apps in the world’ (£) today, and I’m pleased to say that The Spectator’s brand new app ranks no.4 in its ‘news apps’ category. The newspaper describes the list as ‘the good, the mad and lovely’ and ours emerges as little of all three. What we have sought to do with the new app is combine our blogs and the magazine, and we are (I think) the first magazine to do so. The Sunday Times gives it the thumbs-up. It ranks us behind its own app, and those of the BBC and Sky News. Here’s its verdict: ‘The contents page may be slightly

A quick post to wish CoffeeHousers a very happy New Year, and to thank you for reading and commenting in 2011. The blog may be a bit quieter over the next day or two (although there will be some posts); but, rest assured, we’ll come roaring back to normal service early next week. In the meantime, there’s still time to enter our New Year competition. Or how about sifting back through the ten ‘most-read’ articles from all across the website this year? Here are the links: 1) What the papers won’t say — Peter Oborne 2) The footballer is named — Alex Massie 3) More like Veena, please — Nick Cohen 4)

Christmas is but a day away, and with it a chance to remember when British and German troops clambered out of the trenches to declare impromptu ceasefires in December 1914. CoffeeHousers are no doubt familiar with the specifics: how the Germans started by singing carols, and finished off (according to some letters from the time) by beating our soldiers 3-2 in a game of football. But I thought you still might care to see how The Spectator wrote it up a week later. So here is the brief report that appeared in the ‘News of the Week’ section of our 2 January issue, 1915: ‘The news from the western theatre

A brief post to let CoffeeHousers know that the blog will be going a bit quieter over the next few days. We hope you have a very happy and peaceful Christmas. Coffee House won’t fall completely silent, though. Tune in over the weekend for the occasional post and selections from The Spectator archives. And there’s our ongoing Christmas competition here. We’ll be back, proper, early next week.

Keen-sighted Spectator readers may have noticed that there was no ‘Barometer’ column in our Christmas double issue. The weekly column, which features topical, little observations and statistics, had to be pulled because of space restrictions. But no such restrictions on the Internet, of course — so we thought CoffeeHousers might care to see some of the festive factoids we had poised to print. Among them were the poll findings shown in the chart above: only 12 per cent of people regard the religious significance of Christmas as its most important component. And here are more for you to mull over, collected from various YouGov surveys: This Christmas, 31 per cent

A sad foray into the Spectator archives today, as we mark the death of Christopher Hitchens. He was, of course, linked with many publications: The New Statesman, The Nation, Vanity Fair — and with The Spectator too. We we all pleased to discover that he wrote so warmly of us in his recent memoirs: ‘…Alexander Chancellor, editor of The Spectator, gave me a call. His correspondent in Washington, and otherwise lovely man, was also having trouble taking the thing seriously and was filing copy that was “frankly a bit ‘flip’”. Would I mind surging down to the capital and seeing if I could hold the fort for a while? I didn’t hesitate.

There’s a great selection of writers named of the cover of our Christmas issue. But one name, however, may stand out: Adam Werritty, who has written an article giving his take on the scandal that brought down Liam Fox earlier this year. We thought CoffeeHousers might care to read the whole thing (naturally, before buying a copy of the issue here), so here it is: When you hire a morning suit for a wedding, you count on being photographed a few times on the day — for photos that will be quickly buried in wedding albums. But by now, half the country will probably have seen pictures of me as

One December in the 1930s, with Britain reeling from the Depression, Lord Wakefield of Wakefield House took out a full-page announcement on the cover of The Spectator. It was an appeal to ‘all men and women of goodwill’ to help 3,693 boys and girls in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage.  ‘For many of them it will be their first Christmas without their fathers and mothers,’ wrote Lord Wakefield. ‘Five hundred guineas would meet the costs of Christmas Day for the entire orphanage.’   That was our Christmas cover of 1933, and it’s just one of the Spectators of Christmas Past that we’re featuring on our new Facebook page this

The Euro crisis is terrifying, as Peter Oborne rightly says in today’s Telegraph. But what scares me even more is the paucity of the debate. Right now, the summitry is aimed at saving the euro as if this were an end in itself. Merkel’s logic (‘if the euro fails than Europe fails’) is dangerously simplistic: there are millions out of work, including half of young people in Spain, and they won’t be helped if their dole money is paid in euros. Recovery is needed. Jobs are needed. The euro has always been a project that puts politics first and economics second, with disastrous consequences. It cannot now be solved by

A brief post to alert CoffeeHousers to The Spectator’s carol concert, which is taking place next Wednesday in the beautiful St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street. It promises to be a suitably Christmassy affair. There will be carols from the choir of St Bride’s; readings from Jeremy Clarke, Rod Liddle, Rory Sutherland and the Mary behind ‘Dear Mary’; as well as Winter Pimm’s, mince pies and hot chestnuts served outside the church. All that remains is for you to buy one of the few remaining tickets. It would be wonderful to see you there, so please do get a-clicking.

A more recent gem from the archives than we would normally mine, but with the forthcoming government report into the riots — and with Fraser’s and David’s recent posts — we reckoned you might care to (re-)read Harriet Sergeant’s piece from this summer. It formed the centrepiece of an issue largely dedicated to those fiery disturbances, and which also included thought-provoking articles by Theodore Dalrymple and Ravi Somaiya. Here it is: These rioters are Tony Blair’s children, Harriet Sergeant, The Spectator, 13 August 2011 On the third day of the London riots I received a telephone call from Mash, a member of a Brixton gang who I befriended three years

Last night, as we mentioned yesterday and the day before, was The Spectator’s debate on whether Britain should cut its overseas aid budget. Here, for CoffeeHousers who couldn’t attend the event, is Lloyd Evans’ review of it:   Chair: Rod Liddle Proposing: Ian Birrell, Richard Dowden, Stephen Glover Opposing: Prof Paul Collier, Alan Duncan MP, Richard Miller   Ian Birrell, former speechwriter for David Cameron, proposed the motion by likening aid programmes to helping child beggars in the third world. The gift, though well-intentioned, keeps children out of school, encourages more kids to start begging and condemns entire families to penury. If aid worked, Birrell would happily treble it. But

  What is the Queen’s secret? She seems to defy political gravity. Right now, an English monarch is in Australia being feted by her subjects, who seem delighted by this very un-modern constitutional arrangement. Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister of Australia, recounts in The Times today the time he advised the monarch to let go. “I told the Queen as politely and gently as I could that I believed that majority of Australians felt the monarchy was now an anachronism; that it had gently drifted into obsolescence.” This was 18 years ago. There is no such sign of this now, with just 34 per cent of Australians being in favour of

Yesterday, Lord Wolfson — the new Tory peer and CEO of Next — made an extraordinary offer: £250,000 of his own money to whoever comes up with the best plan to break up the Euro. It’s the second biggest prize in economics, after the Nobel, and a great and patriotic idea from Wolfson, an original and forceful thinker with plenty real world experience from whom I hope we’ll hear more. Inspired by this, we at Coffee House would like to make our own offer: a bottle of Pol Roger, our house champagne, to whoever can explain George Osborne’s growth strategy. The chancellor needs some help on this front, with some unkind