France

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 3 November 2016

‘Look at them, they’re all fat,’ he said. I’d slowed the car to allow four children to cross the zebra crossing. One of them secretly signalled thanks on behalf of them all as they trooped across. Polite. But they were all indeed a little on the plump side. ‘Even in France they’re getting fat now,’ he lamented, leaving unsaid the conclusion that if the French were getting fat, then that’s that, game over. ‘Of course it’s the working classes who get fat first,’ he explained. ‘Eating all that sugar and salt.’ I thought I detected blame and took exception. ‘Well, if anyone is to blame,’ I said, ‘it’s you.’ In

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Contours of the mind

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore knickers made out of second world war airmen’s silk escape maps. Maps certainly colonise our imaginations in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much of personal value can be lost in the creases and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And couples who often travel

Jonathan Fenby

Le Pen’s long game

Marine Le Pen can be excused for thinking her time has come. With six months to go until France’s presidential election, the left-wing government of François Hollande has produced only one winner, and it is her. She’s providing the Gallic contribution to the insurgent charge epitomised elsewhere by Brexit and Donald Trump. France, the home of joie de vivre, has become an introverted place whose citizens fear their nation has lost its way. It is an existential challenge, in the birthplace of existentialism, that the mainstream right is failing to answer. Le Pen, on the other hand, says she has all the answers — and, despite the questionable nature of

Tuesday

Nicholas Farrell

Sooner or later, the Calais ‘Jungle’ will be back – and the British left can’t wait

The massive operation by 1,200 French riot police and gendarmes to bus the migrants in the ‘Jungle’ at Calais to reception centres elsewhere in France and to raze the illegal camp to the ground has begun. Allelujah. You might think that the destruction of this crime-ridden and rat-infested shantytown, where up to 10,000 mainly African and Afghani migrants live in shacks and tents without running water or mains electricity, was good news. At last, those poor migrants will have a decent roof over their heads while they finally get round to applying to the French government for asylum, as nearly all are required to do by the law. But no. Instead, the

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

Why the French favour secularism over appeasement in the fight to defeat Islamic extremism

In the apartment block next to mine in Paris there are two Muslim families. One I see often: the dad dresses in jeans and a t-shirt, and when the weather is good he’s in the park playing with his kids. So, too, the mum: a stylish woman who matches her headscarves to whatever else she wears with the effortless chic of a Parisian. I see less of the other family: the husband dresses in the white robes of a Salafist and never goes to the park with his child. I’ve seen his wife only once. The two families are emblematic of the fight France faces to defeat Islamic extremism. It will be

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 October 2016

In 1999 I went to the doctor about the impotence. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Viagra to get me over the psychological hump. It worked; spectacularly. In 2001 I went to the doctor mumbling about depression. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Prozac to lift me out of it. Within three months I was back on the poop deck of this ship of fools with the wind in my hair and salt spray on my face. In 2013 I went to the doctor because I couldn’t pee. A blood

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 October 2016

Vote Leave was the most successful electoral campaign in British history. Against the opposition of all three political parties, it won, achieving the largest vote for anything in this country, ever. But voting to leave is only the essential start, not the fulfilment, and now there is no Vote Leave. After victory, the campaign’s leaders went their various ways. Some were lulled into a false sense of security by Mrs May’s clear declaration of Brexit intent, and by the fact that one of their top colleagues, Stephen Parkinson, is now installed in 10 Downing Street. Nick Timothy, now all-powerful in Mrs May’s counsels, was running the New Schools Network during

Henry Jeffreys

Notes on… Champagne

The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year. In fact, champagne as a dry sparkling wine was created specifically for us. Until the mid-19th century, most production from the Champagne region was still red wine. French connoisseurs thought the fizzy stuff rather vulgar. Bertin du Rocheret, a wine merchant, compared it to ‘beer, chocolate and whipped cream’. It would have been a rich

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

The road to the Jungle

 Calais On Sunday evening a British motorist, Abraham Reichman, 35, from Stamford Hill, north London, hit two Eritrean migrants who were trying to block the A16 outside Calais. They had leapt in front of his car, he says, as he slowed down to avoid dozens of migrants on the motorway. Terrified, Mr Reichman drove off at speed to the police station, where he later found out that one of the Eritreans had died. The police released him after several hours but he is under investigation for homicide involontaire. It is not difficult to meet migrants so determined to get to the land of milk and honey on the British side

Thursday

Ian Sansom

All work, many plays

‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains much krapping away to both no little and little or no avail. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ remarks Krapp in the play, ‘But I wouldn’t want them back.’ Well, here they are, like it not: 9,000 pages of letters whittled down to just under 800 pages of text by a quartet of editors —

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Sarkozy is sceptical about climate change? String him up

Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy has gone ‘beyond the limits of decency’. Cue an atmosphere that’s almost medieval, which basically tells Sarkozy, and by extension everyone, that you cannot say things like that. You probably shouldn’t even think them. The swiftness and ugliness of the response to Sarkozy’s comments confirm that questioning climate change is to the 21st century what

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Liberté, égalité, securité is the new normal for French schools

My daughter started secondary school on 1 September. She was very excited. I wish I could report that she skipped through the gates on her first day, but this is France, and no child skips through school gates in 2016. Instead she stood in a queue outside the entrance, as one by one she and her new classmates had their satchels searched by a pair of security guards. Not that I’m complaining. In fact if I did have a gripe it was that the security was too light. According to Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, 50m euros has been provided to tighten security at schools and colleges, and more than 3,000

Monday

Douglas Murray

Sarkozy’s tough talk on Islamic radicalisation lacks conviction

The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has announced that the French police and intelligence services have identified 15,000 people across France who are either ‘radicalised’ or in the process of becoming radical. In response to this Nicolas Sarkozy (who is of course in campaigning mode) has given an interview to Journal du Dimanche in which he has said that anybody who ‘regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must be pre-emptively placed in a detention centre.’ This is an interesting step-up in rhetoric from the former President, but very far from being a policy.  Not least

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 September 2016

What is happening to estate agents? Or let me put it another way. If the professional classes thought they were going to escape unscathed from ‘free movement of people’ then they were wrong. I feel it is only fair to warn the office workers and the suited and booted that their salaries are no longer safe from the Eurovision job contest. I know this because I have been trying to sell my flat for a while and a part of the problem has been that the agent put in charge of selling it was a young girl who, while sweet, lacked the ideal vocab range. I overheard her doing a

Thursday

Toby Young

France began breeding jihadis in 1989

E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done so much harm to schools in the West. Hirsch identifies three ideas in particular: that education should be ‘developmentally appropriate’, with the emphasis on learning through discovery; that it should be ‘child-centred’, taking account of different ‘learning styles’; and that the overarching aim of education should be the cultivation of ‘critical thinking’ skills. I’ve spent

Tom Holland

Diary – 1 September 2016

European unions come and go. Back in 1794, one of the more improbable ones was founded when Corsica joined Britain as an autonomous kingdom under the rule of George III. It didn’t last long, and by 1796, after an ignominious Brexit from the island, the Corsicans once again found themselves under French rule. Today, the episode is chiefly remembered for the injury sustained by one particular officer during the initial British capture of the island: it was during the siege of Calvi that Nelson lost the sight in his right eye. ‘Never mind,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I can see very well with the other.’ Naturally, as an appalling

Tuesday

Katie Harrison

France’s Calais threats are a recipe for more human misery

French politicians have been busying themselves recently offering solutions to Calais’s crowded ‘jungle’ camp – and it’s good news that the Home Office has said their suggestions are all ‘non-starters’. Quite right, too. Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to set up a system for displaced people living in France to apply for asylum in the UK might sound humane. In fact, it’s a recipe for even more misery. Why? Because offering the faint hope of sanctuary to those who have suffered unimaginable terror would encourage more vulnerable people to set out on a tragic journey which has already claimed far too many lives.  Displaced people from the Middle East, in particular, have been through enough. Working for a humanitarian NGO, I spent much of

Friday

Kate Maltby

France’s burkini ban was an own goal for secularism

I’ve always hated the beach. The water? Great. The sunshine? Terrible. It starts with the hot trek across the sands to find a square of free ground – loaded up with factor 60, several books, a comedy floppy hat, two towels, three bottles of water and the rusty family parasol. Then there’s the bodily anxiety. Find me a woman who doesn’t fret about her body on the beach, and I’ll find you a liar. Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for The Spectator about my own fraught history with my body on the beach. I still don’t understand how it ever became acceptable to wear an itsy bitsy bikini around

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

France is right to ban the burkini

May I interrupt, for a moment, the howls of anguish from those liberals in uproar at the news that authorities in France are banning burkinis on their beaches? I’d like to relate an incident that occurred earlier this month in France. It involved my girlfriend, who was on her way from Paris to visit her grandmother in eastern France. An hour into her journey she pulled into a service station to fill up with petrol. On returning to her car she made a small sign of the cross as she slid into her seat. Navigating one’s way on a French motorway during the height of summer can be a fraught experience,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Oil prices will drift down again as Opec fails to get its act together

How many Olympic medals did Opec win? The answer (though I’ll bet no one else has bothered to work this out) is 15, or an average of 1.07 medals per member of the world’s leading oil-producer cartel. That result — boosted, I should add, by the five-medal triumph of the Iranian wrestling team — compares with the now notorious aggregate figure of 325 for the EU, including Team GB’s 67. I highlight the contrast only to make the point that, as power blocs go, resource-rich Opec is piss-poor at managing its affairs to advantage: the indolent leadership of the Saudis (Rio medals: zero) and their permanent stand-off with Iran means