Taki

The idiot economy – behind the ‘dark web’ cyber-crime busts

Spectator Money is out, with ideas on how to make it, spend it and even how to be seen spending it. Freddy Gray looks at the ‘social economy’ – think tax loopholes for financiers of politically favoured endeavours; while Camilla Swift peruses credit cards such as Kanye West’s ‘African American Express’ and the Dubai First Royale, ‘studded with diamonds. Bring it on, Sheikh Sugardaddy.’ Spare a thought, though, for the inconspicuous consumers – or at least, the wannabes. This segment took a hit last week in a joint operation dubbed ‘Onymous’, in which the FBI, Europol and friends arrested 17 alleged web-administrators and vendors and shuttered dozens of sites peddling child pornography, weapons, fake Danish passports, hacking services and so on. ‘Cash, drugs, gold and silver

If Brooks Newmark didn’t want these photos leaked, why did he email them?

So it now seems pretty clear to me that we can no longer send women photographs of our genitals without worrying that we might be the subject of some horrible sting operation and consequently suffer public humiliation and possibly lose our jobs. One by one, the harmless little pleasures in life are being withdrawn from us. It is even being said that we would be wise not to photograph our own genitals at all, let alone send the snaps to anyone, because a third party might somehow acquire them and cause us mischief. If this is true, I am not sure how I am going to pass the long winter

Letters: Lord Lawson is not banned from the BBC, and Wales is wonderful

No ban on Lawson Sir: You write that the BBC ‘has effectively banned’ Lord Lawson from items on climate change unless introduced with ‘a statement discrediting his views’ (Leading article, 12 July). There’s a lot of muddled reporting of this story. Lord Lawson hasn’t been in any sense ‘banned’, and the Editorial Complaints Unit finding didn’t suggest that he shouldn’t take part in future items. It found fault with the way the Today item was handled in two respects: firstly that it presented Lord Lawson’s views on the science of global warning as if they stood on the same footing as those of Sir Brian Hoskins, and secondly that it didn’t make clear

Spectator letters: Interpreting Islam, and Spectator-reading thieves

Chapter and verse on Islam Sir: Irshad Manji’s generally very sensible article on ‘Reclaiming Islam’ (29 March) suggests using the Qur’an sura 3:7 as a verse to challenge Islamists who claim a fundamentalist reading. She quotes the verse as saying that ‘God and God alone knows the full truth of how the Qu’ran ought to be interpreted’. I don’t speak Arabic, but unfortunately in my English translation this isn’t quite what the verse says. What it says is ‘only God and insightful people know their true meaning’. Sadly then the verse, I suspect, would be next to useless in challenging fundamentalist interpretations — as most Islamists would, I suspect, consider

How I became editor of The Spectator (aged 27)

Thirty years ago this weekend, I became editor of The Spectator. In the same month, the miners’ strike began, Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as the right-wing press still insisted on calling him) won the Chesterfield by-election, the FT index rose above 900 for the first time and the mortgage rate fell to 10.5 per cent. Mark Thatcher was reported to be leaving the country to sell Lotus cars in America for £45,000 a year. Although she now tells me she has no memory of it, Wendy Cope wrote a poem entitled ‘The Editor of The Spectator is 27 Years Old’. Because I was young, the events are vivid in my mind, but in

Spectator letters: Slavery continues to this day; and why Russia’s re-emergence as a world power is down to Obama’s apathy

Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in modern slavery in the UK. The CSJ’s work revealed exploitation taking place across the country, from young British men enslaved on traveller sites and forced into manual labour, to vulnerable children forced to live as slaves behind closed doors in one of Britain’s thousands of cannabis farms, to young British girls being trafficked into sexual

Spectator letters: Wind and bias, and the Scots at war

Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists. With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February). Replete (as one would expect from an organisation that previously went under the name British Wind Energy Association) with dismissive assertions and bogus statistics, Weber’s letter exemplifies the

Spectator letters: Fears for Scotland, and John Cornwell answers Melanie McDonagh

Save our Scotland Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to praise Lord Lang’s speech in the Lords on Scottish independence 9 (‘The End of Britain’, 8 February) and there were other notable contributions, especially from Lord Kerr, on the European dimension, and Lord Robertson, the former secretary-general of Nato. But is anyone listening? The debate got virtually no coverage in the Scottish editions — and I suspect even less in the English ones. Meanwhile the SNP publicity machine rolls on here and is now promising an annual ‘Indy bonus’ of £600 for every man, woman and child in Scotland, exceeding the £500 threshold at which (as Alex Massie pointed out in

Spectator letters: Aid, Arabs and how to spot a gentleman

The battle over aid Sir: Why Nations Fail, the book rightly lauded in The Spectator (‘Why aid fails’, 25 January), is one of the inspirations for many of the changes this government has made in international development policy. Those changes can best be described as driving value for money through the system, tackling conflict and instability, and building prosperity. Bringing together defence, diplomacy and development — not least through the mechanism of the National Security Council — has made a significant difference to the success of British development policy. Buried in the article is the sentence: ‘We do not argue for its [the aid budget’s] reduction.’ Our development policy is

Letters: Charles Saatchi’s challenge to Taki, and the battle over Benefits Street

On Benefits Street Sir: Fraser Nelson asserts that people in charities do not want to talk about what life is like on poverty (‘Britain’s dirty secret’, 18 January). To those of us who have experienced poverty or supported others stuck in it, there is no secret. We didn’t need a sensationalist pseudo-documentary to know that life with no money is grinding, miserable and soul-destroying. However, few answers to the problems of the poor are offered by low-paid workforces combined with flawed markets deciding the value of essential goods and services. The real means to help people out of this poverty trap would be to reduce rents, utilities and childcare costs

Charles Saatchi’s letter to Taki – I’m a cage fighter. Still want to insult me?

We’re putting the new Spectator to press this morning, and we have an interesting reader’s letter from Charles Saatchi. It’s addressed to Taki, as opposed to the editor, and takes issue with his disobliging references last week. He has this to say: ‘Dear Ms Taki [sic], Although the Spectator is a lovely read, I always skip your column, I’m afraid. I am simply not interested in your social life.  I know that you delight in telling readers that your friends of Prussian nobility find you hilariously entertaining company at their swanky Europoncy parties. But it was very hapless of you to spring to Nigella’s defence last week, as she always found you toe-curlingly vile, and

High life | 22 January 2011

Gstaad Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilisation, I am not at all surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilised. How apt that the arch crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights — especially for women — instead of embarrassing my little community of Saanen and landing here in good old Helvetia. Mind you, Saanen airport can only take very small jets, something a crook like Ben Ali Baba would never deign to escape in. But it’s nice that crooks and dictators help each

Ryan Gosling couldn’t play Taki better than Taki

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial backing for a film inspired by Last Tango in Paris. They schmooze. They lunch. They cajole. They beg. And in the process meet, among others, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ryan Gosling as well as the billionaire shipping heir and journalist Taki, who writes the High life column in this magazine, and

Another dodgy deal with Gaddafi

No, not Tony Blair in a big tent in the desert, but our man Taki in the Big Apple. In tomorrow’s Spectator, Taki writes, with characteristic tact, on the Middle East. Mr Steerpike particularly liked this snippet: ‘My friend Saif Gaddafi… was ‘detained’ while fleeing [Libya] and is held by some nice guys south of Tripoli. I call him my friend because we were introduced in New York four years ago and I mistook him for a coke dealer and politely asked if he had anything good.’  Apparently, he did not. The poor little Greek boy claims that Saif’s gear was ‘lousy’. Subscribers will enjoy this and more tomorrow. Non-subscribers

Being blind for 48 hours concentrates the mind

New York Life is definitely beautiful, as long as one can see, that is, which for two miserable days last week I couldn’t. Having had a glaucoma operation two months ago, I needed to use drops for a while but didn’t pay attention — too many girls in their summer dresses, and things like that — and the next thing a pain started in one eye. I ignored it and went out and smoked and drank, and woke up the next day, opened my bleary eyes and felt nothing but extreme pain in both. I quickly shut them and the pain went away. I tried opening them again, and it

High life | 21 March 2013

He was a member of a charmed circle of Hellene and Philhellene intellectuals just before and after the second world war, experiencing modern Greece and seeing it as a place rich in beauty and a stimulus to artistic creation. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose biography by Artemis Cooper I just put away almost in tears — like a magical night with the girl of one’s dreams, I didn’t want it to end, but end it did — was a second Byron in Greek eyes. I found the book unputdownable, as they say in Boise, Idaho, especially the rich descriptions of rambunctious jaunts to tavernas and places I had spent my youth

Taking Olympic history to Manchester

To Manchester for an address to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society for the Kilburn Lecture on ‘The Future of the Olympic Games’. The learned society is Britain’s second oldest, after the Royal Society, having been instituted in 1781. John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry, was one of its important past members. My NBF Peter Barnes (I had to explain to him that the acronym meant new best friend) picked me up at the airport and whisked me to Manchester Metropolitan University, and within 45 minutes I had changed into evening clothes and was facing a jolly gathering of bearded professors, smiling ladies and an all-round appreciative audience who

A small world away in Gstaad

In the latest Spectator Life, our very own Taki told us: ‘I learned long ago that the harder it is to arrive at one’s destination, the better the resort.’ Apparently ‘Gstaad is one of the few ultra-chic winter playgrounds where big jets cannot land.’ Always up for a challenge, I decided that Switzerland’s finest mountain spot needed checking out. Bloody Mary-spilling turbulence, various coach ‘malfunctions’ and sideways snow aside, our resident High Lifer was proven wrong; ten hours after leaving London I arrived outside, as Taki finely puts it: ‘The Palace — a large chocolate cake of a castle-hotel, favoured by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.’ I was not alone; 200 of

Taki competes for Lindsay Lohan’s affections

T’was not in another lifetime, but in New York last week that our very own Taki became rather smitten with Hollywood bad girl Lindsay Lohan. Writing in this week’s magazine, the old rogue recounts how he weathered Hurricane Sandy with the troubled actress, more famed for her binges than her fortitude: ‘I went to Brooklyn, to Norman Mailer’s house, now inhabited by his son Michael, got completely crocked and proceeded to the Boom Boom room, the best nightclub in the Bagel.  Once up there, I got a bit confused but chatted up a beautiful girl who seemed awfully friendly and nice. She asked me what I did and I told

High life | 12 February 2011

Philosophy has been known to be a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we happen to be professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality TV performers or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Spectator Quentin Letts offered a primer on how to pretend to be an Egypt expert, the poor little Greek boy, always ready to offer more to the sacrosanct Spectator readership than an Englishman, will now take you to the wilder reaches of philosophy as applied to real life. One of the reasons I always write about the past is ‘anamnesis,’ which is the exact opposite of amnesia, the latter a condition