Society

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Another rotten culture, another political risk on the NHS

The allegations of a cover-up at Colchester General Hospital suggest something rotten in a culture, once again. The police have been called in by the Care Quality Commission to investigate claims that documents about patients’ care were falsified and that managers bullied staff into doing this so that cancer care at CGH could meet its targets. Bernard Jenkin, the local MP, placed great emphasis in his interview on Today on the problems with culture in the NHS, which Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is trying to resolve with a series of reforms to NHS leadership. But there will inevitably be a row about the role of targets in this scandal as

Tuesday

Monday

Sebastian Payne

The next Spectator Debate: Addiction is not a disease

Does addiction actually exist? It’s an issue we’ve examined before at The Spectator and I’m delighted to announce it will be the topic of our next debate. On the 21 November at the Royal Institution in London, we’ll be looking at whether addiction is really a disease or simply a form of behaviour we need to find a way of controlling. We’ve gathered an expert panel who will be tackling this question, all of whom have strong personal experiences to back up their positions. Arguing for the motion will be regular Spectator contributor, Daily Telegraph columnist and recovering alcoholic Damian Thompson. His book The Fix examines how addiction is taking over our lives.

Steerpike Steerpike

Sebastian Shakespeare leaves Londoner’s Diary

All change over at High Street Ken this afternoon with the departure of Sebastian Shakespeare, who had edited the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary for the better part of 20 years. Famed for his long-running feuds with Lord Archer, Ian McEwan and the Candy Brothers, Shakespeare once had manure dumped on his head as he sat in his soft-top BMW by a happy reader. Standard editor Sarah Sands thanked Shakespeare for serving the paper ‘brilliantly for many years’, and then announced the new line up: ‘I am delighted to announced that Joy Lodico is to become the new editor of Londoner’s Diary. Joy is a talented journalist of notable intelligence and wit

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Richard Dawkins is right: Osama bin Laden has made air travel insufferable

It’s not that often I feel a real bond with Richard Dawkins but no sooner did I read his diatribe about Osama bin Laden having won the global war on terror because he, Prof Dawkins, had had a jar of honey confiscated at the airport, than I realised that here was a kindred soul. The prof declared on Twitter over the weekend: Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 3, 2013   Ah yes, I’ve been there. Except the jar of forest honey – raw, lovely,

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Introducing the Coffee House Lunchtime Espresso email

For some time now, we at  Coffee House have been running an Evening Blend email which sums up the day’s goings-on in Westminster. It has proven so popular that we’re launching a lunchtime version today. Every day at 1pm, the Lunchtime Espresso briefing will bring you you up to date with what’s been happening in and around SW1. If you prefer the latest delivered to your inbox, then do sign up below. Like the Blend, the Espresso is free to sign up for and will run every day when Parliament is sitting. Tomorrow’s news, by lunchtime today. Sign up for the emails here.

Saturday

Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

The National Theatre – 50 years (and more) in The Spectator

Today the National Theatre hosts a gala performance, screened on BBC2 at 9pm, to celebrate fifty years since its launch as a company in 1963. You can view the full programme here – I’d wanted to be cynical about a Greatest Hits parade, but reading the cast list, it simply looks astounding. But it’s not the fiftieth birthday of Denys Lasdun’s building on the South Bank – that robotic monstrosity, suggestive of an early design for Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, if Bay’s anthropomorphic tanks could ever rear onto hind legs while made of concrete. When the building was finally complete in 1977, Auberon Waugh told The Spectator’s readers that the

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: compose a sporting clerihew

Spectator literary competition No. 2824 You are invited to submit a double clerihew about a well-known sporting figure, past or present. The rules governing a clerihew are well set out in its Wikipedia entry but here are some additional pointers from the poet James Michie, a master of the form, who regularly contributed clerihews to The Spectator: ‘Clerihews, in my view, must be concise (no elephantine last line), written in straightforward English without inversions; and they are all the better for having some connection, however tenuous, with the real life or character of their subject.’ Please email entries (up to four each) to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 November. Here are

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The next bitter battle over the NHS is looming

It’s been a while since we had a nice big fat NHS row, but those who enjoy watching Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt fight over the ‘party of the NHS’ crown can rest assured that there’s a really bitter one coming up this autumn. NHS England has spent the past few months consulting on a change to the way clinical commissioning groups are funded that could end the current arrangement where more money per capita is spent on patients in deprived areas. The formula currently being considered would make the number of elderly people in an area a more important factor in the size of the grant that each CCG

Charles Moore Charles Moore

In life, Jimmy Savile was excused everything. In death, he is indiscriminately condemned

Jimmy Savile and I were both born on 31 October, though separated by 30 years. Sir James would be 87 this week. While he lived, I must admit, this fact did not give me much fellow feeling with the famous disc jockey, knight and member of the Athenaeum (proposed for membership by Cardinal Hume); but since he has died, I have been distressed that absolutely no one will speak in his defence. What bothers me is the sense that no one knows fully what he did, and few have tried seriously to establish the facts. Operation Yewtree, conducted by the police and the NSPCC, would barely admit that it had not actually

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 31 October 2013

Not fair on cops Sir: Nick Cohen (‘PCs gone mad’, 26 October) claims that the police are deliberately attacking the press and fundamental liberties because, in light of the overall reduction in crime, they are now underemployed and ‘many are surplus to requirements’. This is an inventive conspiracy theory by any standards, but lacking any link to plausibility. In 2006, as the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, I called a halt to the first phone-hacking investigation because we had other priorities such as the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks, and stopping the killing of several thousand people with liquid bombs on aircraft over the Atlantic. We really did have better things to

Peter Jones

Grayson Perry thinks democracy has bad taste. Is that why he sells luxury goods to the rich? 

‘Democracy has bad taste’, declared potter Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures on the BBC about art. Tell that to the inventors of democracy. Ancient Greeks would have been appalled at the reverence accorded the views of potters, artists, chefs and other riff-raff about their work, let alone anything else. The satirist Lucian says of the would-be sculptor: ‘You will be nothing but a workman, doing hard physical labour and investing the entire hope of your livelihood in it. You will be obscure, earning a meagre and ignoble wage, a man of low esteem… a workman and one of the common mob… Even if you should emerge a Pheidias or

Raymond Keene

Tendonitis

Magnus Carlsen has risen to achieve the highest ever chess rating. He ascended to 2872 on the rankings, which compares with 2851 for Kasparov, 2785 for Bobby Fischer and 2817 for Viswanathan Anand, the reigning champion. Carlsen commences his multi-million-dollar challenge for the world chess title against Anand in Chennai on 9 November. Carlsen is the firm favourite, with the betting odds clearly in his favour — he is being offered at 1/3 with Anand at 2/1. But for all the impressive statistics, he does have one Achilles heel, namely a certain vulnerability when facing White’s most aggressive first move, 1 e4. On occasion he has even resorted to contortions

The Spectator

Which NHS staff have enjoyed the biggest salary increases? 

What can they do? Saudi women took to the wheel in defiance of laws preventing them from driving. Some recent freedoms Saudi women have gained: — From this year they have been allowed to ride bicycles, although only around parks and recreation facilities and when accompanied by their official male guardian. — From this year sports have been introduced to girls’ schools for the first time. — From 2015 they will be allowed to vote (and stand as candidates) in municipal elections for the first time. — Laws requiring women to ask their male guardian for permission to marry, get a job, open a bank account or have surgery were

Raymond Keene

No. 290

White to play. This position is a variation from Carlsen-Anand, Monaco 2011. White is a piece down here but has a powerful move which destroys the black position. Can you see it?  Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 5 November or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I shall be offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.   Last week’s solution 1 … Nh5 Last week’s winner Nick Cook, Castletown, Isle of Man

Toby Young Toby Young

Toby Young: Please, Boris, don’t allow a Waitrose in my neighbourhood

Five years ago I joined forces with some local worthies to object to the opening of a strip joint on Acton High Street. We weren’t successful, but the owner of the club decided to invite us all to the opening night. He claimed we’d got the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t a sleazy lap-dancing club — oh no — but a ‘burlesque’ club. What this meant in practice is that the dancers had glued feathers to their micro bikinis. Apart from that it was business as usual. The upshot was that I spent a couple of hours standing in the middle of a strip club trying to make small talk

Taki

Taki: Ugly people build ugly things — look at New York and London

New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, unaffordable is relative. There is a delicate social ecology system pointing in the wrong direction in both metropolises, but — like a stock market gone haywire, as at times markets tend to do — when the correction comes there will be lots and lots of empty luxury lots the poor can move into. London is now essentially a tax haven, and New York

Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke’s date with a plank fancier

We’d being trying to meet for lunch for weeks, but always something had got in the way and either she or I had had to cancel. But at long last we’d managed it, and after two pleasant hours we emerged from the fish restaurant and made our way along the sea front towards the car park, still marvelling at the achievement. We hadn’t gone far when she noticed two planks leaning against a wall. They were six by twos, each about 2ft long. The sight of these planks seemed to cause her to lose the ballerina’s poise that she’d maintained throughout lunch. She became agitated and started hopping from foot

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite’s fraught relationship with printers

Blind panic grips me at the thought that all over Britain there are people sitting in cosy home offices operating gizmos with ease. I imagine I am the only person alive who can’t print out something from an email without getting in my car and driving to a small shop with no name on Streatham High Road, where a monosyllabic gentleman in Islamic dress will allow me to log on to one of his ancient reconditioned desktop computers and send the document I want to print to his printer, and who will then slap the few stray sheets down on the counter with a look of disdain and ask me

Alexander Chancellor

A dog mess or two is not too high a price to pay for an owner’s happiness

A month ago I was reporting complacently that peace and calm had returned to Stoke Park after a series of bestial attacks on my chickens and ducklings by foxes and birds of prey. No foxes had come to call since the spring, and seven of the eight Indian runner ducks hatched here in September had survived and grown big enough to deter avian predators. All seemed to be well in this little corner of south Northamptonshire. The hens seemed contented and were laying copiously in gratitude; the ducks were gliding dreamily on the pond. But my complacency was premature, for last weekend turmoil returned. This had nothing to do with