Society

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why Hain must go

Of all the reasons why Peter Hain should go, here’s my top one. Right now a quarter of British families are caught up in Labour’s hideously complicated means-tested benefits – tax credits, etc. If they “forget” to declare income, it’s called benefit fraud – an offence for which Hain’s department successfully prosecuted 28,800 people in 2006-07. Yet now that Hain himself has forgotten to declare income he has a get-out clause: declare late, and you are automatically off the hook. Not so for those being hounded for over-payment of tax credits.   Everyone has seen the DWP posters “no ifs, no buts” – which Guido brilliantly adapts for Labour special

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Friends reunited

On the last day of the year 22 of us turned up at the car park. We’d come for the ranger-led walk advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor Guide as an opportunity to watch the sun go down on 2007 from Hound Tor. Hound Tor is reputed to be the inspiration behind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous ghost story The Hound of the Baskervilles. The title has in turn inspired the owner of the burger van in the car park. He’s called it called The Hound of the Basket Meals. Feeling a bit peckish, I joined the queue. The chap in front of me was holding a matching pair of surprised-looking

Taki

Name fame

Although I have to declare an interest, by far the most authentic comments about the Bhutto murder were those made by Jemima Khan in the Sunday Telegraph. As Jemima pointed out, Benazir never repealed the Hudood Ordinances, Pakistan’s ‘heinous’ laws that make no distinction between rape and adultery, failed to pass a single major law and ‘kowtowed’ to the mullahs and backed the Taliban, which illustrates to me the bankruptcy of America’s foreign policy. All style, no substance. If Benazir represented democracy I am Oprah Winfrey. And I further agree with Jemima when she writes that, if there has to be a Bhutto as successor to Benazir, it should be

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 January 2008

Through all the apparent banality of campaign speeches, politicians do, in fact, convey a message about themselves. There is a vital distinction between candidates who, mentally, face outwards and those who face inwards. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair all faced outwards: they instinctively wanted to communicate with voters, just as good actors or good preachers wish to reach their audiences. Although she may well win the Democratic nomination because of her standing with the party establishment, Hillary Clinton is a politician who faces inwards. She says she ‘found her voice’ in New Hampshire, but what does her voice say? One of her stated reasons why she should

Diana Rigg

Diary – 12 January 2008

Years ago my divorce liberated me from many things, not least of which was a wife’s burden of organising the traditional family Christmas. Inevitably, come Boxing Day, I was whey-faced with fatigue and singularly lacking in ‘ho-ho-ho’. Subsequent Christmases have been spent in far-flung places and this year I have just returned from visiting Tamil Nadu and its myriad temples. Getting to grips with Indian gods is not easy. There are over 3,000 of them. But on this visit I came across a particularly fascinating one — Ardhanareshwara. It seems the god Siva in one of his earliest incarnations declared man and woman were equal, so Ardhanareshwara was given the

Toby Young Toby Young

My hopes to become a high-status cultural Omnivore melt with ‘The Snowman’

More bad news for the ‘Hons’. According to a sociological survey funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, class doesn’t necessarily guarantee status. On the contrary, the two are barely even connected in today’s Britain. So the fact that my father was ennobled for, among other things, founding the Economic and Social Research Council has no bearing on my status. An unemployed ‘Hon’, such as myself, may possess class, but when it comes to my ranking in society I score lower than a ‘works manager’ (whatever that is). Much though I’d like to dismiss this, I suspect it is true. I have long wondered why my tweed jacket and

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 12 January 2008

Q. My brother-in-law, of whom my wife and I are very fond, is an admirable man and rightly proud of the ordinary background from which he has risen to a leading position in his company. However his rise (without trace, as they say) means that all he knows about food and wine is what he has gleaned from expense-account meals and he has adopted many of the mannerisms of waiters for home use. For example, when opening wine he waves the cork under his nose, pours some wine into the glass, sips it adopting a judicious expression and then proceeds to pour it for others. Recently, after he had gone

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 January 2008

An advertisement for birdfood said: ‘To differentiate between the imported niger oilseed, used to feed wild birds, and thistle — as well as to eliminate any possibility of offensively mispronouncing the word “niger” — the Wild Bird Feeding Industry trademarked the name Nyjer in 1998.’ They might have done, if an industry can, but I’ve seen a packet of seed bearing the name of the British Trust for Ornithology, on sale at a garden centre, labelled ‘Nyger’ in big letters, which is neither one thing nor the other. There is also a standard blurb that birdseed merchants copy on to their websites, both in Britain and America. The section on

The Spectator

Letters | 12 January 2008

Forgotten Army Syndrome Sir: Boris Johnson is to be praised for his intention to honour the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (‘How, as mayor, I would help our brave troops’, 15–29 December). Unfortunately, I believe he is up against Forgotten Army Syndrome. Burma, during the second world war, was an undeserved victim of this syndrome as well. It took 50 years before at last a fitting tribute was paid to the 14th Army Burma Veterans: at the VJ Day parade at Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park on Saturday 19 August 1995. It was tremendous and moving for the veterans, most of whom were by then in their seventies and

Diana Rigg

Diary – 12 January 2008 | 12 January 2008

Years ago my divorce liberated me from many things, not least of which was a wife’s burden of organising the traditional family Christmas. Years ago my divorce liberated me from many things, not least of which was a wife’s burden of organising the traditional family Christmas. Inevitably, come Boxing Day, I was whey-faced with fatigue and singularly lacking in ‘ho-ho-ho’. Subsequent Christmases have been spent in far-flung places and this year I have just returned from visiting Tamil Nadu and its myriad temples. Getting to grips with Indian gods is not easy. There are over 3,000 of them. But on this visit I came across a particularly fascinating one —

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 12 January 2008

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Rock On

Since I’m not a Northern rock shareholder, I wasn’t at yesterday’s EGM in Newcastle’s Metro Radio Arena – so I’m grateful to Graeme Wearden on the Guardian’s NewsBlog for a blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. A lot of ‘north-east (hurt?) pride’ was on display, he writes, as well as some natty shirting worn by the two hedge fund managers who have made themselves central to the story, Philip Richards of RAB Capital and Jon Wood of SRM. In the chair, trying to get the audience on his side with a joke about having the second toughest job in Newcastle (the worst, of course, being manager of the troubled football club),

Michael Tanner

Arts Extra: Going Nowhere

La Cenerentola, Royal Opera House; Cecilia Bartoli, Barbican The Royal Opera may have hoped to raise spirits, or to contribute to their liveliness, by reviving Rossini’s La Cenerentola in the Leiser-Caurier production of 2000, but it seems to have run out of steam — the production, I mean, and Christian Fenouillat’s sets. Something has gone wrong when a large car is driven on to the stage at Covent Garden and no one laughs. Admittedly, it was towards the end of the huge Act I, when everyone was wilting: Rossini in rather diffuse comic mode is exhausting in an unusual way. Laughs had been rare all evening, however. And though it

The Spectator

Change you can believe in

In an interview with The Spectator last September, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, advanced the following paradoxical political principle: ‘What we have tried to do is make sure people understand that you need experience to bring about change.’ To translate: in order to usher in the new, it helps to be old — or at least to have been round the political block. The thrilling start to the US presidential primary season has revolved around the (often infuriatingly vague) notion of ‘change’, and the question of who is best placed to implement it. Which of the candidates, in practice, truly personifies the clean break with the Bush years that

Paul Johnson

What has sawing a lady in half to do with global warming?

At this time of year, exactly 70 years ago, I was taken to my first exhibition of professional conjuring. The magus called himself Dante — he was Danish-American and his real name was Harry Jansen. He had an amazing moustache and beard, wore dazzling evening dress and a red satin-lined cloak, and performed his tricks at lightning speed: his slogan was ‘15 sur- prises in 15 seconds’. However, the performance I would like to have seen most was staged by Charles Dickens on Boxing Day 1843 at a children’s party given by the actor Macready. Dickens had bought at Hamley’s a proper ‘apparatus’ which had belonged to the conjuror Doëbler.

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

It occurs to me that, with all this stress, Gordon may be having the time of his life

The assumption, of course, is that Gordon Brown isn’t having much fun. That is what lurks behind the question, every time. On Monday’s Today programme, when Ed Stourton asked him if he was enjoying being Prime Minister, we all knew the presenter was not being entirely honest. He didn’t really mean ‘Are you enjoying it?’ He actually meant ‘Are you hating it?’ This is what we all want to know. This, indeed, is what we all suspect. We think he’s hating it. We think he’s going nuts. We think he wants to stay in bed each morning, with the covers pulled up around his head, making a pudding-faced duvet version

Bryan Forbes

In less than a fortnight I turned down £2 million

Bryan Forbes is drawn into a cyberspace scam by an indignant ‘happily married’ woman who invites him to Madrid to arrange a princely payout It all began when an email greeted me one morning with ‘Dear Esteemed Winner, we are pleased to inform you of the result of the Fatelgordo International Promotions Program. Your email address was attached to the winning number 08 15 30 31 34 43 40 and you have therefore been approved for a lump-sum payout of £685,000.’ The shock of the amount almost started me smoking again. The message included the name and email address of the claims officer, a Mrs Helen Illic, at Teal Consulting

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 12 January 2008

The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else? I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seems, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error. A friend of mine recently attended a conference on

Tim Heald

Life after Wills: barely a whiff of smoke in the cosmopolitan gateway to the west

At the time of his death in 1972 my father worked for WD and HO Wills, the Bristol tobacco people. Wills were huge and rather enlightened employers and even now plenty of Bristolians remember the days when everyone either worked for the company or had a friend or relation employed there. Wills produced a cigarette called ‘The Bristol’ but were most famous for cheap Woodbines and Wills Whiffs — small cheroots sold in packets of five. For the first three quarters of the 20th century, the company seemed unassailable — and synonymous with its home city. I remember a huge new tobacco factory being built and despite early rumblings about

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the press wrote the Obama surge story so hard

The debate over why the polls in New Hampshire were so wrong is still raging on this side of the Atlantic. An agenda-setting op-ed by the top pollster Andy Kohut in the New York Times says that it is all about race, while others think that it is all to do with gender. To my mind, the most persuasive argument is that the polls underestimated Hillary’s support because she picked up the votes of those who were planning to back Democratic candidates who dropped out after Iowa. Like pretty much everyone else who was in New Hampshire, I’ve been thinking about why everyone (including yours truly) got it so very wrong. One