Society

Saturday

Tom Gallagher

The SNP is playing a deadly game with Islam

A civic reception will take place next month for the Glasgow airport workers and travellers whose courage on Saturday 30 June when bombers struck the terminal building may well have prevented horrific slaughter.John Smeaton, a 31-year-old baggage handler, became the emblematic figure for a day when God smiled on Glasgow. His comment that he was only doing his civic duty was indeed a boost for the battered concept of citizenship. He was affirming that, as well as rights, we also have duties that sometimes we are called upon to exercise in order to protect freedom and the rule of law. Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond will preside at the ceremony

Aidan Hartley

Raid rage

Northern Kenya I sat down to write this next to the skull of a Samburu cattle rustler who recently fell in battle. Nothing remains of him for us to bury today except his cranium, some healthy teeth and an anorak. Hyenas ate the rest. His last moments are recorded by the red ochre war paint smeared across smooth boulders, marking where he crawled on his belly. Here a posse of Pokot tribesmen surrounded him. Nearby rocks and trees are shattered by bullets. Incoming rounds blew the rustler’s head apart. The trail of war paint ends where the earth is stained in the ghostly red outline of a man. I have

Kate Chisholm

Rewriting history

Twenty minutes is reckoned by psychologists to be the most that any of us can concentrate without the mind wandering, the legs becoming restless, the eyes gently closing, the head dropping slightly towards the chest. It’s also just about the time needed to serve a hall-full of people gin-and-tonics and tubs of ice cream, and to roll on the piano for the second-half concerto, ‘Heeeeeave-hooooo!’ The Proms are back on Radio Three for the summer season, and, with them, the nightly interval talks, rebranded in recent years with their own running title, Twenty Minutes, as if in celebration of the happenstance that necessity is in this case matched by perfect

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

If not Dave, then who? The parlour game that might get serious

It is horrible to imagine. It would be a tragedy, for party and country. Even contemplating it seems lurid and, given recent events, deeply mischievous. It is certainly not something for loyal Tories to discuss in public. But, in their darker moments, few Conservative politicians will have not asked themselves the question in the past turbulent week: if David Cameron were to be run over by a bus tomorrow, who would lead the Conservative party?At Westminster, it is amazing how quickly today’s parlour game can become tomorrow’s leadership battle. For those who prepare properly (as the Blairites did in 1994) the rewards can be immense. In Mr Cameron’s case, what

Martin Jacomb

A very private enterprise

Private equity investment, backing venture capital and management buy-outs, has been around a long time. Private-equity takeovers of public companies listed on the stock exchange are a more recent development; and the number and size of such transactions has increased dramatically. Since some identified individuals have made enormous fortunes, inevitably there has been a bit of an outcry.Several forces have come together. Abundant liquidity has made banks ready to lend large amounts of money at interest rates which are still low by historical standards. Energetic entrepreneurs have spotted that they can exploit opportunities arising from the way the stock exchange values some companies. On top of this, tax changes have

Paul Johnson

Is the Loch Ness Monster heading for real celebrity?

At this time of year my thoughts often dwell on the Loch Ness Monster. Let me recapitulate what we know about this beast. It was first spotted on 22 July 1932. It was described as crossing the main road running north of Loch Ness and being about six feet long. Later it was seen in the water, with its head above the surface. It had a long neck, a snake-like head and flippers, and was at least 20 feet long. A famous but indistinct photo was taken corresponding to this description. The monster has never again been seen on land but is often sighted, always in midsummer, holding its prehistoric

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Shared opinion

There was a photograph in one of the Sunday papers, and it caught my eye. It showed a cheery bald man in some drowned Gloucestershire village traversing the floodwater on a penny-farthing. Hmm, I thought to myself, almost immediately, I bet that’s faked.I should be careful here. The kind of man who would ride baldly and cheerily through floodwater on a penny-farthing is the kind of man, I suspect, who would fire off a wronged and angry letter to a newspaper at the merest drop of a (doubtless jaunty, perhaps themed) hat. So, to be clear, I am suggesting no impropriety. I am merely suggesting that, perhaps, the situation was

The Spectator

Common sense submerged

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street… The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses through the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street’. The year was 1770, though it

Oliver Gilmour

The unromantic approach

John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable. His publishers, meanwhile, claim that this book ‘frees Schumann from 150 years of myth-making and unjustified psychological speculation’. Worthen hardly covers the music, so nor do I. In 1985, Peter Ostwald, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, published Schumann: Music and Madness. In this brilliant book, Ostwald concludes that Schumann exhibited the classic

Friday

The Spectator

Having a blast before blast off

There are few things that can be more boring that floating around in a tin can looking down at the earth. So I’m glad to hear that the astronauts have found a way, albeit a rather unoriginal one, to make the time fly by. (Insert your own joke about one small sip for man, one giant drinking session for mankind) Following on from the infamous Nasa love triangle, it does seem that these astronauts are rather more interesting than their notoriously anodyne press conferences suggest.

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shambo to the Slaughter? For shame!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the heart-tugging story of Shambo, the Heroic Hindu Bull in west Wales threatened with execution simply because he’s contracted TB. This is just the sort of story the British press, bless it, loves: peaceful Hindus, a placid animal, heartless bureaucrats, death, grim gallows humour…It’s the perfect silly season story. And indeed, a Google News search reveals brings up 761 stories concerning Shambo’s plight. According to a wire report, the latest exciting developments include: The plight of Shambo, a bull at the Skanda Vale monastery in Wales, was captured in real-time drama as the monastery launched an Internet campaign to save his life. A

Alex Massie Alex Massie

In which it’s a small, small world…

Heaps and heaps of stuff has been written on the historic/revolutionary/awesome CNN/YouTube debate on Monday night. But what are the odds that you’d see and old friend from college days in Ireland pop up to ask one of the questions? Slim, I’d say. Yet it happened. Lucia Brawley, with whom I appeared in productions of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Heiner Muller’s Hamlet Machine had her question selected by the CNN bods. Weird proof of the smallness of the world and all that, given that one ain’t seen her since those bright college days at Trinity College…

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Shock troops latest:

Much gnashing of teeth in conservative circles over a TNR piece written by a soldier in Iraq that catalogues various episodes of unsavoury behaviour in Iraq. The Weekly Standard has been especially indignant, laughably accusing TNR of failing to support the troops and suggesting that Pvt Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s piece was entirely fabricated. Other conservatives went so far as to suggest that Beauchamp was not even a soldier. Bill Kristol’s startlingly dishonest Weekly Standard editorial argued (to use the term loosely) that: “…what is revealing about this mistake is that the editors must have wanted to suspend their disbelief in tales of gross misconduct by American troops. How else could

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of missing the point completely

Good grief. Jonah Goldberg makes this argument: I think, even if broadly accurate, Frank made a mistake in running these pieces because they aren’t up to the standards of his magazine and they advance an argument I don’t think the New Republic should be making. Liberals don’t want to beat up on the troops anymore, they want to enlist them as victims.  The subtext of the pieces is that the war has made American soldiers evil or at least put holes in their souls. But, at this point at least (and I would argue always), I think it’s pretty clear that even if true, Beauchamp’s experience is not representative. But,

The Spectator

Is their money good here?

If you’re wondering what to make of the Chinese decision to invest in Barclays and the Qatari effort to buy Sainsburys do read this column that Martin Vander Weyer has done for us explaining why there is nothing sinister about such developments.

The Spectator

The case Obama should make against Hillary

It’s the electability, stupid should be one of the major themes of the Obama campaign if they want to play harball with Hillary. The Democrats are desperate to take back the White House and the polls suggest that he is far better placed to do that than her.  Just look at the numbers when you pit the two of them against the current Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani 50Clinton 44 Obama 52Giuliani 43

The Spectator

Obama takes a shot at Hillary

At the YouTube debate Barack Obama and Hillary got into a row about whether or not the US president should meet with some of the world’s least attractive leaders—Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad etc. Clinton went after Obama hard for promising to meet with all these guys during his first year in office. After the debate, she described his plan as “irresponsible and frankly naive.” Hillary, perhaps, overplayed her hand, as her criticisms drew from Obama his toughest attack on her to date: “I think what is irresponsible and naive is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out — and you know I think Senator

The Spectator

Has the Dianaisation of Britain changed the country for the better?

The new issue of the always excellent Prospect has a great debate between Andrew Marr and Joan Smith about whether the mass emotionalism that followed Diana’s death, and is now a regular part of our national life, is a good thing or not.  Andrew Marr argues that thanks to it: “We are a more relaxed and more emotionally healthy people than we used to be, and the “Diana moment,” for all its weirdness and excess, marked this change. It was a telling national catharsis, and the moment too when “holding it all in” was no longer seen as a virtue. I like what we have become. I like the footballers’

The Spectator

RIP Shambo

If you’re thinking about the sacred bullock that is about to be slaughtered on the orders of the Welsh Assembly, do read the incomparable Jeremy Clarke’s piece on Shambo.