Society

Saturday

Robin Oakley

Star quality

Keeping thin enough to star in your sixties comes hard, and the recently sadly deceased George Melly once inquired of Mick Jagger why the rock supremo’s face was so lined. ‘Laughter lines,’ replied the Rolling Stone. Keeping thin enough to star in your sixties comes hard, and the recently sadly deceased George Melly once inquired of Mick Jagger why the rock supremo’s face was so lined. ‘Laughter lines,’ replied the Rolling Stone. ‘Nothing’s that funny,’ replied Melly. But, facial creases or not, Mick Jagger still pulls in the millions because he has star quality. On the racing scene we have been yearning for a British sprinter with enough star quality

Edward Skidelsky

Faith in the future

John Gray’s latest work brings together many themes that will be familiar to fans of this scintillatingly gloomy intellect. It denounces neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism as forms of utopianism, destined like all previous forms to shipwreck upon the hard facts of human existence. It emphasises al-Qa’eda’s roots in Western political extremism rather than Islamic tradition. It envisages a world in which history, far from coming to an end, has resumed its usual bloody course against a background of dwindling oil resources and proliferating weaponry. And it insists that our only escape from this miserable farrago lies in the company of ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’. All this is vintage Gray. What is

Merryn Somerset-Webb

The price of sex in the City

Morgan Stanley has just hosted its first ‘early access’ event for young women: 75 girls from 15 top schools were taken on a tour of the trading floor (I bet there weren’t many traders off sick that day) Morgan Stanley has just hosted its first ‘early access’ event for young women: 75 girls from 15 top schools were taken on a tour of the trading floor (I bet there weren’t many traders off sick that day) and given ‘networking’ sessions in which they could talk to female staffers. Morgan Stanley says the event was part of its strategy to ‘bring women in’, and it is not alone in this worthy-sounding

Jules Evans

The KGB man who spied on the bond markets

It’s not every day a former KGB spy invites you to interview him. But Alexander Lebedev is not your typical KGB spy. He’s made billions in stock-market trading, he throws lavish parties in London attended by the likes of Tom Wolfe and J.K. Rowling, and he might just be the most serious critic of Kremlin policy still standing. Naturally I accept, and go to meet him in the Hyatt hotel in central Moscow. He’s sitting at the back of the bar, dressed more like a rock-band manager than a billionaire spook. Lebedev joined the KGB in the early 1980s and was sent to London in 1988, operating out of a

Paul Johnson

And another thing | 21 July 2007

The wet weather this summer has made me think about umbrellas, and the curious moral associations they attract. It is not so in the Orient, where they were invented (in China) sometime early in the first millennium bc. There they were designed to protect exalted persons against the sun. They were carried by attendants in state processions and were associated with power, privilege and class. We would call them parasols. The plebs were not allowed to possess or use them and often they were carefully graded, in size and elaboration, in accordance with the dignity of the owner. There are occasional hints of similar status-parasols in the West. Thus Louis

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another voice

A friend twisted his knee badly playing football last week. In considerable pain next morning and able to bend the knee only with difficulty he contemplated going to an Accident and Emergency unit at a London hospital. The alternative was to assume his injury was what he took it to be — a twisted knee, no more — and that there was no point in queuing for many hours only to be told to bandage it up, take a painkiller and anti-inflammatory tablets, borrow a pair of crutches and try to rest the knee as much as possible. Such things he could organise without specialist advice. But he opted to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Wakefield is probably wrong about MMR, but I am glad he has taken his stand

Dr Andrew Wakefield, if he is still a doctor by the time you read this, seems to be a baddun. A disciplinary panel heard that when children arrived at his house for a birthday party he grabbed a syringe and extracted blood from each one of them, giving the kids five pounds in exchange. Some fainted or vomited following this unexpected procedure, just before the cake was cut. So, already we have a vampire trope to be going on with. Also, he now works at a clinic in West Texas, the last worldly refuge of all manner of scoundrels. As he arrived at the General Medical Council hearing which was

Sarah Churchwell

Sex and the City has nothing on screwball comedy

You can learn a great deal about a culture from its fantasies. If Sex and the City is anything to go by, ours are pretty impoverished. The first film version of the HBO series is going into production and will be released next year, guaranteed to offer its trademark view that femininity today is defined by shoes, shopping and sex. I like all three as much as the next girl — unless the next girl is a character on Sex and the City — but my fantasies are rather more ambitious. They were formed years ago by a passionate devotion to the peerless romantic comedies of the 1930s, known as screwballs.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 21 July 2007

Public affairs vex no man, said Doctor Johnson, and I know what he meant. He, however, did not live as we do in an age of information in which, without retiring entirely to bed, it is next to impossible to dodge the headlines altogether. Besides, there’s something extraordinarily tonic in vexation: it is to my muse what Galvani’s electrical current was to frogs’ legs. Is there anyone so dull of soul that he does not enjoy a little light indignation now and then? It would not be right — it would be advertising, in fact — to mention by name in which magnate’s publication I read a story recently about

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A resignation at CCHQ

Ben Brogan reports that George Bridges, David Cameron’s former campaign manager, has quit, It is a loss, he’s a great guy and had a hell of a tough job. Being in charge of campaigning for Scotland and the north is like being made head of the Saudi Arabian division of Guinness. I gather his departure was not to do with a clash with Andy Coulson, and that he had been growing steadily disgruntled with the Cameroon operation for some time. So when Coulson was appointed, Bridges didn’t even know (as Francis Elliot tells us). A rather puzzling move: Cameron needs all the talent he can get right now.

The Spectator

Why Cheney is a law unto himself

What makes Dick Cheney so unusual a Vice President is that he knows this is his last gig. He really couldn’t give two hoots who he ticks off because after this it is time for the carpet slippers. When Bush picked Cheney in 2000, the general view was that this was a good thing as it would mean that Cheney could give Bush advice without worrying about what the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire would make of it. It also meant that he didn’t need Bush’s help to win the Republican nomination, so he could give Bush frank advice unworried about the consequences of offending the president. But over

The Spectator

The fallout from ‘cash for honours’

My thoughts on today’s drama 1. Yates will be hopping mad if (as is believed) he recommended charges against Jonathan Powell and others. He may see this as the second time he’s been shafted by the establishment. 2. No criminality doesn’t mean no wrongdoing said Martin Bright, my counterpart at the New Statesman in a Week in Westminster episode we were both invited in for (broadcast tomorrow). Lord Hutton cleared the government of any wrongdoing. But the documents he released damned Messrs Blair and Campbell in the court of public opinion. 3. No one can now claim that Yates wasted time because we don’t know what he found. Yes, he took time. The

The Spectator

The ties that bind | 20 July 2007

In a piece keying off the Beckhams arrival in the States, Time magazine tries to explain what unites the English-speaking peoples and comes up with an interesting, distinctly non-Churchillian answer: Britain is now just about as open and classless a society as the U.S. (The Beckhams’ habits are far more typical of modern Britain than the boarding-school japes of that other ubiquitous Brit, Harry Potter.) So why bother to settle in the U.S.? For the same reason that investment bankers from New Jersey like London–because the two nations have so much in common. Britain and the U.S. are the most messy, undeferential, schlocky societies on earth, places that like making

Thursday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

When giving makes you feel good

Dr Salvatore LaSpada (what a lovely name) had a plaintive piece in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph about how little we Brits give to charity. America gives away 1.7 per cent of it’s GDP to good causes, he says, so what’s with our pitiful 0.7? Giving is great! says LaSpada encouragingly, “It’s the best fun you’ll ever have!”  Whoa there Dr S! But he’s right of course, giving does generally feel good, so there’s probably a decent reason why we don’t. And the reason I think is actually quite simple. It’s not that we’ve contracted our consciences out to the State, or that we’re intrinsically mean, but rather that Big Charity has

Wednesday

The Spectator

Getting the band back together

Today sees the launch of an intriguing new international group, The Elders. It is a collection of aging, diplomatic all-stars who will join forces to push issues up the international agenda. The cast is pretty stellar: Nelson Mandela and his wife, Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter,  Muhammad Yunus et al. The whole idea makes sense–even if the current crew do rather run the risk of group think–as at the same time that people are living longer, political leaders are getting younger. It would be foolish to let their expertise and knowledge go to waste once they’ve left office. At the very least, this new club will give our recently departed PM something to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Priorities?

This is quite incredible: there are more people in US military bands than in the entire US foreign service. Hat tip: My old colleagues at Foreign Policy