The Spectator back issues from November 2007:
How to save the Union
Nov 03, 2007 ...When Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he liked to say that the problem with tax simplification was that you always end up complicating tax, too. The same is true of much constitutional reform: any attempt to remove an anomaly will often create another. New Labour's ...
DIARY
Nov 03, 2007; ...Can anyone lend me quid or two? For the first time in my life I'm borrowing money. Mortgaging property. Scrabbling around for cash so I can live my lavish lifestyle. In case any of the firms I have accounts with are getting worried, please don't. I have many, many, many millions of ...
Immigration policy can 'swamp' a party's message. But Cameron knows this
Nov 03, 2007; ...The government's failure to count up the number of foreign workers in this country rightly reinforces the public's fear that control of the borders has been lost, that an unstoppable tide of migrants is flowing into the country. It is in these circumstances that unsavoury politics ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Nov 03, 2007; ...This week, Policy Exchange, of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, 'The Hijacking of British Islam', of literature found on the premises of more than 100 mosques. In about a quarter of the mosques, often 'mainstream' ones, some blessed by a visit from the Prince of Wales, the ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Nov 03, 2007; ...MONDAY Dear me! How are we supposed to have a grown up argument about immigration when silly Lithuanian ambassadors can't see the funny side of a little joke about one-legged dance troupes? If you ask me, people with names that look like the last line of the optician's testing chart ...
Cameron means business on welfare:the Tories are the radicals again
Nov 03, 2007; ...There is something about impending doom which focuses the mind. That is why the Tory conference in Blackpool was perhaps the most effective brainstorming session in the party's history -- albeit inadvertently. David Cameron arrived facing an election. He left the northern ...
Pioneer of the studied casual
Nov 03, 2007; ...NORAH LINDSAY : THE LIFE AND ART OF GARDEN DESIGNER by Allyson Hayward Frances Lincoln, £35, pp. 287, ISBN 9781845132576 £28 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Norah Lindsay had wit, beauty and a bohemian spirit. Diana Cooper described her dressing 'mostly in tinsel and leopard skins ...
Joan of Arc with connections
Nov 03, 2007; ...THROUGH THE DARKNESS: A LIFE IN ZIMBABWE Zebra Press, £14.99, pp. 460, ISBN 9781770220027 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a book long anticipated, as much in dread of dire news from Zimbabwe as in expectation of brilliant reporting spiced by mordant wit. It does not ...
How others see us
Nov 03, 2007; ...British Vision : Observation and Iimagination in British Art 1750-19-50 Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, until 13 January 2008 This stunning, and constantly surprising, exhibition is the brainchild, or love child even, of the Flemish art historian Robert Hoozee, author of ...
Blinking marvellous
Nov 03, 2007; ...New Art Club: The Visible Men The Place: Robin Howard Theatre Andria Raunch: Weavers Greenwich Dance Agency According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club's dynamic duo, 'audience participation is s**t'. I could not agree more, especially since public ...
Ethical eating
Nov 03, 2007; ...Since I wrote in The Spectator a fortnight ago about the 'Say no to foie gras' campaign, my email has been flooded with protests. Animal-rights groups have claimed that I am wet, limp, cravenly judicious; I should have said that force-fed geese are a symbol of the evil Man everywhere does to ...
The Saudis are in the global saddle
Nov 03, 2007; ...The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to ...
'There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around'
Nov 03, 2007; ...Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades -- Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay's prospective father-inlaw in Citizen Smith, among many others -- but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his ...
I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist
Nov 03, 2007; ...Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire ...
I beg to differ...Briefs
Nov 03, 2007; ...The recent muliplex blockbuster 300, an historical epic concerning the Spartans fighting King Xerxes's Persian forces at the Battle of Thermopylae was remarkable in one chief respect: it subliminally projected the message that briefs are perfectly suitable attire for chaps. Indeed, the ...
I beg to differ...Boxers
Nov 03, 2007; ...About 20 years ago, while on a business trip to the Gulf, I unthinkingly proposed to a male colleague that we visit the souq together. I told him that I wanted to buy some silk with which to have some boxer shorts tailor-made, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ...
All Hezbollah lacks is a group on Facebook
Nov 03, 2007 ...Beirut A year after Israel's failed attempt to bomb Hezbollah into the Middle Ages, the 'war' of 2006 is now known as the 'Divine Victory' in these parts. With November's general election on hold, politics in Lebanon is as complicated as it ever has been. Druze, Christian groups, ...
The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage
Nov 03, 2007; ...I suppose there must be someone left in Britain who is surprised or shocked that a minor member of the royal family has alleged homosexual tendencies and is partial to the odd snort of cocaine. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, for example -- formerly the Queen's private secretary -- would at least ...
The nightmare of 'pre-crime' is already with us
Nov 03, 2007; ...Those who express concern about the onset of a dystopian surveillance society in Britain, in which the boundary between public and private is being erased, and in which the state malignly uses new methods of monitoring, usually invoke the spectre of Nineteen Eighty-Four. 'Orwellian' is the ...
Has the smoking ban reduced heart attacks?
Nov 03, 2007; ...It's four months since the smoking ban was imposed in England, and most smokers I've met in that time seem to be quietly adapting. A friend wants to buy Suck UK's unisex Smoking Mittens. If you have not come across them before, they are gloves that have a metal hole in them for your cigarette ...
In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness
Nov 03, 2007; ...St Petersburg The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women's clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don't see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don't see much of ...
Gregory and the inquest
Nov 03, 2007 ...Sir: We read once again an attack on Mohamed Al Fayed by Martyn Gregory over the inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed ('No "flash before the crash"', 27 October). As it happens, Mr Gregory has rarely appeared at the inquest, which goes a little way to explaining ...
Appeals for a ref
Nov 03, 2007 ...Sir: Sir Malcolm Rifkind ('A trap for Eurosceptic Tories', 27 October) declares that the Conservatives must not offer a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty if it has already been ratified before they come into office. He glosses over the fact that Mr Cameron has already done so and he ...
The propaganda problem
Nov 03, 2007 ...Sir: What Philip Stevens calls in his letter last week 'a vast amount of unimpeachable evidence' [about the alleged Armenian genocides] was actually produced as part of the British government's propaganda campaign during the first world war. And in being convinced 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' ...
Sex scandals overlooked
Nov 03, 2007 ...Sir: Paul Bew's generous and perceptive review of my Luck and the Irish (Books, 20 October) gently chides me for inaccurately stating that Vincent Twomey's book The End of Irish Catholicism? never mentions sexual scandals. But the single passage Professor Bew quotes from page 33 refers ...
Putin's game in European energy: divide and conquer
Nov 03, 2007; ...Vladimir Putin's efforts to divide the West may be on the back foot now that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have decided to stop being beastly to the Americans, but his most effective attack dog -- Gazprom -- is gleefully setting EU countries against each other. For governments ...
The City's fascination with farming
Nov 03, 2007; ...Everyone's an expert on agriculture these days. Talk to anyone in the City: when they're not boring you with how much copper wire it takes to build a satellite city outside Shanghai and what that means for mining shares, they're telling you about soy bean yields in Brazil and the rising price ...
Slums for the masses, fortunes for the few
Nov 03, 2007; ...Hu Bin is your archetypal Chinese real-estate entrepreneur. Built like a bull, with a huge, moon-shaped head, a permanent grin and tiny, nicotine-blackened teeth, he is also the embodiment of Beijing's sudden determination to use its huge capital reserves to buy the world. Despite an ...
The tale of Grand Central's ghost train - and why I'm right behind Chris Huhne
Nov 03, 2007; ...Rail delays are a daily fact of life, but Grand Central's ghost train has set new records. Due to depart from Sunderland last December, it has yet to pass York en route to King's Cross. I've read the timetable -- three services a day north and south. I've read the BBC travel website, which ...
Heaven scent
Nov 03, 2007; ...'Let's go to that house, for the linen looks white and smells of lavender, and I long to lie in a pair of sheets that smell so.' Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler On the seventh day, while God was resting, He picked up the sheaf of papers on which he had sketched out Creation, ...
Know your mind
Nov 03, 2007; ...Collecting art on a budget can be daunting. The galleries are snide, the auctions confusing, the whole apparatus seems to have been set up as a conspiracy against the decent, normal, interested punter. Well, it needn't be. Here are a few pointers to make sense of the process that separates you ...
Light is might
Nov 03, 2007; ...Do you remember that ad for the Citroën 2CV years ago? It was along the lines of: number of wheels -- four; number of steering wheels -- one; top speed -- the British speed limit; price -- something very low. You get the point. Given that you spend most of the time sitting in traffic, ...
Crowning glory
Nov 03, 2007; ...How much should a sensible woman pay for a hairdo? £20? £50? In most provincial salons one would be hard pushed to spend much more than £80 on even the most dramatic of hairstyles. But if you're a man, particularly a man with a glamorous blonde to run, I suggest you look away now; ...
Mega box
Nov 03, 2007; ...This year, the prize for the most lavish hamper goes to Fortnums for their £20,000 compilation of inessentials. Nothing in moderation here. 'For one year only, we've pushed the galleon out, ' reads the literature. 'This is no tuneless hymn to opulence, no gormless glut of gilded ...
Heel thyself
Nov 03, 2007; ...I am buying a pair of shoes. And this is something I have never done before. Not really. Not at a Savile Row tailors where the shop assistant asks you questions such as: 'Would you say you are conservative by nature or are you more of an extrovert who likes to be noticed?' Bit of both, ...
Thanks for the memories
Nov 03, 2007; ...Sir Roy Strong's eyes widened; his nostrils twitched; his pen hovered as though the horror of what confronted him had momentarily robbed him of the power to write. The offending object was the visitors book of Helmsley Arts Centre in North Yorkshire, where he had just given an eloquent ...
Guru to five presidents
Nov 03, 2007; ...THE AGE OF TURBULENCE by Alan Greenspan Allen Lane, £25, pp. 531, ISBN 9780713999822 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Seated next to her at dinner, I was prepared for a dull evening with a politician. 'Tell me, Chairman Greenspan, ' she asked, 'why is it that we in Britain cannot ...
The bad boy comes of age
Nov 03, 2007; ...POLANSKI by Christopher Sandworth Century, £18.99, pp. 480, ISBN 9781844138791 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 As the biopic comes back into fashion -- think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind -- somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material ....
Master of the masquerade
Nov 03, 2007; ...OLD MEN IN LOVE by Alasdair Gray Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 311, ISBN 9780747593539 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair ...
Deadened by shock
Nov 03, 2007; ...THE ALMOST MOON bt Alice Sebold Picador, £16.99, pp. 291, ISBN 9780330451321 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's first novel, sold 2 ½ million copies, so it's not surprising that Picador are calling the nation's attention to its successor with ...
The story behind the story
Nov 03, 2007; ...WHY NOT CATCH 21? FIFTY BOOK TITLES AND THEIR ORIGINS by Gary Dexter Frances Lincoln, £9.99, pp. 228, ISBN97807611227965 £7.90 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 And so we enter the Christmas books season, a phase in the publishing calendar so terrifying, so utterly without hope, that ...
People keep appearing
Nov 03, 2007; ...THE MAN IN THE PICTURE by Susan Hill Profile Books, £9.99, pp.160, ISBN 9781846680755 £7.90 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, ...
No mean feat
Nov 03, 2007; ...SHANGHAI TANGO : A MEMOIR by Jin Xing, with Catherine Texier Atlantic Books, £10.99, pp. 195, ISBN 9781843546320 £8.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Rows of black suits filled the China Airlines flight from Beijing to Paris in September 1984. The People's Liberation Army had ...
The artist as a middle-aged man
Nov 03, 2007; ...A LIFE OF PICASSO: VOLUME 3: THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS, 1917-1932 by John Richardson Cape, £30, pp. 555, ISBN9780224031219 £24 (plus £2.45p&p) 0870 429 6655 It's perhaps worth reminding ourselves at the outset, as we reach the third volume of John Richardson's stupendous biography of ...
The curse of riches
Nov 03, 2007; ...DIAMONDS, GOLD AND WAR by Martin Meredith Simon & Schuster, £25, pp. 569, ISBN 9780743286183 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy ....
Old wine in new skins
Nov 03, 2007; ...WHERE THREE ROADS MEET by Salley Vickers Canongate, £12.99, pp. 195, ISBN 9781841959863 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 GIRL MEETS BOY by Ali Smith Canongate, £12.99, pp. 164, ISBN 9781841958699 10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 BINU AND THE ...
Surprising literary ventures
Nov 03, 2007; ...THE FIXED PERIOD (1881) by Anthony Trollope The Fixed Period is the most un-Trollopian thing Trollope ever wrote. It is a firstperson futuristic narrative set in the state of Britannula, an island somewhere near New Zealand, in the year 1980. The President of Britannula, John ...
Glutton for punishment
Nov 03, 2007; ...Act one, scene one The curtain opens on the offices of The Spectator magazine, London SW1, where a woman stands, stage left, staring at a telephone. A clock on the wall says 7.15. Something about the woman's demeanour suggests it to be p. m. How long can she look at a phone? Just as ...
Glowing in the dark
Nov 03, 2007; ...Rrenaissance Siena: Art for a City National Gallery, until 13 January 2008 Sponsored by Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena The latest exhibition in the grim dungeon of the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing actually looks rather splendid. After a slow start, this tribute to later ...
New order
Nov 03, 2007; ...Siegfried; Gotterdammerung Royal Opera Siegfried is in some ways the most complex of the Ring dramas, showing us alternately, and then simultaneously, the old order recognising or/and resisting its need of replacement, and the new order beginning to emerge, but with no consciousness of ...
ARTS
Nov 03, 2007; ...Anyone who likes the work of Craigie Aitchison will appreciate the nuanced colour fields of Milton Avery (1885-1965), one of the subtlest of American modernists and as such one of the last to achieve widespread recognition. Influential on such younger artists as Newman, Gottlieb and Rothko, ...
Do it yourself
Nov 03, 2007; ...Vanity publishing is all the rage these days. Not long ago the idea of putting out something by yourself under an independent label, owned by yourself or one of your many dependents, was considered to be rather shoddy. There was really no replacement for winning a contract (important ...
Poor Cate
Nov 03, 2007; ...Elizabeth: The Golden Age 12 A, Nationwide Already, the word is out that Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn't up to much, and it isn't. It may even be a dog's dinner although, I should stress, not our dog's dinner. Our dog, Woofie, likes sushi, which he eats tidily with chopsticks ...
Pause for thought
Nov 03, 2007; ...With ever longer gaps between albums, it's becoming difficult to identify which rock stars are just having a quick lie-down, and which are actually missing in action. Retirement: now that is a bold career move. There must be a few old rockers currently eyeing the example of Joni Mitchell, who ...
Conversation pieces
Nov 03, 2007; ...There's an endless amount of 'chat' on radio and TV, but how much 'conversation'? A recent book by an American, Stephen Miller, reminds us of the difference between them, and how much we have lost by our obsession with argument, obfuscation, self-revelation, or should I say self-deception ....
Young Muslim Britain
Nov 03, 2007; ...Peter Kosminsky's Britz (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday) was heavily flagged beforehand as a drama that was going to annoy a lot of people. Naturally, I assumed that one of those people would be me. It came in two parts, the first telling the story of Sohail, a young Bradford Muslim ...
Crowded country
Nov 03, 2007; ...'Nobody would be happier than me if, in 50 years' time, the Prime Minister, the Archibishop of Canterbury, the Poet Laureate, the Lord Chief Justice, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford and the editor of the Times were all non-white.' So wrote Stephen Glover last week, just in time to ...
Never trust a lady
Nov 03, 2007; ...The estate agent was hopelessly late -- stuck in traffic, she said -- so I gave the couple the tour of our home instead. It was clear that they had no intention of buying: they lived nearby and were just being nosy. What's more, I caught them exchanging superior glances, first at the ...
Mid-life crisis
Nov 03, 2007; ...I had an epiphany at 5.30 a. m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed ...
Love thy neighbour
Nov 03, 2007; ...The curtain of my upstairs neighbours' flat has been hanging by a single hook for three weeks, and if something is not done about it soon I am going to call the police. There must be a part of Blair's legacy, a piece of legislation on a statute book in Westminster somewhere, which ...
SPECTATOR WINE CLUB
Nov 03, 2007; ...Icannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than ...
Good food down under
Nov 03, 2007; ...The question has, over the last few years, been persistent and the answer elusive. Bruno Loubet was a successful chef in London during the 1990s. He belonged to the period just before the celebrity of cooks such as Gordon Ramsay and Rick Stein, but came from the era which spawned men ...
Puzzling times
Nov 03, 2007; ...When I was a lad, in the tawdry, tatty 1970s, a jigsaw was a thing of thin cardboard that came in a big box and featured, as the picture, the Houses of Parliament (soot-blackened) against an unnaturally vivid blue sky, with violently red buses in the foreground. There were 500 pieces and if ...
Happy as Harry
Nov 03, 2007; ...With league fixtures into double figures, the autumn's general-excuseme overture has finished and the long winter slog is really underway. The eightsome reel at the top of the Premiership comprises natch the four usual suspects (Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea) and a fresh ...
The vision thing
Nov 10, 2007 ...Gordon Brown managed to keep a straight face last month when he claimed that he was abandoning plans for a snap election because he needed time to spell out his 'vision for change'. The rest of the country, it must be said, was laughing at this nonsense, knowing full well that it was polling ...