The Spectator back issues from December 2007:
Brown's fatal flaws
Dec 01, 2007 ...As prophecies go, it had none of the ritual majesty of the Sybil of Cumae's pronouncements, none of the blood-chilling qualities of Cassandra. But it has, in its own way, come to pass nonetheless. Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff to Tony Blair, once told our former editor that Gordon Brown's ...
DIARY
Dec 01, 2007; ...It has been a monarchical week -- despite the election of a republican in Australia. I don't just mean the Queen's wedding anniversary, Ugandan tour, and the unveiling of the BBC's famous TV series (of which more later). No, I'm thinking of the blossoming of the world's more ...
At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party
Dec 01, 2007; ...'Get me a Bishop. Get me a f--ing Bishop!' Peter Mandelson, then Labour's political strategist, yelled these words across the floor of Labour campaign headquarters at a rare moment of crisis before the 1997 general election. Inquiries were made, soundings taken in ecclesiastical and other ...
SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Dec 01, 2007; ...It is undeniably enjoyable to see Gordon Brown squirming about the £600,000 his party will have to pay back to David Abrahams, the man of many aliases. If Peter Watt, the resigning general secretary of the Labour party, really, as he claims, saw something devious about the practice of taking ...
Is that an iceberg ahead? Make mine a jereboam and put it on my credit card
Dec 01, 2007; ...First there was the news of passengers rescued from lifeboats in Antarctica as their cruise ship went down after hitting an iceberg. Then Tim Price, our guest Investment columnist this week, reminded me of ex-Citigroup chief Chuck Prince's observation about dancing as long as the music keeps ...
Christmas funny books (Part 2 of 2)
Dec 01, 2007; ...A pissometer? (Prince Philip, at the top of his voice, visiting a winery in New South Wales, being shown a piezometer, a device measuring water depth in soil, March 2000). Just occasionally Parris and Mason are unfair to politicians, pillorying them for imagined verbal bêtises ...
The call of the wild
Dec 01, 2007; ...SIBELIUS by Andrew Barnett Yale, £25, pp. 445, ISBN 9780300111590 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Sean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky ('with his stillborn affectations') or the artificial ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Dec 01, 2007; ...MONDAY Am worried and confused. Just back from Forward Planning Meeting and whole of Grid for next three months is choc-a-bloc with extremely scary stuff. Clampdowns on everything from malingering benefit claimants to selfish single mums. New catchphrases include: 'Prison Works', 'On Your ...
Blair may be about to convert, but will that make him a Catholic?
Dec 01, 2007; ...'My First Confession' would be a great title for Tony Blair's memoirs. At any rate, though the book may be years away, Tony Blair will soon confess his sins to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, and later (no one is sure, but the Vatican has heard it will be after Christmas) Mr Blair will be ...
Help! I'm a Marxist who defends capitalism
Dec 01, 2007; ...As one of the Marxists named in James Delingpole's recent Spectator article (3 November) on his alleged conversion to the commie cause, I really should be angrier about reckless, riskhungry, overambitious bankers. Yet I find myself in the curious position today of thinking capitalism isn't ...
'Money-culture is ruining Kiev'
Dec 01, 2007; ...Kiev Well, this was a fine one -- the story of my fellow Yank Robert Fletcher, who'd been making a living hiring himself out in Ukraine, where I live, as a 'millionaire mentor' -- that is, someone who could teach strivers from Sumy and Dniprodzerzhinsk how to get rich, for a reported ...
Too much security makes us all a lot less secure
Dec 01, 2007; ...Here is a little paradox. For 30 years during the Troubles you have been taking the Belfast to Stranraer ferry. No one asked you for identification: you just bought your ticket and off you went, even though it is quite possible that among your fellow passengers on one of those journeys ...
'We are at war with all Islam'
Dec 01, 2007; ...Last Tuesday at nightfall, as the servants of democracy fled SW1, a young Somali woman stood spotlit on a stage in Westminster. Behind her was the illuminated logo for the Centre for Social Cohesion: a white hand reaching down across England to help a brown one up; in front, an ...
The importance of being serious about France
Dec 01, 2007; ...There is a new French ambassador arriving in London this week. He is Maurice GourdaultMontagne, known as -- what else? -- MGM in Quai d'Orsay. It is fashionable to downplay the role of the ambassador in the modern world. Has not instant communication made the profession of diplomacy ...
How to waste £2.3 billion of public money
Dec 01, 2007; ...In these times of green awareness, waste management has become an increasingly fashionable issue for the public sector, always keen to find new excuses for bureaucratic intervention. The South East England Development Agency (Seeda), one of the many quangos created by Labour over the past ...
No one should be prohibited from questioning our past
Dec 01, 2007; ...Tarnaw, Poland (maybe) I'm hungry, stuck here with a tube of flavoured pork fat, a bottle of bison grass vodka and 400 cut-price English cigarettes. This is the sleeper train from Krakow to Bucharest, via Budapest, at the bad, cold hour of midnight -- and there's no dining car. Just ...
New world order
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: Poor old Irwin Stelzer is stuck in an Atlantico-centric world in which the main debate is still about choosing between Europe and America and deciding which side of the Atlantic Ocean is top dog ('The Special Relationship is between Washington and Brussels', 24 November). When ...
Hood's lack of style
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: Lord Patten ('Westminster politics has nothing on Oxford's battles', 24 November) shows less than his usual savvy in dealing with the vice-chancellor's departure. It was not only the reforms proposed by Dr Hood that so many Oxonians objected to, but also the manner he went about trying to ...
Razing the issue
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: Quinlan Terry (Letters, 24 November) answers Simon Thurley's plea for better architecture by pointing out, with reason, that steel and glass buildings designed to last only 40 years are less environmentally congenial than enduring brick and stone. He might have challenged Thurley on the ...
Poetry packs a punch
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: Vernon Scannell, who figured in Jeremy Clarke's column last week (Low Life, 24 November), was quite a legendary figure in Milton Keynes, where he was poet-in-residence some 50 years ago. His mild, scholarly demeanour belied the fact that he had been a ferocious professional boxer ....
Devices and desires
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: Page 13 of your 24 November issue carries an advertisement for a BlackBerry with the GPS device showing a location between St James's and Piccadilly ....
Can it
Dec 01, 2007 ...Sir: I would just add one thing to Bryan Forbes's excellent article regarding the dire state of British television ('I have earned the right to shout at my television', 17 November), and that is the insult to one's intelligence that is 'canned laughter'. I know what I find funny: I don't need ...
Freedom of speech is a foggy issue with no absolutes - and that's sort of the point
Dec 01, 2007; ...It is a weird business when stories combine, even if they only do so in the mind of the commentator. On our screens, Tony Blair is about to fret about Jesus, making him look like a loony again. In Oxford, David Irving and Nick Griffin are cast, preposterously, as defenders of free ...
The Liberal Democrats' sound money man
Dec 01, 2007; ...I met Vincent Cable recently at a dinner party with a mixture of City and business bigwigs: a few FTSE-100 bosses, a smattering of hedge-fund tycoons, the odd private-equity baron. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman was the only politician at the table and the debate inevitably focused on ...
The end of the world is nigh
Dec 01, 2007; ...Before September, British portfolio managers had only ever seen a run on a bank on the cinema screen. It's a Wonderful Life shows how the Bailey Building and Loan is saved by the prayers of the local community. The collapse of Northern Rock suggests that modern finance doesn't quite ...
Free at last: the next web revolution
Dec 01, 2007; ...Amid the shockwaves caused by Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, one significant policy shift attracted relatively little attention. When the ink finally dries on the deal, one of Murdoch's first moves will be to remove the 'pay wall' from the ...
If the cup fits
Dec 01, 2007; ...My inability to remember which Seventies sitcom character referred to somebody's knickers as 'harvest festivals' (because 'all is safely gathered in') has long troubled me, but the matter is now resolved. Ronnie Barker's Fletch had seemed the most likely candidate, or possibly Sid ...
'Tis the season to be lazy
Dec 01, 2007; ...For some, the countdown to Christmas starts on Boxing Day. These people carefully fold up wrapping paper to re-use, they freeze leftover brandy butter, they buy their baubles and decorations at half price in January sales, they make the plum pudding in May, and they follow 48-point ...
Carry it off
Dec 01, 2007; ...The most beautiful piece of luggage I have ever owned remains my least favourite. The navyblue school trunk with its shiny golden clasps and my name painted on the top in white letters stayed in the attic out of sight during the holidays. But the time inevitably came when it was hauled down, ...
Time os off the essence
Dec 01, 2007; ...Being time-rich can make you cash-poor. That's something to remember when shopping for a wristwatch. Fashionable watches can be very expensive indeed. But you can also pick up a beautifully engineered, extremely handsome specimen for well under £2,000. Every stylish man ought ...
Mill! thou shouldst be living at this hour
Dec 01, 2007; ...JOHN STUART MILL: VICTORIAN FIREBRAND by Richard Reeves Atlantic Books, £30, pp. 616 ISBN 9781843546436 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Britain has had few public intellectuals. The one undeniable example was John Stuart Mill who lived from 1806 to 1873 and whose utterances ...
Christmas funny books (Part 1 of 2)
Dec 01, 2007; ...Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as 'fragrant', ...
Ludbrooke: His Multiculturalism
Dec 01, 2007; ...Shows in the delicate way he rests his head -- Despite every fear that she will remove it -- On the shoulder of Miss Chiang to watch Duck Soup, The video, from his reproduction sofa. The alarm clock rings beside the bed of the man Made President with the aid of American money In the ...
A criminal waste
Dec 01, 2007; ...THE ROAD TO SOUTHEND PIER: by Ross Clark Harriman House, £9.99, pp. 168, ISBN 9781905641444 £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 With an estimated one surveillance camera in Britain for every 14 Britons, reality television has never been more invasive. The reason Big Brother has ...
A long way from Rome
Dec 01, 2007; ...CAESAR: A LIFE IN WESTERN CULTURE by Marie Wyke Granta, £18.99, pp. 278, ISBN 9781862076624 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Although Latin, Greek and the ancient world in general are no longer central to modern education, Julius Caesar still remains a household name. During ...
His own short story
Dec 01, 2007; ...THE UNBEARABLE SAKI: THE WORK OF H.M. MUNRO by Sandie Byrne OUP, £19.99, pp. 314, ISBN9780199226054 £15.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is an academic monograph on Saki's literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes ...
A false dawn
Dec 01, 2007; ...BEST FOR BRITAIN? THE POLITICS AND LEGACY OF GORDON BROWN by Simon Lee One World, £16.99, pp. 304, ISBN 9781851685370 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth ...
The parent trap
Dec 01, 2007; ...SLAM by Nick Hornby Puffin, £12.99, pp. 304, ISBN 9780141382975 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read ...
Ski skool is best
Dec 01, 2007; ...One of the biggest flashpoints in parent-offspring relationships comes when the child reaches 17 and the provisional driving licence arrives. Some parents think that they can teach their children to drive and the results are generally disastrous for both parties. Tuition is best left ...
Sex with no appeal
Dec 01, 2007; ...Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now Barbican Art Gallery, until 27 January 2008 WalterSickert: The Camden Town Nudes Courtauld Institute of Art, until 20 January 2008 What has come to be known as the Sex Show at the Barbican has received mixed reports ....
Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider
Dec 01, 2007; ...EDWARD BURRA: THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY EYE by Jane Stevenson Cape, £30, pp. 496, ISBN 9780224078757 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, ...
Disgusted of Donegal
Dec 01, 2007; ...ASKING FOR TROUBLE by Patricia Craig Blackstaff, £8.99, pp. 230, ISBN 9780856408083 £7.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela's Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but ...
The loss of enchantment
Dec 01, 2007; ...THE MAGIC CIRCLE: PERFORMING MAGIC THROUGH THE AGES by Michael Bailey Tempus, £18.99, pp. 288, ISBN 9780752442471 £15.19 (plus 2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes ...
A very English domesticity
Dec 01, 2007; ...COLLECTED POEMS by Anthony Thwaite Enitharmon, £25, pp. 445, ISBN 9781904634393 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of ...
Surprising literary ventures
Dec 01, 2007; ...A REPORT ON THE VIOLENT MALE (199) by A. E. van Vogt A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt's novels are The Voyage of the Space ...
Blast from the past
Dec 01, 2007; ...Percy Wyndham Lewis 1882-1957 Design Centre, Rugby School, until 8 December In the 1915 Vorticist Manifesto, published in the movement's magazine Blast, Wyndham Lewis (he dropped Percy) wrote: 3. Luxury, sport, the famous English 'Humour', the thrilling ascendancy and ...
Last farewells
Dec 01, 2007; ...Just outside Florence's city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England. Well, it's really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the ...
Compare and contrast
Dec 01, 2007; ...'We have introduced an artificial and theatrical music into the church, a bawling and agitation of various voices . . . Amorous and lascivious melodies are heard such as elsewhere accompany only the dances of courtesans and clowns.' 'The singers wanted to overshout each other, they were ...
Present thoughts
Dec 01, 2007; ...'Tis the season to be cheerful, especially if you like shopping. Which, obviously, as a heterosexual white middle-class male in his forties with no money, I don't much, unless it's for books or CDs. But at this time of year those of us of a non-shopping persuasion must bury our prejudices, ...
Shine on you crazy diamond
Dec 01, 2007; ...The ambulance creeps to a halt outside the Brixton Academy at 9.15 on the evening of Amy Winehouse's second London gig on Friday and is greeted with a ripple of excitement by the crowd. 'She's arrived' is the whisper through the queue. And whether by this means or another, Amy does ...
Traditional fare
Dec 01, 2007; ...This Christmas 12A, Nationwide As the holiday season is all but upon us, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on Christmas movies of the past and the standards that have been set. There was one called Jingle All the Way that I liked very much indeed. It was about a man of foreign ...
Good humour, bad taste
Dec 01, 2007; ...L'Elisir d'amore Royal Opera Das Wunder der Heliane Festival Hall After not seeing Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera ...
Radical prophet
Dec 01, 2007; ...It's not what you think, we were warned by Jenny Uglow, the far-seeing biographer of Hogarth and Elizabeth Gaskell. Those 'dark Satanic mills' and 'mountains green' of William Blake's epic poem were never intended as an anthem in praise of England's democratic virtues. Blake was neither a ...
Royal treatment
Dec 01, 2007; ...On the very night that Monarch: The Royal Family at Work (BBC1, Monday) was being broadcast whom should I bump into at the Pen International quiz at the Café Royal in the queue for the coats but Stephen Lambert. Lambert, you may remember, was the head of the independent production ...
Champion secrets
Dec 01, 2007; ...New York I'm not sure which of the two sights was funnier: hundreds of Brit bargainhunters huffing and puffing and laden with enormous shopping bags while taking advantage of the shot-to-hell dollar, or the English football heroes huffing and puffing and being sliced up by the national ...
Glum night out
Dec 01, 2007; ...Ten minutes into Les Misérables my boyfriend turned to me and whispered, 'Is it just me or is this Charlie Rap?' As the thunderous clatter of a large prop being unceremoniously dropped backstage reverberated around the mournfully tatty Queen's Theatre, I concurred that the legendary musical was ...
Talking turkey
Dec 01, 2007; ...With the holidays approaching, foodies are grumbling again about turkey. The domesticated bird is overweight, too fat to fly; in cooking, turkeys easily dry out; their meat, especially the breast, is tasteless. Why bother? So I thought many years ago, when I served instead at Christmas ...
You take Manhattan
Dec 01, 2007; ...There's a famous New Yorker magazine cover from the 1970s called 'View of the World From 9th Avenue'. Manhattan is in focus and everything to the west of the Hudson River is just an irrelevant cartoon blur, tiny, receding away into the distance. Thirty years on and the message ...
SPECTATOR WINE CLUB
Dec 01, 2007; ...This is our positively final offer for Christmas, and it's terrific. Thanks to Lay & Wheeler we have half a dozen French classics, all of which would be very welcome on the Yuletide dinner table, or at a memorable party. What's more, every one is generously discounted. They are not ...
If every day were Christmas
Dec 01, 2007; ...Last spring I noticed that some Cotswold shops still had their Christmas decorations up. When they were still sporting Santas in the summer, I took a closer look and discovered that these were 'Christmas shops'. What's more, these shops suddenly seemed to be everywhere -- in Burford, Lechlade, ...
Ancient & modern
Dec 01, 2007; ...Mission statements and codes of practice are all the rage today among business communities. Everyone has to have one. The trouble is, they are all the same, and consist mostly of strings of platitudes about 'best practice' and 'personal integrity'. 'Investors in People' is a favourite ...
Nowhere to hide
Dec 01, 2007; ...Clueless about who, where or what to turn to next, I wonder which was history's first body to announce a 'full and far-reaching commission of enquiry' in which to cover itself with a sub judice blanket until the army of furious castigators either runs out of rotten tomatoes or turns their ...
DIARY
Dec 08, 2007; ...Well, I've learnt my lesson. After my last Speccie diary was satirised by the Guardian, Emily Maitlis, Michael White, Taki, a newspaper called the Asian Age, and -- honour of genuine honours! -- Craig Brown in Private Eye for being too name-droppy, this one is just going to be a sober chronicle ...
The sense of an ending
Dec 08, 2007 ...'Sleaze has been the dominant factor throughout, ' declared the opposition, 'and sleaze has been the end issue. Nothing better encapsulates what people think of this government. Sleaze will be one of the things that brings this government down.' The opposition in question was New Labour and the ...
The Labour party has ended up as the unloved child of the Blair - Brown divorce
Dec 08, 2007; ...Deep party feuds never really die: they just lie buried under the flimsy covering of the good times. For Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, such times have been brief indeed. My yoga teacher tells her wobbly pupils that the point of balance in a perfect headstand is the point just before we fall ...