The Spectator back issues from June 2008:
Hail to the not-yet-Chief
Jun 07, 2008 ...The man who four short years ago addressed the Democratic party convention as a little-known state senator from Illinois will do so this August as his party's nominee for president. It is the most rapid rise in the history of the Republic: not bad for the son of a Kenyan goat herder. ...
DIARY
Jun 07, 2008; ...Last weekend I discovered what it is like to be a small furry animal in its burrow, when in an effort to catch up on some sleep and do some work, I had refused to go out and instead sat steadfast in my living-room. I was subsequently hissed at through the window and then smoked out when a tramp ...
Welcome to Brownland, where everything that goes wrong is blamed on one man
Jun 07, 2008; ...It's a funny old thing, the Labour party. For ten years it tolerated Tony Blair, hoping that if it put up with him long enough, it would get the leader it really wanted. Naturally, it also assumed that this would entail having the best bits of Mr Blair (winning) without the ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Jun 07, 2008; ...Never having watched Jonathan Ross, I have no opinion as to whether he is worth £18 million over three years, which is what the BBC is said to pay him. But the news that the BBC Trust had just reported that the BBC was not distorting the market with its huge payments to such stars happened to ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Jun 07, 2008; ...MONDAY Jed has reassured us that he will still be working full-time for Dave once he moves to America. All those silly people claiming his physical whereabouts makes a difference to The Project are hysterical. There is no reason why he cannot run the Conservative party from his new home in ...
'If there's a vote of no confidence on 42 days, we'll win
Jun 07, 2008; ...In a government stuffed with malfunctioning robots, nervous wrecks and preening Fauntleroys, Jacqui Smith shows every sign of being a fully paid-up member of the human race. Which, as it happens, is the first lucky break Gordon Brown has had in months. It is a slight ...
A selection of recent paperbacks
Jun 07, 2008 ...Non-fiction: Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson (Penguin, £8.99) A Voyage Round John Mortimer by Valerie Grove (Penguin, £9.99) A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr (Pan, £8.99) My Year Off by Robert McCrum (Picador, £7.99) William Wilberforce by William Hague (Harper Perennial, ...
Miss Marella Mink
Jun 07, 2008; ...She walks down the stairs descending into my eye with dark, crisp hair, freshly curled, her namesake's fur around her neck. She is mischievous in her goodness and knows how to laugh into mellowness; her clear voice is a mockery in its Irish brogue and sometimes she wears lipstick in ...
Stifling the Egyptians
Jun 07, 2008; ...Aida Wales Millennium Centre Welsh National Opera's new Aida, directed by John Caird, is a moderate success, not more, and raises the question of why some operas survive falling into that category so much better than others -- Aida is not, I think, one that does. However much ...
Saffron studies
Jun 07, 2008; ...Recently I enticed my niece to a gastronome's dinner during the London Food Festival. She is about to enter university, and I thought it was about time she learnt to taste. The evening proved a disaster; after a lengthy discussion of saffron she turned to me and asked, with quiet rage, 'How can ...
Naked commercial greed meets Stalinist control
Jun 07, 2008; ...There is an increasingly Orwellian tone about the language of the Labour government. The Ministry of Truth, the state propaganda machine in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, would have been only too pleased with the doublethink of the fashionable mantra 'together in diversity', endlessly repeated ...
McCain is in for a terrible shock if he wins
Jun 07, 2008; ...Britain's Conservatives might be plotting a triumphant return to power but America's Republicans are in a state of utter collapse. And it's not just because the tide is turning after two terms of George W. Bush. For better or for worse, the Cameron Conservatives have adapted to a more ...
I have a basic human right to look at fag packets
Jun 07, 2008; ...Has your personal life been 'denormalised' yet? Mine is about to be, and believe me it's not pleasant. The health ministries in Scotland and Westminster have just announced plans to make a perfectly legal habit seem as abnormal as possible. The SNP's Public Health Minister Shona Robinson, ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Jun 07, 2008; ...Staying recently in a handsome French provincial city, I could not help thinking, as I walked down its silent cobbled streets at night, what it would have been like if it had been in England. How restful is that deep, urban silence, which the young English so hate for fear of having to attend ...
I don't think my mum has much to fear from 'Emos'
Jun 07, 2008; ...I was walking through Hyde Park with a friend on Saturday when I noticed some people dressed in black gathering on the other side of Round Pond. At first I thought it might be a school trip having a picnic, but the eclectic mix of young teenagers -- many of them with their parents -- and ...
An official no-go area for Christians? Excuse me: I need a drink
Jun 07, 2008; ...A week or so back, my two-yearold daughter said to me, apropos of nothing: 'You have been sad since you lost Jesus.' I didn't really know what to do, so I looked at her open-mouthed for a bit and then fixed myself a stiff drink. Best not to get involved, I reckon. Later -- again, out of the ...
Poppy appeal
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: Fraser Nelson's article accurately outlines the urgent need to implement an alternative counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan ('The precarious peace in Helmand', 28 May). Helmand province now cultivates half of Afghanistan's opium in a country which accounts for 93 per cent of the global ...
The original Homer?
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: Reading about Jeremy Clarke's Homer Simpson talking bottle opener (Low life, 31 May) has not quite made me rush out and buy one, but I am pleased to discover that Homer is heard yelling, 'Don't mind if I dooo!' That's almost exactly Colonel Chinstrap's catchphrase from It's That Man Again ....
Bel canto
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: Stephen Pettitt laments the lack of 'dramatic cogency' in bel canto opera (Arts, 31 May). But dramatic cogency has never been the purpose of opera. Since singing is not the accepted manner of speaking, opera is, by definition, unrealistic. Unlike theatre, it is not meant accurately to ...
Who's the worst PM?
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: I should not dream of challenging so august a source as Christopher Fildes (Letters, 24 May). I can only state that I definitely remember first coming across the Harold Wilson being the worst prime minister since Lord North anecdote in an article written by Bernard Levin for the Times, to ...
Self-justifying theology
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: Nigel Stone is brilliant in exposing Gene Robinson's self-justifying theology (Letters, 24 May), but the churches' traditional repudiation of homosexuality does not stand up either. First, there is the rather obvious fact that Jesus himself appears to have been utterly indifferent to ...
Bureaucratic nightmare
Jun 07, 2008 ...Sir: Dealing with the financial affairs of a deceased relative has made me wonder if standards in our service industries have declined. In correspondence with our major banks I have been beset by problems. Two made mistakes in the figures they gave me, these being corrected after a letter and a ...
There are no 'good' teachers: the teacher who is good for you may wreck another's prospects
Jun 07, 2008; ...The funny thing is that I'm not sure I ever knew her Christian name. No doubt she had one, and for no reason at all I think it might have been Jean, but to us she was so much, and so completely, Mrs McLeod that as a boy I probably imagined her husband called her Mrs McLeod at breakfast. Come to ...
Will the wisdom of Warren Buffett translate into German?
Jun 07, 2008; ...If Warren Buffett had not become famous as the world's richest man -- a career choice that trumps most alternatives -- he could still have carved out a niche for himself as a writer of homely lessons in economics and business. The Sage of Omaha, as Buffett is known for his uncanny knack of ...
The great box-ticker takes charge
Jun 07, 2008; ...The Financial Services Authority has had only two chairmen since its creation in 1997, and as the Northern Rock debacle happened on the watch of the second incumbent, Sir Callum McCarthy, the model for his replacement is inevitably the original holder, Sir Howard Davies. On that basis, Adair ...
Painful birth of a new epoch of simplicity
Jun 07, 2008; ...An unpopular, costly war; a sliding dollar; high levels of US government debt; behind us, 20 years of growth; oil and commodity prices out of control. . . Remember the first oil shock of 1973? Or are we looking at 2008? Just as 1973 was the harbinger of a new political epoch ...
The autobiography of a fig leaf
Jun 07, 2008; ...PREZZA: MY STORY, PULLING NO PUNCHES by John Prescott Headline, £18.99, pp. 416, ISBN 9780755317752 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 There are going to be plenty more of these, no doubt, even though the Blair administration doesn't strike one as having been a government full ...
All the best tunes
Jun 07, 2008; ...DEVIL MAY CARE by Sebastian Faulks (writing as Ian Fleming) Penguin, £18.99, pp. 320, ISBN 9780718153762 On a damp spring evening in 1955, Ian Fleming returned home to find his wife, Ann, hosting a salon at their house in Victoria Square. Raucous laughter was emanating from ...
Drawing a blank
Jun 07, 2008; ...THE STORY OF FORGETTING by Stefan Merrill Block Faber, £14.99, pp. 313, ISBN 9780571237463 I can't remember. How many times have we all made a similar response and thought no more about it? But what if those three words start to recur rather more often? Panic. And what if you are under ...
The intelligentsia head south
Jun 07, 2008; ...THE STANDING POOL by Adam Thorpe Cape, £16.99, pp. 423, ISBN 9780224079419 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Adam Thorpe set his previous novel, Between Each Breath, in Hampstead. He moves in his latest to the liberal intelligentsia's summer hunting ground, the south of France ....
Sound and fury, signifying nothing
Jun 07, 2008; ...NAPOLEON'S CURSED WAR by Ronald Fraser Verso, £29.99, pp. 587, ISBN 9781844670826 £23.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In exile on St Helena, Napoleon brooded on the cause of the failure of his bid for the mastery of Europe. He confessed that 'accursed Spain was the primary cause ...
Trouble and strife
Jun 07, 2008; ...INDIA: THE RISE OF AN ASIAN GIANT by Dietmar Rothermund Yale, £20, pp.274, ISBN 9780300113099 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 If anybody knows about modern India, it's Dietmar Rothermund. He's the Professor Emeritus of South Asian history at the University of ...
Getting to the heart of the matter
Jun 07, 2008; ...BLEEDING HEARTS SQUARE by Andrew Taylor Michael Joseph, £16.99, pp. 480, ISBN 9780718153731 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Andrew Taylor's latest thriller is set in London in 1934, when Mosley and his Blackshirts were beginning to capitalise on the miseries of economic ...
The decline of the West
Jun 07, 2008; ...THE LEGEND OF COLTON H. BRYANT by Alexandra Fuller Simon & Schuster, £12.99, pp. 203, ISBN 9781847372758 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'This is a work of non-fiction, ' Alexandra Fuller writes. 'But I have taken narrative liberties with the text.' She presents a ...
The revolutionary, the president, the playwright
Jun 07, 2008; ...TO THE CASTLE AND BACK by Vaclav Havel Portobello Books, £20, pp. 383, ISBN 9781846271373 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 A troika of heroic Slavic statesmen played the key roles in the last great drama of European history -- the collapse of Soviet Communism. They were Mikhail ...
A house and its history
Jun 07, 2008; ...MADRESFIELD: THE REAL BRIDE by Jane Mulvagh Dovecote Press, £20, pp. 384, ISBN9781904349587 £16(plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The new Brideshead Revisited film, out in September, was, like the 1981 television version, filmed at Castle Howard. For Jane Mulvagh, however, the 'real' ...
China's piano fever
Jun 07, 2008; ...As my plane makes its final approach into the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mountains give way briefly to green paddy fields, and then industry takes over. Beneath are hundreds of vast blue-roofed sheds and smoking red-brick chimney stacks. The landscape is mapped with railway ...
The savvy Mr Perry
Jun 07, 2008; ...Unpopular Culture De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, until 6 July, then touring This is not a review, for I haven't yet seen the exhibition under discussion, it's an expression of mixed incredulity and interest. The exhibition is called Unpopular Culture, and is an artist's selection ...
Hip-hop hell
Jun 07, 2008; ...I was on a number 43 bus the other afternoon, on a sparsely populated top deck, on my way to pick up my daughter from school, when three teenage boys came upstairs. If you travel on buses as much as I do (having never learnt to drive), you assess the potential for trouble in fellow passengers ...
Saved by the horses
Jun 07, 2008; ...Mongol 15, Nationwide Mongol traces the early years of the legendary warrior Genghis Khan and does not feature, at any point, the world's greatest adventurer/archaeologist or four fortysomething women living and loving in New York. Yes, it is probably safe to come out now. They're all ...
Confucian confusions
Jun 07, 2008; ...The Reith Lectures have been going for 60 years, the acme of Radio Four's ambition to reflect the cultural heart of the nation, named after the man who believed British broadcasting should inform and educate the nation. They're something I've always felt I 'should' listen to, but have rarely ...
Top women
Jun 07, 2008; ...This weekend, by chance, brought us television biographies of the two most famous British women of the 19th century. They were very different programmes, for good reason. Queen Victoria's Men on Monday was made for Channel 4, so of course it had to be in that channel's long ...
Umbrian idyll
Jun 07, 2008; ...Città di Castello, Umbria A few years before the end of the 19th century, King Leopold of Belgium summoned his favourite banker, Baron Lambert, for an intimate chat over lunch. 'My dream is to have a little place in the sun, ' said the monarch to the banker. 'Somewhere down ...
Tree talk
Jun 07, 2008; ...All my life I've tried to acquaint myself with trees by learning which ones are which, but the task seems beyond me. Wouldn't it be praiseworthy, for example, to be able to recognise the 32 native species of broad-leafed tree -- willow, oak, lime, ash, wych elm, and so forth -- and the ...
Cosmic codes
Jun 07, 2008; ...I am a great one for omens. So the arrival in my inbox of two emails, completely unconnected, from two different people called Dirk had to be interpreted as a sign. The chances of two people in Britain being called Dirk outside the pages of comedy science fiction are pretty slim. The ...
Women! Get back in the kitchen
Jun 07, 2008; ...'Must go, I have to cook dinner, ' said my friend Robin, who had dropped in on his way home from work. Jumping on his bike, a fresh mallard and some curly kale in his rucksack, he pedalled off home to his young wife. It's the 'he' part of this that gets me. My new copy of Delia Smith's book hit ...
Rock the kasbah
Jun 07, 2008; ...Hats off to Richard Branson's mum. If it wasn't for the formidable Mrs B, most of us wouldn't be able to stay at Kasbah Tamadot in Morocco, and that would be a terrible shame. 'As soon as I saw it and realised it was for sale, I rang Richard and pleaded with him to buy it, ' she told ...
No Sky's the limit
Jun 07, 2008; ...As hard luck stories go, it might not be up there with Oliver Twist, but dammit last weekend my Sky went down. In that pathetic, fat-arsed nerdy way I had been planning the ideal weekend: bouncing happily from the climax to the 20/20 Indian Premier League, to Wasps and Leicester in the Rugby ...
Zero tolerance for Tory sleaze
Jun 14, 2008 ...'What gets me, ' said David Cameron in a speech to the CBI last November, 'is the deliberate extravagance committed by the people at the top of the government machine, the administrators and managers and quangocrats who administer public money.' He went on to name Home Office officials who had ...
The Blairites are making a comeback -- at Conservative HQ
Jun 14, 2008; ...David Cameron really must do something about the quality of the Conservatives' leaked documents. Once they offered delicious details of the infighting and reprisals which occupied the party for more than a decade. Yet the leaked memo which emerged last Friday simply warned that the party cannot ...
DIARY
Jun 14, 2008; ...Another Ark fundraising dinner has come and gone and I can finally get back to running my business. More importantly I can focus on the programmes that the dinner paid for. The stress started in January as Ian Wace (my partner in Ark) and I planned a thousand details for Europe's largest ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Jun 14, 2008; ...It would be a lie to say that I feel sorry for the Tory MEPs who have been attacked for paying their staff allowances to companies of which they or members of their family are members, but they are not the most at fault. Giles Chichester, for example, and Den Dover, did at least follow ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Jun 14, 2008; ...MONDAY Fraught morning. Drew the short straw and had to take Mrs Spelperson her camomile tea but couldn't find her. Looked everywhere. Under the desk, in the filing cabinet. Nowhere. So I couldn't tick the chart confirming that she had been checked on and given light ...
Ladies, bring us your business plans
Jun 14, 2008; ...In eight years in venture capital, my partners and I have met only a handful of female applicants for capital. Yet we receive 500 to 600 business plans every year. It seems remarkable when you consider that women figure prominently in almost all walks of life -- over 50 per cent of ...
Less mighty than the sword
Jun 14, 2008; ...THE TRANSLATOR: A TRIBESMAN'S MEMOIR OF DARFUR by Daoud Hari Penguin, £8.99, pp. 210, ISBN 97801410370004 £7.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When Daoud Hari was a boy, the villages of northern Darfur were peaceful places. He had a camel called Kelgi, to which he was much ...
Inspirational individuals
Jun 14, 2008; ...FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE SECRET WAR@ AN INSIDE HISTORY OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Roderick Bailey, in association with the Imperial War Museum Ebury Press, £19.99, pp. 382, ISBN 9780091918507 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 My 85-year-old neighbour ...
Dylan obsession
Jun 14, 2008; ...There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie ...
Even middle-class children are suffereing from neglect
Jun 14, 2008; ...And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them -- let's be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate -- at alternate weekends? So we don't need to ask any more who tucks ...
'If we die today, you will be responsible'
Jun 14, 2008; ...Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem was holding court last Thursday in the VIP lounge at Khartoum International Airport. Sudan's voluble United Nations ambassador was accompanying the UN Security Council as it prepared for the short flight to northern Darfur. Many hoped that the Council's visit to the ...
No child left behind
Jun 14, 2008; ...It's just over a year since David Willetts made his thoughtful but ultimately fatal pronouncement: 'academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it'. Those nine words -- anathema to most Conservatives -- led to a civil war inside the party, a messy U-turn and the reshuffling of ...
Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms
Jun 14, 2008; ...'Do you have the new novel by Alexandre Dumas?' Who ever imagined going into the local branch of Waterstone's and asking that question, in the 21st century? Yet the unexpected -- the impossible -- has happened and an authentically new historical novel by the legendary author of The Three ...
'Global warming is not our most urgent priority'
Jun 14, 2008; ...Gosh, I do hope Bjørn Lomborg doesn't think I was trying to pick him up. I've only just learned from his Wikipedia entry that he's 'openly gay' which, with hindsight, probably made my dogged insistence that we conduct our interview in his cramped hotel bedroom look like a cheap ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Jun 14, 2008; ...The image of women in Victorian times veered between that of madonna and whore, but nowadays in Britain it veers between harridan and slut. This is only natural in a country where vulgarity is not only triumphant, but militant and deeply ideological. The men, of course, are just as ...
42 days
Jun 14, 2008 ...Sir: Thank goodness for Matthew d'Ancona's clarity of mind on 42-day detention ('Jacqui Smith's vote of confidence', 7 June). People who want to be provoked will always find an excuse. If they are subtle, they will manufacture a grievance based on an issue about which their sworn enemies ...
The other side of the desk
Jun 14, 2008 ...Sir: Those who presume to judge 'Who's the worst PM?' (Letters, 7 June) should reflect on President Kennedy's deep dissatisfaction with the glib way historians had rated some of his predecessors as 'below average' and some as 'failures'. He said: 'No one ...