Columns

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

The media is out of control. But we can still worry about the behaviour of tabloids

For months now, the whole idea of the Leveson inquiry into press standards has been dimly reminding me of something. Only recently did I figure out what it was. You know when anthropologists descend upon some almost-doomed Patagonian tribe, desperate to document their language, costumes and strategies for spear-throwing, nose-boning and rat spit-roasting before the last one succumbs to alcoholism and keels over and dies? It’s a bit like that. It’s the Domesday Book for the British press. This isn’t to say that there won’t be a British press 30 years from now. There had better be, or else some of us are going to be in trouble. But surely, by then, it isn’t going to look much like it does now. And I don’t just mean in delivery.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Politics: Miliband pitches his tent with the protestors  

During the Depression, tent cities sprung up across America. Today, in the second great contraction, they are appearing in the financial centres of the western world. But there is a crucial difference: the contemporary campers are there out of choice not necessity. Pitching your tent has become the fashionable form of protest. It is easy to dismiss the attention heaped on ‘Occupy London’ and its criticisms of greed in the City as a classic example of left-wing media bias. The rally for an EU referendum attracted nearly ten times as many people, but didn’t receive even a tenth of the news coverage. But the reason Occupy is causing such a stir is because of the sense that some new form of politics should be emerging.

Rod Liddle

Go on, Sarko, tell us another

The typical cowardice of French journalists has prevented us from knowing the full details of that off-the-record chat between Nicolas Sarkozy and President Barack Obama — until now. Hitherto we had to make do with Sarkozy’s rather boring attack upon the Israeli leader Benyamin Netanyahu: ‘I cannot bear Netanyahu, he is a liar.’ To which Obama replied: ‘You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him even more than you.’ Well, so far, so so-so. It is an exchange which will certainly have Netanyahu laughing his head off, largely on account of Obama’s connivance (I don’t suppose he could give a monkey’s what Sarkozy thinks about anything, any more than the rest of us should).

Matthew Parris

Why, as the Great War recedes further into the past, does it loom larger?

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’ And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval.

James Delingpole

Don’t expect the BBC to tell you, but Ukip is on the march

 ‘Farage has only got one ball.’ The last time I made reference to the Ukip leader’s monotesticular status, I got a rocket from an outraged reader. But the reader had missed the point entirely. Nigel Farage’s handicap is a strength, not a weakness. He’s open about it, he’s unembarrassed by it and he’s a better man for it. Yes, Farage may have lost a bollock to cancer, but by God he’s got more cojones than almost any Conservative you could name. Our Nigel is a Conservative himself, of course. Just one who has been temporarily dispossessed by the mainstream party. When you talk to Farage he’s perfectly upfront about what he considers to be Ukip’s role: to act as the Tory party’s conscience.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The euro is killing Europe – can the coalition turn the chaos to its advantage?

Last week’s rebellion by David Cameron’s backbenchers in support of an EU referendum ended eight years of peace in the Tory party on the European question. Now, the offer by the Greek Prime Minister of a referendum on the ­bailout package — designed to appease nervous Greek Socialist party backbenchers — means that the uncertainty surrounding the eurozone will drag on into the New Year. George Osborne regards the confusion surrounding the future of the single currency as the single biggest obstacle to a British economic recovery. The Chancellor and his colleagues have become increasingly convinced that only when the markets have confidence about what is going to happen will businesses be prepared to invest their cash, and not just sit on it.

Rod Liddle

Organised protest? Mass alfresco sulk, more like

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has at last spoken on the issue of the great St Paul’s Cathedral controversy, which has so far seen the departure of both the Dean of the cathedral and its canon. Dr Williams lamented the loss to the church of both men but added that the ‘issues’ raised by the protesters outside the church ‘remain very much on the table’. So not just on the table, but very much on the table. Somewhere near the centre of the table, perhaps, just to the left of the candlestick. Dr Williams did not describe the table at all, but I have taken the liberty of assuming it is a large and robust wooden table, with a leg at each corner. But what are these important issues, then?

Hugo Rifkind

I’m ready to be scared. Just tell me what to be scared of

What I’m lacking, really, is any sense of the parameters. As I understand it, a best-case scenario involves the Greeks doing what they’re told. Everybody else tightens their belts a bit and there’s a bout of quite dispiriting inflation, followed by the ejection of a couple of countries from the euro, the slow retrenchment of almost every European public sector, the fundamental restructuring of industry here and in America, and a slow, slogging march back to stability and prosperity so that, in a decade or two, we can do it all again. Yes? Is that about right? So what’s the opposite? What’s the worst-case scenario? What happens when it all goes wrong? I haven’t a clue. Nobody is saying. Is it like the above, but just slightly worse?

Saturday

James Forsyth

The rebellion wasn’t just against Europe — it was also against Cameron’s style of leadership

In the hours leading up to Monday’s vote in the Commons on the EU referendum motion, frantic negotiations took place between No. 10 and Nick Clegg’s office. Downing Street wanted the Liberal Democrat leader to stay away from both David Cameron’s statement on the European Council and William Hague’s speech in the debate. It feared that the presence of the deputy Prime Minister would inflame the tinder-dry Tory benches. One Tory remarked that this was a moment when the party would appreciate some space. Eventually they reached a compromise. The pro-European Clegg would be on the front bench for the statement. But he had to accept Cameron saying that he wanted to ‘refashion our membership of the EU’.

Rod Liddle

A lesson from the Premier League in what’s truly offensive

What is the appropriate sort of language, do you suppose, for the captain of the England football team to use in respect of his colleagues? This is an important issue and I, for one, will not sleep until a sort of resolution — a closure, if you will — has been arrived at. Because we have a dispute on our hands and at the heart of it is a moral issue. Needless to say, the police are investigating. It is alleged that the present England captain, Mr John Terry, of Chelsea FC, addressed his opponent, Mr Anton Ferdinand, of Queens Park Rangers, with the wholly unacceptable words ‘you f***ing black c***’. Mr Terry, for his part, has strenuously denied saying such a thing and insists it was simply the anodyne and perfectly inoffensive ‘you f***ing blind c***’.

Matthew Parris

What is the point of the storytelling bore?

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’ I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men and women in their sixties, seventies or eighties — the more am I struck by that candid remark.

James Delingpole

I’m trying to block out the suppurating vileness of Twitter

‘Great God, Twitter is an awful place!’ I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It’s quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle. The reason Rod doesn’t do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness. He’s right, of course, as I’m reminded almost daily by missives like this: ‘Gutted to learn that c**t @jamesdelingpole has kids. So that means even more c**ts in the world.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

I’m too busy to set up schools and regulate industries. Isn’t that what governments are for? | 22 October 2011

How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been why. Racing home, for another thrilling evening of comparing the damn meerkat. The spectre of rising energy prices is one of those bleak and terrible things that you know will have horrible consequences, but with which you cannot quite grapple until the bill comes. The spectre of the Energy Secretary and Prime Minister trilling on about it is an annoyance of a more visceral sort.

Hugo Rifkind

I’m too busy to set up schools and regulate industries. Isn’t that what governments are for?

How long do you suppose it takes Chris Huhne to shop for the most competitive energy bill for all seven of his houses? Ages, I reckon. If he had been driving during that infamous speeding incident on the M11 — and everyone knows, of course, that he wasn’t — then this would surely have been why. Racing home, for another thrilling evening of comparing the damn meerkat. The spectre of rising energy prices is one of those bleak and terrible things that you know will have horrible consequences, but with which you cannot quite grapple until the bill comes. The spectre of the Energy Secretary and Prime Minister trilling on about it is an annoyance of a more visceral sort.

James Forsyth

Politics | 22 October 2011

The government’s never-ending European problem In the hours after the coalition was formed last May, a minister and a group of Tory MPs sat around a table in a parliamentary cafeteria discussing what it all meant. One new MP said to the minister that it was a pity that, in the course of the talks, the Tories had agreed to ‘park Europe for the next five years’. The minister, high on the Panglossian spirit of the early days of the coalition, reassured her that this was for the best. The party could devote its full attention to Europe when the economic situation was less pressing. Yet almost 18 months on, Europe is taking up an ever-increasing amount of the government’s time.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Did The Spectator prompt the new consultation on gay marriage?

It isn’t often that a piece in the Spectator makes its way straight into a Prime Minister’s party conference speech but, as this magazine’s online Coffee House hinted last week, Douglas Murray’s ‘Why conservatives should welcome gay marriage’ (1 October) looks like an example. I’ve often disagreed and occasionally crossed swords with Mr Murray but always admired him as a writer; this article, though, was to my mind not only framed with clarity and grace, but came close to constructing the definitive case in moral logic for ending inequalities between civil partnership and marriage. I can’t add to it. For years after being elected to parliament I tried to explain the Conservative case for giving social status to same-sex relationships.

James Delingpole

When the world ends, will I know how to cook our cat?

 ‘Oh God, you realise if it gets really bad we might have to end up eating that,’ I said, meaning our fat cat Runty. The Fawn started making upset noises. She’s very fond of Runty. My problem wouldn’t be so much the sentimental aspect as the practical one. Just how do you go about skinning and cooking a cat, when the power’s most likely to be gone and you’re long since out of barbecue charcoal? Which bits are safe to eat? Does it taste like chicken? ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s never going to get that bad,’ she said. ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘Well London would need to be under siege for that to happen.’ ‘Not necessarily. They ate cat in France during the War. Lapin sans tête.

Rod Liddle

Some suggestions about how the BBC management can save money

Do you have any idea what a decision support analyst actually does for a living? This is a controversial topic because the chief operating officer of the BBC, a woman called Caroline Thomson, was unable to answer the question as to what her own decision support analysts did while they were at work. Truth be told, I’m not sure what a chief operating officer does either, although as Ms Thomson’s salary is in the region of £385,000 a year it is clearly something that should occupy my thoughts more frequently. Isn’t the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, by definition also the chief operating officer?

Saturday

James Forsyth

Cameron must offer women more than an apology

Shortly after he arrived in Downing Street as the chief political strategist, Andrew Cooper sent David Cameron a memo about the nation’s hopes and fears. Shortly after he arrived in Downing Street as the chief political strategist, Andrew Cooper sent David Cameron a memo about the nation’s hopes and fears. Cooper’s research showed that voters’ greatest concern was that their children wouldn’t have the opportunities they’d had. The mood of pessimism in the country, he concluded, could not be lifted until this question was addressed. This is why the conference this week has featured lots of of talk about children and ‘inter-generational fairness’.

Rod Liddle

What does it take to save a she-devil? Good PR

Here’s a tip for nowt: if you’re thinking of travelling to Italy, don’t keep a dildo in your washbag. Here’s a tip for nowt: if you’re thinking of travelling to Italy, don’t keep a dildo in your washbag. Put it somewhere that intimates to the authorities a certain discretion and reserve. You don’t want to inflame the Italian public: show them a naked dildo and they may very rapidly reach the conclusion that you are Satan, or more likely one of his infernal handmaidens, and probably guilty of everything.