Features

‘The US stock market is rigged.’ That’s the j’accuse headline that screams out from Flash Boys, the new book by Michael Lewis. It’s a very big claim, made by America’s foremost financial writer. It’s also a claim that, after years of accumulating evidence, warrants extremely close and sustained official scrutiny. Lewis produced Liar’s Poker, his first bestseller, in 1989 — after a four-year stint as a fresh-from-the-Ivy-League bond dealer at the now defunct firm Salomon Brothers. The book, an insider’s account, brilliantly lampooned the macho, aggressive behaviour of the ‘big swinging dicks’ who paced the carpet-tiled trading floors.

Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true. She was much loved by all at The Spectator and we miss her. Here is her prize-winning piece.    I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different.

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in murder. As we drank tea with him, we failed to ask why he had the body of a woman with her brains bashed out sprawled on the steps of his church. And then it just went on and on.

In a valedictory interview, Sir David Nicholson was quite frank about the state of the health service that he has run for the last eight years. ‘In its current form,’ he declared, ‘the NHS is unsustainable.’ It is hard to imagine Simon Stevens, who takes over as NHS England chief executive this week, having to say that when he leaves. His friends know him as an experienced reformer, a policy expert and a radical. His CV causes some suspicion in Tory circles — he is a former adviser to Tony Blair (I’m also guilty in that respect) and was a co-author of the last Labour government’s health reforms — but that is precisely why he will be so valuable to David Cameron now.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_March_2014.mp3" title="Liam Mullone and Freddy Gray debate whether it's a good idea to let children learn French" startat=1467] Listen [/audioplayer]My children won’t learn French. If their school tries to force the issue, I’ll fight tooth and nail. There’ll be the mother of all Agincourts before I let it happen. It’s not that I have any problem with the language, even though it has too many vowels and you have to say 99 as ‘four-twenty-ten-nine’, making it impossible (I imagine) to sing that song about red balloons. It’s just that I want my children to be successful, and learning French makes no business sense.

I have just decided that my work is of equal value to that of the feminist supermodel Cameron Russell. Neither of us, admittedly, is quite as useful as a plumber, and I can’t claim to be of much use promoting swimwear. But otherwise I reckon we are a pretty close match. We both tart ourselves around and while my work doesn’t involve a lot of physical input, I would like to think that it requires a slightly higher contribution from the brain department. There then arises the question: should I not be paid as much as she is? Ludicrous? Perhaps, but no more so, I think, than what is going on in Birmingham, where council taxpayers are facing a £1 billion bill for a mass equal pay claim on the part of 11,000 female staff.

It was an averagely OK evening at one of London’s smarter restaurants: the food was edible, the wine wasn’t vinegar, the company was quite adequate and I managed to return home without actively wanting to shoot myself, which is always a plus. But a mere 12 hours later these feelings of nondescript non-satisfaction turned into a boiling rage, because it had happened yet again: an email pinged into my inbox. ‘Rate last night’s experience at London’s finest,’ it urged. ‘Were you a) Extremely impressed with the restaurant? b) Quite impressed? c) Neither impressed nor distressed...’ And so it went on, pages of it, because you cannot do a blinking thing these days without being asked to fill in a customer satisfaction survey.

When I told a friend that my nine-year-old son was staying with his grandparents for the whole week of the half-term, she said: ‘A whole week! My son would be lucky to get his grandparents for a weekend! Who are these people?’ ‘His grandparents are working class,’ I said. She looked puzzled. ‘What?’ I explained. ‘Working-class grandparents are the best you can have — these days middle-class grandparents are bloody useless.’ I’m not alone in thinking this about the middle-class grandparent (MCGP).