More from The Week

When Ed Miliband stands up in the House of Commons, he might be surprised to hear the loudest cheers coming from the wrong side of the chamber. He is becoming an unlikely Tory champion, the man who’ll do more than anyone else to ensure that David Cameron wins an outright majority at the next general election. Labour MPs grumble, but loyalty is hardwired into their collective DNA. As Gordon Brown knew, the word ‘unity’ has a near-hypnotic effect on his party. Labour has never ejected a bad leader. Unlike the Tories, they have not mastered the art of political regicide. So Labour seems to be stuck with a leader whom its MPs are unwilling to support or supplant. Miliband was little-known when elected.

The murder of a teenager on Boxing Day, stabbed during a brawl over a pair of trainers in Oxford Street, offers another horrifying glimpse of the culture of violence being incubated in our sink estates. Police have not yet confirmed if this was another gang killing, but it seems to fit a sickening pattern. There was Negus McClean, killed in April after he confronted a gang who tried to steal his brother’s mobile phone. Then Nicholas Pearton, stabbed to death in a shop doorway in May by a group of schoolboys. At each outrage politicians denounce criminality and the police promise crackdowns. Then things carry on as before. It’s unclear at what point children killing children became part of British national life.

The hands of Big Ben are approaching the designated hour, and the bells are about to toll for our Readers’ Representative Award. Only a few days remain for you to vote for your favourite parliamentarian. Dwindling time is not the same as no time, of course. New runners can emerge and overtake old favourites in an instant — and that is what has happened this week. Thanks to the brouhaha over an EU referendum, names such as David Nuttall, Douglas Carswell, Jon Cruddas and Kate Hoey have started appearing in our postbag more frequently. One reader, Edward Bartlett, says of Mr Nuttall that ‘in fighting for an In/Out referendum, he has fought on behalf of the people’.

Q. A friend of ours went with his nephew to a funeral. The nephew is an absolute maniac driver. They flew up to Scotland and all the way our friend was terrified because the nephew was renting a car at the airport and then proposed to drive 50 miles. What to do? Just as the nephew was paying for the car, our friend asked to be added as a driver because he was thinking of buying the same model and could think of no better time to do a test drive! Problem solved. —D.P., by email A. Indeed. How considerate of you to share this solution with readers. Q. Consanguinity obliges me to extend hospitality to a relative of my wife’s, and thus somewhat reluctantly I include him once a month on our dinner list.

Q. My new boyfriend holds his knife like a pencil. How can I gently correct this without him thinking I am starting to nag too early on in the relationship? My parents will be appalled.   — Name withheld, Godalming, Surrey A. You may be unable to break the habit but you can explain its origin to your parents.  In the words of Madame de Staël, ‘Tout comprendre rend très indulgent.’ The epidemic of incorrect knife-holding is an evolutionary response to the mass production of painful cutlery. Until the 1950s even cheap cutlery was moulded and the handles attached to the blades. Then cutlery began to be made by stamping out the knives and forks in one piece, resulting in knives for public use which dig like tent pegs into the palm of the hand.

So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? So everyone is going to live much longer and will therefore have to work much longer to pay for their pensions. But what is so wrong with dying, Greeks and Romans would ask? They came at the problem from different angles. Homeric heroes sought to compensate for death with eternal heroic glory (and got it, judging from the number of people who still read Homer). Plato argued that the soul was immortal. The Roman poet Lucretius thought that was the problem. For him, life was an incipient hell because of man’s eternal desire for novelty.

Almost 20 years ago, Samuel Huntingdon forecast a ‘clash of civilisations’. Almost 20 years ago, Samuel Huntingdon forecast a ‘clash of civilisations’. In the past few months, this clash has become outright war. Christian minorities, who have lived peacefully in Muslim countries for generations, are finding themselves subject to increasingly violent persecution. Churches are being attacked in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia and the Philippines. The recent assassination in Pakistan of a Muslim politician who defended a Christian woman sentenced to death for ‘insulting’ Islam was particularly shocking. Pakistan has had blasphemy laws since its inception, but never before have they been used to persecute Christians.

As I was slipping a pudding into the water to boil a bellowing noise like the questing beast in Malory made me jump. But I did not drop it. ‘My word of the year,’ said my husband, blowing like a tuba-player through a rolled up copy of the Radio Times. ‘Vuvuzela. We’d never heard of it till this summer. It’s a thing and it has no other name.’ Despite the annoying nature of the thing and the imitation of it by my husband, he is right. It is strange that Oxford University Press chose big society. Not only does no one know its meaning, but it is practically a proprietary name. Other words on its shortlist of 12 were stranger. Los 33, taken from the note attached to a drill-bit by the Chilean mine survivors, looks memorable, but how would you pronounce it?

Part of the pleasure of the WikiLeaks revelations is that they confirm the view now universally reviled as ‘neocon’. Part of the pleasure of the WikiLeaks revelations is that they confirm the view now universally reviled as ‘neocon’. It emerges that whereas the public pronouncements of the Arab world all concentrate on Israel as the villain of everything, what really worries the Arabs is Iran. The Arab regimes share Israel’s view that Iran is an ‘existential threat’. They also turn instinctively to America to sort out the problem. While President Obama has tried unsuccessfully to pursue a doveish policy, real, live Muslims want Ahmedinejad’s nuclear ambitions stopped, if necessary by violence.

Churchill popped up early at last week’s Spectator debate, which was sponsored by Brewin Dolphin. Churchill popped up early at last week’s Spectator debate, which was sponsored by Brewin Dolphin. James Crabtree, the Financial Times’s comment editor, deplored the way our war leader’s bust had been ‘removed from the White House’ by an incoming Barack Obama. It marked the terminal point in a relationship that once shaped world events. America was looking east. Obama had pledged to run ‘a Pacific presidency’. Crabtree repeated Helmut Schmidt’s gag about our alliance with the Americans, ‘a relationship so special that only one side knows it exists’.

A familiar story was played out in Brussels last week. A British prime minister entered the conference chamber vowing he would not give one inch to the European Union. He emerged a few hours later having given way but nonetheless declaring a ‘spectacular’ victory. It was John Major and Maastricht, Tony Blair and his ‘red lines’, all over again. How quickly David Cameron has settled into the role expected of him by Brussels. To pretend that he is happy to be giving away an additional £450 million a year to the EU. To sound the bugle of triumph, no matter what the outcome. To his credit, Mr Cameron did not pretend to be pleased about his latest instructions from the continent: to grant prisoners the right to vote.

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