Culture

Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter, and from the comments you’d have thought that I’d shot, cooked and eaten Shergar the Racehorse. But I stand by what I said. Like Princess Diana and Nookie the Bear before him, Bowie was not some selfless saint; he was a sharp-eyed, ambitious creature who once floated himself on the Stock Market in the 1990s, and sold himself for the advertising shilling - when already a millionaire many times over - in 2006 to a bottled water company.

Regardless of the background of the men who carried out the attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve, it is a pretty horrific story. A series of sexual attacks took place in the city centre by a group of around 1,000 men. More than 150 women have filed criminal complaints, three-quarters of them for sexual assault. Two cases of rape have been reported. It is the kind of story that should make headlines - and should provide ample fodder for writers who like to tackle feminist topics head on. After all, surely this is the very definition of 'rape culture'? And if the actual attacks aren't enough to merit a reaction, then how about the suggestion by Cologne's female mayor that women should adopt a 'code of conduct' to prevent future assault.

How’s this for dark irony: throughout 2015, ‘white male privilege’ was the buzzphrase on every rad tweeter and liberal hack’s lips, as they fumed against the easy, pampered lives allegedly enjoyed by human beings who had the fortune to be born with a penis and pale skin. Railing against ‘white men’ and their cushy existences has become the stock-in-trade of many feminists. Yet towards the end of 2015 it was revealed that there’s a social group in Britain more derided and less successful than pretty much every other social group. Guess who? Yep, young white men. Especially young working-class white men.

I was in Toys R Us in Brent Cross the other day with my kids, pondering the true miracle of Christmas -- that thanks to capitalism, global poverty has halved in just a generation, and we are now able to feed, clothe and shelter record numbers of people -- and buy them lots of presents. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/7PcxR/index.html"] My two-year-old was screaming because he wanted some toy cars, just a handful of fun things among an awesome display of toys that are far better, and cheaper, than they were when I was a child -- and available to more people, not just in Britain but across the world.

Why is it that the sight of a huge, thrusting rocket ploughing through virgin space at 25,000 kmph makes me feel so good? As for seeing a real astronaut with a Union Jack on his arm, how can anyone not be moved? Englishman Tim Peake launched into space just after 11 AM yesterday, alongside Russian Yuri Malenchenko and American Tim Kopra, the three men heading for the International Space Station. Peake is the first official UK astronaut, although the seventh Briton in space, the first being Helen Sharman in 1991. There are many people who consider this all a bit of a waste of money; Rev Giles Fraser, for one, was mulling over the expense involved yesterday morning.

It’s not that often you get the low business of journalism put into its proper social and spiritual context but that’s what happened courtesy of the Oxford Dominicans on Saturday. Its conference on 'Truth-telling and the Media' – yep, that well known oxymoron – included a contribution by the Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle. Not a sausage about any current issues relating to the press, thank God. Just a context to put it all in. And that context is that journalists turn the big society into the small society in the way we write; we make the individual reader feel they can relate to the big stuff.

On hearing that a ‘transgendered flag of remembrance’ was being flown by a government department for the first time (the Department of Education, on November 20th, the Transgender Day Of Remembrance) I was reminded of that old line about prison food - ‘It’s rubbish, and there’s not enough of it!’ It seems the height of duplicity that the sort of people who would mock a flag being flown to support our war dead (indeed, they might well use it as an excuse to break out the DIE TORY SCUM spray-paints) suddenly approve of running a bit of flimsy tat (which looks unpleasingly as if an Argie flag got put in a washing machine with a job-lot of red bedding) up a flagpole to celebrate a man’s right to tuck his tail between his legs and call himself Linda.

Actress Frances Barber has complained about her taxi driver after a night out in town, tweeting: https://twitter.com/francesbarber13/status/668598758473654272 The man had allegedly told her she was ‘disgustingly dressed’ and that ‘women should not be out at night’. This was after she had remarked about the weather being cold. That’s the problem with liberalising the taxi market to let any random person drive you around – it reduces the level of trust. As Rory Sutherland explained in this magazine a couple of years ago, trust is extremely important to capitalism and that’s why having hurdles such as the Knowledge is necessary: ‘Reciprocation, reputation and pre-commitment are the three big mechanisms which add to trust.

Andrew Neil is the best political interviewer in Britain. I am not just saying that because he is so high up here at The Spectator, although that helps. I am not saying it because he once bought me lunch, although he did his cause no harm there either. I am saying it because he is one of the few broadcasters who makes me stop what I am doing and listen. God help the interviewee who goes on his programme unprepared. If he or she has not thought through every flaw in their argument, they will find that Neil has done their thinking for them. He will expose their contradictions on live television. He will have a list of the inconvenient facts they forgot or never took the trouble to find in the first place, and will broadcast them to the nation.

Watching the increasingly bleak and depressing Peep Show the other night I was pleased to note that my on-screen alter ego Mark Corrigan is a big fan of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which is I think my all-time favourite documentary. To me Civilisation, and the then controller of BBC2 who commissioned it, David Attenborough, represent what the BBC should be, and is at its best: a strangely Freudian father figure to the nation, erudite, intelligent, open-minded and very British. The BBC was a product of a strong national culture, but it also helped to further cement it, making events like the Proms or FA Cup final part of our collective experience.

That students are becoming rather hardline about speakers they disagree with visiting their campuses is now well described. Brendan O'Neill first explained the 'Stepford Student' phenomenon in the Spectator, and in today's Times David Aaronovitch described his own encounter with a student leader who believes speakers who may upset students should be banned from campuses. What was particularly interesting about Aaronovitch's Newsnight discussion last week was that Toke Dahler, his opponent, seemed quite concerned that students shouldn't suffer 'trauma' as a result of a speaker being on their premises. Aside from all the arguments about the importance of a clash of ideas, especially when some of those ideas are foolish and not persuasive, the concept of 'trauma' is interesting.