The Spectator

Friday

The Spectator

Are ministers better off today?

From our UK edition

From the Barometer in this week's Spectator. Home Office minister Mark Simmonds resigned this week, complaining he couldn’t afford to live in London on his junior minister’s salary of £89,435. His resignation echoes that of Lord Gowrie, who resigned as minister for the arts in September 1985 complaining he couldn’t live in London on £33,000 a year. Are ministers better off now than they were then? — If you uprate Lord Gowrie’s 1985 salary with the Retail Prices Index (which the government now regards as overstating inflation), it would be worth £85,000, less than the sum earned by Simmonds.However, Lord Gowrie’s was a cabinet post and would now carry a salary of £134,565.

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The Spectator at war: A well-behaved press

From our UK edition

‘War and the press’, from The Spectator, 15 August 1914: When Mr Churchill paid a high compliment in the House of Commons to the British newspapers he said no more than was deserved. The newspapers are now under control by law, and we need not specially praise them for a reticence and a public spirit which are exacted of them. At the same time, there has obviously been no attempt whatever by them to dodge the letter of the law, or to give themselves the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous circumstances – a benefit which might aid a newspaper greatly in competition with its rivals. The chief merit of the newspapers, however, was their conduct during what Mr. Churchill called the precautionary period, before war was declared.

Thursday

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Spectator letters: Human shields, the leadership vacuum, and why HS2 must go ahead

From our UK edition

Hamas’s human shields Sir: Unlike the rockets fired at Basra air base by Iraqi fighters (Tom Drife, Letters, 9 August), rockets from Gaza aim to kill Israeli civilians. A more accurate analogy would be if English cities were under attack by thousands of rockets from Scotland. Any country under such attack would try to destroy the aggressor’s rocket launch capability. Since Hamas deliberately sites its rockets amongst Gaza’s civilians, it is impossible to do so without civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid these, but with an enemy determined to sacrifice its own people this is not always achievable. Human shields are not ‘less immoral’ than Israel’s defensive war. Using civilians in this way is a Hamas war crime.

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Lord Gowrie, Mark Simmonds: who had more right to complain?

From our UK edition

Ministerial needs Home Office minister Mark Simmonds resigned, complaining he couldn’t afford to live in London on his junior minister’s salary of £89,435. His resignation echoes that of Lord Gowrie, who resigned as minister for the arts in September 1985 complaining he couldn’t live in London on £33,000 a year. Are ministers better off now than they were then? — If you uprate Lord Gowrie’s 1985 salary with the Retail Prices Index (which the government now regards as overstating inflation), it would be worth £85,000, less than the sum earned by Simmonds.However, Lord Gowrie’s was a cabinet post and would now carry a salary of £134,565.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 August 2014

From our UK edition

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, resisted calls for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in Iraq. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that the government was not considering military intervention ‘at the present time’. Mark Simmonds resigned as a Foreign Office minister, but Downing Street hastened to say that his resignation, unlike Lady Warsi’s a week earlier, had nothing to do with government policy on Gaza, since he was complaining he could not afford to rent a flat in London for his family with the £27,000 allowance. A man sought by police investigating the theft of a fish tank from a furniture shop in Leeds hid in a bush and was attacked by a swarm of wasps. Unemployment fell 132,000 to 2.

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Violence, fear, confusion: this is what comes into a leadership vacuum

From our UK edition

The old cliché that ‘nothing happens in August’ has again been brutally disproved. From the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war to the Russian invasion of Georgia six years ago, August is a month often packed with violence — but rarely more so than this year. In Syria, Christians are being crucified for refusing to convert to Islam. In northern Iraq, there are reports of mothers throwing their children from mountains rather than leaving them to the jihadis who are parading the severed heads of their victims. Russian convoys are rolling towards the Ukrainian border as Vladimir Putin tests the resolve of the West. Barack Obama has watched this unfold from his holiday spot in Martha’s Vineyard; David Cameron from the Portuguese coast.

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Podcast: Iraq War III, the cult of Richard Dawkins and the moaning middle class

From our UK edition

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_14_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Iraq War III, the cult of Richard Dawkins and the moaning middle class" fullwidth="yes"] The View from 22 podcast [/audioplayer]The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has extended its hold from eastern Syria into western and northern Iraq, massacring Shi’ites, Christians and Yazidis wherever it can. But can we afford to let Isis run wild, asks Max Boot in this week's Spectator. Peter Hitchens, a columnist for the Mail on Sunday, discusses this on our podcast, and argues that we have made the most tremendous mess in Iraq, and it’s high time we realised this.

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The editor’s village guards

From our UK edition

From ‘Rifle clubs and village guards’, The Spectator, 15 August 1914.  John St Loe Strachey, in addition to being High Sheriff of Surrey, was the editor and owner of The Spectator: We understand that the High Sherriff of Surrey, Mr. St. Loe Strachey, is this afternoon holding a Conference of the Surrey Rifle Clubs at Brett Reynard’s Restaurant, Guildford, at five o’clock, with the object of making proposals for the formation of Town and Village Guards. It must be obvious to every one that it would be an enormous if every small town and village had such Guards, and if the police and military authorities could, in the case of emergency, could find an organised body, even though roughly organised, ready to co-operate with them.