The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

Spinning down the Tube

From our UK edition

The other morning I came into work after one of those awful tube journeys that put you in the foulest of tempers. So it didn’t improve my mood to see a staged picture of Gordon travelling on a pleasantly full Tube train staring out at me from the papers. The Chancellor had, conveninently, found a Tube carriage in which it was perfectly possible to sit down and do some work. Iain Dale—who is a real must read, he broke the Coulson story the other day—has the scoop on just how cynical the whole thing was. One of the ‘passengers’ quoted in a news story about Brown’s trip is actually chair of the SOAS Labour Party and has previously been in one of Brown’s leadership videos.

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Channel 4’s crass sensationalism

From our UK edition

My first job was working for Index on Censorship, so I instinctively recoil from prior restraint of the media. Nonetheless, there is a difference between censorship and humane editing, and the defence of free speech ultimately depends upon society understanding the distinction. I can see absolutely no merit in Channel 4 broadcasting the photographs of the crash scene in tonight’s documentary about the death of Diana. True, the programme-makers are not showing the infamous paparazzi pictures of the dying princess herself. But – in exercising this minimal discretion  – they are seeking to have their sensationalist cake and eat it.

Tuesday

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Is Bush a good man?

From our UK edition

Politics in Washington can be an unpleasant affair. But the news that Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury and obstrucion of justice during the investigation into the outing of the CIA agent Valerie Plame is particularly sickening. This whole case has been an absurdity from start to finish. It is by no means clear that there was even a crime to lie about in the first place. Indeed, seeing as Libby had committed no crime—the source for her naming in the press was the then deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage—Libby’s motivation for lying was not his own preservation but protecting his boss from political embarrassment.

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Song of the Dove

From our UK edition

A new opera is a major undertaking for any company and one of the challenges is that staff responsible for raising money, enticing audiences and selling tickets can't know exactly what they're dealing with in advance. No handy recording to listen to, no DVD of a previous production to slip into their laptops. The problem is pretty much solved when a composer is as obliging, skilled and entertaining as Jonathan Dove. Yesterday afternoon in Leeds he treated key members of the Opera North team to a bravura one-man show, playing and singing through the entire score of his new opera Pinocchio (with a brilliantly lucid and witty text by Alasdair Middleton).

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Sierra Leone’s tragedy

From our UK edition

I was depressed to learn yesterday that nineteen people died on a Paramount-operated helicopter in Sierra Leone on Sunday night. They had been travelling to Lunghi airport from Freetown after a football game. Unlike in Europe, where it is usually rich businessmen and football club chairmen who travel back after matches on helicopters, in Sierra Leone everyone has to do it. Lunghi is situated just over the bay from Freetown, so your options are: a car, which can take over six hours on appalling roads; a ferry, which can take longer, with few lifejackets or lifeboats; or the helicopter, which should take about seven minutes.

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PM and Becks

From our UK edition

Jonathan Freedland has a fun piece in The Guardian today on the similarities between Tony Blair and David Beckham. Both have wives with a taste for the finer things in life, both are going to take the Yankee dollar in semi-retirement and both revel in their celebrity. It remains to be seen, though, if the Labour party will be forced to recall Blair after dropping him. Freedland argues that the two men are the epitome of modern Britishness. That’s precisely what is wrong with the country, I hear your roar. But really, they are not bad role models. Both work phenomenally hard, neither are easily down-hearted and both have show an ability to keep going long after the experts have written them off. Anyway, I’d rather have Blair and Becks than Brown and McClaren.

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Putin’s power play

From our UK edition

Read this excellent piece on the Putin missile row in the DT by Anne Applebaum (a Contributing Editor at the Spectator, when she is not winning Pulitzer Prizes and writing for the Washington Post).

Monday

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Some mothers do ‘ave ’em

From our UK edition

You would have thought that Lindsey Lohan’s mum would be a little suspicious of the whole showbiz tread mill what with her daughter checking into rehab for a month. But no, she’s in talks to put her two younger children—aged 11 and 14—on a reality show in which she’ll try and turn them into tabloid fodder, or depending on your point of view young starlets with a great future ahead of them. Also in celebrity land, one has to love the fact that the LAPD mug shot of Paris Hilton looks like a typical modelling shot. For the next 23 days, the outside world will be a Hilton-free-zone. Enjoy this while it lasts because once she’s out there’ll be no escaping her what with the prison diaries, the talk show appearances etc, etc..

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No go with the logo

From our UK edition

I am a big fan of the London Olympics but I am not a fan of their new logo. It looks like one of the puzzles from the Krypton Factor c.1977 or a very bad local authority advert for a Festival of Fitness. Apparently it is meant to appeal to the “Google Generation”. Dear me, no.

Sunday

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Tory grassroots vent their anger at Cameron and Willetts

From our UK edition

ConservativeHome’s regular survey of Tory activists, the same one that got the leadership result pretty much spot on, shows that David Cameron’s popularity with the grassroots has been badly dented by the grammar school debacle with his net satisfaction down from +49% to +22%. David Willetts is bearing the brunt of the party’s displeasure, though. His satisfaction rating has fallen 60 points to minus 24 percent; making him the most unpopular member of the shadow cabinet. No shadow minister has received such a low score since the survey started back at the beginning of Cameron’s tenure.

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Name that job

From our UK edition

Following the Coffee House debate a few days back on the lunacy of referring to "gangs" as "groups", I was delighted by the revelation in today's Mail on Sunday that an Islington primary school has decided that the headmaster should now be called the "lead learner". What would Thomas Arnold have made of that redesignation, I wonder? And why stop there? Let's call surgeons "health helpers" and psychiatrists "brain buddies". Prison warders should be "incarceration facilitators", while police officers might feel more comfortable re-titled "liaison workers with the criminal community". And Stephen Hawking would surely be less forbidding if he were called an "atomic aide", just there to help out with the tricky business of the origins of the universe.

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 2 June 2007

Major achievements Sir: I enjoyed and applauded Matthew Parris’s piece (Another voice, 26 May). It is indeed time that Sir John Major’s legacy was recognised and that he be remembered for those two acts that will leave what I hope will be an indelible mark on our daily life. Having been involved with cultural institutions that have been wholly renewed with Lottery money, I can only hope that its introduction will be remembered as his great contribution to this country. Let us fervently hope that this administration’s raid for the Olympics is resisted with maximum force by the current trustees to allow it to continue its remarkable work. Also let us remember his keeping sterling out of the eurozone by negotiating our opt-out of monetary union.

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The Blair story

From our UK edition

To John Self, Charles Highway and Keith Talent must now be added another unforgettable Martin Amis character: Tony Blair. Today's must read is the author's eyewitness account in the Guardian of the PM's last days. There are plenty of classic Amis phrases. I particularly enjoyed ; "the white-lipped and bloody-minded persistence of the question of Iraq";  the description of John Prescott as a "battered sensualist"; "the full totalitarian motorcade" in Washington; and Gordon Brown as "all fish and chips and Woodbine" compared to the sleek Blair. Amis is refreshingly candid about the "mildly but deplorably flirtatious" relationship he quickly established with his subject: this, after all, is what Blair does, to individuals and to nations."You’ve got steel.

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Join the Brady Bunch

From our UK edition

Why has the Tory grammar- school row raged for so long? It is glib to suggest, as some have, that it is simply filling a news vacuum as the political world awaits the ascension of Prime Minister Brown and averts its gaze from the slow car crash of the Labour deputy leadership contest. The truth is that Mr Brown and the six contenders to succeed John Prescott cannot believe their luck. Just when Labour was expecting embarrassing scrutiny of Mr Brown’s coronation and the Wacky Races of the battle for the deputy’s job, the Conservatives have contrived to mount an unexpectedly protracted bout of ‘Tory turmoil’: the first since David Cameron became leader in December 2005.

Friday

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The new Paris

From our UK edition

Paris Hilton’s coming incarceration and Lindsay Lohan’s trip to rehab creates an opening for a new party girl to keep the paparazzi employed though the summer, the red tops in copy and the rest of us entertained. New York Magazine have done us all a service by providing a guide to the runners and riders in the great It-girl steeplechase—and you’ll be glad to know that there’s plenty of  British representation. The Brit pack consists of Lily Allen who gets points for declaring that anyone who paid for Paris Hilton’s music album should be put down.

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Stating the obvious

From our UK edition

Bewildered rage has greeted Cardinal Keith O'Brien's announcement  that abortion is a bad thing and that Catholics should be against it.  He has been accused of using threatening and inflammatory language and of "punishing" pro-choice Catholic politicians by seeking to exclude them from the Church. He has done no such thing. In a sermon at St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act, the leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics urged medical schools to teach that all human life deserves protection, and called on hospitals to end tests designed to target and kill the weak and infirm.

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How to Survive without Government

From our UK edition

Wales scored a first in the modern political history of Britain this last month. It became the first area of the UK to survive-quite happily-without an elected government. For over three weeks after the inconclusive elections to the Cardiff Asembly the parties squabbled on who should form a coalition. Meanwhile, schools, hospitals and transport systems continued to operate and life continued much as before. Under-developed,de-industrialised countries do of course always benefit from the shock effect  and overall stimulation which spreads throughout the body politic when government withdraws from the scene and stops giving itself too much to do.

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It was forty years ago today…

From our UK edition

Sergeant Pepper always cheers me up because – aside from its musical brilliance – it is slightly older than I am. Today’s papers are full of readable celebrations of the album’s anniversary, including a Guardian leader and a “where is she now?” piece in The Times on the Lucy of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”. My favourite track, by a whisker, is still “She’s Leaving Home”. What do other Coffee Housers think?

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‘Im worried about Lesley’

From our UK edition

Now that Big Brother's returned for its summer run what does it tell us about the political mind of Britain? Leaders-and deputy leaders-come and go, manifestos get launched,opposition spokesmen are sacked and ministers do u-turns. But it's the cultural mood which decides whether a party's time is up or not. Brown's arrival and Brady's departure,Blears's bid and Cooper's HIPs (deceased) play into that mood and reflect the shifting scene. And reality tv really does tell us what television executives have decided about what the cultural stereotypes should be and how they perform on the scene.

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Depressing story of the day

From our UK edition

The Portuguese police are now using, of all things, tip-offs from mystics in the search for Madeleine McCann. It is hard to remember a police operation that has been so comprehensively or publicly bungled.