Commentariat

You are browsing the archives of 2008 May.

It is the final death knell of punk rock: Johnny Rotten, the former Sex Pistols front-man named and famed for the dreadful state of his gnashers, has had his teeth fixed.

When a story breaks of the pitiful death of an abused child, it often emerges that its plight was already partly known to social services.

For centuries, rubbish has been at the very heart of the understood bargain between citizens and their civic authorities. Recently, however, something has gone horribly awry in that long-standing agreement.

Like it or not, grandparenthood is indeed a life-changing event - one that is currently overtaking millions of ageing baby-boomers in a quite unexpected way, writes Jemima Lewis.

The Government wants a substantial increase in the period of detention without charge, but former Labour attorney general Peter Goldsmith warns that this would pose too great a risk to British freedoms.

Terry Wogan says that if the British music industry can’t swing even one of our major acts to represent the country at the Eurovision, we’re really wasting our time.

Gordon Brown’s government is so fragiles that one more gust of fury could do for it, writes Matthew d’Ancona.

Britain’s streets may be cleaner than those in war zones, but in the past couple of years they have acquired something of a similar aura of random violence, writes Colin Freeman.

The thing about economic downturns is that they are spiritually as well as financially depressing, which makes it more important than ever to keep morale up by over-indulging, writes Melissa Kite.

He won’t hear a word of criticism, dismissing it all as snobbery. In fact it derives from his disregard of the job’s traditions and his keen pursuit of its pay, pension and perks, writes William Langley.

Reading unpleasant things about yourself in the press is gut-wrenchingly grim; more so than you’d imagine, writes Margaret Cook.

At some stage — perhaps very soon — the English Question will explode into British politics, and will decisively change the political landscape, writes Frank Field.

Literary festivals are all the rage. After Hay-on-Wye last week, everybody wants to know what’s coming up. Here are some dates for your diary, writes Oliver Pritchett.

Oxford wants £1.25 billion. That is the target of the biggest fundraising drive in the university’s history, announced last week, writes Jenny McCartney.

There is rich symbolism in the fact that the former Conservative Central Office in Smith Square, Westminster, is to be renamed “Europe House”, writes Christopher Booker.

These are tough times for Labour. The local election results and the opinion
polls tell a depressing story. The Crewe by-election defeat cannot be
dismissed as normal mid-term blues. Nor can it be laid at the door of the
local campaign. It is more fundamental than that. Voters are walking away
from us because they fear we have failed to keep pace with them.

This is one of those moments when fine words are tested. In recent months and years, we have heard plenty of calls to action on climate change, phrased in increasingly urgent terms. Yet there is still a common perception, as Peter Ainsworth, the Conservative spokesman, put it yesterday, that “at the first whiff of economic difficulty the green agenda dies”. That is the old thinking, and Mr Ainsworth rightly chastised the Prime Minister for falling into it. A steep rise in oil prices is precisely the time when it is most important to argue for and defend green policies. That is why we present the choice in our coverage today as that between a Brown future and a green future.

Was it bad karma? Or possibly, feng shui? I must say I hadn’t considered either as the cause of the earthquake that devastated China nearly three weeks ago. I was thinking more along the lines of tectonic plates and sudden releases of energy. So I am grateful to Sharon Stone for alerting me to the possibility of a supernatural explanation. Ms Stone thinks all those tons of rubble could have been caused by China’s treatment of her “good friend” the Dalai Lama.

At last week’s launch party for Standpoint, the right wing intellectual magazine, I said to Marigold Johnson, wife of Paul Johnson and mother of the magazine’s editor Daniel Johnson, that she must be proud of her son (an opening line that works with 99.9 per cent of mothers on this planet). Marigold smiled prettily and referred to a letter her husband had written to Daniel to commemorate the occasion. She had been touched and amused by its Victorian formality and its bashfulness about mentioning the magazine itself.

It will be one month tomorrow since Cyclone Nargis swept across the Andaman Sea and crashed into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta. Initially the secretive junta said that just 351 people had lost their lives. The gap between their Orwellian pronouncements and reality soon became clear. More than 100,000 were estimated to be dead. Another two million were at risk.

Because he is not Tony Blair, I have been prepared to forgive Gordon Brown for most things. I am a reasonable woman, and everybody should be given a fair chance. But last week I finally ran out of patience. The Prime Minister has been phoning up members of the public, it turns out. He calls them on their home numbers. And even if he doesn’t actually call them at six o’clock in the morning, as his critics delighted, briefly, in believing, he is either out of touch with modern communication etiquette or lining up a fallback career as a double-glazing salesman - neither of which is forgiveable.

It all started so well. Had the wives and girlfriends on The Weakest Link last Monday banked at the right moment, they would have taken a perfect five grand from the first round. The questions weren’t rocket science, exactly, but the WAGs still got them all correct, and even Anne Robinson seemed becalmed in the face of such relentless adequacy. The opinionators hoping for a bimbo bloodbath must have been starting to worry.

Friends of James Purnell are wondering when he will name the day. Not to topple Gordon, but to end his 38 years as a bachelor and get married. The salad-faced Work and Pensions Secretary could make a convincing bid for the top job, but being unmarried would prove a major hindrance. Fortunately, he is already equipped with a long-term girlfriend, art-house film-maker Lucy Walker, a friend from his days at Oxford University. The pair have had a long-term engagement, which was broken off a couple of years ago although it is now back on, according to his staff. Friends say she is “the one”, but his staff refuse to confirm whether there are any plans for this nebulous marriage. Gordon will know to start worrying should the wedding bells ever ring out.

When John Peel died and a nation mourned, his widow said he would never have believed all the fuss, had he been there to witness it. The same is surely true of Beryl Cook, whose paintings, largely eschewed by national galleries, have been gracing the TV headlines and the front pages of newspapers after the artist’s death last week. Cook, who was 81 and had been suffering quietly from cancer, was a shy, working-class woman who preferred to drink in her Plymouth local than accept an invitation to see her paintings hanging in Jackie Collins’s home in Los Angeles (though her husband rather fancied making the trip and was a bit annoyed she wouldn’t go).

Tomorrow, Gordon Brown can make an old man happy. “Mr Fukuda,” he can say, as he shakes the hand of the Japanese Prime Minister, who is visiting No 10, “I am even more unpopular than you.”