Commentariat

You are browsing the archives of 2008 May.

Ever since things began to go wrong for Mr Gordon Brown, in autumn last year, the progress of the Government has been presented as an obstacle race. He has fallen at every hurdle.

The Independent titles don’t exist, I was told last week. “Yes, really,” an official from one of Britain’s leading lobby groups informed me. “We’ve been sending emails to you and they just keep bouncing back.” I don’t need to repeat the famous words of Mark Twain to reassure you that we are very much alive and well! Sadly, it turns out that my correspondent is suffering from an affliction increasingly rife in the UK - the inability to spell some of the most common words in the language. Such as “independent”.

A few weeks ago, all but one of the stories handed into my creative writing workshop ended with the narrator being murdered. I looked around my students, trying to spot a homicidal glint in their eyes. Was that human blood, or just a tea stain, on my Don DeLillo handout? Was he holding his pen like a flick knife?

I can barely remember my previous life before Hay-on-Wye. I distantly recall that I have children and a wife – is she Canadian or Japanese, definitely foreign, but from where?

In 2000 little Victoria Climbié, eight years old, was murdered by her
guardians, having endured months of appalling abuse and cruelty. You may
remember the harrowing court case, Lord Laming’s subsequent inquiry, the
trenchant criticisms of Haringey social services for their “blinding
incompetence”. Victoria came from the Ivory Coast and arrived here in the
custody of her “great-aunt”.

Amazing how the ideological U-turns come thick and fast after you hit 40. I’ve
written in the past about the freakiness of Botox and procedures like it and
about the evils of plastic surgery. It turns out that my opinions were
shared by Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue, who wrote last week about
how she deplored any kind of procedure aimed at concealing the inescapable
fact that none of us is getting younger.

It became clear last week that the mantle of the late Mary Whitehouse has
wafted onto the shoulders of Bishop Nazir-Ali of Rochester. Just as she did,
he is now standing as a lonely champion of western, particularly Christian,
civilisation. Just as she did in her Edna Everage glasses, he with his
lavish mutton-chop whiskers cuts a distinctly comic figure.

Who needs James Bond again? Hollywood offers no shortage of suave sex and
violence. Television delivers breasts, hunks and blood galore. Yet something
in the national psyche craves the return of a hero who operates on the
wilder shores of national defence, an embodiment of Britishness against a
deadly foe.

I haven’t said it yet, but I hope that both Lord James Higham of Strath-Pfeffer and Welshcakes Limencello enjoy themselves. Sometimes life does give us a free lunch …

Neel Mukherjee: Virgin, Renaissance princess, warrior: the myth Elizabeth I created centuries ago still has us in its grip

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column Why is it that nobody in our own elite actually likes or understands this country or its people or its traditions? Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born…

Guy Dammann: Hay festival 2008: Fact: capitalism is destroying the world. Question: what the hell are we going to do about it?

John Harris: Hay festival 2008: Martin Amis should return to fiction. Global politics are not his strong point

Ian Bancroft: If Bosnia and Herzegovina is to move forward, it must stop being an international protectorate - and the high representative should be scrapped

Phil Hall: Recent violence could have been avoided if the government had lived up to the progressive spirit of the ANC’s Freedom Charter

From Noodle Pie via Twitter:

Watching crabs wriggling their last in boiling water. I know I’ll have to pay for this in another life. But they do taste good.

Noodlepie is a cookery and “bio blogger, journalist, media trainer, dietary explorer”.

William Hall’s career as a film critic and broadcaster spanned 50 years. A
former president of the film section of the Critics’ Circle, he was the film
critic for the London Evening News from 1959 until its closure in
1980 and during his time with the paper interviewed many of Hollywood’s
biggest stars, including John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Spencer Tracy, Clint
Eastwood and Elizabeth Taylor. He was famous for his byline, “The man the
big stars talk to”.

Nicholas Baker was a London yacht broker involved in the sale and purchase of
some of the world’s most opulent yachts.

Though he concealed it beneath a gruff exterior and quite liked to be
described as a curmudgeon, Dai Davies, the golf writer for The Guardian
for 22 years, was a man who cared deeply about a number of subjects. Whether
it was barbershop quartet singing, the performances of Wales’s rugby teams,
slow play in golf, red wine, links golf courses or the affairs of Crewe
Alexandra, Davies championed them with considerable vigour.

Peter Milne was one of Britain’s most prolific and innovative designers of
small boats. He is best known for the 4.93-metre dingy Fireball, a two-man
performance scow.

Watch the
Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, directed by Joseph Pevney

Terence Samuel: For evidence of how badly George Bush has damaged the Republican party, consider where Ronald Reagan stood 20 years ago

John Harris: Hay festival 2008: My preconceptions about John Prescott were blown away by the sensitive soul I met last night