Commentariat

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I have a confession to make. I love not one despised style of music, but two: heavy metal, and country& western. As they scroll down my iPod, my friends weep – and retch. And it gets worse: I believe these eruptions of noise offer a political parable. Really: set aside your prejudices and your earplugs and stock up on metal and country. You will slowly see we have misunderstood two of the most politically charged, politically reviled places on earth: the Muslim world, and the Deep South. Don’t turn the page over; stay with me.

Nicolas Sarkozy faces a hard task when he travels to Moscow today in an attempt to bridge East-West differences over the Georgia crisis that have, if anything, widened in recent weeks. A month after the Georgian government launched its ill-fated assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the French President, who holds the EU presidency, has to persuade Russia to abide by the six-point peace plan he brokered. This would involve Russia withdrawing forces from Georgia proper, agreeing to the free movement of monitors in a buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia and initiating a framework for security talks between Tblisi and Moscow.

It’s my son Jackson’s fourth birthday today, and we’re having a big party for him. Stacey has booked a huge bouncy castle for the south lawn, and boxes of going-away presents, dinosaur-related plates and other bric-a-brac has been overloading our poor postman. Should it rain, the village hall has also been rented as a fallback – nothing has been left to chance. Jackson is blissfully unaware of all Stacey’s hard work. He is more concerned with the guest list. One moment he wants “no girls”, then he wants “no boys”. Invites change by the second, as someone becomes uninvited because they threw sand in his face or were “mean”. In my experience it’s best never to invite boys, as they are a total nightmare compared to girls at that age. I remember the first time my daughter Parker invited boys to her party – a little feral gang rampaged through our house hitting dogs with swords and shouting … so much shouting.

The Tony award nominations for the best work in New York were announced on Wednesday, and it was a good moment for London theatre. Eight Brits were nominated for major acting prizes, and the Chocolate Factory’s show, Sunday in the Park with George, picked up nine nominations of its own. To think that it started in our small theatre in Southwark makes me very proud.

Tom Fawthrop: The junta won’t let in western aid workers. Unfortunately, the south-east Asian nations that could be saving lives in Burma are dragging their feet

Tom Fawthrop: The junta won’t let in western aid workers. Unfortunately, the south-east Asian nations that could be saving lives in Burma are dragging their feet

Before engaging in the complex and technical debate about whether the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius should be permitted to compete in the able-bodied Olympics, it is useful to take a step back and reflect on what a remarkable thing Mr Pistorius has already achieved, and what a trail he has blazed for other disabled sportsmen and women.

Ed Pomfret: Northern Petroleum is planning to drill for oil in Sussex woodland. We shouldn’t allow the South Downs to be treated this way

Ed Pomfret: Northern Petroleum is planning to drill for oil in Sussex woodland. We shouldn’t allow the South Downs to be treated this way

McCain needs to pick his partner very carefully. A heartbeat away from the Presidency matters more when the heart in question will be 72 at the time of the inauguration. Here are some of the suggestions: 1) Tim Pawlenty The…

The Government has pledged to build three million extra homes by 2020, but how can this be done without concreting over the countryside? This question has been worrying me, as it must worry anyone who likes grass, and thinks some of it should still be visible in the South-east. So I went along to a lecture on this topic at the Royal Geographical Society this week, where the message was sent out loud and clear: Worry not. We can do it.

I’m in the south of France for a quick break with Victoria. It wasn’t my idea, I hate France – but Victoria has started to get a little bit of bulimia back as pre-wedding nerves start to kick in and she needed a break.

Political journalists like me love nothing more than a bit of banter with Cabinet Ministers and other senior politicians. But I confess that Harriet Harman won our contest during Gordon Brown’s visit to the Beormund Community Centre, Bermondsey, to spell…

Charles Clarke, the dissident former home secretary, was fairly loyal last night at a debate  held by Progress magazine at (ironic this) the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House. However, Mr Clarke conspicuously failed to answer the question of whether Gordon Brown was the right man to lead Labour into the next election.*
The motion: whether Labour could hold [...]

RW Johnson: Support for the South African president has collapsed; for survival, he now relies on his worst political enemy

Letters: Penis envy comes to public art. The south had the one criterion that its erection must be twice as big as the Angel of the North

Holding the Olympic Games in Beijing was always going to be controversial. China's leaders are not usually ignorant of history. They know what happened when the Games were held in South Korea and Mexico: running, jumping, diving and swimming were accompanied by protesting.

Jeremy Kuper: Despite its protestations, the ANC government seems to want to control more and more of the country’s press and media

The news that Jimmy Mizen, a boy of 16, has been brutally murdered in a south London shop will once more stir deep anxiety about the frightening increase in violent crime involving the young.

Since the Weasel’s research budget for this special issue on China did not
stretch to a business class return to Shanghai, I settled for Croydon. No
544 Purley Way may seem an unlikely spot to plumb the mysteries of the
Orient, but my friend Malcolm maintains that a visit here is "like a
little holiday". It’s not every address on the periphery of south
London that boasts a massive pagoda-style entrance arch decorated with
dragons in green porcelain. Inside, you find more quasi-Chinese architecture
housing a number of Asian restaurants, but a utilitarian structure of
corrugated aluminium just visible behind the pyramid of roofs was the real
goal of our (very) short-haul journey.

In October 1989 Ian Brodie, then Washington correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph, was accompanying Vice-President Dan Quayle on a trip to southern
California when an earthquake struck San Francisco. As Quayle’s aides
dithered, Brodie intervened. “I know what Margaret Thatcher would do. She
would fly straight up there,” he said. Quayle took his advice, Brodie went
with him, and he scooped the world with a helicopter tour of the devastated
area.

The European Commission seems to have applied its competition policy to the letter with its decision to allow South Korea’s STX shipbuilding group to take a controlling interest in Aker Yards

News that England is poised to become the most crowded nation in western Europe will come as little surprise to the millions who already battle their way to work in London and the South East.

I’ve walked past the house on Lordship Lane in Dulwich a hundred times, and wondered how such an elegant building could be dying of neglect. Its graceful proportions, arched windows and luxurious gables suggest a distinguished provenance, but it’s now an empty wreck. The trashed roof, the boarded-up windows, the planks shoring up the frontage all give the place a look of ineffable melancholy – as if it were aghast at the way its life has turned out. I discovered it was once the rectory to St Peter’s Church, that it was built in 1873 by one Charles Drake of the Patent Concrete Building Company, and is apparently the only surviving example in England of a Victorian “concrete house”. But its present owner can’t be found, and Southwark Council won’t demolish it because it’s a Grade II-listed building. So it stands in limbo.

Though the phrase is blithely tossed about, I cannot fathom out how high-fliers manage to “divide their time” between, say, “an ocean cottage in Malibu and a townhouse in Knightsbridge”. Any attempt to shift between our humble dwellings in south London and North Yorkshire involves a logistical exercise on much the same scale as Operation Overlord. For some reason, we find it impossible to make the 250-mile journey unaccompanied by a scarcely conceivable amount of clothing, books, computers and emergency provisions of bacon and cheese. Since Yorkshire is not short of these comestibles, it is far from unknown for them to make the round trip, in much the same way as Norwegian aquavit is matured by being used as ballast on merchant vessels bound for Australia.