19 Sep 2009

19 September 2009

In this issue

Featured articles

Thank you, Germaine, I’m enjoying all the breasts

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one.Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one. Greer wrote a page of splenetic ‘comment’ on my new book, Woman as Design, in Monday’s Guardian.

Chucking millions down the Tube

Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in?At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings. George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans.

Stick to buying perfume and forget about kids, Sir Elton

Rod Liddle says that celebrity adoption has become an unsavoury game of Top Trumps, and that the Ukraine would be right to turn down Elton John’s bid for a babyThe world may indeed be shrinking and its people becoming an undifferentiated morass, but east of the Oder-Neisse line they are not quite the same as us just yet. There is a certain infelicity when dealing with sensitive social issues, the sort of thing you hear over here only when no one is listening.

How to spring the benefits trap

Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemploymentIn the reception of The Spectator’s office stands a statuette of a Welsh miner, pick and shovel over his shoulder, above an inscription ‘from the townsfolk of Aberdare’. The town had been savagely hit during the collapse in demand for British coal in the 1920s, with almost half of its residents out of work.

Cameron is not an enigma, he’s an Anglican

The reason why so many people cannot fathom David Cameron is that he is an Anglican. This gives him considerable (some would say contemptible) flexibility as far as dogma is concerned, while making him intent on upholding a strict (if unstated) code of behaviour.No wonder the Tory leader infuriates those in his own party who crave certainty. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Theirs is the predicament of Nigerian Christians who look to Canterbury for dogma, and find themselves fobbed off with liberalism.

Fixers are the unsung heroes of foreign wars

The black Mercedes lurched forward and sideways, a thick grey cloud erupted at its rear and its boot flew open. The thump of the detonating Israeli tank round reached me 300 yards away as I looked on from the Jewish settlement of Metulla.There was a cheer from local residents, who had gathered to watch the withdrawal of their army from southern Lebanon after 18 years, from the relative safety of Israeli territory.

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