Elephants play football during the annual Surin Elephant Roundup in Thailand, November 2009. The festival, which began in 1960, features some 250 elephants that participate in a giant parade and activities such as football and tug-of-war
Literature
Martin Amis on Coetzee: he’s got no talent
In an exclusive interview for Prospect, to be published on our website on 1st February, Martin Amis discusses his new novel with our arts and books editor Tom Chatfield—and his impatience with just how miserable much of the most acclaimed modern fiction is. Among other things, Amis pours scorn on the popular assumption that “it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones” when it comes to writing novels. “Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure,” he explained. “I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. But the denial of the pleasure principle has got a lot of followers.” For a full transcript of their hour-long conversation—including Amis’s definitive verdict on why “all the good novels are the funny ones”—visit this site on Monday 1st.
Sport
Britain: unlikely chess superpower
With budget cuts forcing Boris Johnson to promise an “intimate” Olympics, Britain may need a more glamorous distraction. Thankfully, as Prospect can reveal, 2012 is likely to see Britain hosting one genuinely well-funded contest: the World Chess Championships. It’s a triumph for native aficionados that owes much to the efforts of a mysterious multi-millionaire, whose love of the game is matched only by his desire to steer clear of the limelight. The championships decide who is the world’s top chess dog—currently Indian Viswanathan Anand, but may soon be 19-year-old Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen, who astonished the chess world during 2009 with his precocious brilliance. Britain’s backer made his fortune in hedge funds, and he’s also said to have the ear of the shadow chancellor. Importantly, too, he devotes much of his time to charity. Perhaps Boris might like to shake a tin in his direction?
Britain
Beware the Manchurian Comrade
A young man, traumatised by conflict, is brainwashed by a shadowy left-wing figure into attacking an attractive aspiring politician. The plot of the 1950s thriller The Manchurian Candidate could soon be played out at the highest level of British politics, thanks to our favourite grumpy leftist: Neal Lawson. The head of centre-left pressure group Compass, Lawson is now professionally disappointed with new Labour. Brown lost his support after only a few weeks of entering No 10. But having washed his hands of Labour, Lawson may have adopted a classic leftist fallback tactic: entryism.
At the new Labour consulting firm Lawson Lucas Mendelson (LLM), where he was a director until late 2004, Lawson led an elite trio of Labour lobbyists. But he was not so narrowly partisan as to eschew hiring young Tories. Now some of these men, schooled in class struggle, have risen to be David Cameron’s inner circle. Ex-LLM’ers James O’Shaughnessy and Oliver Dowden now toil as Tory head of policy and director of public operations respectively. Meanwhile the appropriately named Adam Smith is the right-hand man to Tory culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt, seen by many (especially himself) as the Conservative leader after next. Here is the nightmare scenario: with Cameron in No 10, Lawson flicks the switch, and his deadly drones undermine the Tories’ first year with a brace of poorly prepared briefings and bad spin. Even better: the trio could follow Lawson’s own lead, and form the first Cameroon consultancy. Smith O’Shaughnessy Dowden—or SOD. It certainly has a ring to it.
Why the head counters need a bean counter
In this month’s cover story, Prospect digs deep into Tim Berners-Lee’s personal jihad to unlock Britain’s public information. Most geeks scorn the state for hoarding data goodies, and Berners-Lee uncovered a particularly foul bit of hoarding in an unlikely Whitehall corner: the 2011 census. There is no single database of British postcodes suitable for Britain’s decennial headcount, so frantic civil servants decided to pay top dollar for a new one, which meant merging various other databases. But what happens when the census is finished? It was a question raised by justice minister Michael Wills in a meeting to discuss Berners-Lee’s work. Would they be making this new database free for all to use, as suggested by Berners-Lee? Oh no, came the ashen-faced reply. There were some “problems” with the licensing: the entire postcode database would have to be deleted after use. Wills, Prospect understands, nearly jumped out of his chair. One of Gordon Brown’s closest confidants, and a longtime backer of open government, Wills was also staggered to learn the price tag: many millions, probably more than £10m, for this soon-to-be-deleted asset. From that moment, the scandalised minister became an even more fervent backer of Berners-Lee’s work. Sometimes, it’s the inefficiencies of government that are the real drivers of change.
Tory science policy—more rigour required
“Children are being denied a chance to sit separate science GCSEs” screamed a press release from Conservative HQ last summer, framing the party as custodian of scientific learning. It may be the Tories, though, who need remedial lessons. Labour and Lib-Dem bigwigs have long been courting eggheads, popping in for lunch at the Royal Society and speaking up for their precarious funding in the recession. Few such moves have come from Cameron et al. Moreover, the party’s two major scientific policy initiatives have been put into the capable hands of a vacuum cleaner salesman (the James Dyson review of innovation) and a television presenter (the Carol Vorderman review of maths) respectively. Meanwhile there are increasingly audible grumblings about Adam Afriyie, MP for Windsor, who is Tory innovation tsar and is meant to be hunting down world-beating ideas. So far the only idea he has come up with is that science advisers should be sackable “on any terms.” Not an idea to endear the whitecoated ones.
Northern Ireland
Robinson tries to answer the Irish question
When the Beeb asked Northern Ireland’s unfortunate first minister Peter Robinson to confirm “that neither yourself nor Iris have done anything illegal,” he replied, carefully: “I am absolutely certain that everything that I have done has been done as it should.” Robinson was, no doubt, telling the truth. But he did so in surprisingly guarded terms—and only in response to the question as he had reformulated it in his head, which didn’t include the “nor Iris” bit. In this, the steadfast Pentecostal came perilously close to invoking the odd Roman Catholic doctrine of “mental reservation.” This quirk of theology (which is elaborated on in “Letter from Dublin,” p33) was used in a recent abuse inquiry by the ex-archbishop of Dublin, who answered a different question from the one asked of him in order to deny paying off a paedophile priest. He kept his conscience clean— apparently—because he provided a true answer to the question he had chosen to hear. That it was different from the question asked of him did not seem to matter.
That may seem a moral context of an entirely different order. But then, Peter Robinson’s crisis was occasioned by the admission by his wife, Iris, that she had had an affair. This is the same woman who cited the Bible when likening child sexual abuse to homosexuality. And that same Bible is rather unkind to adulterers. Leviticus, in particular, is unambiguous: “the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
Fortunately, we live in more tolerant times; a fact that the Robinsons may be quickly waking up to. When Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness offered his hand in sympathy at a recent, private meeting, Robinson shook it. “I thought it would be wrong of me in those circumstances to do anything other than that,” he said afterwards. The question that remains, of course, is whether he did so without reservation.
Technology
Fancy a spin of social roulette?
Has the web lost the plot? The latest hit is a website that instantly drops you into a conversation with someone else somewhere else in the world: just the two of you, in two little video windows onscreen. The catch? You have no idea who the person will be, until you click “start.” Then chatroulette.com does exactly what it says on the url: every click brings you a new talking partner, with the only suggestion being “have interesting conversations!” Predictably, the site produces some racy results. As one friend of Prospect put it: “Let’s just say it’s not suitable for the British Library humanities reading room. Biology perhaps?” That said, the holding message on the site—“looking for a random stranger, please wait”—may just have that combination of danger, intrigue and transforming possibility that first made the internet great.
What’s coming up
7th February Ukrainian presidential election, second round 8th February 33rd America’s Cup yachting race begins 12th February Vancouver Winter Olympics begin 13th February Mardi Gras carnival 14th February Chinese new year 27th February The Conservative party spring conference opens in Brighton.
Literature
Martin Amis on Coetzee: he’s got no talent
In an exclusive interview for Prospect, to be published on our website on 1st February, Martin Amis discusses his new novel with our arts and books editor Tom Chatfield—and his impatience with just how miserable much of the most acclaimed modern fiction is. Among other things, Amis pours scorn on the popular assumption that “it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones” when it comes to writing novels. “Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure,” he explained. “I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. But the denial of the pleasure principle has got a lot of followers.” For a full transcript of their hour-long conversation—including Amis’s definitive verdict on why “all the good novels are the funny ones”—visit this site on Monday 1st.
Sport
Britain: unlikely chess superpower
With budget cuts forcing Boris Johnson to promise an “intimate” Olympics, Britain may need a more glamorous distraction. Thankfully, as Prospect can reveal, 2012 is likely to see Britain hosting one genuinely well-funded contest: the World Chess Championships. It’s a triumph for native aficionados that owes much to the efforts of a mysterious multi-millionaire, whose love of the game is matched only by his desire to steer clear of the limelight. The championships decide who is the world’s top chess dog—currently Indian Viswanathan Anand, but may soon be 19-year-old Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen, who astonished the chess world during 2009 with his precocious brilliance. Britain’s backer made his fortune in hedge funds, and he’s also said to have the ear of the shadow chancellor. Importantly, too, he devotes much of his time to charity. Perhaps Boris might like to shake a tin in his direction?
Britain
Beware the Manchurian Comrade
A young man, traumatised by conflict, is brainwashed by a shadowy left-wing figure into attacking an attractive aspiring politician. The plot of the 1950s thriller The Manchurian Candidate could soon be played out at the highest level of British politics, thanks to our favourite grumpy leftist: Neal Lawson. The head of centre-left pressure group Compass, Lawson is now professionally disappointed with new Labour. Brown lost his support after only a few weeks of entering No 10. But having washed his hands of Labour, Lawson may have adopted a classic leftist fallback tactic: entryism.
At the new Labour consulting firm Lawson Lucas Mendelson (LLM), where he was a director until late 2004, Lawson led an elite trio of Labour lobbyists. But he was not so narrowly partisan as to eschew hiring young Tories. Now some of these men, schooled in class struggle, have risen to be David Cameron’s inner circle. Ex-LLM’ers James O’Shaughnessy and Oliver Dowden now toil as Tory head of policy and director of public operations respectively. Meanwhile the appropriately named Adam Smith is the right-hand man to Tory culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt, seen by many (especially himself) as the Conservative leader after next. Here is the nightmare scenario: with Cameron in No 10, Lawson flicks the switch, and his deadly drones undermine the Tories’ first year with a brace of poorly prepared briefings and bad spin. Even better: the trio could follow Lawson’s own lead, and form the first Cameroon consultancy. Smith O’Shaughnessy Dowden—or SOD. It certainly has a ring to it.
Why the head counters need a bean counter
In this month’s cover story, Prospect digs deep into Tim Berners-Lee’s personal jihad to unlock Britain’s public information. Most geeks scorn the state for hoarding data goodies, and Berners-Lee uncovered a particularly foul bit of hoarding in an unlikely Whitehall corner: the 2011 census. There is no single database of British postcodes suitable for Britain’s decennial headcount, so frantic civil servants decided to pay top dollar for a new one, which meant merging various other databases. But what happens when the census is finished? It was a question raised by justice minister Michael Wills in a meeting to discuss Berners-Lee’s work. Would they be making this new database free for all to use, as suggested by Berners-Lee? Oh no, came the ashen-faced reply. There were some “problems” with the licensing: the entire postcode database would have to be deleted after use. Wills, Prospect understands, nearly jumped out of his chair. One of Gordon Brown’s closest confidants, and a longtime backer of open government, Wills was also staggered to learn the price tag: many millions, probably more than £10m, for this soon-to-be-deleted asset. From that moment, the scandalised minister became an even more fervent backer of Berners-Lee’s work. Sometimes, it’s the inefficiencies of government that are the real drivers of change.
Tory science policy—more rigour required
“Children are being denied a chance to sit separate science GCSEs” screamed a press release from Conservative HQ last summer, framing the party as custodian of scientific learning. It may be the Tories, though, who need remedial lessons. Labour and Lib-Dem bigwigs have long been courting eggheads, popping in for lunch at the Royal Society and speaking up for their precarious funding in the recession. Few such moves have come from Cameron et al. Moreover, the party’s two major scientific policy initiatives have been put into the capable hands of a vacuum cleaner salesman (the James Dyson review of innovation) and a television presenter (the Carol Vorderman review of maths) respectively. Meanwhile there are increasingly audible grumblings about Adam Afriyie, MP for Windsor, who is Tory innovation tsar and is meant to be hunting down world-beating ideas. So far the only idea he has come up with is that science advisers should be sackable “on any terms.” Not an idea to endear the whitecoated ones.
Northern Ireland
Robinson tries to answer the Irish question
When the Beeb asked Northern Ireland’s unfortunate first minister Peter Robinson to confirm “that neither yourself nor Iris have done anything illegal,” he replied, carefully: “I am absolutely certain that everything that I have done has been done as it should.” Robinson was, no doubt, telling the truth. But he did so in surprisingly guarded terms—and only in response to the question as he had reformulated it in his head, which didn’t include the “nor Iris” bit. In this, the steadfast Pentecostal came perilously close to invoking the odd Roman Catholic doctrine of “mental reservation.” This quirk of theology (which is elaborated on in “Letter from Dublin,” p33) was used in a recent abuse inquiry by the ex-archbishop of Dublin, who answered a different question from the one asked of him in order to deny paying off a paedophile priest. He kept his conscience clean— apparently—because he provided a true answer to the question he had chosen to hear. That it was different from the question asked of him did not seem to matter.
That may seem a moral context of an entirely different order. But then, Peter Robinson’s crisis was occasioned by the admission by his wife, Iris, that she had had an affair. This is the same woman who cited the Bible when likening child sexual abuse to homosexuality. And that same Bible is rather unkind to adulterers. Leviticus, in particular, is unambiguous: “the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
Fortunately, we live in more tolerant times; a fact that the Robinsons may be quickly waking up to. When Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness offered his hand in sympathy at a recent, private meeting, Robinson shook it. “I thought it would be wrong of me in those circumstances to do anything other than that,” he said afterwards. The question that remains, of course, is whether he did so without reservation.
Technology
Fancy a spin of social roulette?
Has the web lost the plot? The latest hit is a website that instantly drops you into a conversation with someone else somewhere else in the world: just the two of you, in two little video windows onscreen. The catch? You have no idea who the person will be, until you click “start.” Then chatroulette.com does exactly what it says on the url: every click brings you a new talking partner, with the only suggestion being “have interesting conversations!” Predictably, the site produces some racy results. As one friend of Prospect put it: “Let’s just say it’s not suitable for the British Library humanities reading room. Biology perhaps?” That said, the holding message on the site—“looking for a random stranger, please wait”—may just have that combination of danger, intrigue and transforming possibility that first made the internet great.
What’s coming up
7th February Ukrainian presidential election, second round 8th February 33rd America’s Cup yachting race begins 12th February Vancouver Winter Olympics begin 13th February Mardi Gras carnival 14th February Chinese new year 27th February The Conservative party spring conference opens in Brighton.
