Columnists M - Z
Deborah Orr: Don't bother trying to exert yourself when everything has to be 'average'
Published: 13 January 2007
Can government education policy become any more confused? The headlines this week may have been dominated by the decision of the minister for communities to ship her child out of her community to be schooled. But the really gobsmacking thing is that the clumsy, weird legislation Ruth Kelly steered through Parliament as education minister precisely to wrong-foot all those ghastly middle-class state school users doing their best for their child, "like any parent", also came home to roost this week.
Brian Viner: False hunches about Notre Dame and true confessions of a homework cheat
Published: 13 January 2007
There was a wonderful response to this column's end-of-year quiz a fortnight ago, which just possibly had something to do with the marvellous prize generously donated by brewers Shepherd Neame: 365 bottles of Spitfire beer.
Matthew Norman: While Blair burns, Brown plays his fiddle
Published: 12 January 2007
Deborah Orr: She should not be sacked for these political beliefs
Published: 12 January 2007
I love it that the people who bandy around the word "fascist" as an insult to others, also want to see people fired from their jobs for believing things that they find unpalatable. The BNP has a right to exist, though to me this is an ugly and dangerous part of British culture. If Clarke wants to align herself, that's her look-out. And if ballet lovers don't want to see a BNP member dance, they can stay away if they wish to.
Janet Street-Porter: Set an example, Tony, and holiday in Britain
Published: 11 January 2007
How important is it to think of the environment when planning your holiday? If you're Prime Minister, not really. Although we are told all governmental activity will be carbon-neutral by 2015, and that Downing Street leads the way in energy conservation and recycling, Mr Blair clearly thinks that when he's relaxing, it's no one business but his own. His conscience stops when he runs up the steps of that jet whisking him off to Florida, Tuscany or wherever the sun is shining.
Mark Steel: Bush and English cricket have a lot in common
Published: 10 January 2007
Hamish McRae: The slow shift of economic power
Published: 10 January 2007
Deborah Orr: Face the facts: if we don't want a privacy law, we need to change our behaviour
Published: 10 January 2007
Brian Viner: Country Life
Published: 10 January 2007
Here in Docklow, the festive break contained more emphasis on the word "break" than we would have liked. A few days before Christmas, Richard, who lives a couple of fields away, appeared at our kitchen window looking unusually agitated for a man who is normally as calm and resourceful as James Bond.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Will Saddam's life be played out on stage?
Published: 09 January 2007
How long will it be, I wonder, before Saddam takes his bow on stage? Perhaps some assiduous writer is already at work now, penning the death cell monologue for this year's Edinburgh Fringe or working on the first draft of a screenplay. If The Last King of Scotland, Kevin McDonald's film about another murderous thug, Idi Amin, proves to have box office legs after it opens this week (or picks up an Oscar nomination for Forest Whitaker ) then it might not be a bad time to pitch Baathtime: The Saddam Hussein Story. And when such projects eventually appear we will no doubt have a minor fuss over the ethics of Saddam's representation. But however Saddam's post-humous career goes I doubt he will ever threaten the continuing supremacy of taboo achieved by Adolf Hitler - still able to stir unease in all his fictional appearances.
Steve Richards: The more we know about Gordon Brown, the more New Labour he appears to be
Published: 09 January 2007
John Walsh: Tales of the City
Published: 09 January 2007
Rowan Pelling: Girls who marry young get to repent at their leisure - so leave Kate alone
Published: 07 January 2007
Editor-At-Large: Shopping: the loser's route to happiness
Published: 07 January 2007
I hate resolutions, life-changing regimes and free advice. There is no way a "new" JSP is going to emerge from the gloom of January. But one simple bit of philosophy I read about last week has given me a lot to think about. A year ago, nauseated by rampant consumerism and growing piles of waste surrounding them, 10 ordinary people who lived in the San Francisco area formed a group calling themselves the Compact. They chose their name inspired by the Mayflower Compact - an agreement drafted by the original pilgrims who landed in America in 1620. The new Compact, for the 21st century, redefined the way that this group of New World citizens would run their lives. They signed up to give up shopping for a year: no new clothes, gadgets, cars, CDs or make-up. The only things they were allowed to buy were essentials such as medication, food and stuff like toothpaste.
Alan Watkins: Mr Brown is as much to blame as anyone for Labour being 'in a rut' over Iraq
Published: 07 January 2007
Brian Viner: Maximum breaks to breaking records, a year of birthdays and anniversaries
Published: 06 January 2007
Deborah Orr: It's not just the upper classes that are getting away with deadly blood sports
Published: 06 January 2007
When a pair of Rottweilers belonging to her mother's boyfriend mauled five-month-old Cadey-Lee Deacon to death, the nation remained largely decorous about the glimpse into social chaos afforded by the tragedy. There was acceptance, in the public sphere, at least, that it was reasonable that the pub the family lived in might need guard dogs, that a rule about the dogs remaining outside could have been understandably overlooked, and that no one was to blame for the baby's death.
Christina Patterson: Diet books? They're just for reading
Published: 05 January 2007
The wrong kind of weather, and indeed management, may be the chief cause of delays on our own super-pricey trains, but in New York explanations for late-running trains are a little less prosaic. According to the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the main culprits, after engineering problems, are "fainting dieters". Only in the land of the free and the faddy could an urgent desire to squeeze into your size-0 jeans bring public transport grinding to a halt. The supersized, wedged into seats increasingly designed for baby whales, must be furious.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Literary guilt ain't what it used to be
Published: 05 January 2007
Apparently, Stephen King is the nation's favourite guilty pleasure - which strikes me as a bit pathetic, really. I have no problem with the pleasure bit, you understand, having from time to time opened up one of King's Gothic potboilers with the crooning sigh of someone easing into a hot bath. But I'm not at all convinced that these responders really understand what literary guilt is. Don't they know that King effectively bypassed guilt several years ago? That he is a recipient of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. That The New Yorker has published his short stories? Alibis for reading his books are thick on the ground: you could claim to be fascinated by his deconstruction of late-20th-century consumer culture, for example; or pretend to an analytical interest in his incorporation of American demotic into the authorial voice. But you certainly don't have to feel guilty.
Janet Street-Porter: The two Davids tell farmers what to do
Published: 04 January 2007
My local farmer in Yorkshire has just spent three days in the rain up to his knees in water and mud digging a drainage ditch near my house, for £12 an hour. Who'd work on the land in the winter, when you're paid just a bit more than most cleaners in the posher parts of London? And yet everyone seems to have an opinion about farmers, what they grow, how they run their businesses, and what help they should be given.
Mark Steel: Will anyone remember this grumpy old man?
Published: 03 January 2007
Thomas Sutcliffe: Ethics aside, citizen reporters get scoops
Published: 02 January 2007
When ITV scheduled I Was There, a review of the year which sidestepped the traditional suppliers of news coverage in favour of "citizen journalists", they can't have known that the year's end would bring the most macabre example yet of this growing trend - the mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein's final drop.
Joan Smith: I'll always have my memories of Little Chef
Published: 02 January 2007
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