The Spectator’s Notes

20 November 2004

cavalry charge (Keru Gorge, Eritrea, January 1941) was discussed. When was the positively last cavalry charge? Do the events in the House of Commons this week suggest it might be time for

another one?

It seems only yesterday that we British used to congratulate ourselves by pointing out that the Americans were tremendous cry-babies about losing men in combat. Funny how that one has gone quiet. A friend of mine who was a junior minister for Mrs Thatcher tells the story against himself of how he made this claim to her when the coalition forces failed to go on to Baghdad in the first Gulf war.

She turned the famous blue eyes upon him: ‘Only a pipsqueak would make

such a remark!’

One of my favourite BBC characters is Orla Guerin, the Corporation’s reporter in the Middle East. With her grim expression, perfect humourlessness and querulous tones, she could have been created by a satirist of broadcasting bias. Reluctantly acknowledging, after his death, that Yasser Arafat might have had something to do with violence, she turned this round by saying that he was ‘the great excuse’ for Israel not to make peace. One of her traits in her reports is to prefer sentences without verbs, as it might be: ‘Israeli gunships blasting the village all day; for five-year-old Ibrahim, a mother dead, for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, another hit in “the War on Terror”, as night falls, the grieving.’ The absence of a main verb allows her to evade the statement of a fact and concentrate on purveying an impression, always the same: ‘Palestinians good, Israel bad.’

Some annoying things being said too often at present: ‘It’s hard-wired into the DNA’, ‘He’s getting shedloads of money’ (emphasis on the ‘shed’), ‘We must be America’s candid friend’, and anything ending with the word ‘moi?’