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Sunday 27 May 2012

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

The people who best understand and most detest the Western media’s adulation of Islamist terror groups are Arabs from the secular Left. One such was Kassem Jaffar, who died last week. Kassem was part of the Lebanese Shiite diaspora, born in Nigeria. He graduated from the American University in Beirut in the 1970s, and latterly lived in London, writing for London-based Arab papers such as Al-Hayat and Al-Wasat. He served on the board of Al-Jazeera and was an adviser to the Qatar government. Kassem’s anger with Israel and the West was not of the existential or fanatical kind encouraged by the Islamists. In fact, he was not anti-Israel. He criticised only its opportunism in seeking an accommodation with Syria at the expense of his own country. In his view, Lebanon was destroyed by sectarianism, and he was coruscating, though coolly analytical, of the way Western reports romanticised Hezbollah and played down its murderous extremism. You could learn more about the Middle East in half an hour of Kassem than from an eternity of Jeremy Bowen, but now, aged 53, he is gone.

In the first of Jeremy Paxman’s television series The Victorians, which tries to see that age through its paintings, Paxman focused on Frith’s Derby Day. The picture of the picture was spliced with film of a recent Derby, to illustrate the point that, now as then, a rich variety of human life is present. The choice of film proved this better than Paxman could have known, because, to my delight, the camera happened to fasten on a top-hatted man and his wife whom, of all the people I know, I can most easily imagine as Victorians. They were Nick and Victoria Mills. Nick was a country vet of worldwide renown, and our neighbour. He was, as the Daily Telegraph put it, a ‘sex therapist’ to racing stallions, assessing and improving their fertility at stud. He was also a brilliant anecdotalist and a hugely energetic polymath, delighting in rugby and racing, and in any scheme which strengthened the relation between human beings and the natural world. He was a moving spirit in saving the unique garden of Great Dixter after the death of its owner, Christopher Lloyd. In between the making of Paxman’s film and its showing, Nick died suddenly, aged 54 — another death far too young. More than 800 people turned up to the country church for his funeral. With his public spirit and gusto and intellectual curiosity, Nick Mills would have been an ideal subject for Frith. By this little televisual chance, he sort of became one.

Why has the noun ‘harm’ lost ground to its plural? Experts now speak of the ‘harms’ done by alcohol, tobacco, drugs and so on. I wonder if it is something to do with money. If harm can be put into several categories, research into it can be paid for out of several departmental budgets.

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