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Saturday 22 November 2008

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Letters

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Reports of my death

Sir: I was astonished to read in John Michell’s review of Michael X: A Life in Black and White (13 September) that I died 35 years ago. Michell states that I went to Trinidad to investigate the murder, by henchmen of Michael X, of my sister Gale Benson, and that later I had died in an accident in California. In fact it was my younger brother Greville, Gale’s twin brother, who went to Trinidad at that time, and a year later died in a motor accident. Greville’s accident took place in Morocco, where he is buried.

I can hardly blame The Spectator for Williams’s slovenly research. But if you had reviewed the biography of my father, Captain Leonard Plugge, by Keith Wallis, one of your editorial staff might have picked up on this particular howler before publication. I reserve comment on Michell’s loathsome adulation of this murderous thug.

Frank Plugge
Via email

Not a defence

Sir: Theodore Dalrymple’s good sense seems to have deserted him in glossing over the seriousness of the charges against Professors Meadow and Southall (‘In defence of David Southall’, 6 September). He mischievously suggests that the sole complaint against Professor Meadow is that he deployed a misleading statistic in the trial that led to Sally Clark’s conviction and life sentence for murdering her two sons. But his authority and reputation as an expert in such cases was based on a theory that was built on a circular argument.

Dr Dalrymple’s similarly benign view of Professor Southall is at odds with the verdict of the General Medical Council (‘your conduct is so serious it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner’) after hearing, inter alia, of his wrongfully accusing a mother of murdering her son by asphyxiating him with his belt. Dr Dalrymple might usefully have drawn attention to the hazards of the professor’s favoured diagnosis of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy whose criteria are so elastic they could apply to most medical conditions whose explanation is not clear.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.