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Saturday 22 November 2008

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Letters to the Editor

Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

Things are going downright badly for me at the moment, at any rate, in the military sense. The enemy is using his superiority, especially in infantry, to destroy the Italian formations one by one, and the German formations are much too weak to stand alone. It’s enough to make one weep.

These two generals were General Sir Claude Auchinleck and his chief of staff Major-General E.E. Dorman-Smith MC. The rewards that these two generals received for this achievement were to be sacked on 6 August 1942 and thereafter denigrated.

Christopher Dorman-O’Gowan
Northumberland

In Anita’s defence

Sir: It seems a little unfair that Judi Bevan’s critical summing up of Anita Roddick was based on the fact that she wasn’t perfect (‘Moral superiority in cheap plastic bottles’, 22 September). I don’t think Anita ever said she was. What’s so despicable about eating chicken?

Despite her ‘imperfections’, she contributed a huge amount to British entrepreneurialism and helped an awful lot of people, myself included, get innovative ideas off the ground. She taught us that profit can fit with ethics, and that if you want to help people and causes you believe in and if you want to support innovation, then business is a valid way of generating funds to do so — and it’s more effective than bleating that the government should ‘do something about it’.

Perhaps the City couldn’t cope, but she helped and employed far more people than I or Ms Bevan ever will!

Richard Little
Southampton, Hants

No Turkish delight

Sir: Bravo to Simon Hoggart for exposing the staged-looking Turkish restaurant scene in Michael Palin’s latest BBC travelogue (Arts, 29 September). It was an embarrassment to the usually excellent Palin and to the beleaguered Corporation. However, this cringeworthy mezze interlude was probably the least of the programme’s sins.

Palin kicked off the series by promising a fascinating insight into an oft-overlooked chunk of ‘emerging’ Europe. Being a regular visitor to (and investor in) Turkey, I awaited eagerly Palin’s analysis of this fascinating and globally significant country.

So what was the viewer’s reward? Oil-wrestling (with some amusing gripped buttock action), camel-wrestling (enough with the wrestling already), strolling musicians, belly-dancing (my goodness, the originality), a mystic lady who reads coffee dregs and a German chap living a troglodyte existence (in a popular tourist area).

If the BBC wishes to produce a shallow and cliché-ridden travel show pandering to the quirk-seeking package tourist, then it should bill the programme as such. Michael Palin’s lame effort seemed to have little relevance to the modern Turkey that I’ve seen. This is an enormous shame given what the country has to offer to an imaginative journalist who can see beyond the tassels on the belly-dancers’ outfits.

Stephen Ogden
Bowdon, Cheshire

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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.