Distinguished Wardens
Sir: Contrary to Dennis Sewell’s statement (‘Assault on the Ivory Tower’, 15/22 December), Wadham College did not ‘elect’ John Wilkins to be Warden in 1647 after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. Rather, Parliamentary Commissioners sacked the royalist Warden and almost all the Fellows and Scholars and imposed Wilkins as the new Warden, followed by new Fellows and Scholars. Since Wilkins is by far the most distinguished Warden in the College’s history until the election of Maurice Bowra in 1938, his appointment is an uncomfortable example of state interference in university affairs actually doing good.
Wilkins would, as Sewell suggests, have felt at home among the media-types of modern Oxford. Scientific populariser, extremely influential in the foundation of the Royal Society, talent-spotter (Christopher Wren), he was an adept politician. Having married Cromwell’s sister for, he claimed, the good of the university, he nonetheless was appointed Bishop of Chester by Charles II. However he was also a weighty scholar in his own right, as a pioneer in linguistics, and, paradoxically, a defender of the traditional university syllabus against the assaults of contemporary modernisers.
Clifford Davies (Emeritus Fellow)
Wadham College, Oxford
Rape of Africa
Sir: I must take issue with Richard Dowden’s comment in his article about the Congo (‘The sick man of Africa’, 8 December) that ‘the rest of Africa is now doing better…’ In fact, his description of the government of the DRC — ‘unpopular, corrupt, rapacious, incapable of establishing effective institutions’ — applies to most African governments. In South Africa, President Zuma, having failed to buy himself a 747, has spent £15 million of public money on his private house. Meanwhile, the citizens are significantly worse off now than they were under apartheid. Mugabe in Zimbabwe, having stolen all the white-owned farms, is now busy stealing the newly discovered diamonds. President Dos Santos of Angola is perhaps the best example of a rapacious leader. He is high on the Forbes rich list on the back of stolen oil revenues, but his country is so poor that it has recently been awarded EU aid. I could go on.
The Chinese do not invest in Africa, as Mr Dowden says; they rape it. Aside from supporting corrupt regimes such as Sudan to ensure supplies of raw materials, they are now buying up farmland which they then farm themselves and send all the produce back to China. These farms are run by imported Chinese farmers using imported Chinese seeds, fertilisers, machinery etc. There is no benefit to the people of the countries involved — only to the leaders who sold land which they did not own in the first place but instead stole from their own countrymen, thereby making them homeless.
G.C. Neden
Diddlebury, Shropshire
Justice for all
Sir: Nick Cohen makes a number of wide-ranging points in his angry polemic against the legal profession (‘Export-only justice’, 8 December), a few of which are accurate, many of which are not. It is hard to discern precisely who is in Mr Cohen’s crosshairs, whether the lawyer, the government or the judge. He sets out a world in which we are asking ‘what is legal?’ rather than ‘what is right?’ Maintaining the rule of law, which is objective and without emotion, is a much more desirable position than basing a legal system on the moral compass of society at any given point of time. The English legal system, rather than just its practitioners, has for centuries been one of our finest and proudest imports. Yes, it generates significant imports and exports (not to be discarded when growth is at a premium), but more importantly, promotes the values of integrity, fairness, certainty and impartiality all over the world. Nobody has argued more vigorously against legal aid cuts than the Bar Council. We believe in effective justice for everyone, not just those who can afford it, but we should not seek to exclude those who can any more than those who can’t.
Michael Todd QC
Chairman of the Bar Council, London WC1
A return to Rome?
Sir: I enjoyed Charles Moore’s excellent critique of the changes to the laws of succession (The Spectator’s Notes, 8 December), but he missed an obvious point: the change allowing an heir to marry a Catholic is utterly pointless. The fiancé(e) of any heir would require a dispensation from their own bishop to marry. Any such dispensation would require the couple to agree to bring up the child in the Roman Catholic faith, effectively returning the English Church to Rome (or, more realistically, hastening disestablishment). Mr Clegg, showing his characteristic lack of historical knowledge of all matters constitutional, has effectively done what no Jesuit, Jacobite or Armada ever managed.
J. Lafferty
London N5
The black plunge-line
Sir: David Hare hopes (Notebook, 15/22 December) that Alan Jenkins’s phrase about a ‘black waisted plunge-line 50s dress’ will catch on. But surely it was halfway there already: in his 1979 collection Field Work Seamus Heaney had coined ‘the black plunge-line nightdress’ in a love poem to his wife, which Ted Hughes later included in the Faber anthology By Heart: Poems to Remember.
John Weston
Richmond, Middlesex
Kangaroo
Sir: Markus Berkmann asks for other songs where the title is mentioned only once, and only at the very end of the song (‘Music quiz’, 8 December). He should consider ‘Kangaroo’, a gloriously melancholic number by This Mortal Coil.
Simon Ollerenshaw
Newport, Essex
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