Not cricket
Sir: Many a cricket follower (‘Cricket’s foreign legion’, 6 March) would join Peter Oborne in denouncing the growth of South African mercenaries entering our domestic game. As a county cricket spectator, I have always enjoyed scouting for new talent for our national team. It gave me great pleasure to watch an emerging Michael Vaughan score a double century at Scarborough in the early days of his career, and see Graeme Swann spin-bowling for Northamptonshire: both of them with obvious England potential. Somehow it is not quite the same these days, as we survey the array of journeyman players.
John Walker
Abingdon
By the book
Sir: Professor Ekirch (Letters, 6 March) clearly believes in the old orator’s trick, ‘Argument weak, speak louder’. Initially he claimed that the disinheritance of James Annesley, the subject of his own book, ‘inspired’ R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped, but now in response to scepticism he loudly declares that Annesley’s fate provided the ‘template’ for the novel. But had the professor actually read Kidnapped he would surely know that, the title aside, it is in fact about the adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck in the wake of the 1745 uprising, and that Stevenson’s widow had very explicitly stated the novel to have been inspired by a contemporary account of the murder of Colin Roy Campbell in 1752. In support of his unsustainable thesis, Ekirch can only offer his own feeble double negative: ‘It is inconceivable that Stevenson… was un-familiar with the saga of James Annesley’, and a throwaway speculation in the same vein by a reviewer in the long-departed Athenaeum. I suspect the greater longevity of the Spectator is due in no small measure to the greater rel-iability of its reviewers.
Andro Linklater
Kent
Ayn shrugged
Sir: In view of the forthcoming election I think your readers may have benefited more had James Delingpole (You know it makes sense, 6 March) focused his analysis on Ayn Rand’s other great work, Atlas Shrugged, rather than The Fountainhead. After 13 years of Labour, a plot about what happens when bloated governments become fiscally and legislatively incontinent and the effects this has on the most productive members of society is timely. The fact that a Conservative opposition does not appear to have the stomach to risk short-term unpopularity in addressing excessive public spending and can live with a 50 per cent tax rate for high earners makes the message of Atlas Shrugged more timely still.
The real message of Atlas Shrugged is that for those who believe in free markets, low taxes and individual rights and responsibilities, a choice between New Labour and David Cameron’s Conservatives is no choice at all.
Richard Thoburn
London EC1
Foot note
Sir: I am sorry, you simply cannot be allowed to get away with the sentence in your leading article: ‘Michael Foot… was a wonderful man’ (6 March). I don’t know how old your leader writer is, but for those of us who were actually around in the late 1970s, Michael Foot was anything but wonderful. Despite frequently being characterised as ‘a champion of liberty’, he was actually responsible for some of the most illiberal laws ever passed by a British government in peacetime. Under legislation he pushed through, a man could lose the right to earn his living not just because he didn’t belong to a trade union (bad enough), but because he didn’t belong to the officially approved trade union. Thus did this so-called ‘great parliamentarian’ (another label often attached to him) hand over power granted to him by the electors to totally unelected union leaders like Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones. It was largely because of the views and activities of bigots like Foot that the Freedom Association was formed. I would, however, agree that ‘the idea of spin was utterly alien to him’; unfortunately this also applied to the idea of the rights of man. Perhaps, though, he was kind to animals.
John C.H. Mounsey
Barnes
Sir: Speccie readers who, like me, may not have been in sympathy with the late Michael Foot’s political standpoint, nor the Worzel Gummidge image that he habitually displayed, can nevertheless admire his real distinction as a prose stylist. His book Loyalists and Loners, for example, could stand as a memorial. Although many of the articles were written while the author was under pressure as a Cabinet member of the crisis-ridden Labour government from 1974-79, he wrote with a fluency and wealth of literary allusion which not only attested to a well-stocked mind, but also conveyed a generosity of spirit, even towards such a character as Sir Harold Nicolson who, to Foot, must have represented all the toffish attitudes which he found least congenial. It is that magnanimity which is most lacking in the political class today.
Robert Triggs
Oxford
Peak fitness
Sir: I enjoyed Jeremy Clarke’s piece ‘Wrong footed’ (Low life, 6 March). It brought back a memory from my student days in Bangor. A distinguished group of climbers were enjoying a reunion in Snowdonia. The party included Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Charles Evans and others from famous mountain expeditions including Everest climbs. Among them was my botany tutor, the alpine expert Dr Norman Woodhead. It was high summer, hot and dry, and they wore what were then called gym shoes, shorts and short-sleeved shirts. Somewhere high above Cwm Idwal a young man approached, sweating profusely and clad in waterproofs, climbing boots and with a frame rucksack. He gave our distinguished mountaineers a dressing-down for being wrongly clad for the mountains and advised them to descend. Sir Charles Evans responded, ‘Thank you, young man, I do wish that we had had your advice on Everest in 1953, don’t you agree, Sir Edmund?’
Eric Cowell
Cambridgeshire
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