Thatcher’s champion
Sir: The Spectator may have been Margaret Thatcher’s first press champion as Fraser Nelson notes (‘Labour’s best hope’, 17 May), but its support was not unwavering. At the end of 1974 it was unduly impressed by the efforts of Heath’s allies to brand her a food-hoarder when she sensibly encouraged pensioners to stock up with tinned food at a time of rising inflation. On 7 December 1974 it opined: ‘for the milk-snatcher to become the food-hoarder shows precisely the same political ineptitude as Sir Keith Joseph and it is likely to have the same political consequence’. Her defiance of the Tory critics swiftly silenced the editor’s doubts. ‘I saw how they broke Keith,’ she told him, ‘but they won’t break me.’
Alistair Cooke
London SW1
Fare’s unfair
Sir: Tom Harris, the rail minister (Letters, 17 May), rightly states that it would be unacceptable for the government to subsidise journalists and businessmen for first-class rail travel.
On that basis it would also be unacceptable for elected politicians to enjoy a comparable subsidy. Could Mr Harris, therefore, tell us how often he and other Members of Parliament have first-class rail travel not subsidised, but paid in full by the taxpayer?
Councillor Darren Solomons
Borehamwood, Hertfordshire
Scripture lesson
Sir: Theo Hobson’s interview with Gene Robinson (‘It’s harder for straights to feel Christian charity than gays’, 10 May) certainly clarifies the issue at stake. It is not primarily about homosexual practice but about Robinson stepping way beyond the Apostolic Gospel which has defined the Christian Church for 2,000 years.
Firstly, he claims that the Holy Spirit foretold this new teaching, while the Church has always understood this refers to the recollection of the life of teachings of Christ which form the four Gospels and the other New Testament writings. The Church has always understood that no new Scriptures could be added after the close of the Apostolic Age.
Secondly, he seems to overthrow all moral teaching and takes it as a given that ‘no one has the right to tell a woman what to do with her body’. On the contrary, Scripture is clear on the limits for all people, what they may and may not do, and if these limits are overstepped, this is clearly stated to be sinful.
Thirdly, he claims Jesus Himself called him to ‘come out’, although the imagery is somewhat confused here. He attributes to Jesus forgiveness of sin where there is no repentance. Indeed, he also implies that Jesus has overturned Scripture, which of course He Himself said could never be done.
Finally, he wants to ‘be in a church in which all the different opinions are included’, as if a church were a debating society.
We should be grateful for these statements, as it shows that what he preaches is not the Christian Gospel but a new ‘gospel’ and a new ‘way of life’, not the godly, holy way described in the New Testament.
Nigel Stone
London SW19
Religious howlers
Sir: With reference to Eric Brown (Letters, 17 May), verbal anachronisms are not the only plague in Foyle’s War. Its religious howlers are worse. In a recent episode, the murderer was a fake German refugee priest, shown (impossibly) conducting choir practice before the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance. His devout young Catholic victim was called a ‘Bible before bedtime’ type and ‘a Bible basher’, terms only applied to Protestants. The ‘priest’, though an alien, was improbably running a busy parish on his own, then in any case rare and, even more improbably for the time, was part of an ecumenical group of Anglican peaceniks.
The programme makers blamed this all on their props department.
Sheridan Gilley
Western Hill, Durham
Markham my words
Sir: Charles Moore tells us (The Spectator’s Notes, 17 May) that property prices in Markham Square, Chelsea, have rocketed from £7,800 in 1955 for the house in which his wife was born, to £2.25 million for a flat today. The rise is even more impressive than that. In P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate’, written in 1923, the narrator refers contemptuously to Markham Square as ‘a dismal backwater’ where the chronically penniless Stanley Ukridge was once obliged to subsist. Indeed, it may have been in the very room of the future Mrs Moore’s birth that the unfortunate Victor Beamish was bitten by the dog placed there by Ukridge in a doomed attempt to earn a fortune. I shall leave it to Mr Wodehouse to explain how Ukridge was planning to make his fortune.
Maritz Vandenberg
London SW15
Great suit
Sir: Reading Joan Collins’s piece on Doug Hayward (‘An Actor’s Life’, 17 May) remind-ed me of the brief but happy time I spent working for Doug in his Mount Street shop. My job was to answer the telephone, chat up the customers, and rip up the tacking on the suits after fittings, a menial occupation but made memorable by Doug’s wit and good humour. Only once did I see him nonplussed.
A tiny American woman came into the shop to ask him how much he charged to make a suit. On being told the price for the usual size by Doug, she said, ‘OK, I’ll go get my husband’, and returned with the tallest, broadest man any of us had ever seen. Clothing his gigantic frame would require yards and yards of expensive material, wiping out any profit for Doug. It was probably the neatest scam anyone had ever pulled on him and, to his credit, left him shaking with laughter.
Sarah Bradford
London SW6
Ear witness
Sir: It was Jocelyn Hambro, chairman of Hambros Bank — not, as your correspondent Richard Skilbeck tells us (Letters, 17 May), Bernard Levin — who called Harold Wilson the worst prime minister since Lord North. I was there to hear him say it. The Wilson government then ordered an inquiry into Hambros.
Christopher Fildes
London W8
General knowledge
Sir: If Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 10 May) thinks that Che Guevara held the rank of general, it just shows that Collegers don’t know as much as they think they do.
Iain Taylor
Berlin, Germany
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