Not so special
Sir: The only ‘disrespect’ Obama can really be accused of is a degree of indifference to the British delusion of a ‘special relationship’ with the USA (‘A special form of disrespect’, 21 November). One would have thought that after the con-trick of Lend-lease, the wholesale vacuuming-up of British nuclear and aviation technology, Roosevelt’s barely concealed desire to see the British empire dismantled and the Suez fiasco, scales might have dropped from post-Churchillian Britain’s eyes.
Despite General McChrystal referring to two British Generals as ‘Jacko’ and ‘Lamby’, there is not and never has been a special relationship unless it suited Washington. Is it ineradicable Francophobia that prevents us recognising that de Gaulle had it right all along?
J.M. Hallinan
NSW, Australia
Readings of Eliot
Sir: Tom Adès is a good composer but a very coarse reader — of Eliot and of me (Letters, 21 November). The Nazis may have accused the Jews of Bolshevism. T.S. Eliot, though, attacked the Blackshirts in The Rock (1934), and isn’t a Nazi. In his letter, Eliot’s charge of Bolshevism isn’t purely political. It is broader. Eliot expands his ‘prejudice’ to the ‘not always political’. His definition of Bolshevism is ‘destructive instinct’. And Eliot cites Disraeli — an unlikely Bolshevik in the conventional sense — as an example of what he means. Adès seems to think I am responsible for these argumentative inflections in a desperate attempt to acquit Eliot of anti-Semitism. They are, in fact, Eliot’s refinements, not mine.
I haven’t worked for Faber & Faber since 1991.
Craig Raine
Oxford
Supranational issues
Sir: Your cover story (‘How the Tories can win in Europe’, 14 November) quotes Liam Fox saying: ‘We can never allow defence procurement to be a supranational issue.’ If he really means this, he is 70, if not 93, years too late. In November 1916, at the height of the first world war North Atlantic U-boat threat, the Wheat Executive was set up with the responsibility of deciding, on a supranational basis, how much wheat should be sent to Britain, France and Italy from the scarce supplies that were available. The principle was extended to a wide range of materials and to the shipping needed to carry them, with the creation of the Allied Maritime Transport Committee in March 1918.
At the next moment of great peril, the same supranational approach was adopted. The Anglo-French Co-ordinating Committee, set up under the chairmanship of Jean Monnet in October 1939, had the explicit mission to acquire military equipment and aircraft from the United States jointly for France and the UK.
If scarce and badly needed military resources can be put to best use by supranational means, why should we do anything else? The nation would be better served by a future Conservative government that thought more practically and less ideologically on this matter.
Richard Laming
London NW6
The glorious dead
Sir: That the new practice of bringing the bodies of dead soldiers home (The Spectator’s Notes, 21 November) serves also to bring home the realities of the war in Afghanistan is unarguable. If it is going to be done, though, then it needs to be done properly.
To outsource the care of these bodies to civilian morticians makes perfectly good sense. But why are they then transported in civilian vehicles? And why hearses? A hearse is a vehicle customarily used to convey a body on its last earthly journey to its funeral. Yet the bodies conveyed through the streets of Wootton Bassett are not going to a funeral; they are going to the coroner. The vehicle customarily used for that is a ‘private ambulance’ — a type of van.
The processions currently taking place are reckoned dignified (whatever that means). I demur. That they are conducted by a mincing popinjay in cod-Victorian attire is, I think, absurd and unworthy. These are dead servicemen and women. Our military must reclaim them. Once the coroner has done with them, let them be handed over to their families and at that stage re-enter the civilian sphere. Until then, they are the glorious dead and should be accorded worthy military processions.
Charles Cowling
Redditch, Worcestershire
Truth and Hope
Sir: Justin Marozzi’s article on Herodotus (‘Riddle of the sands’, 21 November) fails to mention one of his most interesting stories. Herodotus relates that the Pharoah Necho II (610-595 bc) commissioned a Phoenician ship to circumnavigate Africa, starting in the Red Sea and entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. He ends the story in a surprising way:
As the Phoenicians are unlikely to have guessed the whereabouts of the sun at the Cape of Good Hope, this confirms the veracity of both the Phoenicians and Herodotus.
John Crooks
London SW15
Marr’s pronunciation
Sir: Charles Moore is absolutely right about Andrew Marr’s attitude to the aristocracy. My husband has problems trying to cool me down as I shout at the screen: ‘It is aristocrat, you ignorant fool’ (Marr’s pronunciation is ‘aristocrat).
Sally A. Williams
Pembrokeshire
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