Spectator readers respond to recent articles
REASONS TO DISLIKE THE WEALTHY
Sir: There is much good sense in what Tim Montgomerie writes (‘Afraid of being right’, 30 July), but if his views are to triumph, those who support them need to understand that the
people of Great Britain do not hate the wealth-creators because they are rich, but because they are so often and so obviously greedy, selfish and unpleasant, and because they now experience so
little pressure within their own circles to behave any better.
R.S. Foster
Sheffield
THE CASE FOR HANDBALL
Sir: Andrew Gilligan (‘A gold medal for idiocy’, 30 July) clearly has some strong views about the London Olympics, but his decision to pick handball as an example to mock was a poor
one.
Handball is far from being a white elephant — in fact it is one of the fastest growing sports in the country at the moment, thanks largely to the government’s decision to include it as one of eight sports in its ‘Change 4 Life’ programme. Thanks to that scheme and the efforts of the home-nation associations, handball is now being played in hundreds of schools across the land. Many universities are also taking up the sport and new senior clubs are springing up all the time. The national cups and British university championships have seen record numbers of people of all ages competing in handball. All that makes for significantly more people than ‘could be fitted into the nearest convenient school gym’.
Gilligan also failed to mention that the handball arena is also being used to host elements of modern pentathlon as well as the paralympic sport of goalball, but I suppose he didn’t want to let the facts get in the way of a good rant.
Frazer Snowdon
Media officer, British Handball Association
HOW TO RAISE A JOHNSON
Sir: Toby Young was kind enough to alert me that he hoped to write about my parenting skills (Status Anxiety, 30 July) and invited me to lunch to discuss the matter. Unfortunately I was not able to
accept the invitation since I was in Borneo at the time, climbing Mt Kinabalu. In an email sent from Sabah, I said I doubted whether paternal influence had played much part in my children’s
upbringing. I have always believed that raising children was too important to be left to parents.
Good schooling was the crucial element. Parents should let the professionals get on with the job and try not to interfere. I can count the number of ‘parents’ evenings’ I have attended over more than 40 years of such events on the fingers of one hand. In any case, I don’t think Toby Young is right to compare me with Joe Kennedy.
Nor is he right to say that all my six children went to Oxford. Five of them did indeed graduate from Oxford, but my younger daughter, Julia, decided to break the mould. She went up to Cambridge, then switched to UCL in the course of her first year, where she was extremely happy.
But I do fully agree with Toby that healthy competition — at home or in school or indeed in later life — has a major part to play. Nobody should be ashamed of coming top.
Stanley Johnson
Somerset
FASCISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY
Sir: According to Rod Liddle (30 July), ‘on the far right there is nothing quite so terrifying as a homosexual’. Well, up to a point. In the mid 1930s, the British Union of
Fascists’ headquarters in Chelsea, the Black House, was something of a haven for gay men. Neil Francis Hawkins, the director-general of the BUF, was an active homosexual and at the party HQ
he surrounded himself with admiring young fellow-travellers. The attraction seems to have been the tight uniforms, the body building and the choreographed drill. As the Marxist critic Walter
Benjamin put it: ‘Fascism is the aestheticisation of politics.’
Nigel Farndale
London
Selective loyalty
Sir: Miriam Gross writes of the ‘generosity shown by Murdoch’ at the time of the late John Gross’s illness, which was ‘entirely a matter of loyalty’ (Diary, 30 July).
I wonder whether the staff of the News of the World felt any such sense of generosity and loyalty when sacked by the same man?
Ian Huish
Shenington, Oxon
RUPERT MURDOCH’S LOYALTIES
Sir: I take issue with Martin Vander Weyer’s statement (Any Other Business, 23 July) that the most famous Murdoch in history other than members of the current media family was the first
officer on the Titanic. This accolade should surely be given to another Australian — namely, W.L. Murdoch, who was Australia’s second cricket captain and played for them in 18 Tests
between 1876 and 1890. He scored the first Test double-century in 1884 and a match-saving century at the Oval in 1880.
Murdoch subsequently settled in England and played in one Test for them at Cape Town, in addition captaining Sussex for several years. Such was the affection in which he was held that play was suspended in all county matches on the day of his funeral in May 1911. A rather more substantial list of achievements than seeing your ship hit an iceberg or, some might say, doing the same with a media group.
Peter Cooch
Northampton
THE WRONG SORT OF RAT
Sir: In his review of Rat Island (Books, 30 July), Andro Linklater refers to ‘Rattus rattus, the common brown rat’. However, R. rattus is actually the black rat, or ship rat. The
common brown rat is the Norway rat, R. norvegicus, which used to be referred to by Jacobites as the Hanoverian rat as it was believed to have come over to England on the same ship that brought
George I.
Graham Mogford
Wolverhampton
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