More power to Kazakhstan
Sir: Elliot Wilson rails against the alleged bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism that he argues are strangling business opportunities for foreign investors in Kazakhstan (Business, 28 April). But his three examples of Western companies who have ‘decided to leave’ are misleading.
PetroKazakhstan, which emerged from nowhere as Canadian-based Hurricane Oil, was very happy to sell its Kazakh assets to the Chinese national oil corporation in 2005 for more than $4 billion. The same is true of Nations Energy, which in 2006 was sold by the owners for almost $2 billion. And far from being pushed out by fickle Kazakh bureaucrats, British Gas took a strategic decision to sell its share in the Kashagan oilfield, at a healthy profit, because it wanted to focus on a massive Karachaganak gas field in western Kazakhstan, believed to be the largest foreign operation of the company.
There is, of course, room to further improve conditions. But there would hardly be so many international investors in the country if conditions were as Mr Wilson has described them.
Ambassador Erlan Idrissov
London SW7
Patient explanation
Sir: The health minister Andy Burnham takes me to task for my piece about the rise of the SNP in Scotland (Letters, 12 May). The average hospital operation wait is a fortnight longer than under Thatcher’s years, I said. England’s wait has improved, he says. He has perhaps forgotten that England runs out just north of Berwick. Thereafter lies Scotland, where the median inpatient hospital wait since 1990 has risen from 30 days to a scandalous 43 days. Proof, perhaps, that cash without reform doesn’t work.
Fraser Nelson
London SW1
Grass roots
Sir: Paul Johnson’s invocation of the lawn (And another thing, 12 May) as England’s contribution to European vistas was underlined recently when the Italian foreign minister, Massimo d’Alema, spoke at St Antony’s College, Oxford. The organisers of the event had the excellent idea to plan a walk after his talk. As we all strolled past Keble College and the Parks and got close to Trinity College, where a feast was laid on for the Italian statesman, he looked right just before turning into the Broad before Wadham College and saw the full magnificence of Trinity’s lawns. ‘Giardino belissimo!’ he exclaimed.
As a minister at the Foreign Office, I tried to persuade colleagues to transform the magnificent courtyard there into a partly covered green space to be used for public events, concerts and so forth. Alas, the pleasure of parking a car for ministers and officials trumped my initiative and the FCO is lawn-free. But at least I had St James’s to look out on from my window as I tried, with enjoyment but limited success, to get Britain to take Europe more seriously.
Rt Hon Dr Denis MacShane MP
London SW1
Sir: Paul Johnson is right in describing Susanna Blamire (1747-94) as ‘that fine and underrated poetess’, but wrong in claiming that she hated lawns. He correctly quotes her as writing: ‘We hate the fine lawn and the new-fashion’d planting’; but he omits her following crucial conditional line: ‘If it tears up one record of blissful old times’ — a nostalgic poem in the ‘Auld Lang Syne’ tradition. Elsewhere in her Poetical Works Susanna mightily approves of lawns, notably ‘th’ enamell’d lawn’ of picturesque Painshill Park, described in her poem ‘Hope’.
Dr. Christopher Maycock
Crediton, Devon
The fireman prince
Sir: Hugo Rifkind makes an excellent suggestion regarding Prince Harry entering the emergency services (Shared opinion, 5 May). The modern world probably would indeed ‘go nuts’ for a fireman prince as he suggests. And, in fact, there is a royal precedent here. Edward, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was a major supporter and active firefighter in the early years of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. His uniform was kept ‘at the ready’ for many years at the Chandos St fire station in Charing Cross. It would be wonderful to have a 21st-century fireman prince, bridging back to royal support in the pioneering days of the fire brigade in the 19th century.
David Morton
London W6
History will tell
Sir: Edward Norman says in his review of Hans Küng’s Islam: Past, Present and Future (Books, 12 May) that ‘Küng, however, is no professional historian, which becomes clear when he cites as his authority “the British historian C. Northcote Parkinson”.’
Why should Hans Küng’s status as a historian be in doubt because he cites C. Northcote Parkinson? If anything becomes clear it is that Canon Norman has not connected the author of Britannia Rules, The Classic Age of Naval History 1793-1815 and about a dozen more eminently citable works of military and naval history (as well as historical novels) with the writer of Parkinson’s Law. There was a lot more lore to Parkinson than just his Law.
Richard Rose
London W10
Daft mistake
Sir: Roy Hattersley (Letter from Arcadia, 12 May) has his mid-20th century comedians confused. The ‘over the garden wall’ comic was not Albert Modley. It was the brilliant Norman Evans, the finest panto dame of his time. Albert Modley, in the shade of a huge cloth cap, sat behind a drum kit, imitated a Blackpool tram, and inquired of his audiences: ‘Isn’t it grand to be daft?’ They usually agreed that it was.
John Stevenson
Cheshire
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