Society

Saturday

10 Nov 2007

Fungus foray

To prepare for the collapse of Western civilisation, which seems to be more imminent with every news bulletin, I’m learning about wild food. Two months ago I learnt how to identify, prepare, cook and eat several different types of seaweed. Last week, I went on a ‘fungus foray and feast’. The foray attracted a dozen punters. We met in a National Trust car park in a wood next to a beach. Christian, our guide and instructor, arrived comfortably dressed in a brown trilby hat, tweed jacket with a tear under the arm, and a worn-out old pair of steel toe-capped boots. We were going to walk to a farmhouse four

Taki

What’s in a name? | 10 November 2007

New York My good friend George Szamuely, who is very big in the Jewish community of the Bagel, swears this is a true story. (George’s father, incidentally, was Tibor Szamuely, a great man who managed to leave the Gulag with 5,000 books and was writing leaders for The Spectator when he died suddenly at the age of 47. He and his wife are buried near Karl Marx.) Anyway, during the first week of the Yom Kippur war back in 1973, Israel had been taken by surprise and was barely holding the line on two fronts. I was on the Golan front and later switched to the Sinai one, filing twice

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 10 November 2007

Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC. One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too, and has been for the past 800 years. Poor old BBC. People say all sorts of things on air, and many of them annoy me and you. But this is our laboratory. We listen to these locutions as samples of how the language is changing, and what is going wrong. The BBC still has a

The Spectator

Letters | 10 November 2007

Telling Right from Right Sir: I was very disappointed to see James Forsyth pinning the xenophobe label to Gordon Brown for his comment ‘British jobs for British workers’ (Politics, 3 November). The trouble with Forsyth and his kind of Conservatives is their claim that the logical position of the Right is to welcome a free labour market, hence immigration. But they are best described not as true conservatives but as neoconservatives or market-obsessed Jacobins. Just as New Labour shouldn’t be confused with Old Labour, so the new Right should be differentiated from the traditional, small-c conservative Right. Traditional conservatives believe in markets as a means to an end, not as

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 November 2007

Why is it good to make pupils stay on at school until they are 18? Under the Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech this week, state education will be compulsory for two more years unless the pupil is employed under an apprentice or training scheme. The political reason behind this is the government’s anxieties about young people known as NEETS (Not in Employment, Education or Training), of whom there are now about a quarter of a million aged 16 to 18. Obviously it would be good, in what people call the ‘knowledge economy’, if more of those trying to enter it had some knowledge. But it does not follow that

Barry Humphries

Diary – 10 November 2007

When will the Americans withdraw? I don’t mind how long they stay in Mesopotamia but it’s high time they got out of Grosvenor Square. They’ve been muttering about relocating their embassy, but will it happen? Mayfair, my favourite English village, is ruined by their barricades, tank traps and miles of concrete Toblerone. Grosvenor Square and surrounding streets are becoming impenetrable and it looks as though there are going to be more hideous constructions and obstructions judging by the builders’ sheds and huts that are proliferating in this once tranquil square. Perhaps they should relocate to the old BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane. That is also an area more convenient

James Forsyth

The failings of the MCB

The interview that the head of the Muslim Council of Britain has given to The Daily Telegraph today is phenomenally unhelpful to the cause of community cohesion. Muhammad Abdul Bari throwing around analogies to Germany in the 1930s is only going to polarise the debate. Yet, it is his response to the news that one in four Mosques are giving house room to hate literature, according to a recent report from Policy Exchange, that is most disappointing. Rather than condemning the literature outright, Dr Bari stonewalls: “The bookshops are independent businesses,” he says. “We can’t just go in and tell them what to sell … I will see what books

Christina Lamb

Soon we’ll see if Musharraf is a man of his word

When their TV screens suddenly went fuzzy on Saturday afternoon, most Pakistanis felt they had seen it all before. Their country has, after all, spent 33 of its 60 years under military rule. The troops surrounding the TV and radio stations, the phone networks down, the round-up of opponents, the concertina wire across Constitution Avenue blocking off the Presidency, Parliament and Supreme Court . . . all these have been a periodic feature of Pakistan’s politics. But this time the army chief imposing what amounted to martial law was himself already the President. ‘General Musharraf now has the dubious distinction of being the only man in Pakistan’s history to have

Boris Johnson

James Michie, gentle genius

It is a measure of James Michie’s extreme modesty that most of the younger people who bumped into him in the offices of The Spectator probably hadn’t the foggiest idea who he really was. They might see him reading in the afternoon, sitting with a glass of wine and a half-smile, in the room that led out to the garden. They might have met him on the stair, bearing a sheaf of scrupulously emended proofs. They would have heard him addressed only as ‘James’, and the hordes of young thrusting proto-journalists who passed through the offices of The Spectator would have concluded that this was some kind of landmark of

Paul Barker

The Stalinists have taken over the London Library

The lights blazed out across St James’s Square from the high, first-floor Reading Room of the London Library as members crowded up the handsome staircase, last Thursday evening, to take part in the fiercest row the library has seen for many years, or maybe ever. Some members had to squeeze on to narrow upper galleries, where you search out dusty dictionaries in obscure languages. From there, they intervened in the to-and-fro of hot argument down below, like shabby cherubs in a Raphael painting. This wasn’t some minor fluttering in a dovecot for eggheads. The London Library is one of the capital’s most discreet but most valuable adornments. Tucked away behind

Douglas Murray

A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm

Tom DeLay has a slightly deflated air about him in the London club in which we meet. It might be the financial accusations and personal attacks made on him for 11 years before his indictment and consequent stand-down from Congress last year. ‘I was pretty much burnt out, exhausted,’ he admits. Or it could be the inevitable attitude of a former Republican majority leader observing Washington once more in the grip of the Democratic party — he is over here to speak at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion ‘This house looks forward to seeing a Democrat in the White House’ in a debate with the Rev’d Al Sharpton. But

David Tang

My Chinese week with Elle Macpherson, the Prince of Wales and Tony Blair

Peking In Peking, I took Elle Macpherson to dinner at the ridiculous Lan Club — ridiculous because it is entered from the fluorescent lobby of a nondescript office block, and its owner, a very rich Chinese woman, had spent US$23 million on it — paying Philippe Starck for his signature designs. It is also ridiculous because the massive space is so ostentatiously and extravagantly decked out that it jars in communist China. And lest any Kissingeresque character should repeat his canard that China is no longer communist, they should try standing at Tiananmen Square and just mumbling something derogatory about the Chinese leadership, or loving about the Falun Gong gang.

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 10 November 2007

Monday Whisked to Oxfordshire with Jed and Wonky Tom as part of Queen’s Speech preparation team! Spent whole day in outer inner sanctum!! Dave was in kitchen with his River Cottage apron on making slow-roast organic pork sandwiches when we arrived. If only people could see him like this, we would definitely win the next election. (Actually, Bonny from events was filming with the hand-held, so I guess people will see it at some point, luckily!) There were so many issues to cover we split into sub-groups. I was on ‘Gordon Small Talk’ committee. Dave v worried about what to say on the long walk across central lobby to the

Matthew Parris

I hate badges and ribbons, but this year I have decided to wear a poppy for the first time

Ted Heath was not always easy to love, but his grumpiness could be endearing. I remember him once inveighing against badges. Badges, he said, lapel-stickers, medals, tags, ribbons, bumper-stickers, rosettes, even T-shirts with writing on them — they all added up to the same thing: using yourself as a human billboard to advertise your convictions or good works. He detested the practice, he said. This diatribe had been prompted by a request to attach some perfectly harmless sticker — Save the Whale or whatever — to his coat. The young man who had asked him to do it was rather winded by the tirade. But I agreed with Ted. I

Judi Bevan

Coping with crisis, climate change — and lost luggage

Martin Broughton looks so lean and fit for someone of 60 that I worry he is playing too much golf. But no, his handicap is still only 17, a long way from the single digits that signal too much time teeing off and not enough pressing the flesh on behalf of British Airways and the Confederation of British Industry. Nattily dressed in a sky-blue check shirt with white collar and cuffs and a sunshine- yellow tie, Broughton’s attire owes something to the Turf, another great passion. He owns ten race horses, three of them in partnership with Lazard’s Nicholas Jones, who advised Broughton in his previous role as chief executive

Stephen Bayley

The age of the train

Eight thousand years ago the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine. And if the cities had actually existed, you would have been able to walk from London to Rome without getting your felt-bound feet wet. Since then, geology has given us the Channel, a practical and psychological barrier that defines national identity. The idea of a tunnel beneath this barrier dates back to the Treaty of Amiens 1751. Here reach exceeded grasp and the first realistic — although the word is used loosely — proposals were made to Napoleon by a mining engineer, Albert Mathieu, in only 1802. Mathieu wanted to turn the mid-Channel Varne bank into an island,

Robin Oakley

Twelve to Follow

Enough of these two-year-old babies and equine whippets racing over the length of a few suburban lawns. Not a moment too soon it is time for hardier sorts and for the winter sport, for sturdy mud-stained limbs and exhaled breath hanging in dank November air. First, though, some past business, and I fear that if I were reporting on Twelve to Follow Inc at an AGM there might be some rumblings from the floor about the chairman’s stewardship of the finances. Apologies. On the basis of a £10 level win stake the accounts show a loss of just under £100 on the fortunes of our Twelve on the Flat this

Lucy Vickery

Short story | 10 November 2007

Competition No. 2522: Right on You are invited to submit a right-wing protest song (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2522’ by 22 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2519 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Song from under the Floorboards’. There is a track of the same name by the post-punk band Magazine whose cheerless first line, ‘I am angry, I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin’, is delivered such relish by frontman Howard Devoto that it almost makes you wish you were him; equally mesmerising is James Mason’s performance as the narrator in the 1953 animated adaptation of the spine-tingling Edgar Allen

Frank Keating

Old rivals

In need of a positive spin from anywhere, ITV can at least console itself with the plaudits for its exclusive live coverage of rugby’s recent World Cup. The oddity (probably unnoticed by most viewers) was that the channel’s senior commentary team and many of its studio sages had been rented for the tournament from its deadly rivals at Sky; rather, I suppose, like old Hollywood times when the likes of Bogart, Grable and Gable were hired out to a competitor for lots of lolly when their own contract studio couldn’t find them a part or, as they used to say, ‘a vehicle’. I don’t know how much ITV paid for

Linsey Mcgoey

Betrayed by their disciples

It’s rarely encouraging when a book apologises three times on the first page for its content. First, Tim Congdon regrets that his latest book, a history of monetary policy in post-war Britain, has no proper chapters, but is simply a loose compilation of academic essays and journalistic vignettes. Second, he’s sorry for skipping between the first-person ‘I’ in his journalism, and the avoidance of personal pronouns in the more academic pieces. Finally, he’s contrite about the repetition that could have been reduced ‘with harsher editing’. Congdon is a polemicist, and one of his rhetorical tricks is to apologise for his own deficiencies before a rival has the chance to point