Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 3 November 2007

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case. The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 3 November 2007

Charles Moore’s thoughts on the week This week, Policy Exchange, of which I am the chairman, produced a survey, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, of literature found on the premises of more than 100 mosques. In about a quarter of the mosques, often ‘mainstream’ ones, some blessed by a visit from the Prince of Wales, the researchers found what could fairly be described as ‘hate’ literature — books with titles like Women Who Will Go to Hell (for, among another things, cutting their hair short), invitations to kill anyone who abandoned the Islamic faith, attacks on Jews, etc. Much of this material, about half of it published in English, comes from

Michael Winner

Diary – 3 November 2007

Can anyone lend me quid or two? For the first time in my life I’m borrowing money. Mortgaging property. Scrabbling around for cash so I can live my lavish life-style. In case any of the firms I have accounts with are getting worried, please don’t. I have many, many, many millions of pounds in what is laughingly known as a rollover fund. Mine’s in Guernsey. This turns cash into shares but your money is only put on the money market so there’s no risk. Instead of interest you get extra shares. When you eventually sell you pay around 25 per cent tax because it’s reckoned you’re cashing part of the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Times on ‘The Petraeus Curve’

Today’s editorial in The Times on the improvements in Iraq is well worth reading in full. The key point is that the political debate about Iraq on both sides of the Atlantic no longer reflects the reality of the situation. Things have improved to an extent that it is no longer absurd to start thinking about what might be achieved in Iraq rather than just in terms of preventing all out defeat. 

The Spectator

How to save the Union

When Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Ex­chequer, he liked to say that the problem with tax simplification was that you always end up complicating tax, too. The same is true of much constitutional reform: any attempt to remove an anomaly will often create another. New Labour’s devolution experiment responded to the desire of the Scottish and Welsh people for greater autonomy. In so doing, however, it has created new and growing grievances among the people of England. It is this sentiment that Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s deposition to the Tory party’s Democracy Task Force is meant to address: Sir Malcolm proposes that an English Grand Committee be established in the

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 3 November 2007

Monday Dear me! How are we supposed to have a grown up argument about immigration when silly Lithuanian ambassadors can’t see the funny side of a little joke about one-legged dance troupes? If you ask me, people with names that look like the last line of the optician’s testing chart shouldn’t be allowed to start rows. It creates an awful lot of press releases which the spellcheck on the word processor can’t handle. Jed says we’ll only stop it by sending Mr Hague to Vilnius to eat humble Cepelinai, whatever that means. Thank goodness am getting out of office to help Dave do Sky News . . . Later: What

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness

St Petersburg The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women’s clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don’t see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don’t see much of either, either. In the Hermitage, I saw a girl in thigh-high boots and leopard-print hotpants gazing up at a Canaletto. Had she simultaneously been frying blinis on an leaky gas stove, I think I would have taken a photograph. There. That’s it. That’s Russia. I am here as part of the Liberatum Jewel of Russia Festival, one of

Elliot Wilson

Slums for the masses, fortunes for the few

Hu Bin is your archetypal Chinese real-estate entrepre­neur. Built like a bull, with a huge, moon-shaped head, a permanent grin and tiny, nicotine-blackened teeth, he is also the embodiment of Beijing’s sudden determination to use its huge capital reserves to buy the world. Despite an estimated £5 billion fortune, Hu Bin would normally have remained a low-key figure, even in China. His company, Shanghai Zhongzhou International Holding, is the unlisted owner of isolated packets of high-end residential property dotted around Shanghai. But on 17 October he did something guaranteed to attract the attention of the world’s press, splashing out £15 million on a 40,000 square metre artificial island off Dubai

Irfan Alalawi

The Saudis are in the global saddle

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom. The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan

Tim Walker

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades — Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay’s prospective father-in-law in Citizen Smith, among many others — but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his face. His performance as the Alzheimer’s sufferer Felix Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North and his wonderful turn as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day were the parts that finally did it for him. ‘They were my favourites,’ says the 84-year-old actor. He adds, however, that he has another film now that is every bit as special

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist

It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ And she wasn’t asking it as a glib, meaningless flourish, in the way a Tory MP trying to impress might ask, ‘Why we can’t make our NHS system be the envy of the world?’ Claire Fox genuinely

Lauren Booth

All Hezbollah lacks is a group on Facebook

A tour of Beirut with the militia’s PR division Beirut A year after Israel’s failed attempt to bomb Hezbollah into the Middle Ages, the ‘war’ of 2006 is now known as the ‘Divine Victory’ in these parts. With November’s general election on hold, politics in Lebanon is as complicated as it ever has been. Druze, Christian groups, Muslim parties and a smattering of Marxists are all vying for a say in a government led by a hugely unpopular prime minister. Fouad Siniora lost the public’s support last July when he was filmed warmly hugging Condoleezza Rice as US-made cluster bombs fell on voters’ homes. Not a great PR move. Meanwhile

Patrick West

The nightmare of ‘pre-crime’ is already with us

Those who express concern about the onset of a dystopian surveillance society in Britain, in which the boundary between public and private is being erased, and in which the state malignly uses new methods of monitoring, usually invoke the spectre of Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘Orwellian’ is the customary adjective denoting the kind of cruel, maladjusted authoritarian state that spies on us, that knows everything about us — one, it is feared, that will soon be upon us. Such allusions have some credibility, as Britain has in some respects been transformed into that which George Orwell feared it might: we have detention without trial, armed police and the widespread use of CCTV

Tessa Mayes

Has the smoking ban reduced heart attacks?

It’s four months since the smoking ban was imposed in England, and most smokers I’ve met in that time seem to be quietly adapting. A friend wants to buy Suck UK’s unisex Smoking Mittens. If you have not come across them before, they are gloves that have a metal hole in them for your cigarette so you can keep warm when smoking outside in the winter. They cost £15 and, as my friend says cheerfully, ‘You never know, if it gets really cold, Silk Cut may sponsor white and purple balaclavas with silver puff holes.’ But if many smokers seem to be adapting to the ban, there is still plenty

Aidan Hartley

Mid-life crisis

I had an epiphany at 5.30 a.m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed attendants appeared. Instead of ejecting the man, they gently restored him to his tarts and whisky at the bar. His needs were understood. ‘In Shanghai nobody that age had fun when they were young, before China reformed,’ said a friend showing me the city. ‘Now they have money, everybody’s trying to have a good time before they’re too old.’ I walked out of

Simon Hoggart

NOVEMBER WINE CLUB

I cannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than you or I would go to work dressed as Ronald McDonald. On the other hand, he can be every bit as generous as Saint Nicholas, combining in this Yuletide offer not only some lavish discounts, but also applying the celebrated Brett-Smith Indulgence, whereby you can knock £6 off every case if you buy two or more inside the

Lucy Vickery

Growing pains | 3 November 2007

Competition No. 2521: Tall tale You are invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim: ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway’. (150 words maximum.) Entries to ‘Competition 2521’ by 15 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2518 you were invited to provide an extract from the adolescent diary of a famous historical figure. Teenagers today publish their diaries online as blogs. How they can bring themselves to do this is beyond me — my own adolescent outpourings, a predictably toecurling blend of tormented introspection and pretentious pseudo-philosophy punct­uated by quotations from Nietzsche and

Frank Keating

Happy as Harry

With league fixtures into double figures, the autumn’s general-excuse-me overture has finished and the long winter slog is really underway. The eightsome reel at the top of the Premiership comprises natch the four usual suspects (Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea) and a fresh quartet of determined pretenders girding up to press on from highly promising starts: Manchester City, Portsmouth, Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United. The eight are managed by a Frenchman, a Scot, a Spaniard, an Israeli, a Swede, a Welshman and two Englishmen. The last brace are contrasting guvnors: Newcastle’s plonking praesidium-pompous Sam Allardyce could have been created by Arnold Bennett, while Portsmouth’s perkily engaging and philosophic been-there-done-that

Tim Congdon

Guru to five presidents

Seated next to her at dinner, I was prepared for a dull evening with a politician. ‘Tell me, Chairman Greenspan,’ she asked, ‘why is it that we in Britain cannot calculate M3?’. I awoke. M3 is an arcane measure of money supply embraced by followers of Milton Friedman. We spent the evening discussing market economics and the problems confronting the British economy. Thus , according to Alan Greenspan’s semi-autobiographical The Age of Turbulence, began the first meeting between Alan Greenspan and Margaret Thatcher, at a September 1975 British embassy function in Washington. Greenspan evidently developed a great liking and respect for Thatcher, because, apart from anything else, she wished to

Molly Guinness

Old wine in new skins

Canongate has commissioned various distinguished authors to retell the myths, and whether by choice or bad luck, Salley Vickers got landed with Oedipus. The problem with this story is that the details are so horribly memorable and its poet so good that there is nothing really to add. The Greek tragedians could play fast and loose with the myths and adapt even major details to suit their purposes, but when a story has become so enshrined, we are left with little to do but admire and analyse it. This is what Vickers has done: Tiresias goes to see Freud and tells him the tale. She has plundered the Greek play