Society

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Local heroes

When I was six or seven I went up to London with my father in his car. As we passed through Whitechapel in the East End, he pointed out a pub called the Blind Beggar. ‘That’s where Ronald Kray shot George Cornell,’ he said. There was an element of something approaching pride in his voice, as if the grim-looking pub set back from the road was a significant cultural landmark of which I ought to take note. I did take note (I was an obedient and faithful child), and later, when I became a reader, I tried to find out everything I could about Ron and Reg and their criminal

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 23 June 2007

Lie of the land Sir: In the past few weeks Hamas has shown itself to be a merciless, power-hungry organisation with little interest in the well-being of its own people, let alone that of its Jewish neighbours, so Dr Hamad must be laughing into his cup of Earl Grey tea at the ease with which he has manipulated Clemency Burton-Hill (‘Tea with Hamas’, 16 June). Her naivety is breathtaking, as is her willingness to pass on his fanciful assertions to the rest of us without challenge. It would not take much research to show Hamas for what it is: a fundamentalist Muslim organisation which gets its money and its orders

Richard Beeston

The rules of the meddling game

Paddy Ashdown was standing by a muddy roadside in mid-winter outside Sarajevo enduring the daily humiliation of the assembled members of the international community in Bosnia. The civil war was at its height. Sarajevo was under siege. The first horror stories of rapes and massacres were beginning to surface. And yet to gain access by the only road open to this desperate European capital, UN troops, aid workers, journalists and even the then Liberal MP had first to be subjected to an intrusive search by the very Serb soldiers responsible for tearing the country apart. They not only had a stranglehold on the city, but they also demonstrated their control

Edward Harrison

The tame Englishman

This is an unusual, disturbing and powerful book. It is part autobiography of an English schoolboy who grew up in Nazi Germany, and part biography of the mother who left him there. Widowed early, Norah Briscoe sought with great determination to build a career in journalism in the face of much prejudice. Adversity did not improve her. She was the mother from hell, unfeeling, selfish and cold. She never once kissed or embraced her son Paul. The logical culmination of Norah’s personal development was that she became a Nazi. As the authors point out, ‘Nazism did not count a lack of sympathy for other people’s feelings as a weakness; rather,

Gillian Allnutt

Mr String, considering

Cups in the midden.Imagine.Made by madmen, nineteen hundred  of themIn the asylum’s heyday.Idle hands, then, idle minds.England.Whole institution round the bend.

Michael Tanner

Musical grossness

The latest revival of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Royal Opera, in Francesca Zambello’s 2002 production, now directed by Duncan Macfarland, is so bad as to be almost sensational. The production itself was never any good, and although I have now seen it with four largely different casts, in none of them was the title role taken with conviction, not even by such seasoned Dons as Simon Keenlyside. Nor has the conducting, which has included such eminent and long-lasting Mozartians as Colin Davis and Charles Mackerras, ever been better than somewhat disappointing. This time round though is a connoisseur’s item of musical grossness and dramatic nullity. The best thing about

Lucy Vickery

Pet sounds

In Competition No. 2499 you were invited to submit a poem eulogising a pet.It was not only Dr Johnson’s Hodge who inspired this assignment; credit, too, goes to Jeoffry, immortalised by Christopher Smart in ‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’ from ‘Jubilate Agno’: ‘…For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./ For he is tenacious of his point./ For he is a misture of gravity and waggery./…’A rather more unusual pet, belonging to the bohemian poet Gérard de Nerval, was brought to life by Bill Greenwell. Nerval apparently took his crustacean chum for walks in Paris fastened to a piece of blue ribbon, and regarded lobsters

Frank Keating

Radio days | 23 June 2007

BBC radio’s Test Match Special will deservedly be celebrating particularly special champagne moments in a couple of weeks when their tardis settles on Edgbaston for the one-day international; for  it was at Birmingham’s pleasant ground they began their ball-by-ball odyssey of jabber and jape 50 summers ago. In its turn, tennis next week nods to a cluster of even more  venerable broadcasting jubilees. This year’s Wimbledon championships, which begin on Monday, mark the four-score anniversary of radio’s first running commentary of a match on SW19’s strawberry fields; ten years later, in 1937, the BBC’s fledgling television service relayed some fuzzily flickering outside-broadcast pictures for the first time; and 40 years ago

Robert Beaumont

Good news for everyone except Mr Chu: the post-Prescott era dawns at last

On Wednesday, when John Prescott finally steps down as Deputy Prime Minister, the city of Hull will breathe a collective sigh of relief. Just as Joseph Chamberlain defined Birmingham in the 1870s, so Prezza personified Hull for the past decade. Chamberlain built a great industrial city — but Prescott has reduced this proud, historic port, whose eastern parliamentary constituency he has held since 1970, to something approaching a national laughing stock. It seems unlikely, for example, that Hull would have been named the ‘crappest’ of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, had Prescott not lived there. And I fear

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Terry Wogan and Ken Bruce are beloved because they soar above English ideas of class

Presenting Pick of the Week on Radio Four the other day, I was determined to feature (and did) BBC Radio One’s Annie Nightingale, and Radio Two’s Janice Long — both excellent presenters who take us through the watches of the night; but my producer and I didn’t find it easy to identify any short clips that triumphantly demonstrated their brilliance. The skill of a presenter/disc jockey (or what use to be called a compère) rarely resides in showpiece tours-de-force, but in the whole atmosphere in which by chit-chat, humour, wit and sympathy they contrive to cocoon their hours on air, so that we feel we know them, and are sharing

Paul Johnson

The man who took a PhD in Happiness Science

Lady Diana Cooper used to relate that, at a dinner she gave in the British embassy in Paris, not long after the war, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to now her husband had left office. To the consternation of the table she replied, ‘A penis.’ Whereupon the General spoke: ‘No, my dear, you are mispronouncing the word. You mean “appiness”.’ Yes: but what did the lady really mean? What does anyone mean by happiness? It is the most subjective of all emotional states. As Kant said in his Ethics, ‘Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.’ Nevertheless, public-spirited people, wishing to ‘do

Tessa Mayes

Stars in their eyes

To download a podcast about Tessa Mayes’s experiences with the celebrity Scientologists, click here. ‘A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists,’ wrote L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre in 1969, 15 years after he formed the church itself. So, in a sense, the Scientologists have only been true to their founder’s intentions in the ever greater emphasis they now put on the famous. If you’ve seen the ordinary-looking Scientology shopfront on the Tottenham Court Road, the London Celebrity Centre comes as a pleasant contrast: it is an impressive, six-storey, cream Victorian building in Bayswater, adorned with

Richard Sanders

Hello, sailor!

Richard Sanders recalls the exploits of Bartholomew Roberts, a swashbuckling 18th-century buccaneer to match Johnny Depp — except that he drank tea, and was probably gay The Pirates of the Caribbean films, the third of which has just been released, have revived the age-old interest in all things piratical. But the average Victorian schoolboy would probably have choked on his porridge if he’d known the real nature of the men whose adventures he so avidly devoured. If anyone deserves the title ‘the real pirate of the Caribbean’ it was the Welshman Bartholomew Roberts, who captured an astonishing 400 ships in a brief two-and-a-half-year career between 1719 and 1722 — a

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How the public get stitched up by the professionals

The Tory health policy – such as it is – is based on the Kinnockite principle of “trust the professionals.” A story in GP magazine shows what naïve nonsense this is. It suits GPs to get through patients as quickly as they can, rather than explaining to them the government’s choice agenda and talking them through their rights to select different hospitals for surgery. In a survey, the magazine has found that 42% of GPs “have dropped Choose and Book in response to the pay freeze”. The government’s “choice” policy is useless if GPs refuse to implement it. And despite being paid on average £106,000 and not working weekends, they are

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What the CIA was up to during the Cold War

Next week, the CIA will release its records of its activities up to the end of the 1970s. The Washington Post reports that Michael Hayden, the CIA Director, has confirmed that documents on the CIA’s overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping, infiltration of leftist groups, surveillance of journalists and “unwitting” drugs tests on U.S. civilians are all included in this declassification exercise. The CIA is, obviously, hoping to win brownie points for transparency. But, I fear, that if anything the CIA is suspected of doing is not included in this document dump it will just be written off as an elaborate cover-up. Anyway, brace yourself for a whole slew of stories on the

Thursday

Tamzin Lightwater

DD goes berserk

Well, they can’t say I didn’t warn them. DD has finally lost it. Why did Dave have to go and put him in charge of this stupid social mobility thingy. Now he has a mini empire and is behaving like a power crazed dictator. Today he had one of his poor girls frog marched from the Commons in a military style “counter-coup” operation. By all accounts it was absolutely chilling. One minute he was promising to take her to the National Tank Museum, the next he was ranting about insurgency, ordering her about by her surname and demanding her badge back. Accused her of leaking stories about how capricious and

The Spectator

A nice middle class boy

I have always had a theory that within the anarchic millennial Byron that is Pete Doherty, there lurks an incredibly well-behaved middle-class boy. Doubtless it was the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” pop poet that first appealed to Kate Moss. But it is surely the well-concealed Jekyll within that has persuaded judge after judge to let Doherty off with a mild telling off (“you young scallywag”). Now, there comes proof in the Times’s serialisation of the former Libertine’s journals. Here, for instance, are Pete’s “Things to Do” for February 10, 1999: He only forgot to mention buying a new orange folder for his Physics revision notes. This is the

Wednesday

The Spectator

Rebellion is in the genes

Like father, like son: my old friend Malcolm McLaren’s son, Joe Corre, has rejected his MBE, accusing Tony Blair of being “morally bankrupt”. As manager of the Sex Pistols, Situationist art student and all-round subversive, Malcolm revelled in such acts – famously releasing the single God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee. I gave him a tip or two over lunch when he was running for Mayor of London, a glorious venture that fizzled out at just the right moment (he didn’t take my advice to run as a Tory). His son knows how to pull a stunt, too: he accepted the honour and then had a change of