Society

Saturday

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 24 March 2007

Off to the States for a fortnight’s book tour, trying to plug my A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Prepare yourself for a veritable carpet-bombing of name-dropping, on the basis that if you can’t boast shamelessly in the Speccie Diary, where on earth can you? The Chaos Club in New York radiates reactionary chic. Flanked by Tom Wolfe — complete in the high collar and three-piece white suit — and Norman Podhoretz, I set out my argument. Next stop a speech and dinner given by the wonderfully counter-counter-cultural magazine The New Criterion at the Cosmopolitan Club. Then a dinner thrown for my wife Susan Gilchrist and me at

Josie Reed

Heaven on earth

Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial might look like. Everybody visits the cemeteries of Highgate in London and Père Lachaise in Paris, but there is an almost greater pleasure to be had in discovering a small town cemetery or country churchyard, beside the sea or in the mountains, that is the resting place of a particular hero. Visiting Barnoon Cemetery in St Ives is not on the list of things to do in that particular seaside town, but it should be. Its location is five-star: perched

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 March 2007

Nations need borders Sir: Austen Ivereigh (‘Let’s sort out the migration mess’, 17 March) argues that giving an amnesty to the 500,000-odd illegal immigrants in Britain offers a practical solution to our immigration problem. The policy sounds wonderful and comforting, but the reality is that it will send out a trumpet call to people to come here illegally in the knowledge that they will be made legal later. The experience of the United States makes the point. Since 1986 alone, it has given seven amnesties covering millions of illegal immigrants. The result has been that the number of illegal immigrants has rocketed from below four million in 1980 to around

Said K-Aburish

Ignorance is no excuse

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the best account I have read of why the American occupation of Iraq has gone so drastically wrong. It is an exceptional piece of work, well researched, well written and well judged. Having lived the Iraqi story for over 30 years, from advising Saddam’s government on Iraqi-American relations to resigning in protest against his use of chemical weapons, I cannot remember a book that does more to enhance our understanding of the country than this one. On the whole the quality of reporting on Iraq since the American invasion has been dismal. There have been editors of national dailies telling us that Osama

Kenneth Steven

Voting with My Feet

I wish I could be fun at parties too: Slap men across their backs and flirt with girls, Tell ribald tales, play games with young blonde curls, Shout, ‘Murphy, man, remember at the zoo!’ Instead I drink too much and hog the loo, Avoid the crowd and wince at insults hurled, Trip over doctors’ shoes, get caught in pearls, Knock over priceless Mings . . . but then what’s new? At home they thought me hapless, shook their heads At all attempts to play the suave, cool guy, Just said that I’d been born with two left feet. So now I’m stuck at parties with fat Neds With gorgeous dolls

Joanna Pitman

Auctioneer by appointment to the world’s new rich

In 1987, shortly after joining Christie’s auction house in London as a 23-year-old English Literature graduate from Oxford, Jussi Pylkkanen nervously approached the head of the Impressionists department, James Roundell, and asked if he could transfer to his team. ‘He was a kind of god in the company. He’d just sold Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to a Japanese insurance company for almost $40 million. He was the most important man in Christie’s,’ recalls Pylkkanen. A year later, Pylkkanen joined the Impressionists department; 20 years on, he has replaced Roundell as the colossus of Christie’s European operations. Pylkkanen is the president of Christie’s Europe and the company’s top-flight auctioneer this side of

Matthew Vincent

A duvet day’s as good as a pay rise

Ever wanted to kill your boss? Well, now you can — and, as long as it doesn’t become a regular occurrence, you won’t even have to pay tax on the cost of the exercise. Welcome to the wacky world of employee benefits and workplace incentives. Here, of course, the corporate regicide is imaginary — the scene is played out by characters called Seymour Deals and Lord Fred Bare at a ‘team-building murder mystery event’ for bank and insurance staff, staged by a consultancy firm called Progressive Resources. As its managing director James Coakes explains: ‘The financial industry … is renowned for its staff development programmes.’ And  these programmes are part

Judi Bevan

High-street icons are safe in private hands

Those who fear that private-equity bidders, if they secure control, will destroy national icons such as Boots and Sainsbury’s, might consider that J. Sainsbury fared pretty well as a private company for 104 years before it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1973. Family control with its paternalistic overtones may appear different from highly incentivised professional management backed by private equity, but in both cases the people at the top are motivated by the same goal. To make money for the com-pany is to make money for themselves. Private ownership enables managers to get on with this task without interference from the battalions of busybodies who besiege public companies.

Tim Heald

There’ll be dancing on the Hoe again as Drake’s port begins to punch its weight

The Luftwaffe blitzed Plymouth for two months in 1941 and destroyed 20,000 houses, 100 pubs, 42 churches, 24 schools, eight cinemas and six hotels. In a symbolic act of defiance many of the survivors formed up behind the lady mayoress and danced on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake had played his similarly symbolic game of bowls almost 400 years earlier. The Germans exultantly claimed that Plymouth could never be rebuilt. The city’s next response was to produce a blueprint for a New Plymouth — the Abercrombie Plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie being the foremost town-planner of the day. Ironically, his plan’s partial implementation meant the destruction of more historic buildings

Paul Johnson

The grace and glory, the exultant euphoria of successful flower painting

Art is not going to the dogs in every field. Take flower painting. The Ancient Egyptians were depicting garden scenes from about 2000 bc, especially in private tombs, painting with delight and verisimilitude plants such as the mandrake, the red poppy, cornflowers and (a favourite) the blue and white lotus. In Europe, mediaeval and Renaissance art was intensely floriated, and German artists, especially Dürer, painted flowers with almost religious passion, accuracy and grace. But it was in the Netherlands that flower painting evolved into a special art form. Entire families of gifted and dedicated artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert, his three sons Ambrosius the Younger, Johannes and Abraham, and his

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Simplify taxes, shift the burden, reward marriage: this is Osbornomics

Even when she slips into a room half an hour late, The Lady can still inspire a standing ovation. ‘Can I welcome Baroness Thatcher who has just joined us,’ said Lord Lamont halfway through the Keith Joseph memorial lecture last Tuesday. He had just started explaining that Sir Keith would have accepted today’s Conservative slogan of ‘stability before tax cuts’, because he agreed with the principle of balanced budgets and ‘sound money’. On that basis, Sir Keith, the intellectual architect of Thatcherism, would have been a fan of George Osborne. It’s a welcome endorsement for a shadow chancellor who has been trying to make the same argument for months. ‘I

Edward Stourton

‘We will have to fight them again’

Edward Stourton has had unrivalled access to the protagonists in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here, on the eve of the Winograd Commission’s report, he reveals what really happened in this conflict that nobody won Hogarth’s ‘Fourth Stage of Cruelty’ is a compelling evocation of what it must have been like to attend a public human dissection. Three medical men are busily dismembering a corpse on a wooden table; a group of their fellow surgeons, distinguished by their mortarboards, look on with suitably studious attention — although one of them has the hint of a prurient smirk playing about his lips. And the artist conveys his own revulsion at

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The false dawn that awaits Zimbabwe

If you are thinking of taking your summer holiday abroad this year and have not yet alighted upon a suitable destination, then why not bear Zimbabwe in mind? It looks increasingly likely that Robert Mugabe will not be President for very much longer. Instead they’ll have someone else in charge. The general rule for African countries is that when some obscene, homicidal and incompetent tyrant is at last somehow overthrown, the civilised world breathes a sigh of relief and the new regime is, for a while, garlanded in roses. Suddenly, from being a basket case, the country is referred to by the international relief agencies, the NGOs and Western politicians

Cleo Watson

The girls of St Thinian’s

After the South American models Luisel Ramos and Carolina Reston starved themselves to death last year to try to reach size ‘zero’, the fashion world promised to be more responsible. It hung its head in shame, and even chivvied some size-12 girls on to the catwalk for London Fashion Week last month. So I imagine that most people think that the whole zero fad has finally faded away, and that teenage girls like me and my school-friends have developed healthier role models and a happier relationship with our food. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint any Spectator-reading parents, but in my experience it’s worse than ever. My school is deeply ordinary

Simon Hoggart

March Wine Club

Order your wines by email There are many ways of buying cheap wine, though fewer means of buying good cheap wine. Supermarkets often have bargains. Recently, however, I went to a tasting by a very downmarket chain — they had Châteauneuf du Pape for £6.99 and a Chablis for £5.99. These tasted of nothing, and I was amazed at lax appellation laws which allowed them through. You can go over to France, and that works fine if you want quantity rather than quality. In a highly competitive market, the better French wines tend to be sold abroad or else by specialist merchants; the hypermarchés frequently sell stuff you would not

Jaspistos

The Ides of March

In Competition No. 2486 you were invited to submit a retrospective verse comment from the other world on the assassination by Caesar or by one of the conspirators. Most of you chose to put yourself in Caesar’s bloodied sandals, consigning the conspirators to the sidelines, which they would have hated. Adam Campbell was pithy and to the point:Talk about being stabbed in the back!Nasty way of getting the sack.The prizewinners, printed below, scoop £25 each. The extra fiver goes to D.A Prince, who used some nice half rhymes. I particularly liked ‘whine’ with ‘Elysium’, the rhyme and the meaning working together in a very satisfying way. A commendation to Ray

Frank Keating

Middle East conflict

Once more unto the breach! Harfleur, Dunkirk and all that guff is being desperately evoked by the public prints and broadcasters. Goodwill may be suffering from donor fatigue but for one more time the nation entreats the England football team to get a grip. Victory in Tel Aviv against Israel today (Saturday) is crucial to qualification for next year’s European championship finals, to be jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria. Another tediously limp and drooping disaster by England in the Ramat Gan stadium today would stir supporters to demand immediate and unamicable divorce proceedings between the Football Association and Steve McClaren, even though the poor put-upon manager himself would claim to be

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 17 March 2007

I wonder how much of our hatred of certain words and phrases is really a hatred of people. My husband, no mean hater, is given to self-defeating outbursts in response to some triggers. I’ve known him slam down the telephone when the person at the other end says, ‘Bear with me,’ even though he has waited ages to get through in the first place. I was pondering such hatred during the recent flash-flood of remarks about language on the Letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Many readers of that newspaper seem to hate the sinner more than the linguistic sin. So, some people reach for their revolvers every time they

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 17 March 2007

Primary school pupils in Clackmannanshire, taught to philosophise ‘like Socrates’, have evidently demonstrated dramatic improvements in IQ and other tests. But since the philosophy they are taught is all about working together to seek answers to problems — a worthy aim, of course — it is not at all clear how Socratic they are actually being. The whole point about Socrates is that he began from one simple premise: that he knew nothing. That was why he was so baffled when a friend of his, Chaerephon, asked the oracle at Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which it replied ‘No’. Reluctantly — ‘for the god cannot lie:

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 17 March 2007

MONDAY I don’t know why everyone is getting so worked up about our lovely green taxes. If  they read the small print, they would see that what Gids takes away with one hand, he is quite literally going to give us back with the other. Every penny that he takes taxing your holiday flights (if you will insist on taking more than one!) will be paid back through our Non-Judgmental Family Tax Relief. Nobody will lose out. The Modern Families Tax Allowance will encompass anyone who can make a reasonable claim to be a ‘committed unit’. To give you an idea of how inclusive this will be … let’s just