Society

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

QPR have walloped the Chinese

A few weeks ago the Chinese national youth football team arrived in London to play some matches against the capital’s clubs as part of a historic, groundbreaking, goodwill visit ahead of the Olympic Games. A chance for our two nations to foment sporting respect for one another, despite our profound political differences. Sort of like Nixon’s visit to Peking in 1972, except with the top referee Dermot Gallagher in attendance, rather than Henry Kissinger. I dare say you can imagine what happened, in case you haven’t already heard. Seven members of the Chinese team were sent home after a terrific, spectacular mass brawl during the, um, friendly game against QPR.

Martin Gilbert

Churchill was ‘too fond of the Jews’

In a press release announcing a book by Richard Toye on Churchill and Lloyd George, Cambridge University Press put its main emphasis on the discovery of a previously unknown article written by Winston Churchill in 1937, containing considerable anti-Semitic imagery. In fact, not one word of this article was written by Churchill. Nor did the article ever appear in print, either under his name or that of any other. The article was written in its entirety by a British journalist, Adam Marshall Diston. Churchill, who was then writing on average an article a week, paid Diston, a journalist and would-be Labour party parliamentary candidate, to draft these articles. Some of

Michael Moorcock

How I learned to love the Lords

Lost Pines, Texas When I first moved to America in the early 1990s I arrived as a republican, full of a furious rhetoric about the end of monarchy and the abolition of hereditary privilege. I’d sent a hefty donation to Charter 88, who wanted to see PR, a written constitution and an elected second house. Social justice could not be improved by traditional methods and all the Lords Temporal were good for was raising prize pigs and holding the hands of serial killers whom they visited in jug. The Lords Spiritual were the symbol of an Anglicanism reduced to giving a home to the WI and holding the odd carol

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 10 March 2007

Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran — how intelligently is the West, especially America, handling the East? The Romans may have something to say on the matter. When the Romans took on Carthage in the two Punic wars for mastery of the western Mediterranean (264-241 and 218-201 bc), they engaged with an enemy as militarily brutal as themselves. Carthage defeated, Rome turned its attention to states that had supported Hannibal and took them out as well — and so the Roman empire grew. Such a strategy was wholly typical of Rome, the method by which this small city-state had earlier won power across all Italy. From the 6th to 3rd centuries bc, they

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 10 March 2007

I was baffled when I heard last month that British troops in Iraq would be ‘drawn down’. Byron’s Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, but he didn’t need to be drawn down. To me, as to George Herbert, being drawn down is the sort of thing we worry we might do to God’s wrath. Unprompted, one might assume that drawing down troops would be like drawing down fire, perhaps calling upon extra reserves. But this did not fit the Prime Minister’s drift. ‘Over time,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘we will be able to draw down further, possibly to below 5,000.’ Within a few hours people

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 10 March 2007

Nothing to fear? Sir: I rather enjoyed reading Tessa Mayes’s anxious tirade about the imminent arrival of Big Brother (‘Big Brother is coming’, 3 March), although perhaps not for reasons of which she would approve. During my 88 years of life so far (in at least 44 of which income tax at between 40 and 83 per cent has been levied on part of my earnings), I have never met any self-employed person who has not admitted to ‘fiddling’ his or her tax return as a matter of routine. If, as Tessa Mayes now claims, HMRC is being much more aggressive and — dare we say it? — astute in

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 10 March 2007

MONDAY Off to New York with Dave and DD next week! Am working flat out on preps. First priority: which hotel? It’s the Four Seasons versus Soho House. While East 57th Street says ‘statesmen-in-waiting’, the Meatpacking District says ‘modern, vibrant and cool’. This is what Jed calls a Fork in the Road. Meetings set up with Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Tina Brown and Robert De Niro (subject to confirmation). No word yet from Hillary. Surely she will agree to a top-secret informal breakfast summit? Have just heard Poppy is coming too. Am  trying not to see this as undermining me but rather that we will be glamorous power pals, a

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 March 2007

When I employed him at the Daily Telegraph, I found John Kampfner, now the editor of the New Statesman, a pleasant and able man. But his recent conduct towards one of his writers deserves a passage in the annals of editorial eccentricity. Nick Cohen, who is a leftwing columnist in the New Statesman, has written a brilliant book called What’s Left (4th Estate). Its essential argument is that large parts of the Left are so disoriented by the death of traditional socialism and so crazed with hatred of Bush and Blair that they ignore the fascism of the Islamists and the sufferings of their comrades on the Left — feminists,

Rachel Holmes

Diary – 10 March 2007

William Wilberforce is about to hit cinemas as the Great White Emancipationist Hero in Amazing Grace. Wilberforce was a decent guy. We all need heroes; but let’s be clear, this is not, as it claims, ‘The True Story’. Ioan Gruffudd strides around convincing us that slaves had nothing to do with their own emancipation; nor was abolition due to radical democratic republicanism and mobilisation by ordinary people. No, it was nice conscientious white boys pushing a compromise bill through the corridors of Parliament whom we can thank for ridding the world of this abomination. Wilberforce would be appalled at being credited with virtually single-handedly bringing about abolition. Come on, Michael

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 10 March 2007

Q. I am on my gap year and looking for work as a tutor, which I understand is very well paid. The key months for Common Entrance, AS- and A-level revision are almost upon us and, although I have my details up on the noticeboards of various local schools, I have had no inquiries. I can’t afford to advertise and I do not want to sign up with an agency because I don’t want to give up half my wages on commission. Can you recommend an internet site where I can tout myself?B.W., London SW3 A. No. The following method will reap better results. Have some photo-cards printed up and,

Bella Pollen

Fragile earth

I don’t like fish. I don’t like their scales and bones. I don’t like the way they eyeball you from a restaurant plate and I particularly resent the size they grow to if left unfilleted and grilled. Oh, I realise nobody was actually eaten during the making of that film, but I saw Jaws at an impressionable age and the sea and all things under it have profoundly scared me since. Thus, when a trip involving a boat, the Pacific and a scuba-diving course was suggested, I balked. The Pacific Ocean and I have met before and we did not fare well together — but the boat in question was

Jeremy Clarke

The fascination of the horrible

Supporting West Ham this season has been so full of drama and surprise, it’s been like living in the Book of Revelation. A brief summary. Last season the newly promoted team of Young Turks put together by our decent manager Alan Pardew feared no one. We finished a vertiginous ninth in the Premiership and got to within a whisker of winning the FA Cup final. It was a wonderful, unbelievable season. Even the doubting Thomases among us (given our history of glorious failure, that’s most of us) succumbed to cautious optimism for the future. This season it’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion. Wealth and unaccustomed success,

Pa Greenwood

Beaches and cream

Sydney is an opium den for lifestyle junkies, a hotbed of food-loving, sun-seeking sport enthusiasts. I realised this the first time I went to Bondi Beach. Unless you’re armed with a soya latte, yoga mat, designer bikini or designer in a bikini, you won’t make it past the BMW-filled car-park. I had none of these when I moved to Sydney last year. I moved to get a break from London, which is cool and great for old buildings but also grey, expensive and generally dirty. Living in London isn’t easy. Living in Sydney is. It’s among the sunniest, cleanest and best-looking cities in the world. And full of Brits like

Harry Bucknall

An epic journey

Taking a gap year at 40 did not initially seem like a very sensible idea. I had a good business, a nice flat and everything was relatively rosy — so it still beats me why I chose to jeopardise it all. I suppose I should blame my cousin’s girlfriend, for it was she who largely put me up it. Two years ago, over lunch on Mykonos, I blurted out that someone should write a book about travelling around the Greek islands. Don’t know why I came up with the idea, I just did. But of course it seemed a ridiculous notion really, totally impractical, so I thought nothing more about

Christine Patterson

Enchanted island

‘Excuse me, madam, you are writing for a Buddhist priest?’ For a moment, I was confused — but then enlightenment struck. No, I assured the waiter, whose smile was, indeed, like the Buddha’s, the pieces I was writing were for the British press. After a few days in Sri Lanka, however, I could see how writing for a Buddhist priest might well make much more sense. Buddhas are everywhere in this beautiful country, a country whose Sinhalese name means ‘enchanted island’ and which Marco Polo described as ‘the finest small island in the world’. It is a country which has inspired writers from Paul Bowles to Neruda and Chekhov, a

Christopher Howse

The essence of Spain

Spain doesn’t smell the same any more. At the airport, the very first impression used to be of bitter black tobacco smoke, more acrid than Balkan Sobranie, a harbinger of stronger smells beyond Customs. That smoke would follow you wherever human activity was to be found. It was the cantus firmus in the polyphony of smells flying up from a culture being itself. On the station platform a drift of smoke would bind together the passengers waiting far too early, as is their habit, for a train: the conscript going back to his village on weekend leave or the countryman and his wife, a cardboard box knotted with string at

Interconnect

Sir Ken Macdonald, QC

Our article entitled ‘Shall we tell the Prime Minister? His gang has scattered like rats’ (10 March) was not intended to suggest that Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had leaked information to officials at No. 10 or that he was pressurised by the Police to withdraw from making the decision about prosecutions in the cash-for-honours case for that reason. We accept that there would be no truth whatsoever in any such assertions. We further accept that Sir Ken has behaved properly and appropriately and we apologise to him for any embarrassment caused to him by our article.

Simon Courtauld

Who wants to buy our old office?

‘A unique opportunity to purchase the home of a famous weekly magazine.’ Thus might an estate agent market No. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1, now up for sale after more than 30 years as the offices of The Spectator. But an estate agent cannot know how des a res is this early-19th-century house in Bloomsbury. It should be sold not so much for its fabric — handsome as it is, if slightly worn — as for its recent history, for the rich variety of people who have passed through its doors and the voices which may come out of the now possibly rotting woodwork. As someone associated with The Spectator

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 10 March 2007

This week’s mini-bar is from a new company, titled in the modern fashion, FromVineyardsDirect.com. It’s been set up by David Campbell, who is the publisher of the Everyman Library, and Esme Johnstone, one of the founders of Majestic Wine Warehouses. They have made up a very short list — fewer than 20 choices, though this will no doubt increase — and offer them all online or by post direct from the growers. It’s impossible to compare prices precisely, since these vary wildly according to who’s selling, but David reckons he charges roughly 20 per cent less than you would pay other merchants. Virtually all their wines are French classics, and

Jaspistos

Our vegetable loves

In Competition No. 2484 you were invited to provide the first 16 lines of an ‘Ode to Vegetables’. Thank you for the kind words that have been reaching me at the Charing Cross Hospital. Mike Morrison’s entry was particularly bracing: I’ve never known a patient quite like you,Jaspistos: no, you can’t have Irish stew …‘May I have cheese on toast?’ No, you may not,It’s Hobson’s choice here, sunshine — that’s shallot!My challenge called for either the solemnity of an Erasmus Darwin or Auden in a light-hearted mood, but the results were disappointing. The prizewinners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each, while the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty.Oh, some