Society

Saturday

Michael White

John Yates has previous

When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much. By some mysterious process of osmosis between detectives and the leading crime correspondents, details of that dramatic armed robbery in Croydon would be all over the front pages while the Yard’s official spokesmen were still confined to talking lamely about ‘an incident on Purley Way which required police attendance’. I do not know how much has changed. In our 24/7 media world everything is sharper and faster. Dawn raids have TV crews primed to film the drama, sometimes

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 3 March 2007

Q. The other day I walked into a local restaurant where I saw two people I usually meet up with each year at a certain house-party. They greeted me with yelps of anticipation and asked was I excited about meeting up again next month. I had to admit that no, I wasn’t excited since our host, one of my closest friends (let’s call her Janey) who I see three times a week, has not mentioned the gathering this year and I had therefore assumed it was not taking place. My exclusion from the guest-list baffles me but my conscience is clear, so I am curious rather than hurt. Has there

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 3 March 2007

MONDAY I know I should be excited about the move to Millbank — historic landslide here we come! — but I’d just got my desk next to Jed’s office. It’s taken months of ‘edging’ at rate of one centimetre a day. Now I’ll have to start all over again. It’s sad to be leaving our traditional home above Starbucks. So much history, so many memories: the time I left a top-secret policy document on the counter, the hours spent queuing for caramel lattes. It’s the end of an era…. Dave and DD back from the East End looking v triumphant after their immigration crackdown. DD proclaimed: ‘The boy done well,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 March 2007

One must keep repeating that the bicentenary being celebrated this year is of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. From the amount of breast-beating, you would think that it was 200 years since the trade got going. There is huge concentration on the Atlantic slave trade, which is not surprising since this was the one chiefly pursued by our white British ancestors. I am an interested party in the great reparations debate since some of my maternal ancestors had fortunes dependent on slavery (my sense of guilt is mitigated by the total disappearance of those fortunes), while one of my paternal ancestors, William Smith, was a lieutenant of

Joan Collins

Diary – 3 March 2007

For years, one of the highlights of the Oscar season was the star-crammed party that über-agent Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar threw first at the Bistro in Beverly Hills and later at Spago in Hollywood. Invitations to this party were the most coveted of Oscar night, and Lazar trimmed his guest list with the ruthlessness that Genghis Khan applied to his victims’ heads. Several years ago, as I walked into the Spago party, I watched as an overly buxom starlet posed and preened for snappers outside the restaurant, having been refused entry. She was Anna Nicole Smith, whose life even then seemed like a bit of a train wreck, and now in

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 3 March 2007

Don’t blame the website From Malcolm Gooderham Sir: Your leading article of 24 February misses a fundamental point. Notably, the e-petition initiative has helped to breathe new life into the body politic, and has put No. 10 at the heart of key debates and in touch with millions of voters. The fact that ministers and officials at the Department of Transport were unprepared for such a response is also worth noting, but does not undermine the thinking behind the website.  Rather, it highlights a failure on behalf of the ministry adequately to manage — and pre-empt — such a public reaction. For MPs, or anyone else, to blame a website

Taki

Cold war hero

Gstaad Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao, brought back pleasant  memories. It was February 1972, and I’d just returned to Saigon from Phu Bai and Hue in the north, where I was reporting for National Review. I was eager to get back to civilisation and some skiing in Gstaad, when President Nixon’s trip to Beijing took us all by surprise. Not Bill Buckley, however, my nominal boss at NR, who had accompanied Richard Nixon to the land Imperial England had permanently ‘turned on’ with its opium. MacMillan writes that Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist and cold warrior par excellence, was moved when Mao took his hand and would not let go. The handholding did not impress

Robin Oakley

Bustle and happiness

Newmarket it isn’t. Forget clipped hedges, purring security gates and decorated dovecotes. At Gary Moore’s yard in Woodingdean there isn’t even a name over the stables the other side of the road from the ten-furlong start on Brighton’s racetrack. I’ve seen grander allotment huts than the cluster of wooden and breezeblock stables stretching down the hillside, the rails chewed to a fretwork by equine nibblers. A number of the horses are clad in hand-me-downs, some still bearing the initials of former handlers. Forget the Tidy Britain competition, all the effort goes into the horses who, by contrast, look a picture. It is all about energy, bustle and the sheer happiness

Jonathan Clark

A driving sense of duty

The American Revolution is the gorilla in the corner of the room. Some used to pretend that it was safely dead, merely a stuffed gorilla. Others argued that it was inherently friendly. Others again thought it safely distracted by its banana. Alas, it was none of these things, as recent events show. The American Revolution produced a wholly novel society. Its potential for action will dominate our century, as German unification dominated the early 20th. Yet we prefer to pretend that nothing much has happened. So the British still edge round this momentous question by discussing instead King George III. Nineteenth-century Whigs blamed the loss of the colonies on the

Anna Vaux

Not quite as we like it

‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island. Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More  sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’.  Unsurprisingly perhaps,

Judi Bevan

Barclays’ new head gardener

Marcus Agius was strolling round his Hampshire garden last summer when a headhunter rang to inquire if he would consider becoming chairman of Barclays Bank. ‘It took me a nanosecond to say yes,’ says Agius. ‘Barclays is a great brand and I love great brands; it’s 300 years old; it’s huge and it’s going through a period of enormous change.’ He took up the job in January after more than three decades as an investment banker at Lazard Brothers. We are taking tea in his vast corner office on the 31st floor of Barclays’ tower in Canary Wharf. Despite his enthusiasm, Agius is well aware that Britain’s third-largest bank is

Margareta Pagano

The wonders of modern concrete

‘Look! Concrete!’ Bruno Lafont crashes his fist on the table. ‘You could put 30 tonnes on top of this table and it wouldn’t break. Tougher than steel!’ The table doesn’t look like concrete at all. The top is only a centimetre thick. The surface is painted a Tuscan tone, giving it the feel and look of polished stone. Lafont turns to his desk and bookshelves: ‘They’re also concrete. Aren’t they wonderful?’ These are a more utilitarian beige, but equally handsome. Scattered around the room are more clues to his passions: lumps of gypsum, vital for making cement; more rocks; and an enormous elephant painting, a present from the Prime Minister

Frank Keating

Home advantage

By next Wednesday evening, uniquely, five British clubs could be in the last eight of the European Champions’ Cup. There is still, as they say, a lot of football to be played, but I suppose even the possibility remains testament to the strength at the top of the British club game. Mind you, only a small handful of native British footballers will be marking the occasion by actually participating. In these second-leg ties, important home advantage lies with four of the Brit five. On Tuesday, Liverpool await Barcelona at Anfield in the pick of the games; on the same night in London, Chelsea play Porto; on Wednesday, Arsenal and Manchester

Jaspistos

Sorry, mate

To say ‘I’m sorry’ once can be emollient, but as everybody knows, to say it three times with arms flapping like a penguin is downright inflammatory. Most of your apologies were for sexual misbehaviour. Since there are so many other domestic sins just as exasperating as infidelity I found this surprising. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince. Dear, there’s so much — so where do I begin?(To you the smallest fault’s a mortal sin.)I’ve boiled your egg too hard (again!); your TimesIs creased (I read it first); the cat — her crimesAre also mine — slept on your scarf; the carhas

Tessa Mayes

Big Brother is coming

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair told the road-toll petitioners by email that his government was not trying to impose ‘Big Brother surveillance’. That was accurate, if disingenuous. The real Big Brother doesn’t announce himself. He comes creeping up on you, by stages, until you realise that you are being snooped on, scrutinised and spied upon in all sorts of ways that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. Take the powers of the taxman. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) — the new authority established by the merger of HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue in 2005 — is becoming astonishingly intrusive in its investigation of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A taste of gun crime

Crack crack crack. Three shots, really close, from a car-park just across the road. Everyone in the crowded street stopped. No doubt what this was — gun crime erupting under our noses. Two more shots. Crack crack. Then another. Crack! My eight-month-old son was in a buggy and I shoved him into a gap between two parked cars. What next? Run for it? But I might charge into the line of fire. I paused, terrified. Around me everyone stared in shock and bewilderment. At the end of the street a young black guy came running round the corner, both hands under his sweatshirt, hiding something. He looked wired and frantic

Jeff Randall

The Clunking Fist

Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little list’ of those who are for the chop. Among the joys of W.S. Gilbert’s libretto is its invitation for a contemporary version of victims. Who better to identify them than the Clunking Fist? Ko-Ko, The Lord High Executioner (Gordon Brown):As this year it may happen that more taxes must be found,I’ve got a little list — I am the Clunking FistSo

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 February 2007

If 2006 was the year of issues, when the word problem gave way to ‘issues around’ things, then 2007 looks as if it will be the year of challenge. Dreary management-speak types have long invited workers to see negative problems as positive challenges. All that this has meant is that the new word challenge has taken on the connotations of the old word problem, just as lavatory air-fresheners take on the unpleasant associations of the smells they replace. Challenge was a word ripe for exploitation in this way. It derives perhaps surprisingly from the Latin calumnia, meaning ‘trickery, misrepresentation, false accusation’. The main current meanings date from the 13th or

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 24 February 2007

Monday OK, OK, I was wrong. (It does happen you know.) I may have been a teensy bit oversensitive about the whole ‘marriage’ thing. But I am now prepared to admit that it does seem that it may, after all, be the answer to everything. I cannot argue with statistics showing that hardly anybody on these south London housing estates is married. And everyone is getting shot. Contrast that with the situation in, let’s say, Witney, where 95 per cent of people are married. And gun crime is nonexistent. Also, as Jed explained to us at Strategy Hub, there are no end of political problems you can apply the marriage

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 February 2007

The Anglican Communion, trying to hold itself together in Dar-es-Salaam, is like the Commonwealth. Indeed, it exists for the same reason — the inheritance of the British Empire. Like the Commonwealth, it began as a white-dominated organisation, and has gradually ceased to be so. The Episcopal Church of the United States stands in relation to the Communion as white South Africa stood to the Commonwealth 50 years ago. Its insistence on pursuing its own obsessive doctrine — in this case, the ordination and marriage of practising homosexuals, in South Africa’s case, apartheid — isolates it from its fellows, particularly its black fellows. In the middle, in both cases, stands England,