Society

Tuesday

The Spectator

Our rotten taste in tomatoes

Some people think that the only tomato worth eating is the one you’ve grown yourself but this isn’t actually true. I can think of loads of tomatoes – eg the cherry ones grown at the foot of Mt Etna and sold at I Camisa in Old Compton Street, Soho – that are much nicer than most people’s rubbishy, watery, tasteless home grown ones. With home grown tomatoes there’s only one thing that really matters: they have to be the yellow-skinned cherry type called Sungold. Every other variety sucks. Gardeners Delight? Sucks. Moneymaker? Sucks. That authentic Italian-style, mutant-shaped gigantic tomato variety you bought in order to recreate the ones you buy

The Spectator

Remembering Sheridan Morley

What a wonderful afternoon it was! Who can imagine a theatre jammed full of the most famous thespians in London honouring that despised creature, a theatre critic? But they — Miriam Margolyes, Corin Redgrave, Patricia Hodge, Simon Callow and many others — all came. Actors loved the late Sheridan Morley, for they realised that Sherry not only loved but also had huge understanding of the theatre. And they — actors, directors, producers, friends — came in their hundreds to show their affection for him. And as they read from Sherry’s reviews, reminisced, sang and recited, they made us laugh and cry. 

The Spectator

The fight on the right

The issue that ends up rendering asunder the American right will not be Iraq but the other i-word, immigration. George W. Bush and Karl Rove have long believed that the future of the Republican Party depends on appealing to Hispanics, the fastest growing minority group in the US. They argue that with their strong family values, work ethic and small business mind-set this group are just waiting for the Republicans to court them. Indeed, Bush and Rove received some vindication for this theory when a sharp increase in the Hispanic vote helped win Bush a second term. But, so the argument goes, if the Republicans are to win the loyalty of

Monday

The Spectator

Hollywood, friend of cheap dates everywhere

Leonardo di-Caprio and Blood Diamond gave men an excuse not to buy their wives and girlfriends diamonds on the grounds that they were ethically tainted. Now Julia Roberts is going to star in a movie that will do the same for flowers, reports New York Magazine. The film, based on the Vanity Fair essay ‘A Flowering Evil’, will tell the tale of the conservationist Joan Root who struggled to save Lake Naivasha in Kenya from the flower farm industry before being murdered earlier this year. All Hollywood needs to do now is to make a good thriller about the evils of the chocolate industry and tight-wads the world over will

The Spectator

A good idea from Don Rumsfeld–no really

Few people have a good word to say about Don Rumsfeld right now and there is little doubt that he was an absolute disaster in his second stint at the Pentagon. The Rumsfeld doctrine—just enough troops to lose, as one Washington wag dubbed it—is largely responsible for the Coalition’s inability to bring order to Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Having said all that, his latest wheeze does seem like a good idea. He is planning to set up a foundation to provide fellowships for those in the private sector who want to do a stint in public service. The fact that he is going to use any money he

Matthew Dancona

Grammatical error

Janet Daley is spot on in today’s Telegraph: the grammar schools row was a coronation gift to Gordon Brown. What were the Tories thinking of? According to the always excellent John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday, this was – by accident or design – Cameron’s Clause Four moment when he shed an old party doctrine and (more importantly) stood his ground when the Right went beserk. This gets to the heart of the matter: is academic selection actually an old party doctrine, as the nationalisation of industry was for Labour? It seems to me, living in Hackney, that social mobility through education is an idea whose time has come:

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 19 May 2007

Q. Over the past three years a small birthday lunch party has been given for me by the mother of my daughter’s best friend at school. She invites a handful of other school mothers, and as we leave for the school run she says, ‘Same time, same place, next year!’ It is so sweet of her. I do take her out to lunch but cannot return the birthday-party favour, as her birthday falls outside term time. My problem is that I fear the tradition has run its course. I do not like having to commit myself a year in advance, and neither, I sense, do the other mothers. Our hostess

Taki

Fond farewells

New York Ahmet Ertegun was the greatest Turk since Kemal Ataturk, but unlike Mustafa Kemal he never killed anyone, especially a Greek. In brief, Ertegun was the supreme record man, the signer of the most important rhythm & blues, jazz, pop and rock artists of all time, the founder and builder of Atlantic Records, a company he began with the $10,000 he borrowed from his dentist. He was a diplomat’s son, his father having served as ambassador to Paris and Washington, among other posts. I met him in 1956 and we stayed friends until his death last October, when he slipped at a jazz concert, fell and hit his head

Alan Judd

Spoilt for choice

When I was a child Bristol was a port somewhere beyond Kent. Later on I discovered that in the plural — as in a nice pair of — it referred, mystifyingly, to mammalian tissue. Why not a nice pair of Wolverhamptons or Plymouths or Canterburys? But when I became a man I put away childish notions and ceased to see life as in a showroom window, darkly: I learnt that real Bristols were cars. I particularly liked the svelte, curvaceous beauties of the Forties and Fifties (the cars, that is), though subsequently my taste extended through later, straighter models as far as the elegantly understated 411 (1969–76), where it stops.

Ursula Buchan

Show time

Once, a long time ago, when I was a horticultural student at the RHS Gardens at Wisley, I helped to stage an exhibit of pelargoniums at the Chelsea Flower Show. That event has shone brightly in my memory ever since. Now, more than 30 years later, I am back exhibiting once more, this time helping to plan and plant a small ‘Chic’ show garden for my old college, New Hall in Cambridge. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the first time that an Oxbridge college has laid out a garden at Chelsea. Called ‘The Transit of Venus’, its theme is suitably cerebral, you will be relieved to hear; it is intended

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 19 May 2007

MONDAY Am in severe shock. Just put the phone down from the Labour press office. Someone called ‘Bev’ rang to say she had found 15 inaccuracies in stories we briefed to the papers this weekend, including five major ‘porkers’ about Gordon’s economic record. She was v loud and bossy and went on and on about how gloves had come off and they weren’t going to take this &@*£ from us lying down any more. She asked me what I intended to do about it and when I said nothing she demanded I fetch my ‘supervisor’. I said I didn’t have a supervisor. She said ‘what a f@****@ shower’ and told

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Diary – 19 May 2007

Stalin and the Rothschilds is one of the more bizarre connections that I discovered while writing a book on the dictator’s early life.  Stalin worked for the Rothschilds;  he burnt down their refinery and ordered the assassination of their managing director — yet later they helped fund Lenin and Stalin. There were always rumours, but my discovery of a long-forgotten memoir in the archives of Tbilisi now reveals the true story. In December 1901 Stalin, aged 23, arrived in the Black Sea oil port Batumi, which was dominated by the Rothschild and Nobel dynasties. One day Stalin came home late boasting, ‘Guess why I got up so early this morning? Today

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 19 May 2007

More power to Kazakhstan Sir: Elliot Wilson rails against the alleged bureaucracy, corruption and nepotism that he argues are strangling business opportunities for foreign investors in Kazakhstan (Business, 28 April). But his three examples of Western companies who have ‘decided to leave’ are misleading. PetroKazakhstan, which emerged from nowhere as Canadian-based Hurricane Oil, was very happy to sell its Kazakh assets to the Chinese national oil corporation in 2005 for more than $4 billion. The same is true of Nations Energy, which in 2006 was sold by the owners for almost $2 billion. And far from being pushed out by fickle Kazakh bureaucrats, British Gas took a strategic decision to

Boris Volodarsky With Oleg Gordievsky

Untangling the web of deception

This is perhaps the most amazing non-fiction spy book that has ever appeared during or after the Cold War. There is little doubt that all intelligence historians interested in the past 50 years of espionage games played by the CIA and the KGB will read it as we did — in one take: A day in the 1990s must count as one of the extreme low points of CIA counter- intelligence. When this KGB provocateur and deceiver concluded a lecture to CIA staff personnel in their Langley auditorium, the audience — all professional American intelligence officers — rose as one, eager-faced and thrilled, to give Yuri Nosenko a standing ovation.

Neil Rennie

That’s All

The dead are back at Sulphur Bay, dancingunder umbrellas, wearing three kinds of shorts:English, French and Seventh Day Adventist.Hair wavy, faces posthumously whiteas foam, they strum and croon the gospel of St Paul:‘You-me no die. You-me no buggerup. That’s all.’

Donald Michie

Not so dumb

Students of ants, wasps, hornets, termites and bees have for more than a century realised that the intricately interlocking teamwork of these insect builders deserves some more respectful characterisation than ‘blind instinct’. Moreover, in certain mammals, as seen in the dams and dens of beavers, the leaps of engineering insight would do credit to human designers. To explain their feats requires us to credit animals with the ability mentally to map sense-data to objects and processes in the outside world. In some cases the animal first has to recognise the potential of materials and tools, and then to envisage and maintain a sequence of goals so as to determine how

The Spectator

Cameron fails the test

The most perceptive indictment of the Blair era was delivered, in an admirably candid speech last September, by Alan Milburn (interviewed by Fraser Nelson on page 14). Describing his own rise from a council estate to the ranks of the Cabinet, Mr Milburn asked, ‘Do we think that for a child growing up today in one of Britain’s poorest estates such mobility is possible or likely? Sadly, I think not.’ That observation should inspire the core mission statement of the next Conservative government. Asked about his gilded schooling at Eton and youthful indiscretions, David Cameron has stuck to the mantra that a person’s origins should be irrelevant: ‘What matters most

Richard Orange

London’s diamond trade may not be forever

Richard Orange says London’s traditional dominance of global dealing in uncut stones is under threat from new players based in India, China and Dubai ‘How does it feel to hold $9 million in the palm of your hand?’ One of the world’s leading diamond buyers, Rajiv Mehta, watches intently for my reaction to this question: the sachet of dull glassy pebbles I am gently weighing, if I could somehow get them out of this building and into the hands of some Antwerp middleman, would buy me one of London’s most prestigious addresses, my own island in the Bahamas, or a country-sized swath of the Argentinean pampas. Slim chance: the building

Matthew Vincent

How cyber-vetting catches job liars

‘Interests: travel, cinema, country walks, volleyball, volunteering at the pet-rescue centre…’ Why do CVs make job applicants sound like contestants in the Miss Cleethorpes beauty pageant, or desperate divorcees on dating websites? It’s possibly because job hunters now believe ‘personality’ is what wins over potential employers, and many applicants are prepared to lie about themselves to make the right impression. A survey by Reed Recruitment a few years back claimed that what you say about your interests when applying for a job can determine whether or not you get an interview: it also found that mundane hobbies such as ‘reading’, ‘drinking’ and ‘socialising’ put off employers almost as much as

Robert Cottrell

You’d be a brave man to bet against Rupert Murdoch or Michael Bloomberg

Call me a sentimentalist, but when Rupert Murdoch gave a speech here last week telling News Corporation to go carbon-neutral, and to inspire its many millions of viewers and readers to do likewise, I couldn’t help thinking that he must have been affected by the spectacle of human frailty revealed to him in his current efforts to take over Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. To bring the Journal into his portfolio, Mr Murdoch needs to win over the extended Bancroft family, descendants of a swash-buckling newspaperman called Clarence Barron who bought control of Dow Jones in 1902. Three generations later, Barron’s stake has been scattered among so