Society

Saturday

Jane Ridley

In Her Majesty’s service

The night Prince Albert died at Windsor (14 December 1861) Queen Victoria rushed wild and sobbing from the death bed to the nurseries, where four-year-old Princess Beatrice lay asleep. Grabbing the child, the queen brought her to her bedroom. According to one account, Victoria, stunned by grief, ghoulishly dressed the little girl in the nightclothes of the dead Albert and lay beside her. Afterwards, the queen insisted on having Beatrice, or ‘Baby’ as she was called, with her for hours each day. Beatrice was the youngest by four years of Queen Victoria’s nine children, and this closeness to her grieving mother was, in Matthew Dennison’s account, the defining feature of

Aidan Hartley

House work

Laikipia Our farmhouse is at the finishing stage and Wachira, the electrician from Large Power and Control, is advising me on aesthetics. ‘A spotlight in the garden is a beauteous thing to behold,’ he urges. I reply, ‘Fine, but can we talk about house lighting first?’ ‘Yes, but we must illuminate the garden path in a way to be admired.’ ‘No spotlight,’ I say firmly. After three years in tents and having spent a fortune we still have not moved into the house. Our Kenyan farm is a white elephant leaning on my chest. The way we have spent money causes me to have ghastly visions of wrist slashing, serious

Frank Keating

The big freeze

Predicting last week’s raging gales would subside in time for the Saturday football programme, a BBC weatherman forecast, nicely I thought, ‘a weather-free sports weekend’. Sixty years ago this week it was by no means that as an unrelenting 48-hour Arctic blizzard on Thursday and Friday, 23 and 24 January 1947, entombed  Britain in a monochrome inertia. It froze solid, and for the next 40 days and nights, only twice and by a fraction — on 11 and 23 February — did the temperature on the Air Ministry roof edge above freezing. Skaters waltzed on the Tyne, the Trent and the Thames; above the latter, wartime totem Big Ben couldn’t even

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

‘We should have been bolder’

It is 7.30 a.m. and I am the first to arrive at Harris City Technology College in south London, where Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to meet for breakfast. The building is shut, the weather is freezing and a kindly cleaner asks me inside to wait. ‘Are you here for an interview?’ she asks. I nod, and she offers me a cup of tea. ‘What position are you applying for?’ I almost spit out the tea and explain I’m interviewing Lord Adonis. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Him again.’ Most schools would go into overdrive before a ministerial visit, but this particular establishment is used to seeing the lanky figure of

Clemency Burtonhill

Blood Diamond should help

Diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend. You may have heard that it’s ‘girls’ who share a special relationship with the little sparklers, but don’t be fooled; females have simply had a rather more sophisticated advertising campaign working for them over the years. Drug-addled soldiers, morally lobotomised mercenaries and bloodthirsty terrorists are more appreciative of the potential contained in those chalky-white carbon stones than any dewy-eyed fiancée could ever hope to be. Since the late 1990s, thanks to relentless lobbying by organisations such as Global Witness and Amnesty International, Western fiancées have become more conscious that these expensive symbols of eternal love may not have had the most loving of journeys

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 20 January 2007

Every now and then, I come across a way of using language that is so divergent from the norm that I wonder how anyone can have adopted it. This seems to have happened to spectrum. Ofcom declared in 2005, ‘One of Ofcom’s primary statutory duties is to ensure the optimal use of the radio spectrum in the interests of citizens and consumers.’ Whether one likes that or not, at least it is English. Ofcom then refers to ‘spectrum management’ and ‘spectrum trading’. This too is English. The noun spectrum is there being used attributively, with an adjectival force, qualifying another noun, as with dog biscuit or brain fever. The misuse

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 20 January 2007

Monday Don’t ask me why, but suddenly the buzzword is ‘Thatcher’. Memo marked ‘Urgent’ says the T-word count for an average speech is now ten times minimum ‘until further notice’. Jed rushed into the office this morning all breathless and sweaty, and announced extra greenie points (frappuccino machine tokens, carbon offset holiday credits, soft loo-roll allowance!) for anyone who thinks up new and inventive ways of relating Dave’s policies to ‘the Leaderene’. All ideas must be fully reversible in case we want to ditch her later. Am going to give it a whirl. I could really do with a ski-ing holiday and the thought of being allocated a roll of

Piers Morgan

Diary – 20 January 2007

If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their ‘Person of the Year’ last month, it got us all thinking about the nature of ‘power’ in the modern technological age. In pre-internet days, power was fairly easily definable. Politicians and newspaper proprietors essentially ran the country, because they decided how we led our lives, how we got our news, and how we thought. But the emergence of the world wide web has changed everything.  I recently interviewed Gordon Brown for a forthcoming GQ ‘power’ issue,

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 20 January 2007

Stop hounding us From Simon Hart Sir: Ever since he was sacked by Radio 4’s Today programme for his obsession with the Countryside Alliance, Rod Liddle has not been able to leave us alone (‘At least they understand democracy’, 5 January). The problem is that it suits Liddle to pillory us as a single-issue pressure group when he knows full well that the truth is somewhat different. While no one would deny that we have played an active and key role in the hunting debate up to and beyond the introduction of the largely ridiculed Hunting Act 2004, we have been far from ‘utterly silent on the real problems which

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 20 January 2007

Q. Is there a tactful way to invite certain favourite old friends to dinner but without their partners? I have no wish to exclude or be cruel to anyone, but I know from personal experience that sometimes people are only too happy to go out separately. My own husband, for example, is delighted to be excused a drunken dinner if he has already booked in to play bridge somewhere else. Yet I always feel I must invite both members of a couple to avoid hurting feelings, and assume that most people feel they should both accept an invitation for the same reason. A.E., Pewsey, Wilts A. Why not pretend to

Jeremy Clarke

Grace and favour

The check-in queue was constrained by portable barriers into one of those snaking, pointless and unexpectedly intimate queues that are all the rage at British airports. Every time I made the 180-degree turn, I found myself once again face to face with these two elderly women. They were short and stout and festooned with gold chains, and one of them had the same kind of striking, deeply lined face that W.H. Auden had in later years. And they both had something unusual about them that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Finally I checked in my bag and joined the queue for security clearance. Someone touched me on the

Robin Oakley

Second best

A punting friend at Kempton Park told me about the school class last week who were asked to stand up and talk about  what their fathers did for a living. The sons of bakers and binmen, stockbrokers and scaffolders all happily recounted their parents’ daily routines. But one little lad at the back refused to come forward. Finally, when pressed, he mumbled, ‘My Dad wears fishnet stockings and works as a male pole dancer in a sleazy night club.’ After class the teacher remonstrated, ‘Now come on, Johnny, that wasn’t the truth, was it? I’ve seen your Dad, the clothes he wears, the car he drives. He’d have been really

Michael Mcmahon

Holy orders

‘No flash! No flash! Mama mia, four times I tell-a you, ma you do it again!’ The anger of the sacristan of the church of S. Agostino rolled past Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna dei Pellegrini’ and struck a Japanese with a beatific smile fixed under a digital camera who was clicking away in the direction of Bernini’s altar and the ‘Madonna of St Luke’, igniting explosions of light. At the back of the church, meanwhile, a thirty-something woman knelt silently before Sansovino’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, to whom the Romans pray for the safe delivery of a child. Defending the holiness of Rome’s historic churches is — and probably always has been —

John Laughland

Fish fries in Half Moon Fort

When you think of Barbados, you think of celebrities. Tony Blair’s annual holidays in Sir Cliff Richard’s villa; high-profile Hello! weddings on the beach or the golf course, like that of Tiger Woods or Jemma Kidd and the future Duke of Wellington; the absorbing sight of an enormous Luciano Pavarotti being gently decanted into the sea at Sandy Lane — whenever he stays at that most luxurious of hotels, he has an oven specially installed in his room so that he can cook pasta for all the family — all these combine to produce an image of a holiday island which is the exclusive preserve of the terminally rich. This

Ian Warrell

Pre-Raphaelite of the world

Had there been a poll of the nation’s favourite painting 100 years ago, the front runner would almost certainly have been William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’. Its representation of a crowned and bearded figure, knocking at a door that is obstructed by thorns and dead flowers, was a sermon in paint. Viewers were expected to piece together its symbolic references and arrive at the idea of a suppliant Christ, offering to redeem the world with the light of his salvation, even as he meekly awaits admittance by each individual. As well as being a work of faithful naturalism, painstakingly recorded during chilly moonlit nights in the Surrey

Allan Massie

The rewards of crime

Raymond Chandler once praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who committed it. One knows what he meant; away with murders at the vicarage or on the Orient Express (where, however, a good few have doubtless taken place). Yet it wasn’t really a very intelligent observation because all sorts of people, even little old ladies and clergymen, do in fact commit murder. In any case, what used to be called ‘the hard-boiled crime novel’, even Chandler’s own, marvellous as the best three or four of them are, is often as far from realism as the classic English detective novel. Marlowe himself is a romanticised

Frank Keating

Mud and money

Day and night, night and day …relentlessly the football season slurps on through the January mud — mud and money, slurp, slurp — transfer ‘windows’, raucous headlines, phoney passions torn to tatters, ‘hot’ news stories cold and discarded in a blink. British professional football preens itself as pre-eminent in the culture, and broadcasting and the public prints clamorously whoop up the presumption, but I fancy most of us who happily call ourselves ‘fans’ are only ‘quite interested’ as opposed to being obsessed by the passing show. Although most of the leading players cannot with an innate and comfy ease kick the ball with either foot (once the prerequisite basic talent), for

Judi Bevan

The struggle to make Sainsbury’s great again

Justin King feels underappreciated. Dubbed ‘Tigger’ by his staff shortly after arriving as chief executive of a crisis-ridden J Sainsbury Plc in March 2004, the 45-year-old’s normal bounce is notably absent when we meet at the grocery chain’s Holborn Circus headquarters to discuss his progress in ‘making Sainsbury’s great again’. Sales over the 12-week Christmas trading period were a laudable 5 per cent up on a same-store basis, but he struggles to conceal his irritation with City analysts who, instead of praising this achievement, are already muttering about ‘a profitless recovery’ and the difficulties of improving margins. ‘It would be nice,’ he says wearily, ‘if a little bit of recognition

Merryn Somerset-Webb

A slow dawn but not a false one

For fund managers who specialised in Japan, 2005 was a fantastic year. After more than a decade of dealing with a market in the doldrums they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a boom: stocks were rising fast, gurus around the world were tipping Japan as their favourite market and Japanese-themed hedge funds were springing up everywhere. Money poured in and the managers — who had looked resentfully at the fortunes being made in US and UK markets for many years — started to live the dream: they opened offices in St James and rushed to buy the cars, boats and houses that the City thinks go with making

Paul Johnson

Time raises Longfellow, like Lazarus, from the dead

It is good news that Longfellow is at last enjoying a revival, happily coinciding this year with the 200th anniversary of his birth. He is far and away America’s greatest poet. In his own time this was the general verdict on both sides of the Atlantic, and critical approval joined with popular success. His narrative poem ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ (1858) sold 15,000 copies on its first day of publication, in Boston and London. His home, Craigie House, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a place of pilgrimage. When he came to England in 1868, he breakfasted with Mr Gladstone, the incoming prime minister, lunched with Earl Russell, the outgoing one,