Society

Saturday

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,

Jaspistos

Tata Ltd

In Competition No 2477 you were informed of a German firm that offers to say goodbye on your behalf to an unwanted friend or lover by telephone, letter or personal visit, and invited to describe one such operation from the viewpoint of either the victim or the messenger. If you look up Tata Ltd in the telephone directory you will find it, but beware: it is a huge conglomerate and may be puzzled by the service you require. The man you want is Herr Bernd Dressler, who no doubt has a niche on the internet. Sixty years ago I was in the unhappy position of being asked by a close

The Spectator

United we stand

The 300th anniversary this week of the Act of Union between England and Scotland has been a depressingly defensive event rather than a festival of celebration. In the Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown — that indefatigable champion of ‘Britishness’ — warned against the ‘Balkanisation of Britain’. The Scottish National Party is poised to form the largest party in the Scottish Parliament after the May elections, and is promising a referendum on the future of the Union. The psychological reflex of the English — 61 per cent of them, according to a BBC Newsnight poll — is to demand an English Parliament. In some ways this is a strange time for Scottish

Daniel Hannan

Last hours of a monster

Amid fresh reports that Fidel Castro is at death’s door, Daniel Hannan says that the Cuban dictator was the beneficiary of Western hypocrisy about left-wing tyrants, and of the strategic errors of the 44-year US blockade Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Sixteen years ago, he looked finished. The USSR had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the Cuban economy for 30 years had been abruptly terminated. Around the world, statues of Lenin were being melted down or sold off to collectors of kitsch. But Castro never wavered

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

‘No one has the last word’

Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’. What a difference a year makes. The man I meet in the Treasury office has been transformed into a towering figure in the global warming debate. His report, The Economics of Climate Change, has had a huge impact in Britain and around the world. It is billed as hard proof of the compelling economic case

Andrew Geddes

Being with John Betjeman

Andrew Geddes recounts the long affair between his  mother Margie and the great poet, and the passion of  his letters to her over many decades My mother first met John Betjeman in the summer of 1929. She was 20 and he was a master at Heddon Court prep school in Potters Bar where her brothers Dick and John Addis were pupils. Together with her parents, she had driven over from Primrose Hill in an open landau (my grandparents did not seem to be aware of the invention of the motor car) to attend the school sports day. It was a hot summer’s day and they sat in deck chairs on

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Get rich with unethical investment

Rod Liddle says that it is not only entertaining to put your money into companies that  behave naughtily. It is also economically lucrative: so buy more stocks today Are you worried about the size of the footprint you are leaving on this earth? More specifically, are you worried that it might not be big enough? I may have the solution. The Spectator Unethical Investment Fund (SUIF) is a chance for all those decent, God-fearing, rather right-of-centre citizens to put their money where their mouths are, for once. Sick of politicians whining about corporate responsibility? Of being hectored to plant a bloody forest every time you make a trip to Florence

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 13 January 2007

Casket looks as if it will be an early victor in 2007 as a triumphant Americanism. In 2006 it was train station. A letter to the Daily Telegraph noted that even English Heritage had entitled a snowy scene of a Victorian railway station on its website as ‘Train Station’. Even before the New Year, casket began to show its face. Reporting the death of the soul singer James Brown, the Sun said that he ‘remained a showman yesterday even in death — wearing a blue silk suit in a gold casket’. Then, in the Independent, it was over to Washington, where ‘a steady stream of mourners walked slowly past the

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 13 January 2007

Monday Who would have thought thrift could be so much fun! Am having a ball teaching working people to be careful with their money as part of our ‘Live Life For Less’ campaign. Obviously we can’t actually cut the cost of living or mess about with interest rates and inflation (we’re not going there again!) so the next best thing is to teach people to be a bit more responsible with the cash they have. Buy slightly smaller plasma TVs, one 4×4 per family, that sort of thing. Nigel suggested it would be more hard-hitting if we called it ‘Poor people — know your limits’, but Jed doesn’t want to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 13 January 2007

Obviously Ruth Kelly is a ‘hypocrite’, but the hypocrites in her party are more admirable than the consistent ones. At least the former show some human feeling. There must be Labour ministers who know that their children would be better off in a private school, can afford to send them there, and still don’t, because of their careers and their opinions. That really is disgusting. It will be interesting to see whether young Leo Blair finds his way into a private school once his father leaves office. Miss Kelly pleads her son’s ‘special needs’. In this area, Labour is truly hoist with its own petard. It has been the slave