Society

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 27 January 2007

MONDAY The scariest thing was waiting for us in the meeting room this morning. It was a huge projected figure on the wall with the head of Shilpa Shetty and the body of Jade Goody. Jed marched in, stood in front of it and said, ‘Ideas?’ Everyone mute. Except Wonky Tom who can’t bear silences and stammered, ‘Is this about broadcasting regulations?’ But our beloved Director of Strategy said it was not — or words to that effect which I can’t use here. ‘This, my fellow change-makers, is today’s Conservative party. Beautiful head — shame about the fat, horrible, reactionary bit underneath it.’ Why didn’t he just ask us to

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 27 January 2007

How can a single state school defend itself in court? The question arises because of the 14-year-old Muslim pupil at Wycombe High School who has been forbidden by the headmistress from wearing the niqab, a veil which leaves only her eyes visible. The girl’s father is seeking judicial review. The father gets government money, in the form of legal aid, but the school does not necessarily get anything. The local education authority of the Conservative-controlled Buckinghamshire County Council indicates that it will not put its money behind its school. This is cowardly and against its own interest. If the school cannot afford to fight, then the county’s entire policy about

Boris Johnson

Diary – 27 January 2007

It is one of the great mysteries of modern geopolitics. How the hell has Condoleezza Rice got away with it for so long? There she is, Secretary of State of the United States and one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is Condi Rice who leads on behalf of you, me, the entire Western world, in waging this deepening Cold War with Iran. She is the girl who threatens Ahmedinejad with Armageddon, or whatever our policy is. And yet if you read State of Denial by Bob Woodward (as you must) it is clear that she was the most stupefyingly incompetent National Security Adviser in the history

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 27 January 2007

Q. Unlike your correspondent J.G. of Bath, I received a prompt and fulsome letter from my 15-year-old godson thanking me for the money I had sent him at Christmas. Unfortunately, this year I had sent no gifts of any kind to any of my godchildren. I did sheepishly admit this to his mother, but she refused to believe me. What should I do to rectify this?A.R., East Sussex A. The boy may have mixed you up with another godparent in a case of embarrass de richesse. You should resolve the matter by sending him some cash anyway. Remind him as you do so that there may well be another godparent

Jeremy Clarke

Spanish epiphany

Las Alpujarras When I was in Spain at Christmas, I bumped into the guide who had led the walking tour of the Sierra Nevada that I’d been on nearly a decade ago. I met him and his wife by chance in the narrow street. He recognised me and invited me to join them at a nearby bar for café con leche, where he told me his news. He’d had to give up the walking tours because he’d been ill with shingles behind the eyes. But he was better now. He’d finally been persuaded to have a consultation with a white witch living in his village who specialises in curing herpes

Taki

Dictatorial style

Style is the most abused word in the English language. It is usually attributed to fashionable people by those not in the know. Style, however, is an elusive quality, and few fashionable people and almost no celebrities possess it outright.  No one is capable of buying it, although thousands try. The dictionary defines ‘style’ as a noticeably superior quality. It is of an abstract nature and one either has it or one does not. As a child, I used to admire dictators, their brilliant uniforms, their swagger and their conviction. Although I hate to admit it, I still like dictators and for a very good reason: their lack of hypocrisy. They

Alan Judd

Height discrimination

Chugging up the drive to a friend’s shoot in the ancient Land Rover, the first two guns I saw were men of about six feet seven. My immediate thought was that all the guns, bar me, had been chosen for their height. If so, the line would look pretty impressive until it reached a mere six-footer (or less — I’m shrinking). They would presumably also have the advantage of being nearer their quarry. Fortunately, the rest of us were in the 90 per cent of humanity that car designers cater for. I was placed next to the elegant wife of one of the tall men, who was shorter than me

Interconnect

Born-again bodegas of the Rioja

After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain’s best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta and Marqués de Riscal (as they became) changed the face of the wine in the 1850s, everybody involved in the industry has brought new thinking with every passing generation. The result is an astonishing diversity; from bright, fresh ‘Nouveau’-style wines, through classic, oaky, vanilla-scented gran reservas, to modern, stylish, lightly oaked examples, to the ‘new

Simon Hoggart

January Wine Club

The festive season is long over, so it’s time to stock up on less expensive but delicious wines that will be gluggable through the cheerless winter months. Last year one of our most successful offers was with Averys of Bristol, who offered terrific discounts, largely to reduce stocks of wines that were first-rate but weren’t flying off the list. They have done the same again, and some of the reductions are boggling. It’s the perfect opportunity to refill your post-Yuletide cellar at a very modest price. You might get the sample case, try them all, and order more of the ones you like best. The offer will be open for

Jaspistos

Bouts rimés | 27 January 2007

The rhyme scheme is from Auden’s ‘The Composer’. As eagle-eyed Basil Ransome-Davies, who spotted this, remarked, ‘It’s hardly the best of Auden, so compers have a chance of writing a superior poem.’ We shall see. Some objected to the word ‘adaption’, claiming their spellcheck didn’t acknowledge its existence. Auden was no slouch: the word is plainly recognised in my Chambers. I reckoned it was a difficult comp, so a large and skilful entry impressed me. Commendations are too numerous to mention. Just general congratulations. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to George Simmers. Says God, ‘That’s one of my unfinished sketches —A planet I’ve

Allister Heath

Mugged by inflation — again

It was Ronald Reagan who warned that ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man’. Having just worked out that my personal rate of inflation is running at a scary 6.6 per cent, I know exactly what he meant. A few months ago Britain’s official statisticians began to panic. They had realised that nobody believed their figures any more. With school fees, gas bills and the cost of car insurance soaring, many people — especially pensioners and middle-class consumers — laughed through gritted teeth when told that inflation remained at rock-bottom. In desperation, the number-crunchers decided to launch

Richard Orange

Invasion of nerds leaves India’s high-tech capital yearning for its old identity

‘This is a celebration of the nerd in each of us,’ declared Partha, the pony-tailed co-founder of Mindtree, an information technology consulting firm, flashing a nervous grin at thousands of young software engineers ranged in a marquee in front of him and going on to read out a dictionary definition: ‘an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person, slavishly devoted to intellectual pursuits’. He might well have been welcoming Gordon Brown, whose recent visit to India’s IT capital, Bangalore, made more headlines than it might otherwise have done because of the hullabaloo about Celebrity Big Brother. But in fact Partha was on the podium a few weeks earlier to launch Osmosis,

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,