Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 August 2006

Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai sword at police (what a lot of people possess samurai swords; not a recommendation of character, I’d have thought), but had ‘aspirations to become a landscape gardener and is now attending drink counselling off his own back’. Back should, of course, be bat. This is a typically mangled example of a dead metaphor, a cliché

The Spectator

Security first

The United Nations is good at passing resolutions. It is, sadly, a little less effective at displaying resolve. As The Spectator went to press, Security Council discussions on the French-inspired resolution designed to deal with the conflict in Lebanon and Israel were dragging on. But whatever form of words the UN settles upon, the actions required by the international community seem to be implicitly understood by the French, the Americans and the British government. What will count in the days ahead is an unshakeable readiness to implement the steps required to provide both Lebanon and Israel with the security they deserve. And that will require the determination to tackle the

Dominic Midgley

The new faces of motor-racing: the sheikh and the African trader

Think Formula 1 and it’s not long before a short man with a terrible haircut and an unfeasibly tall wife comes to mind. But while Bernie Ecclestone is very much the face of the world’s premier motor-racing series, it’s a different story with A1 Grand Prix. This weekend the upstart rival to Formula 1 will be staging demonstration races in Manchester to promote the alternative high-octane racing series it holds in the Formula 1 off-season, the northern hemisphere winter. A1 has a short but intriguing history. It was inaugurated last year by one of the younger members of Dubai’s ruling family and a controversial South African entrepreneur who made a

Frank Keating

A glut of glovemen

Football’s got a nerve: the Premiership resumes business next week and is already blaringly full of itself, its conceited luminaries strutting about as if England’s abject World Cup show was nothing to do with them. Sanest way to continue enjoying the summer is to ignore anything that concerns football till the clocks go back in October, which is about the same time as the England cricket team set off for Australia in defence of the Ashes. Beset with injuries, at least the cricketers have knuckled down to turn out a new team by introducing some warmingly bright sparks. In the absence of crocked captain, Vaughan, for instance, for much of

Friday

Mary Kenny

Diary – 11 August 2006

Edinburgh ‘Oh, God, you couldn’t buy that publicity!’ people exclaimed as Mel Smith appeared on the front page of a clutch of newspapers, on radio and TV and finally on the world news channels. Mel is Winston Churchill in my play Allegiance (which depicts the night that Churchill and Michael Collins got drunk together in 1921), and a fracas had arisen about his entitlement to smoke the Churchillian cigar. Heroic Mel was insisting on lighting up the Havana on stage, in defiance of Scotland’s draconian anti-smoking laws. Just before curtain-up on Monday morning, a rumour went around that the police were standing by, the heavies of the Edinburgh Council were

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 11 August 2006

MondayI love August! So exciting. Dave is in totally secret location in Corfu. Only Jed and an agency snapper know the details. This is part of brilliant ‘deflection’ strategy. If anything goes wrong, e.g., shad. cab. split on Middle East erupts, we roll out pics of Dave in O’Neill surf shorts. Genius! If row really bad — e.g., Foxy manages to work out we’ve put a bar on his mobile phone to stop him calling journalists — we have pics of Dave with trunks slightly falling down. I hope it won’t come to that. Poor Dave, the things he does for the Cause. Even though he’s by a pool with

Wednesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Our overpopulation is a catastrophe

There are queues everywhere in Britain, says Rod Liddle. The country has long since reached saturation point and it’s time for the government to admit that we have a problem There were two stories in our morning newspapers this week which seemed at first sight unrelated. The first was a report from the Local Government Association warning the government that council tax charges might need to rise by as much as 6 per cent because the number of immigrants to the UK had hitherto not been properly accounted for. Immigrants placed a new and costly burden on local councils and there were many more of them than had previously been

Paul Johnson

What did Jane Austen and Bill Clinton have in common?

The recent scorching weather in London has brought out some repellent pairs of trousers, particularly those baggy half-length affairs, worn by stocky, thick-calved, T-shirted young men, with shaven heads and beer bellies, who now appear to epitomise English youth. Trousers are useful, indeed indispensable garments, but sartorially the only solution to the trouser problem is to make them as inconspicuous as possible. The moment you notice trousers, critical thoughts arise. This applies to both men and women. Trousers are popularly supposed to date from the 1790s, when they began to replace breeches or culottes, first in Paris, then in London. Revolutionary gentlemen, wishing to dissociate themselves from the aristos, adopted

Dorothy Pope

Cool Morning

Mid-August, even so, a faint hint, giftof autumn momentarily — a sweetsoft breeze. With slender branches trees entreata sift of foliage. Their fingers lift.Then half a dozen paper leaves adriftblow in and dance round summer-sandalled feet,though brief, their restlessness another fleetingsign of imminent and massive shift.The season’s on the very cusp. We’ll seethe great sun climb and midday will be hotbut morning now, as evening later, sparesrelentless sultriness, humiditywith temperate caress. Long-shadowed autumn’sin the wings. The old earth cools, prepares.

Stuart Nicholson

Class act

Like footsteps in the sands of time, record companies have provided the raw material around which jazz history has been constructed — RCA Victor, which recorded the first bona fide jazz band in 1917 and was the first to cash in on the post-first world war jazz craze, and Columbia, which quickly followed. As a burgeoning record industry blossomed in the 1920 and 1930s, a vast array of companies with romantic-sounding names like Decca, Okeh, Vocalion, Harmony, Parlophone and Brunswick sprung up that were host to some of the great names in jazz — Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. After the second world war, most of

Jaspistos

A swarm of bees

In Competition No. 2455 you were invited to incorporate a dozen given words, all beginning with b, into a plausible piece of prose. The given words were on the surface less testing than usual, but that was only to lure you into the trap of the too obvious. Cleverclogs, like Jeremy Chilcott and L.E. Betts, who managed it in half the maximum number of words lost in entertainment what they gained in brevity, even though they impressed me. David Jones, Andrew Brison and W.J. Webster were all close to the money. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Alan Millard earns the extra fiver for his Cumbrian fantasy. An

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 5 August 2006

Hezbollah and genocide From Lord KalmsSir: William Hague’s usual good sense has deserted him. Criticising Israel for being disproportionate without serious consideration of the alternatives merely mouths the buzzwords of the ignorant armchair critic. Think again, William, for whom you speak. How do you deal with the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, who is committed to Israel’s total destruction (not a single Jew to remain alive in Israel) and who rains thousands of rockets on Israel, keeping the population in shelters, devastating industry, kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers within Israeli territory? Hezbollah combines a unique and dangerous formula: a terrorist organisation ensconced within a large area of the independent but incompetent nation

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 5 August 2006

Q. I am worried. I have to attend the banquet of a livery company so senior that white tie is the order of the day. I am now over 70 years old. My son-in-law, slenderer by far than me, has inherited my tailcoat. My hunt coat appears regularly at hunt balls, but is now worn, oh so elegantly, by a Joint Master, more my junior than I care to recall. I am staying at my club for the great night. I am not too concerned by the members. It’s the staff that worries me. You know what snobs club servants can be. When I enter the club with Moss Bros

Taki

No laughing matter

On board Bushido The little village of Assos lies in the shadow of a Venetian fort off the western side of Kefalonia. From afar, it appears as a dark-blue dot, almost indistinguishable from the shimmering sea mist. But, as the boat surges closer, the rugged mountain peaks above Assos gain definition and then the tiny port itself appears out of nowhere. Kefalonia should not be confused with neighbouring Zante; the former is blunt and gruff, the latter gentle and low-lying. Although my family is from Zante, I’ll take Kefalonia any day. Kefalonians are known for their lunacy, the people from Zante for their gentle and poetic nature. The trouble is

Frank Keating

Running on empty

It may be fast and noisy still, but it has become drearily predictable, uncompetitive and even, you might say, totally un-hairy. Even obsessive vroom-vroomers, I fancy, are completely cheesed off with their sport. Certainly to the casual follower, Formula 1 Grand Prix motor racing has just about vanished from the radar. Yet on it drones in the background, pitching its same candy-striped executive marquees in various of the world’s seemingly romantic spots a couple of times a month. Britain, once so fascinated, is now oblivious — except for the corporate fat-cat sponsors and, I suppose, ITV, which covers the ersatz, so-called races. Schumacher or Alonso? Ferrari or Renault? Who cares?

The Spectator

Against isolation

The old order changeth, yielding place to new: as Fidel Castro’s mortality marks the fall of the last Cold War colossus, so a new global ideological struggle hardens in our midst. The conflict in the Middle East is but one symptom of this battle between the West and militant Islam. To extract this particular crisis from its broader context and see it as merely another chapter in the long battle between Jew and Arab — as many do — is a grievous error, and one that could have terrible consequences far beyond the Middle East. Rarely has the word ‘renaissance’ been used as euphemistically as it was by Tony Blair

Friday

David Tang

Diary – 4 August 2006

‘The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and …no other task is of any consequence.’ So Palinurus, aka Cyril Connolly, warns in the opening sentence of The Unquiet Grave. This ruthless reminder made me totally depressed as I published my first book in English in Hong Kong last week. Obviously it’s not a masterpiece. But what could I have done? The only thing I had published before was a Chinese translation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. English is my second language and my book is in no way erudite. It is merely an anthology of articles I had written for a Hong Kong

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 4 August 2006

MONDAYHave learnt important lesson: Never meet your heroes, or, in the case of former prime ministers from Brixton, don’t even speak to them on phone. Had to call for quote on Lottery proposals. Norma answered. Lot of sighing. Then clunking as phone dropped and long silence before a voice said, ‘Sir John Major KG here, hello, yes.’ I explained that I just needed two sentences. He said, ‘This will necessarily take a not inconsiderable period to organise. In my judgment, you should remain at the end of the telephone during what I hope will be a reasonably brief interlude.’ Cue muffled sound of things being dropped, paper crackling, pens that

Thursday

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 3 August 2006

The French are finally coming to terms with generic wines. The bottles, instead of being labelled with the name of the grower and location, have names that are either trendy (Fat Bastard or Le Freak) or else amiably meaningless, such as Chamarré, a kind of butterfly. The labels also show the grape variety. This information was previously thought unnecessary; if you didn’t know that, say, Chablis was made from Chardonnay, or Condrieu from Viognier, you probably weren’t fit to drink it. But these wines, it’s thought, will be welcome to confused drinkers everywhere, in Britain, the US or in France itself. But it will be a slow process. The notion

Wednesday

Judi Bevan

Selling a different kind of capitalism

During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint of northern origins. ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do; I still think working in government service is extremely important.’ Now the chairman of the iconic John Lewis Partnership, where the staff owns the company, Hampson retains a strong sense of that early virtue. Tall and clean-cut, with a steely gaze, in