Society

Saturday

Robert Salisbury

When our servants become our masters

This country is incompetently governed. The cost to the taxpayer is vast and growing. The level of incompetence has increased almost as rapidly as public expenditure. Indeed, taxation has failed to keep up with Gordon Brown’s prodigality. So, in order to feed the Moloch, he has been obliged to raise taxes. That has proved inadequate to satisfy the public sector’s insatiable demand for money, so he has had to turn to ever more ingenious devices to squeeze the tax-payer. His most expensive device is likely to prove the longest lasting. The Private Finance Initiative failed to take off under the Major government, largely because Kenneth Clarke sensibly refused to soften

Philip Womack

In praise of unwanted gerundives

I had a succession of brilliantly eccentric Classics teachers. Father Hunnwycke, a kindly and acerbic priest, showed his hatred of school inspections by holding up a German book called Group Sex in Ancient Rome every time the inspector’s dreary head was bowed. Another, a small, military Scottish man, would, after berating my misuse of the optative, launch into a diatribe about the evils of Tesco — or the Antichrist, as he preferred to think of it. He eventually ended up on Mount Athos. These wonderful people are a dying breed, says Harry Mount in this likeable, easygoing book. It is an odd creature — part memoir, part grammar book, part

Cosmo Lush

The promise of real profits from a weird virtual world

My name is Cosmic Finucane. I have lots of money, a body to die for and I’m building my dream house on an island with an ocean view. At least, that’s my alternative persona — sadly, a far stretch from the real me. He inhabits the internet’s hottest new phenomenon, the virtual world of Second Life. Cosmic is an ‘avatar’ — a computer-generated 3D human lookalike who makes friends, throws parties, goes shopping and has the potential to help me earn real money. Launched by San Francisco-based Linden Labs in 2000 with backing from the founders of eBay and Amazon, Second Life is now hitting the big time. Its population

Joanna Pitman

Flawless, timeless, almost priceless

White diamonds are the world’s most expensive gems. White diamonds are the world’s most expensive gems. The ideal stone is like a piece of ice, whiter than white, graded ‘D’, the purest possible grading, and cut with exquisite precision. Only a handful exist. Ten years ago a pure white, pear-shaped 100.10 carat diamond (pictured here), classified as ‘D’ and internally flawless, was sold by Sotheby’s in Geneva for $16,548,750. Named ‘The Star of the Season’, it is still the most expensive precious stone ever sold at auction. Today its whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, but it is likely that it sits contentedly, if a little unloved, in a secure

Richard Orange

A year in exile, but still in the game

Bill Browder is strangely apologetic for the grandeur of his offices in Hudson House, a Lutyens mansion off Covent Garden. ‘I like the high ceilings,’ he says, scanning the room with a nervous smile, ‘It’s easier to work with some space around me.’ Somehow, though, neither the building’s fine fa

The Spectator

Let justice be done

The US mid-term election results have many lessons, but one of them, as Christopher Caldwell argues on page 14, is that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is over, and that it has been lost. This reflects a broader, bone-deep fatigue in the West with the war on terror generally: a perception that the price we have paid has been too high, that our governments have systematically misled us, and that the whole enterprise stinks of arbitrariness and illegitimacy. This is why the sentencing this week of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the jailing of the British al-Qa’eda terrorist, Dhiren Barot, were so significant. True, the two trials

Alasdair Palmer

Saddam’s trial shouldn’t be fair

When Mohammed al-Ureybi, the presiding judge at the trial of Saddam Hussein, started reading out that the court sentenced Saddam to death for killing 148 inhabitants of the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982, Saddam interrupted him. Just as the learned judge got to the part about the punishment for ‘crimes against humanity’, the deposed tyrant shouted, ‘Down with the traitors! Down with the invaders! To hell with your articles and your clauses!’ It is not how a man accused of crimes against humanity is supposed to react to a guilty verdict. According to the ideals of international law, he is supposed to accept his own guilt and bend his

Fiona Maddox

A last, affectionate look

Three decades ago, in one of modern musicology’s great labours of love, David Brown began work on his definitive four-volume study of Tchaikovsky. Fifteen years after his initial researches, he laid out the composer on his death-bed and pulled up the sheet, so to speak, in 1991. Brown’s efforts transformed Tchaikovsky’s reputation from that of sentimental tunesmith of the ‘1812’ Overture, the B flat Piano Concerto and a few sugary ballets (as they were perceived) to towering figure of late Romanticism and an opera composer of genius. Even the Russians were startled. Given the repressive censorship of the Soviet years, Brown’s discoveries were remarkable, though since he had learned Russian

Simon Hoggart

Lay & Wheeler Spectator Christmas wine offer

Click here to order online We have two Christmas offers this month, both from top-ranking wine merchants. The first is by Lay & Wheeler. Nearly all the wines have been reduced by 10 per cent (with free delivery); there are further discounts if you buy more than one case, and two of the reds represent astonishing value. Both are over-production of famous names. The strict French appellation system limits the amount of wine that can be sold under any particular label. This must be infuriating if, for example, you make white wine in one of the great Burgundy districts and in a particularly good year you produce more than you’re

Jaspistos

Rip Van Winkle

In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke. Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike Morrison envisaged an aged Ken Barlow supervising a pedestrian crossing in Coronation Street and Madonna in the news for adopting a Lithuanian grandmother. Last week I read H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes in which the hero, after a nap of a mere 203 years, is faced with ‘the nightmare of Capitalism triumphant — higher buildings,

Frank Keating

Eye screams

At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. At Shrewsbury School a couple of weeks ago, with nice ceremony, they opened a swish new indoor cricket centre alongside what Neville Cardus once called ‘the most beautiful playing fields in England’. All I could think of was Private Eye — for this was where the magazine’s founders learnt their cricket. I wondered what they’d have thought of four floodlit indoor nets, bowling machines, and banks of television screens to examine the crookedness of your cover-drive. Not that

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 4 November 2006

Q. I knew that legal aid lawyers like myself were facing a difficult future, but I was caught somewhat off guard when a barrister colleague told me that she had just turned 40 and wondered if she were too old to ‘go on the game’ as an alternative career option. As she is a frequent opponent, I knew that anything short of honesty would undermine my credibility with her, and yet I did not want to be ungallant. I said that I thought she could manage it, but might have to specialise. Do you think I got it about right? M.D.S., Gravesend, Kent A. Congratulations on your intelligent response to

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 4 November 2006

Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. Look, first off I’d just like to say that what follows has nothing to do with not being either hip or edgy. I am hip and edgy. Some days I’m so hip and edgy that’s all there is to me: hip and edge. ‘Wow, look at the hip and edge on that,’ people have even been known to gasp when I pass them in the street. I just wanted to get this absolutely straight so you wouldn’t think I just wasn’t hip or edgy enough for his week’s

Simon Courtauld

Good hare day

In my early days as editor of the Field, I read an article submitted by one of the magazine’s venerable hunting correspondents In my early days as editor of the Field, I read an article submitted by one of the magazine’s venerable hunting correspondents — the subject was harehunting and a day out with, I think, the Cambridgeshire Harriers — which mentioned that, in the course of the chase, ‘puss clapped’. This slightly disconcerting expression apparently means, in the recondite language of the harehunter, that the quarry stopped and ‘froze’, trying to make itself invisible. I decided that the clap of a puss, so described, was unlikely to assist in

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern | 4 November 2006

When an emotional Tony Blair bade farewell to the Labour party conference, he said how hard it was to give up, but needs must. The ancients too knew all about the love of power: but at least there was a serious price to pay for failure. Today’s failures simply wind up in the House of Lords. Ancient Greeks were as power-mad as anyone — despite the fact that, of the top ten executive officials appointed every year, two on average incurred the wrath of the people’s Assembly so badly as to be condemned to death. But it did not prevent candidates lining up for the jobs. The price of power

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 4 November 2006

MondayWe have to stop Gordon from stealing the environment! It was Dave’s idea to save the planet. It’s theft, pure and simple, what Labour is doing. Jed has written ‘Ownership’ in big green letters on the whiteboard. We’ve all got to come up with five ideas (why is it always five of everything in politics?) on how to remind people that tackling climate change was our policy in the first place. Have nearly done mine: spray-paint our offices bright green; promise to tax people until the pips squeak (think we may have already said that); ban gas-guzzling 4x4s from the Commons carpark (this is tricky because half the front bench

Jimmy Carr

Diary – 4 November 2006

I’ve been doing a stupid amount of travelling recently. I’ve been doing a stupid amount of travelling recently. First to Dublin to appear on The Late Late Show, the world’s longest running chat show. It’s a televisual extravaganza; Ireland’s answer to Parkinson, Question Time and Trisha all rolled into one. I was the final guest, and when I arrived at the studio the previous ‘act’ was already being interviewed by the host. He was a convicted paedophile. Fortunately he had found a new purpose in life: giving advice to parents on how to keep their children safe from people like him. I felt the comedy gods were testing me: ‘Follow

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 November 2006

Iraq: why the media turned From Jonathan Mirsky Sir: William Shawcross (‘Leaving Iraq would court disaster’, 28 October) rolls out the stab-in-the-back accusation that the media ‘helps only those violent extremists’ trying to destroy Iraq. But the media initially supported the war. Then Bush and Blair were caught lying and the realities of the war became apparent. The same happened in Vietnam. Newspapers and television were once pro-war. For many reporting the war, as I did in 1965 and 1967 (and Mr Shawcross himself did superbly), the realities changed the reporting. Nonetheless, the failed commander, General William Westmoreland, told me, ‘The war in Vietnam is the first war in history

Norman Bissett

Oddball

The stripy blazer doesn’t match the pants belonging to his suit, the Hush Puppies worn for comfort, the rain mac — once his aunt’s — tied by a length of string. Chelsea yuppies mistake him for a shuffling derelict on the Embankment, where he hums and sings Cole Porter and recites some lines he’s picked from ‘Ode to Joy’ and Idylls of the King. He’s not a child-molester nor a wife- abuser but a Nobel Laureate in astrophysics, Chancellor for Life of Oxford and a Patron of the Tate. His mistresses have had six kids in toto. Rush Not to Judgment is his family motto.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A lesson still worth learning

Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal with the Arabs, beginning with the troublesome Egyptians: Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, ‘Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should