Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 28 April 2007

Shot in the dark Sir: Just a thought. Has anyone ever considered the possibility that, if all citizens were armed, the Columbine and Virginia Tech perpetrators would have been shot long before they killed so many (Leading article, 21 April)? Moreover, the 9/11 perpetrators would also have been shot before taking control of the aircraft — 130 armed passengers must trump four armed terrorists. Are proposed gun laws not just a vain attempt at treating an effect rather than stopping the cause? If a murderer knows he will be shot if he steps out of line, he will think twice. Ray HattinghCape Town, South Africa Sir: There is something else

Frank Keating

Cups runneth over | 28 April 2007

A vibrantly challenging final in Barbados today (Saturday) might at least — and at last — put a smile on the face of cricket’s dismally tedious World Cup. The England team will doubtless be watching at home, behind closed curtains. Let’s hope their new coach has more oomph and isn’t such a stubborn sourpuss as his predecessor who allowed the rot to set in on top of that Trafalgar Square bus 19 months ago. Enough said; except don’t say you hadn’t been warned in this corner even before the gruesome Ashes winter began. Meanwhile, hooray for a languidly normal olde-tyme summer, but don’t doze off at the back there because in

Lucy Vickery

Metamorphosis

In Competition No. 2491 you were invited to submit a piece of prose describing what happens when you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed into an insect but not a beetle. Beetles were outlawed so that you weren’t scribbling quite so much in Kafka’s shadow. But in fact, the correct translation of Ungeziefer is vigorously disputed. In his lecture on The Metamorphosis Nabokov insisted that Gregor Samsa’s new incarnation was not as a cockroach, as it is sometimes rendered, but as a ‘big beetle’ with wings, capable of flight had he but known it. The more generous than usual wordcount means fewer winners. G.M Davis’s ant-with-attitude went down

Jonathan Davis

Oxbridge investors fail to win glittering prizes

Jonathan Davis says that if Britain’s ancient universities want to remain world-class, they should take tutorials from Harvard and Yale in how to invest their endowments Devotees of the diaries of Harold Nicolson and Alan Clark will feel that they know the cramped apartments at the Albany in Piccadilly as a vicarious second home. It was there that both men would repair after dining and gossiping in clubland; there also, the reader is led to assume, that their extramarital assignations would be consummated. But how many of the millions who pass the Piccadilly entrance to the Albany have ever stopped to wonder who owns the elegant building in which these

Richard Northedge

Aux armes, actionnaires!

French democracy is in full swing, but the spirit of Revolution is alive and well sous la Manche. Eurotunnel’s small shareholders, having seized control of the company, are prepared to go down — and determined to go down fighting. Their weapon is the private investors’ right to be irrational, voting on prejudice and putting the questions at shareholders’ meetings that pension funds are too polite to utter. In other companies, their holdings add up to little, leaving sober institutions to impose reason — but at Eurotunnel the big funds sold out long ago to cut their losses. The small fry are in charge. Mostly French, they own 94 per cent

Elliot Wilson

Why come to Kazakhstan?

Russia may have set the bar pretty high, but Kazakhstan still has to be one of the most extraordinarily business-unfriendly places on the planet. A visit to this vast Central Asian state is like a modern reworking of Malcolm Bradbury’s satire Why Come to Slaka?, which catalogued the dubious attractions of a fictional East European state in the Cold War. On the surface, this giant, underpopulated nation is doing remarkably well. From being virtually bankrupt a decade ago, the two main cities — Almaty in the south, and the northerly capital of Astana — now brim with confidence and cash. Mercedes and Bentleys jostle for road space with Ladas and

Lucy Beresford

Shoppers think fresh – and think less of products endorsed by World Cup losers

Middle-class Delhi-ites have fallen in love — with supermarkets. The ‘Organised Retail’ concept has exploded here, as mini-chains such as Big Apple, Food Bazaar and Reliance Fresh seek to get a head-start over the likes of global brands such as Wal-Mart and Tesco — both rumoured to be looking for sites in the capital. Big Apple (slogan: ‘Think Fresh’) consisted in 2005 of just one store employing 30 people; by August 2007, the group hopes to have opened 300 stores. Analysts say the market is growing at over 25 per cent annually. At six o’clock on a Sunday evening, the Reliance Fresh outlet on Rani Jhansi Road in north-east Delhi

Paul Johnson

It is the imagination which links man to God

We are imprisoned in space and time and there appears to be no obvious way of escaping from them. Indeed if, like Richard Dawkins and other neanderthals, you do not believe in a non-material world, there is no escape at all. You, as an individual, have no more significance, no more meaningful past, present or future than a piece of rock or a puff of dust. Nobody else is significant either, and nothing matters. When we die, darkness closes in and we go out like the light on a switched-off television set, dwindling and then vanishing utterly, for ever. But what does it mean ‘When we die’? What is death?

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

New Labour’s final collapse

Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power? When locals give chase in a deprived Glasgow housing estate, it is normally a signal to run. The woman who started coming towards the Scottish National Party campaigners I was with on Tuesday certainly seemed angry: perhaps we’d blocked her driveway, or sullied her carpet with separatist literature. But her gripe was with Labour. ‘I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the Health Service really suffer under

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning

This week Theodore Dalrymple begins a new column — on globalisation, moronic technology and modernity in general.Whenever I read the French newspapers I come to a strange conclusion: that I hate anti-globalisation as much as I hate globalisation. What, then, do I stand for? I don’t know, really. But it seems to me clear that, just as the globalisers are the party of the triumphant corporatists, so the anti-globalisers are the party of the French train drivers who want to retire at the age of 50 at the expense of all the people unfortunate or foolish enough not to be French train drivers. I think I must be what a

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Democracy may die

A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar; Putin’s a practical politician.’ But who, I asked was the more lovable? ‘Putin,’ he replied, ‘because he’s always direct and he keeps his word.’ His words returned to me when I heard on Monday that Yeltsin had died. Yeltsin’s style of tsardom — impulsive, bombastic, secretive, drunken — meant inconsistency and insecurity for even his closest

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 21 April 2007

Q. A young man from Oz, the son of a friend of my wife, has been staying for several weeks. He walks into the house and helps himself to a beer or a banana or a toasted cheese sandwich. This is what they do in American soaps, opening the fridge without even saying hello, but it is slightly at odds with the upbringing of our children who are encouraged to ask before helping themselves. My wife believes this shows that he feels at home and that, if I disapprove, I should ask him next time to bring back some beer, bananas, bread or cheese. I prefer a different approach, making

Dominic Midgley

Bag a McNab

Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover — stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting. Hunting with foxes may be in abeyance but when the roe deer stalking season begins on the first of next month, there will be more takers than ever, and all the big banks have started organising shooting days at venues like Bisley and the Royal Berkshire Shooting Ground. The Holy Grail for this new breed

Christine Patterson

Travels with Don Juan

Certain cities, like certain men, have the instant power to seduce. Seville, I’ve discovered, is one. Romantic, classically handsome and oozing charm, it offers glimpses of a fascinating past, combined with irresistible joie de vivre. This is a city utterly committed to pleasure. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that it’s also the city which inspired the legend of Don Juan. I think I’ve probably met more than my fair share of Don Juans, but I couldn’t resist the chance to meet the original. Yes, he was dead, but he has also been brought thrillingly to life in The Lost Diary of Don Juan (Orion, £12.99), which has already sold in

Alan Judd

Back chat

New York Two men prostrated themselves before the new Freelander — in gratitude, presumably, for anything more reliable than the previous model — but it turned out that the turntable on which it was displayed had jammed. On the Hummer stand another man went from car to car covering the filler caps with sticky tape. I had no idea these were so desirable, but then this was the New York Motor Show and they were expecting 200,000 visitors. The filler cap is indeed satisfyingly chunky but the rest of the car looks as if it’s trying to be more than it is, like a man with shoulder pads. Over at

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 21 April 2007

MONDAY V annoyed. Am I the only one around here who hasn’t been offered a job at Google? Not a single phone call from a headhunter in the whole time I’ve been working my little Dolce & Gabbana boots off for the good of Modern Conservatism. The whole of CCHQ is downing tools and scuttling off to make megabucks in the private sector. Nigel says it’s the Brain Drain he’s been warning about since Jed issued a memo telling everyone that working on Project Dave was reward enough in itself and ‘let’s hear no more off-message nonsense about pay and conditions. We’ve all had to make sacrifices. And don’t forget:

Oscar Humphries

Diary – 21 April 2007

The smoking ban approaches with terrifying speed. I fear that all my righteous indignation, my libertarian instinct, is merely the frightened whimper of an addict whose last crutch is being kicked away by the men in grey suits. When I drank — and I drank a lot — I couldn’t imagine a life for myself in which I wasn’t drinking. When I eventually stopped, nearly four years ago, the reality of life without debts to bars, being slapped by women I was sure I’d never met, and a perpetual hangover was so pleasant that I wondered why I hadn’t stopped sooner. I want to stop smoking so should be grateful

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 21 April 2007

US and them Sir: David Selbourne seems to suffer from tunnel vision in his analysis of failing US imperial ambitions (‘No more Pax Americana’, 14 April). He seems to believe that Islamism is its undoing and makes no mention of nationalism — a far more potent force. American imperialism is being resisted in Latin America as well as in the Middle East, and the common thread is nationalism, not Islamism. Paranoia about Islam is as widespread throughout the West as it once was about communism, but viewing either of these phenomena as monolithic is much too simplistic. The vast majority of Muslims around the world are concerned with local problems

Matthew Lynn

The brothers are back — and they’re setting the agenda

Even allowing for retro-chic, there were some things from the 1970s that most of us assumed were never coming back: cheese-and-wine parties, lime-green bathroom suites, and trade unions setting industrial policy. The little cubes of cheese and the green baths look safely forgotten. But the brothers? They’re back. In the past few months, trade unions have been making the running on issues ranging from the role of private equity to the responsibility of manufacturers to keep their factories in Britain. Led mainly by the GMB and the Transport & General Workers, the unions have developed a stunt-happy, web-friendly, celebrity-savvy campaigning style that has left the overpaid suits of City PR

Joanna Pitman

A frenzy for Chinese art

The great China investment boom has many facets. A fortnight ago at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong of Chinese works of art, wealthy mainland collectors and their representatives became so excitable during the bidding that along with the rest of the audience they ended up splurging almost £30 million. Historical works of art from the Qianlong Reign attracted particular attention: one of the highlights of the sale was an ‘Extraordinary Group of Seven Jade Imperial Archer’s Rings’ along with its original cinnabar box and cover, which sold for just over £3 million. ‘The Qianlong emperor (1736–1795) was something of a Renaissance man,’ says Henry Howard-Sneyd, managing director of Sotheby’s