Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 2 September 2006

Q. Sharing my name with a well-known property tycoon and philanthropist, I frequently receive invitations for dinners and other fund-raising events from organisations expecting a substantial contribution to their cause. I am not tight-fisted, Mary, but a minimum donation of £100,000 is something I can ill afford. The problem is that such amounts are rarely stated on the invitations themselves and organisers are not prepared to divulge anything on the telephone. No doubt some invitations are meant for me, but I tend to decline them all for fear of embarrassment. How can I work out whether invitations are truly intended for me or for my wealthy namesake? D.R., address withheld

Frank Keating

A summer of shame

There occurs next week (8–12 September) a sobering little anniversary. Remember 12 months ago and that heady aura of innocent joy and optimism all around? At the end of an enthralling Ashes cricket series through the summer of 2005, England and Australia were locked in a riveting decider in south London. A celebration of cut-and-thrust endeavour and good fellowship ended with a tumult of national mafeking in Trafalgar Square, the second one in the three months since London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end …and at least sport had shown itself a cause for good, and

Friday

Diary – 1 September 2006

Inevitably, at this time of year, it has been a fortnight dominated by cricket. It began in extraordinary fashion. The Oval, where I was working, became the scene of a unique event in the sport: the first time that a Test match had been forfeited by one team refusing to take the field. The team was Pakistan and the umpire who sparked off the row was Darrell Hair, after he accused the Pakistan team of cheating. In the commentary box we scoured hours of footage to try to find any visual evidence of ball-tampering, but we couldn’t find a thing. Since then I have not changed my opinion: if there

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 1 September 2006

MONDAY Sawubona! And what terrific feedback from our South African adventure. Although it was touch and go at first. The poor guy was obviously extremely nervous about meeting such an iconic figure. But Dave put Mandela immediately at his ease by asking him whether Robben Island had a House system. Soon they were chatting away like old chums, swapping stories about the deprivation and hardship of their youth. (Reading between the lines of the summary notes, I think it was obvious that Eton in the Seventies was a bit tougher than de Klerk’s penal system but I don’t think Dave laboured the point.) Anyway, the upshot is we’re all friends

Thursday

Anthony Daniels

Seeds of wisdom and dissent

George Orwell was deeply hostile to vegetarianism. Vegetarians were of ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. And before the days of South Indian restaurants in London, one had only to go to a vegetarian eating establishment to see that he had a point. It wasn’t only the beards that wilted (to quote Orwell again): it seemed that nut rissoles had an existentially wilting effect on those who subsisted on them. Of course, one might have mistaken cause for effect. Tristram Stuart’s very, indeed excessively, long and somewhat shapeless history of

Jaspistos

Breaking the silence

In Competition No. 2458 you were invited to disprove Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. I meant disprove by your own efforts, not disprove historically, but either approach was acceptable. Belloc waxed lyrical on the subject in an essay, ‘In Praise of Cheese’, and the American writer Clifton Fadiman happily described it as ‘milk’s leap towards immortality’, but it was left to you to represent the poets. Among your recommendations were some strangers to me: Havarti, Geitost, Caboc (a double-cream cheese wrapped in oatmeal) and, most romantic, ‘the truckle from Appledore’. Commendations to Doris Davies. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and

Wednesday

Geoffrey Riley

‘To My Friends Pictured Within’

Dedication of Elgar’s Enigma Variations    The faded, grainy photographs reveal   A late-Victorian decent openness.   These were his friends: with them he could express   His candid self, indulge his whims and feel   That there was nothing that he need conceal.   Their loyalty assuaged delayed success,   Keeping at bay the hurt of bitterness   No future accolades would ever heal.    ‘Enigma’ made his name and changed his life.   Honours and fame made him a traveller;   He roamed the world, was fêted, made new friends.   His amour propre guarded by his wife,   He kept his wounds, sensitive to a slur.   The music, nobilmente, made amends.

Gary Dexter

Alternative reading

The Trailor Murder Mystery (1846) by Abraham Lincoln In 1841 the young Abraham Lincoln was working as an attorney in Illinois. He became the defence counsel for three brothers named Trailor, who were accused of murdering an odd-job man for his money. No corpse had been found: the odd-job man had simply disappeared, and the brothers seemed suddenly wealthy, which was enough for the good folk of Springfield, IL. Then the odd-job man turned up alive and the case collapsed. Lincoln, unpaid for his services, tried to recoup something by writing an account of the affair for the newspaper The Quincy Whig, which splashed it as ‘A Remarkable Case of

George Trefgarne

Are these Spanish builders really fit to run Heathrow?

After the chaotic scenes of the past few weeks, with probably more than a million travellers caught up at Heathrow alone, it is surely time to rebrand BAA. In the fashionable corporate way, those three initials no longer actually stand for anything, but everyone thinks they still signify the British Airports Authority. This unloved operator is, however, no longer either British or an authority. In fact, it is a private company controlled by a secretive family of Spanish builders. A consortium led by Grupo Ferrovial, a Spanish construction giant still controlled by its 85-year-old founder, wheelchair-bound Rafael del Pino, launched a hostile bid in February for BAA and finally completed

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The NHS may be ‘in crisis’, but it still works when you dial 999

For the first time in my life I had to call an ambulance, because my mother was suffering from chest pains. It was a fascinating episode: so much so that my mother, when she was feeling a little better, accused me of actually enjoying it. The reality of Monday morning in a south London A&E department — within 25 minutes of the 999 call she was in the recovery room at St George’s, Tooting — may lack the intensity of ER and offer no hint of the tangle of doomed doctor-nurse-paramedic relationships that afflicts Holby City, but it gives you plenty to think about. Stories this week have suggested that

Alan Dershowitz

How to protect civil liberties

Harvard It is five years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but Western democracies have not even begun to address seriously, and in a nuanced way, the moral and intellectual challenges posed by the relatively new phenomenon of mass-casualty suicide terrorism. The traditional paradigm by which we have long confronted harmful conduct — waiting until the harm occurs and then punishing the harm-doer to deter others — cannot work with the suicide terrorist who welcomes the ultimate punishment. A new paradigm, relying more on anticipatory and preventive measures, must be considered. But such measures carry with them considerable dangers to civil liberties. The debate thus

Laura Trevelyan

History is relative

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan found others knew more about her famous ancestors than she did â” until she went in search of the great dynasty of scholars and public servants My introduction to the legacy of my ancestors came rather late in life. You might think I had been raised to recite the great works of George Macaulay Trevelyan, historian of England and my great-grandfather, by heart. Or to quote verbatim from the Northcoteâ“Trevelyan reforms of the Civil Service, brainchild of my great-great-great-grandfather Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan. Or perhaps my formative years were spent poring over a dog-eared copy of the Early History of Charles James Fox, by Sir George

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

He dared speak the truth about the BBC

There were only two radio reviewers who ever ruffled the feathers of senior management within the BBC. In terms of ratings, the BBC has radio pretty much its own way; neither the competition, which is negligible, nor critical comment is liable to sway a BBC radio mandarin if he firmly believes that (to take an example) You and Yours is groundbreaking investigative journalism in the Reithian tradition. The hard economics of television does not apply — and, you have to say, that with some exceptions, including the one quoted above, BBC Radio is not noticeably worse off for this lack of externally imposed rigour. All the better for it, in

Allister Heath

I stand by what I wrote

Even the most perceptive and brilliant commentators have their blind spots. In the case of Matthew Parris, a giant of modern British journalism if ever there was one, it is an inability to appreciate the true extent of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. This was demonstrated again by his column in these pages last week, where he attacked a recent Spectator/YouGov poll and my accompanying analysis of its findings. The poll revealed the British public to be remarkably hawkish; Matthew believes this to be a distortion. Matthew recently criticised in the harshest terms the thesis expounded by Tory MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7. For Matthew, to

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 August 2006

The sort of people who humorously say ‘Eat your heart out’ are also likely to say ‘To die for!’ as if they had just coined either phrase. ‘Eat your heart out’ has adjusted its meaning since the Oxford English Dictionary was redacted — 1893 for the letter E, edited by Henry Bradley. Then the definition was, ‘To suffer from silent grief or vexation’. Now an element of jealousy is added. The OED quotes Spenser from the 1590s, but there is a celebrated passage in the contemporary Essays of Francis Bacon, warning how bad it is not to have a confidant. Bacon says that Charles the Hardy (whom we call the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 August 2006

Perhaps it will take allegations of ball-tampering to focus on the role of Pakistan in modern British life. There is a certain sort of upholder of national sovereignty who thinks that ethnic and religious problems can be solved if only the national borders are shaped to reflect the divisions. The British partition of India surely proves that life is not so simple, and we are now paying for our mistake. Partition created a confessional state, and gave that state a motive for acquiring a nuclear bomb, the only Muslim Bomb until we allow Iran to get there. Thus armed with righteousness and with actual kit, the state persecutes its small

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 26 August 2006

Pakistan ‘supports terrorism’ From Sam MukerjiSir: Stephen Schwartz (‘Britain has a unique problem’, 19 August) brilliantly exposes the doctrinal poison coming to us from Pakistan. Over the 1980s and the 1990s there has been evidence to suggest that the radical Sunni community in the UK, US and Canada has funded terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and that the government here has experienced great difficulty in restraining this activity. On the ground in Jammu and Kashmir, innocent shepherds have been slaughtered in their thousands, only because they were Hindus, in order to terrify the rest of the population and force them to run for the plains. By describing the terrorism in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 26 August 2006

Q. I have recently started going out with a new girlfriend. She is articulate, well-spoken, elegant, witty and polite — in short, a real catch. There is only one thing that puts me off: she holds her knife like a pen. You will accuse me of being an inveterate snob, which I hope I am not. However, I know what my parents would say if I were to take her home for supper. Worse still, my grandmother! Perhaps, Mary, you will say I am making a fuss about nothing, or you will tell me not to be so snobbish. Equally, I am not trying to wheel in old-fashioned prejudice under

Roy Hattersley

Unnatural behaviour

We are a canine village. Of course people outnumber dogs. But I doubt if the ratio is much above three to one. Like the rest of the country we favour Labradors and Jack Russells — most of which (or whom as their owners would say) are imaginatively called ‘Jack’. There is the occasional scuffle when incompatibles meet. My Buster was actually attacked by three inoffensive-looking golden retrievers who belong to an even more inoffensive-looking middle-aged lady, whose woolly hat creates a false sense of security. Fortunately, in my attempt to fend them off, I slipped and, by landing on Buster, both protected him from harm and won the reputation of a

Frank Keating

High summers

While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading county batsmen. Hobbs did it on 17 occasions, Sutcliffe and Hendren 15. In my boyhood, 2,000 was almost commonplace. Sixty summers ago, for instance, the two grand was posted by Laurie Fishlock, Vijay Merchant, Jack Robertson, Tom Barling, Dennis Brookes and Walter Keeton, with the two Test players back from the war, Denis Compton (2,403)