Society

Saturday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody | 31 March 2007

MONDAY What on earth is going on? Ever since Budget day there’s been a really strange atmosphere around here. Can’t put my finger on what’s wrong except to say — I know this is going to sound hysterical — I think there’s some sort of situation developing between Dave and Gids. It could be nothing but it’s been haunting me ever since Dave got to his feet to fight Gordon armed only with a file full of dodgy jokes about Stalin (mostly Nigel’s, v poor). Given the circumstances, he did really, really well. I mean — 2p cut/10p band?! It’s all Dutch to normal people. But couldn’t Gids have passed

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 31 March 2007

From the astonishing film of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams together you can see at once that it is Paisley who has lost. Birthrights and messes of pottage come to mind. Smart-looking, cool-headed, smug Adams has gained respectability and power, and the chance to unite Ireland under his leadership without having to renounce any of his evil past. What has sagging old Paisley gained? A seat for his wife in the House of Lords and the exquisite discomfort of being called a ‘man of destiny’ by Peter Hain. He has weakened the Union; that is not something he would mind if, in exchange, he became the ruler of Ulster, but

Tony Parsons

Diary – 31 March 2007

Vilnius Sex clubs are a bit different in Lithuania. You don’t walk down some dark alley, knock three times and ask for Lulu. Here they come and get you. I dump my suitcase, crack open the mini-bar and pick up the usual hotel spam about pay-per-view and fine dining. And out fall all these glossy leaflets featuring high-class escorts crawling on all fours. Call to our club for free taxi!! they urge. Outside my hotel window, I see the narrow streets of Vilnius Old Town are deserted apart from cruising stretch limos, awaiting the call from lonely foreign businessmen. And I wonder — do they also bring you back? Or

Theodore Dalrymple

‘I want Sarkozy to be right’

Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown Les Vans During the height of the Dreyfus affair, a cartoon appeared depicting the setting of a bourgeois dinner party before and after it had taken place. Afterwards, the room was wrecked, as if a platoon of marauding soldiers had passed through it. The problem was that the guests had talked about the affair. The current French election is a little like this. The word Sarko is enough to raise the temperature and the heart rate at

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Lilla’s greatest feat is to make us imagine the unimaginable

‘I was much surprised,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1873, ‘at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.’ He was right. Guarding the entrance to the city’s great inland harbour system at North Head and South Head are lookouts and fortifications in the most beautiful of situations. The coincidence last week of the short walk to South Head, the long journey to Australia, and a book, led me to a curious sideways reflection on the fine old cannon still pointing across the harbour mouth. Which way to face? Who are the next enemy? Sitting near

Paul Johnson

Noah and his ark are perennial, and now fashionable too

Noah was the first believer in climate change. He saw it coming and acted in time. So it’s odd he is not the hero of the greens. But then they are all atheists. The two things go together, for being green, a secular form of pantheism, is a substitute for religion. Hence the fanaticism, so typical of primitive beliefs. Certain green scientists even want denial of climate change made into a criminal offence, as Holocaust denial is in some Continental countries. Another reason Noah is unsatisfactory to the greens is that he believed that climate change would be temporary: hence the ark and its passengers, to be saved ‘that they

Edie Lush

Channel 4 heads closer to the edge

How much do you hate Big Brother? A lot perhaps; but enough to welcome the demise of Channel 4? This is a real possibility: an Ofcom report due in a few days time will detail just how precarious Channel 4’s finances are becoming. While the report’s contents are still unknown, the challenges C4 faces are not. C4 has produced some of the nation’s favourite programming, including Channel 4 News and Film4 hits such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Trainspotting. It has also produced programmes such as Celebrity Big Brother, which have grabbed headlines but horrified the chattering classes. In a bid to avoid more of the same, C4

Allister Heath

A radical, reforming Budget? No – it was tax-and-spin as usual

Gordon Brown’s 11th and final Budget was a masterpiece of spin and obfuscation, with his headline-grabbing reductions in the basic rate of income tax and corporation tax more than made up for by a series of stealth tax raids. On that point, my friends and I are in complete agreement. But for the first time since I began writing about the British economy, some of the economists and think-tankers I most respect have broken ranks with the rest of the Chancellor’s critics. To many free-market policy wonks, the fact that Brown has dared to break a central taboo of modern British politics by cutting direct tax rates easily makes up

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Not so dark continent

In Bond Street tube station an ad catches my eye every morning: ‘140 million people, 9th largest market in the world, 42 billion tonnes of bitumen, 3rd largest movie industry in the world, Africa’s fastest growing telecommunications market. Nigeria …it’s more than what you think it is.’ The effect is slightly ruined by the grammar of that final slogan, but the message gets across: anyone in the business or investment world who has written Nigeria off as nothing more than a no-hope nation of clever but fraudulent letter-writers is making a mistake. The same could be said of much of the rest of Africa. It’s not hard to find misery:

Angela Summerfield

Shifting impressions

Abstract art in Britain, in its widest sense, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among collectors, art dealers and curators; a time span which runs from the 1960s to the latest recipient of the Turner Prize, Tomma Abts. Callum Innes, still only in his mid-forties, is Scotland’s premier abstract painter. He is represented in leading public collections and by commercial galleries in London, New York and Dublin; he was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize 2002 and showed at Tate, St Ives in 2005. The current show, organised by the dynamic Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, features a selection of small and large-scale paintings created over the past 15 years. They are

Jaspistos

Ancient and modern | 31 March 2007

In Competition No. 2487 you were invited to submit a theatrical critic’s response to a production of a modern play in ancient costume. There were easy laughs to be had at the expense of ropy chitons and inadequate loincloths and in general you took a harsh line. Most of you set your jaundiced sights on productions of works by just a few (Pinter, Osborne and Coward loomed large). None, though, scaled the scornful heights of Kenneth Tynan’s much-quoted take on Gielgud in modern dress, whom he described as having ‘the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’. A more or less lone chorus of approval came from W.J. Webster,

Frank Keating

Woolmer in Wisden

The appalling crime in Jamaica still has the cricket world in shock, and it was harrowingly eerie this week to be coldly attempting to relish Wisden’s latest arrival, hot off the press. In it, of course, Bob Woolmer features prominently. The new almanack includes a poignant full-page close-up picture of a desperate Bob brandishing (in vain) The Laws of Cricket on the Oval balcony on that cataclysmic afternoon last August. For cricket’s own official version of how the laws of life were so greviously smithereened this March, as well as the game’s intimate farewell hosannas to trailblazer Woolmer, we shall have to wait the 12 months till Wisden 2008. Last

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 24 March 2007

Q. I find myself constantly smarting — for want of a better phrase — from the presumptions of instant matey-ness one encounters in almost every human interchange in English day-to-day life. Why should someone I have never met before address me by my Christian name? Why should the youth from the local garage who has never clapped eyes on me let alone been introduced (but who knows full well that I am a Lord) telephone me saying, ‘Hi Alex, do you want to test drive the latest BMW we’ve got in?’ I am 33 and some of my friends say that I am being pompous, and that this epidemic of

Jeremy Clarke

Rogues and funsters

At Cheltenham this year I was once again a guest of racing tipster and bon viveur Colonel Pinstripe. The Colonel is famous for his rambling, gossipy, sexist, often libellous telephone tipster line, the avowed goal of which (seldom attained) is to send callers home with ‘bulging trousers’. Serious, high-rolling gamblers who ring up his tipster line must be surprised to find themselves invited by the Colonel to repeat solemnly after him, as if it were a mantra, the words ‘bulging trousers’, having earlier learnt, at a pound a minute, about the Colonel’s obsessive passion for the wife of Irish trainer Willie Mullins. In chalet 47, a nomad-style tent within a tent

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 March 2007

The unbeatable duo of Judas Iscariot and Jeffrey Archer have teamed up to bring the world The Gospel According to Judas, published this week at a mere £9.99. The scholastic midwife to this monstrous birth is a previously respectable biblical professor called Francis J. Moloney. He must have copied out the bits from the gospels which provide the narrative links holding this novella together. They are printed in red type. Lord Archer is credited with the bits in black. He has chosen a strange register of English in which to work. I am glad it was not an elevated pseudo-Jacobean style. Instead it is a sort of Woman’s Realm novelese.

Alan Judd

People like us

‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ ‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ Thus spake Elizabeth I, that font of pithy regal eloquence who learnt such worldly wisdom without buying or selling a single car. (If she had, her merry quip — ‘I will make you shorter by the head’ — might have been deployed more frequently.) It’s usually easier to buy cars than sell them, of course, but it’s still an anxious process. Most of us like to think we’re getting at least what — if

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 24 March 2007

Monday Forty-one per cent! Would be nice to celebrate, but of course we know this is out of the question. Mr Maude is in bad enough mood already, since his attempt at optimism went so badly wrong at Spring Conference. He’d been practising sounding ‘noncommittally cheerful’ all week with our Wellbeing Guru, Sherwood. Before he went on they were backstage together blowing out their cheeks and shaking their limbs loose, the Frankster repeating, ‘I really believe we can win!’ and doing his special tantric smiling exercises. But when it came to the optimistic bit of his speech he just froze, and couldn’t get the words out. Ended up looking as

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 March 2007

Sir Alistair Graham is presented as one of the heroes of our age. He is the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was originally set up by John Major as what he (Mr Major) called ‘an ethical workshop called in to do running repairs’. Now Sir Alistair has lashed out at Tony Blair. ‘The most fundamental thing is that Blair has betrayed himself,’ says Sir Alistair. ‘He set such a high bar for people to judge him and he has fallen well below the standards he set for himself.’ Then he mentions not only cash for honours, but also the Iraq war, postal voting, ‘sofa government’,

Andrew Roberts

Diary – 24 March 2007

Off to the States for a fortnight’s book tour, trying to plug my A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Prepare yourself for a veritable carpet-bombing of name-dropping, on the basis that if you can’t boast shamelessly in the Speccie Diary, where on earth can you? The Chaos Club in New York radiates reactionary chic. Flanked by Tom Wolfe — complete in the high collar and three-piece white suit — and Norman Podhoretz, I set out my argument. Next stop a speech and dinner given by the wonderfully counter-counter-cultural magazine The New Criterion at the Cosmopolitan Club. Then a dinner thrown for my wife Susan Gilchrist and me at

Josie Reed

Heaven on earth

Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial might look like. Everybody visits the cemeteries of Highgate in London and Père Lachaise in Paris, but there is an almost greater pleasure to be had in discovering a small town cemetery or country churchyard, beside the sea or in the mountains, that is the resting place of a particular hero. Visiting Barnoon Cemetery in St Ives is not on the list of things to do in that particular seaside town, but it should be. Its location is five-star: perched