Society

Saturday

Interconnect

Sir Ken Macdonald, QC

Our article entitled ‘Shall we tell the Prime Minister? His gang has scattered like rats’ (10 March) was not intended to suggest that Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had leaked information to officials at No. 10 or that he was pressurised by the Police to withdraw from making the decision about prosecutions in the cash-for-honours case for that reason. We accept that there would be no truth whatsoever in any such assertions. We further accept that Sir Ken has behaved properly and appropriately and we apologise to him for any embarrassment caused to him by our article.

Simon Courtauld

Who wants to buy our old office?

‘A unique opportunity to purchase the home of a famous weekly magazine.’ Thus might an estate agent market No. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1, now up for sale after more than 30 years as the offices of The Spectator. But an estate agent cannot know how des a res is this early-19th-century house in Bloomsbury. It should be sold not so much for its fabric — handsome as it is, if slightly worn — as for its recent history, for the rich variety of people who have passed through its doors and the voices which may come out of the now possibly rotting woodwork. As someone associated with The Spectator

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 10 March 2007

This week’s mini-bar is from a new company, titled in the modern fashion, FromVineyardsDirect.com. It’s been set up by David Campbell, who is the publisher of the Everyman Library, and Esme Johnstone, one of the founders of Majestic Wine Warehouses. They have made up a very short list — fewer than 20 choices, though this will no doubt increase — and offer them all online or by post direct from the growers. It’s impossible to compare prices precisely, since these vary wildly according to who’s selling, but David reckons he charges roughly 20 per cent less than you would pay other merchants. Virtually all their wines are French classics, and

Jaspistos

Our vegetable loves

In Competition No. 2484 you were invited to provide the first 16 lines of an ‘Ode to Vegetables’. Thank you for the kind words that have been reaching me at the Charing Cross Hospital. Mike Morrison’s entry was particularly bracing: I’ve never known a patient quite like you,Jaspistos: no, you can’t have Irish stew …‘May I have cheese on toast?’ No, you may not,It’s Hobson’s choice here, sunshine — that’s shallot!My challenge called for either the solemnity of an Erasmus Darwin or Auden in a light-hearted mood, but the results were disappointing. The prizewinners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each, while the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty.Oh, some

Frank Keating

Now there are Six

Six Nations rugby musters for its last convulsive heaves this weekend and next. Today (10 March) in Edinburgh, the appealing Irish XV should confirm their latest Triple Crown, while victory at Twickenham tomorrow will, to all intents, settle yet another championship for France. Both their matches next Saturday, respectively against Italy and Scotland, should each assume the nature of an emperor’s victory parade. It has panned out roughly as expected — except, bejaysus and godammit, it could so easily have been Ireland going to Rome next week to be anointed with its first Grand Slam in more than half a century if only one of the blithering eejit-heroes had called

Richard Orange

Pipeline politics is the new Great Game

‘We’re always told that Russia is using its economic resources to achieve foreign policy aims,’ President Putin told journalists recently. But, he went on, it is ‘ill-wishers’ in the Western press who paint Russia as a threat to European energy security. ‘That is not the case.’ Yet within minutes of this assurance, Putin issued a bald threat to one of the EU’s newest members that was a textbook example of how Russia has bullied its way to energy dominance. If Bulgaria did not accept Russia’s terms for the planned pipeline from its Black Sea port of Bourgas to the Greek port of Alexandroupolis, Putin warned, it risked losing decades of

Matthew Lynn

The shipwreck of the last buccaneer

Before the number-crunchers of private equity and the hedge-fund world took control, the City was dominated by a pretty rough gang. Predatory tycoons such as Lords Hanson and White, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and Sir Nigel Broakes of Trafalgar House were the big beasts of the stock market. They created conglomerates to match their  egos, and made themselves fortunes in the process. Yet either time or shareholders caught up with them, one by one, and their empires disintegrated. Except, until recently, for one. James B. Sherwood, baron of the Orient-Express hotel chain, Great North Eastern Railways, cross-Channel ferries, container-leasing and dozens of other businesses, somehow managed to cling on. He,

The Spectator

Climate of opinion

The government has declared the scientific debate on global warming ‘closed’. A dwindling minority of scientists still contest that claim, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ministers are right. The trap into which they risk falling is to confuse scientific orthodoxy and the inclinations of the liberal elite with mainstream public opinion. Next week, David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, will publish the Climate Change Bill which was promised in last November’s Queen’s Speech. In doing so he will have a chance to prove that the government has a coherent strategy to tackle global warming and — no less important — to encourage practical changes in public

Paul Johnson

The little Spaniard and the bearded lady of the Abruzzi

Sir Flinders Petrie, who did more than any other scholar to bring Ancient Egypt and Palestine alive for us, once remarked that the perpetual joy of being a historian is that, whereas most of mankind are confined to one plane, the present, those who study the past have the freedom to sample life on all. It is like being in possession of a time machine, without any of its dangers. Many times and places thus beckon me, but today I am setting its controls to ‘Naples in the 17th century’. It was an amazing place, probably the most populous city on earth, with nearly half a million inhabitants, and certainly

Michael White

John Yates has previous

When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much. By some mysterious process of osmosis between detectives and the leading crime correspondents, details of that dramatic armed robbery in Croydon would be all over the front pages while the Yard’s official spokesmen were still confined to talking lamely about ‘an incident on Purley Way which required police attendance’. I do not know how much has changed. In our 24/7 media world everything is sharper and faster. Dawn raids have TV crews primed to film the drama, sometimes

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 3 March 2007

Q. The other day I walked into a local restaurant where I saw two people I usually meet up with each year at a certain house-party. They greeted me with yelps of anticipation and asked was I excited about meeting up again next month. I had to admit that no, I wasn’t excited since our host, one of my closest friends (let’s call her Janey) who I see three times a week, has not mentioned the gathering this year and I had therefore assumed it was not taking place. My exclusion from the guest-list baffles me but my conscience is clear, so I am curious rather than hurt. Has there

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 3 March 2007

MONDAY I know I should be excited about the move to Millbank — historic landslide here we come! — but I’d just got my desk next to Jed’s office. It’s taken months of ‘edging’ at rate of one centimetre a day. Now I’ll have to start all over again. It’s sad to be leaving our traditional home above Starbucks. So much history, so many memories: the time I left a top-secret policy document on the counter, the hours spent queuing for caramel lattes. It’s the end of an era…. Dave and DD back from the East End looking v triumphant after their immigration crackdown. DD proclaimed: ‘The boy done well,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 March 2007

One must keep repeating that the bicentenary being celebrated this year is of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain. From the amount of breast-beating, you would think that it was 200 years since the trade got going. There is huge concentration on the Atlantic slave trade, which is not surprising since this was the one chiefly pursued by our white British ancestors. I am an interested party in the great reparations debate since some of my maternal ancestors had fortunes dependent on slavery (my sense of guilt is mitigated by the total disappearance of those fortunes), while one of my paternal ancestors, William Smith, was a lieutenant of

Joan Collins

Diary – 3 March 2007

For years, one of the highlights of the Oscar season was the star-crammed party that über-agent Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar threw first at the Bistro in Beverly Hills and later at Spago in Hollywood. Invitations to this party were the most coveted of Oscar night, and Lazar trimmed his guest list with the ruthlessness that Genghis Khan applied to his victims’ heads. Several years ago, as I walked into the Spago party, I watched as an overly buxom starlet posed and preened for snappers outside the restaurant, having been refused entry. She was Anna Nicole Smith, whose life even then seemed like a bit of a train wreck, and now in

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 3 March 2007

Don’t blame the website From Malcolm Gooderham Sir: Your leading article of 24 February misses a fundamental point. Notably, the e-petition initiative has helped to breathe new life into the body politic, and has put No. 10 at the heart of key debates and in touch with millions of voters. The fact that ministers and officials at the Department of Transport were unprepared for such a response is also worth noting, but does not undermine the thinking behind the website.  Rather, it highlights a failure on behalf of the ministry adequately to manage — and pre-empt — such a public reaction. For MPs, or anyone else, to blame a website

Taki

Cold war hero

Gstaad Margaret MacMillan’s new book, Nixon and Mao, brought back pleasant  memories. It was February 1972, and I’d just returned to Saigon from Phu Bai and Hue in the north, where I was reporting for National Review. I was eager to get back to civilisation and some skiing in Gstaad, when President Nixon’s trip to Beijing took us all by surprise. Not Bill Buckley, however, my nominal boss at NR, who had accompanied Richard Nixon to the land Imperial England had permanently ‘turned on’ with its opium. MacMillan writes that Nixon, a lifelong anti-communist and cold warrior par excellence, was moved when Mao took his hand and would not let go. The handholding did not impress

Robin Oakley

Bustle and happiness

Newmarket it isn’t. Forget clipped hedges, purring security gates and decorated dovecotes. At Gary Moore’s yard in Woodingdean there isn’t even a name over the stables the other side of the road from the ten-furlong start on Brighton’s racetrack. I’ve seen grander allotment huts than the cluster of wooden and breezeblock stables stretching down the hillside, the rails chewed to a fretwork by equine nibblers. A number of the horses are clad in hand-me-downs, some still bearing the initials of former handlers. Forget the Tidy Britain competition, all the effort goes into the horses who, by contrast, look a picture. It is all about energy, bustle and the sheer happiness

Jonathan Clark

A driving sense of duty

The American Revolution is the gorilla in the corner of the room. Some used to pretend that it was safely dead, merely a stuffed gorilla. Others argued that it was inherently friendly. Others again thought it safely distracted by its banana. Alas, it was none of these things, as recent events show. The American Revolution produced a wholly novel society. Its potential for action will dominate our century, as German unification dominated the early 20th. Yet we prefer to pretend that nothing much has happened. So the British still edge round this momentous question by discussing instead King George III. Nineteenth-century Whigs blamed the loss of the colonies on the

Anna Vaux

Not quite as we like it

‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island. Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More  sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’.  Unsurprisingly perhaps,

Judi Bevan

Barclays’ new head gardener

Marcus Agius was strolling round his Hampshire garden last summer when a headhunter rang to inquire if he would consider becoming chairman of Barclays Bank. ‘It took me a nanosecond to say yes,’ says Agius. ‘Barclays is a great brand and I love great brands; it’s 300 years old; it’s huge and it’s going through a period of enormous change.’ He took up the job in January after more than three decades as an investment banker at Lazard Brothers. We are taking tea in his vast corner office on the 31st floor of Barclays’ tower in Canary Wharf. Despite his enthusiasm, Agius is well aware that Britain’s third-largest bank is