Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Home advantage

By next Wednesday evening, uniquely, five British clubs could be in the last eight of the European Champions’ Cup. There is still, as they say, a lot of football to be played, but I suppose even the possibility remains testament to the strength at the top of the British club game. Mind you, only a small handful of native British footballers will be marking the occasion by actually participating. In these second-leg ties, important home advantage lies with four of the Brit five. On Tuesday, Liverpool await Barcelona at Anfield in the pick of the games; on the same night in London, Chelsea play Porto; on Wednesday, Arsenal and Manchester

Jaspistos

Sorry, mate

To say ‘I’m sorry’ once can be emollient, but as everybody knows, to say it three times with arms flapping like a penguin is downright inflammatory. Most of your apologies were for sexual misbehaviour. Since there are so many other domestic sins just as exasperating as infidelity I found this surprising. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince. Dear, there’s so much — so where do I begin?(To you the smallest fault’s a mortal sin.)I’ve boiled your egg too hard (again!); your TimesIs creased (I read it first); the cat — her crimesAre also mine — slept on your scarf; the carhas

Tessa Mayes

Big Brother is coming

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair told the road-toll petitioners by email that his government was not trying to impose ‘Big Brother surveillance’. That was accurate, if disingenuous. The real Big Brother doesn’t announce himself. He comes creeping up on you, by stages, until you realise that you are being snooped on, scrutinised and spied upon in all sorts of ways that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. Take the powers of the taxman. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) — the new authority established by the merger of HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue in 2005 — is becoming astonishingly intrusive in its investigation of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A taste of gun crime

Crack crack crack. Three shots, really close, from a car-park just across the road. Everyone in the crowded street stopped. No doubt what this was — gun crime erupting under our noses. Two more shots. Crack crack. Then another. Crack! My eight-month-old son was in a buggy and I shoved him into a gap between two parked cars. What next? Run for it? But I might charge into the line of fire. I paused, terrified. Around me everyone stared in shock and bewilderment. At the end of the street a young black guy came running round the corner, both hands under his sweatshirt, hiding something. He looked wired and frantic

Jeff Randall

The Clunking Fist

Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little list’ of those who are for the chop. Among the joys of W.S. Gilbert’s libretto is its invitation for a contemporary version of victims. Who better to identify them than the Clunking Fist? Ko-Ko, The Lord High Executioner (Gordon Brown):As this year it may happen that more taxes must be found,I’ve got a little list — I am the Clunking FistSo

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 February 2007

If 2006 was the year of issues, when the word problem gave way to ‘issues around’ things, then 2007 looks as if it will be the year of challenge. Dreary management-speak types have long invited workers to see negative problems as positive challenges. All that this has meant is that the new word challenge has taken on the connotations of the old word problem, just as lavatory air-fresheners take on the unpleasant associations of the smells they replace. Challenge was a word ripe for exploitation in this way. It derives perhaps surprisingly from the Latin calumnia, meaning ‘trickery, misrepresentation, false accusation’. The main current meanings date from the 13th or

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 24 February 2007

Monday OK, OK, I was wrong. (It does happen you know.) I may have been a teensy bit oversensitive about the whole ‘marriage’ thing. But I am now prepared to admit that it does seem that it may, after all, be the answer to everything. I cannot argue with statistics showing that hardly anybody on these south London housing estates is married. And everyone is getting shot. Contrast that with the situation in, let’s say, Witney, where 95 per cent of people are married. And gun crime is nonexistent. Also, as Jed explained to us at Strategy Hub, there are no end of political problems you can apply the marriage

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 February 2007

The Anglican Communion, trying to hold itself together in Dar-es-Salaam, is like the Commonwealth. Indeed, it exists for the same reason — the inheritance of the British Empire. Like the Commonwealth, it began as a white-dominated organisation, and has gradually ceased to be so. The Episcopal Church of the United States stands in relation to the Communion as white South Africa stood to the Commonwealth 50 years ago. Its insistence on pursuing its own obsessive doctrine — in this case, the ordination and marriage of practising homosexuals, in South Africa’s case, apartheid — isolates it from its fellows, particularly its black fellows. In the middle, in both cases, stands England,

Marianne Macdonald

Diary – 24 February 2007

I arrive at David Bailey’s Clerkenwell studio. Bailey is doing a shoot for Lancôme; I have been asked to interview the Spanish supermodel, Inés Sastre. The shoot is the usual story — unidentified people with ponytails roaming round stained boxes of mini-croissants, a friendly, normal make-up artist, loud, cool music and a simultaneous air of tension and bohemian confusion. Inés and the make-up artist troop to the window to check her make-up in the better light. They sit back down and the make-up artist grasps a brush like Picasso, staring as if to X-ray her brain. All I can see is Inés’s back, slumped slightly in a Valentino coat. It

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 February 2007

Tolerance: for and against From C. Vestey Sir: John Gray argues that ‘relearning the habit of tolerance’ may allow us to reach a ‘modus vivendi’ with Islam (‘The best we can hope for is tolerance’, 17 February). He has learnt nothing from the events of the last 30 years. It was tolerance (and cowardice) that gave us the ‘covenant of security’ that allowed hard jihadi networks to bed down in and operate from the UK in total freedom. We already tolerate honour killings and forced marriage by backing away from a robust response for fear of ‘stigmatising’ Muslims. We tolerate the creeping introduction of civil sharia law and other parallel

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 24 February 2007

Q. I am frequently invited to book launches. I always make a point of buying a copy of the book in question and leave the party with every enthusiastic intention of reading it. Yet these books tend to lie about on my coffee table unread, making me feel slightly guilty and embarrassed. I wonder whether, in these circumstances, should I really go to these parties at all?A.B., London W8A. Take steps to discipline yourself in the following way: each time you accept an invitation to a book launch make sure you keep the following day completely clear. Therefore if someone asks you to lunch on Wednesday, say, ‘Sorry, I’m going

Jeremy Clarke

Inner conflict

During the last week of my stay in the Alpujarras, the almond trees flowered. It happened almost overnight. There was an exceptionally warm afternoon and evening, and next morning the trees were foaming with pink and white petals, and very pretty it was, too. The day they flowered was my birthday. To mark it, I went for a long walk in the countryside. I didn’t enjoy it. The almond blossom’s perfect newness made me jealous. At 50, it seemed to me, I had more in common with the stones under my feet than with the flowers. Fifty! Even the word seemed distasteful. To have lived for half a century somehow seemed wrong. Today,

Taki

Manners over money

St Moritz The lack of snow drove me to the Engadine valley and the queen of ski resorts, St Moritz. Mind you, the queen is no longer what she once was. At the beginning of the last century, St Moritz was the undisputable numero uno winter spot.   European aristocracy flocked there for amusement and sport. Downhill skiing had not as yet been invented, but there was curling, tobogganing and, following the latter, the bob and cresta runs which saw brave young blades risking their necks after a night spent dancing and pursuing the fairer sex. In between the wars St Moritz reached its zenith. And even after the second world war, it

Alan Judd

Classic appeal

There’s a fascinating new book about a man with a passion for a house which he lost and regained, brick by red Jacobean brick. The house was Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire, its devotee the late George Seymour, a complex man whose daughter, novelist and biographer Miranda Seymour, tells all with elegance and insight in In My Father’s House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). ‘All’ includes George’s later passion for motorbikes and a couple of the men who rode them. Whenever I met him, we kept to safer subjects — cars, mainly Jaguars.  He had owned several and knew Sir William Lyons, who founded and ran the company. George’s penultimate period Jaguar was

Dominic Prince

Racing uncertainties

Dominic Prince says you’d have to be potty to buy a racehorse as an investment — unless your name happened to be John Magnier or Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum Owning and breeding a thoroughbred racehorse can be a mouth-wateringly profitable enterprise. Sir Percy, winner of last year’s Epsom Derby, cost a piffling 16,000 guineas when he was knocked down to the Pakenham family at auction as a yearling, and costs about the same in training fees each year. To date he has won a little over £1 million in a racing career of just two seasons. Not a bad return on capital, but the risk-reward ratio is huge — and

Jonathan Davis

Toys for boys who play the markets

Twelve years ago, on a rainy afternoon when nothing much else seemed to be happening, I abandoned my desk in Canary Wharf for a few hours in order to track down a new and obscure betting operation somewhere off the Mile End Road. The managing director was a large, florid man in his late forties. He smoked a succession of fat cigars and looked the picture of ill-health. No medically-minded betting man would have offered better than evens on his survival into the new millennium. The business he ran belied his appearance however. The office, in a quiet cul-de-sac, was newly fitted out and spotlessly clean. The trading screens were

Charles Chadwick

Hospital Music

In the square at St Bartholomew’s hospital,Crates of flowers are stacked for bedding outRound the plane trees. Patients with paper cups sit aboutIn wheelchairs or under the shelters. Above, in the hall,An orchestra is rehearsing: a Mozart piano concerto,The Bach double, some Handel — clearly audible outsideThrough the fountain’s splash, as if filling a tideOr a sound the wind makes. Nobody seems to knowIt is there. A youth with a reconstructed faceGlares at a girl, grey-lidded, lip-white, drip-fedWho stares at a scabbed tree permanently disfigured,While nurses, a doctor, go by at a determined pace.Either the sound is of all things the most naturalOr there is no connction of any kind,

Frank Keating

The road to Wembley?

Football’s relishable League Cup final at Cardiff tomorrow has Arsenal and Chelsea, the big guns from London, intriguingly squaring up for what is, officially, the last time English clubs play a showpiece event in a ‘foreign’ country. Well, that’s the plan anyway. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it. I fancy it is still anyone’s guess whether the rebuilt Wembley will host either 2007’s FA Cup final on 19 May or the league’s play-off finals the following week. I’m told Cardiff’s Millennium stadium continues to tell other promoters enquiring about possible bookings that English football remains ‘pencilled in’ at the top of the queue for those two early summer weekends. Ongoing legal

Robert Cottrell

Princes meet in the desert to discuss the bank that has lost its way — and its brolly

When Charles Prince, the chief executive of Citigroup, announced two weeks ago that he was getting rid of his bank’s rather likeable corporate logo, a red umbrella, I feared that he might be tempting the household gods. And the gods have duly stirred. The Financial Times has reported grumblings from some big shareholders that the Citigroup board has been giving Mr Prince too easy a ride while the share price has languished. The external directors are mostly other big bosses ‘naturally sympathetic to Chuck’, says one complainer. A fair argument, and a timely one. American shareholders are getting generally tougher with chief executives just now, after a flurry of boardroom

The Spectator

You’ve got mail

If there is such a thing as e-panic, New Labour is in its grip. Alarmed and caught off guard by the 1.7 million people who have signed an online petition against national road-pricing, the Prime Minister has written a response to them, hastily explaining that the government’s blameless intention is to reduce congestion, rather than to raise a new ‘stealth tax’ or bolster the state’s surveillance powers. ‘Let me be clear straight away,’ says Mr Blair, before doing just the opposite. ‘We have not made any decision about national road-pricing. Indeed we are simply not yet in a position to do so.’ In fact, every briefing emanating from government makes