Society

Saturday

Taki

Tales of the city

Why is it that every time I leave New York I die a little? I know it sounds corny, but I do. I suppose it’s because it was that first great magic city I came upon after the war. The great beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers looming in the distance, the magisterial Rockefeller Center and, of course, the noble Empire State Building were like modern Greek temples to an 11-year-old, and for some strange reason they’ve remained unspoiled and wondrous to look at to this day. Although the city has continued to alter itself at a rapid pace — gone is the Third Avenue Elevated Train, Schrafft’s restaurants, the Edward

Robin Oakley

Ten To Follow

We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. At an appropriate season, starlets and cameramen cluster in Cannes. Canny financiers ‘sell in May and go away’. And invariably at a weekend around the time of the 2,000 Guineas I retreat to my study with a bottle of good malt, the floppy Raceform weekly formbook and Timeform’s latest chunky little bible, this year the Racehorses of 2005 (£70, post free, from Timeform, 25 Timeform House, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX1 1XF), in an attempt to find

Simon Courtauld

Always around

There never seems to be any shortage of pigeons. Whether feeding in a field of corn or rape by day or coming into woodland at dusk, they are always around. Depending on the weather and the time of day, you may have to wait a while for them, but, as William Douglas-Home once wrote in a memorable article for the Field on pigeon-shooting, ‘they always turn up in the end’. They may be shot over decoys in spring and summer or from the shelter of trees on a winter’s afternoon; with no close season there should always be a plentiful supply for the table. These, of course, are wood pigeons.

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 20 May 2006

Blair’s cowardly invasion From J.G. Cluff Sir: In your leading article (13 May) you list a litany of Mr Blair’s failures without mentioning the Iraq war. How can you leave out his dismal role in committing the country to that illegal, incompetent, unnecessary and cowardly excursion? I say cowardly because I am so cynical about this meretricious and mendacious politician that I now believe it was precisely because there were no weapons of mass destruction that America and Britain invaded Iraq. There is a sinister symmetry between Hans Blix’s pronouncement and the invasion. Had he established the existence of weapons of mass destruction, I doubt whether Bush and Blair would

The Spectator

Crime and Mr Cameron

Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. After nine years in office, this was a terrible admission — not least for a Prime Minister who was swept to power on a promise to be ‘tough on crime’. It is not hard to see why ‘reasonable people’ feel so anxious. The murder of Special Constable Nisha Patel-Nasri was all the more shocking because it seemed of a piece with a growing trend towards brutal

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

If we can’t use the bus, why can’t we use each other’s cars?

So there I was last Monday at 12.20, standing outside All Saints Church in Elton, in the Peak District of Derbyshire where I live, with a small suitcase, on my way to London. The bus to Matlock meets the train, and a No. 172 Hulley’s bus was due at 12.22. It’s a five-mile journey. Silly as it may sound, the new green edge to David Cameron’s blue has caused me, as a Conservative, to think a bit more before I drive. We really do have to rescue the ideal of environmental responsibility from the left-tinged puritans for whom threats about global warming are just a weapon with which to beat

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

You’re hired — so long as you swear like they do on telly, and you don’t smoke

Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice — even our usually infallible television critic James Delingpole, who told me that he loved it ‘because it’s so awful’. Perhaps I should make more effort to master postmodern irony, but I’m afraid I found Sir Alan Sugar and his contestants just too irritating to watch for more than five minutes at a time. I’m with Sir Digby Jones on this one: the about-to-retire chief of the CBI accused the programme’s makers of chasing ratings by presenting a caricature of business as a brutal

Frank Keating

Painting Cardiff carmine

For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. Now it is rugby’s turn. This afternoon’s European club final — the Heineken — delivers a relishable match-up in Cardiff: France vs Ireland and Basque vs Celt in the he-man collision of Biarritz and Munster. It will be a white-knuckle ride; fast, fraught, furious; bone on bone, hit for hit — not remotely a pretty sight. But, olé and bejaysus, the commitment, the passion, the theatre! In just ten years the

Friday

Nicky Haslam

Diary – 19 May 2006

The embattled Prime Minister is not the only one being dogged by Blairite woes. I ran into his namesake Lionel, my friend of 50 years, in Sloane Square. He is still deeply upset about the theft of his beloved pooch, nabbed while his wife was walking in the park. Misty-eyed, he tells me that Debbie Forsyth (Bruce’s nipper to you) has just called with the awful news that her two Yorkies have been stolen. I say I’ve heard there’s a terrific trade in pet theft. Lionel’s eyes brighten. ‘Ooh. I haven’t had terrific trade for ages.’ In the late 1950s David Bailey and I used to frequent a very straight

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 19 May 2006

MONDAY Apparently the interviews for the A-list of candidates were horrendous. Three of Poppy’s friends, Bunty, Polly and Suzie, went before the panel and said it was like Pop Idol. Bernard Jenkin sitting there with his arms folded like Simon Cowell, Shireen Ritchie all smiles and hugs like Sharon Osbourne.Mr Flight had the worst time. Bernard barked, ‘Well, what do you do?’ ‘Er, I used to be an MP.’ ‘No no. What do you do? Can you sing, can you dance, are you offering to be sawn in half?’ So Mr Flight — O the horror of it — sang ‘I Am What I Am’. Total silence. Mind you, it

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 19 May 2006

We are hardly out of a long winter and already parts of the country are celebrating the traditional Festival of the Summer Water-Shortage, in which the god Hôspipês and his divine consort Sprinkla are ritually banished from the earth for six months, to be gloriously resurrected in the autumn. All very Demeter and Persephone. Strange that the Romans never had this problem. But then they had a superb aqueduct system for delivering water to far distant places. An aqueduct serving Constantinople, 75 miles long as the crow flies, is in fact 155 miles with all the twists and turns. Rome was served by 11 aqueducts, totalling over 300 miles in

Austen Ivereigh

Blessed are the spin doctors

Austen Ivereigh, who is leading the battle against the movie of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in this country, reveals how its principal target — the controversial Catholic organisation Opus Dei — is turning the fight to its advantage Rome In the run-up to the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code on 19 May the communications director for the UK branch of Opus Dei, a bundle of nervous energy even in calmer times, can hardly contain himself. ‘This is going to be the most exciting month of my life,’ Jack Valero grins, as he passes me a bundle of some of the astonishing recent coverage: pages and

Irwin Stelzer

Immigration, Iraq and oil: a bitter brew for Bush

Don’t look to polling data to get an idea of what is going on in the minds of Americans. Only 29 per cent of Americans say they are satisfied ‘with the way things are going in the United States at this time’. Yet 85 per cent are satisfied with ‘the way things are going in their personal lives’. Three out of four say they are uneasy about the economy, but only one in ten thinks it likely he will be laid off, and consumer confidence is at its highest level in four years. It is easier to read the mood in Washington. This is the time of year when the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The real disgrace is a fit of bogus morality about Prescott

Rod Liddle say that — whatever his political failures — the Deputy Prime Minister is the victim of a deplorably hypocritical press assault I spent Bank Holiday Monday trying to find out everything I could about Jo Knowsley, for your benefit. I didn’t find out very much. Certain questions, crucial to the public interest, remain unanswered — so I will have to speculate about them instead, a little later on in this article. Jo was one of the plethora of journalists charged, last weekend, with investing weight and significance to the semi-literate diary scribblings of a certain Tracey Temple, the woman who frequently had sexual intercourse with John Prescott. Tracey

Jaspistos

Take your pick

In Competition No. 2441 (wrongly numbered 2443) you were invited to choose a title of a well-known work of fiction and write an amusing poem with the same title. This gave rise to much comic lateral thinking. Esther Waters featured the hosepipe ban, Scoop followed a dog on a walk, Orwell’s title was transmuted into a rugby disaster: ‘Our side lost 19–84’, I was informed that ‘finnegans wake at half-past ten’ and told of Howard’s gory end. Godfrey Bullard and Bill Greenwell are unlucky runners-up. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Noel Petty runs away with the bonus fiver. Life of PiWhen I was young in ancient Galilee,The

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The idea that Brown’s succession will save Labour is pure fiction

When the last Conservative government sacrificed its reputation for competence, it was at least for a worthy cause. On Black Wednesday, British monetary policy was rescued from what was to become the eurozone after John Major’s government lost a shambolic battle with currency speculators. It was a day of ignominious political defeat. But on that day the economy started what has become the longest sustained expansion in history. Tony Blair is absolutely right to say he has not suffered his own Black Wednesday. The tawdry scandals which now engulf him bear no comparison with what was achieved for Britain on 16 September 1992. The Prime Minister has instead faced a

Paul Johnson

High standards of grub are the norm in West Somerset

Wandering through the Vale of Taunton recently, I reflected that few places on earth could be more fair in April-time. The trees were still mostly bare but the blossom was out in many places, and the entire countryside bore an air of expectation and awakening in the pale, tentative sunlight. The carpet of arable, pasture and woodland leans upward from the valley bottom into the Brendon and Blackdown hills, with the Quantocks to the north-east. Not much has changed here in 100 years or indeed 200. The landscape is a magical blend of man’s making and pure nature. Here is farming and nothing else: no industry, few roads of any

Frederic Raphael

Making the best of defeat

Listing page content here Vae victis, the Roman warning to the defeated, was probably more threatening than sympathetic. Ever after they themselves had been subjugated — forced, literally, to bow their heads under the Samnite yoke — they made a habit of ruthless winning. The defeated could expect slavery and pillage. After June 1940, both were endured by the French for four years which had traumatic consequences. They include the cussedness of France’s foreign policy and her resentment of les Anglo-Saxons. Helping hands too get bitten. As soon as he entered Paris, General de Gaulle set about fabricating the myth that Paris had ‘liberated herself by her own efforts’, which

Interconnect

A selection of recent paperbacks

Listing page content here Non-fiction: Rosebery by Leo McKinstry, John Murray, £10.99 Elizabeth The Queen Mother by Hugo Vickers, Arrow, £9.99 The Vote by Paul Foot, Penguin, £9.99 1599 by James Shapiro, Faber, £8.99 The Wreckers by Bella Bathurst, HarperPerennial, £8.99 Father Joe by Tony Hendra, Penguin, £8.99 The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna, Penguin, £8.99 Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, Pimlico, £7.99 Medici Money by Tim Parks, Profile, £8.99 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary by Henry Hitchings, John Murray, £7.99 How to be a Bad Birdwatcher by Simon Barnes, Short Books, £9.99 A Castle in Spain by Matthew Parris, Penguin, £8.99 Rough Crossings by Simon Schama, BBC Books, £8.99 Warriors by

The Spectator

Macspaunday time

In Competition No. 2440 you were invited to offer a poem which is a pastiche of one or all of the young left-wing poets of the early 1930s, MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. William Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an affectionate send-up worth looking for. I have room only for one verse:What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend?No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend.Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end. Auden tended to dominate this comp, just as he tended to dominate his contemporaries. Among the non-prizewinning entries that paid impressive tribute to him,