Society

Saturday

The Spectator

At least the British people get it

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki writes that ‘under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them’. Our poll today shows that the response of the British people to the terror emergency has been robust and clear-sighted. While many in the political and media elite have offered only hand-wringing, point-scoring and a feeble enthusiasm to blame the West for everything, the voters themselves grasp the scale of the threat and the need for a firm response. As low as their opinion of politicians may be, most of them have not been seduced by the preposterous suggestion that this

Frank Keating

Devonshire cream

Why does this cricket team select itself? In batting order: George Emmett (capt.), Peter Bowler, Ian Ward, Roger Twose, David Shepherd, Roger Tolchard, Jeff Tolchard, Chris Read (w.k.), John Childs, Jack Davey, Len Coldwell. Seven of them played Test cricket. A serious clue to the county they represent is that guest 12th man is recent tearaway English fast bowler whom the then chairman of selectors Ted Dexter once addressed as Malcolm Devon. In celebration of young Monty Panesar’s resplendent bowling for England this summer, I had thought of ruminating on an all-time team of Sikh cricketers, but I found I didn’t have too many research engines after I’d come up

Friday

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 18 August 2006

Mexico City/Punta Ixtapa This summer my family have done a life-swap. Every day we eat a large breakfast prepared by the cook, Isabel, in our residence in Mexico City, while Gaby, the maid, tidies our bedrooms. A brace of gardeners in cowboy hats, José and José-Luis, arrive shortly thereafter to fish out bougainvillea blooms from the fishpond. Another José, the driver, awaits our instructions. A beach house in Ixtapa (which means white sand in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs) is also at our disposal, with a cook and a maid. Not speaking the language, I talk to the staff in pidgin Latin and they reply in fast Spanish. It

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 18 August 2006

MONDAYI thought Hague was Dave’s official deputy. But today DD phones Nigel to say not to panic, he’s in charge and he’s a got a battle plan to rival Austerlitz. Hour later he turns up and gives us all a pep talk (or was it a ticking off?). ‘Listen up: it’s going to be a bit different around here while I’m calling the shots. You’re all going to do some work for a change. No more of this girly ‘wellbeing’ drivel! There’ll be blood, sweat and tears — but by God you’ll thank me at the end of it.’ Poppy so happy she looks close to fainting. She actually fell

Wednesday

Cosmo Lush

Chirac’s internet search — for a French answer to Google

France’s crusade against Anglo-Saxon incursions into its culture has entered cyberspace. To the list of alien influences the French establishment is determined to resist — ranging from words such as ‘weekend’ and ‘cheeseburger’ to radio broadcasts of British pop songs and hostile cross-border takeover bids — have been added two American giants of the internet: Google and Apple. This year President Chirac has announced two publicly funded initiatives to create French replicas of successful Google enterprises, while across the Seine in the Assemblée Nationale, French parliamentarians have passed a Bill potentially driving a stake through the heart of Apple’s iTunes music business. Regardless of whether Chirac and the French parliament

Richard Northedge

Dear Chancellor, inflation is more your fault than mine. Yours, Governor

More interesting than the Governor of the Bank of England’s letter to the Chancellor explaining why inflation has exceeded the official target will be Gordon Brown’s reply. Mervyn King has admitted there is an even chance he will have to write the letter, and a prudent Governor would already be drafting it. King might want to point out that although inflation is his responsibility — under the pact imposed on the Bank when Labour took office — it is nevertheless Brown who is responsible for some of the steepest price rises. While the private sector valiantly slashes the cost of electrical goods, clothing and food, the government allows council taxes

Paul Johnson

Chronological conjunctions, God’s favourite parlour game

Dates are important to me. I have always been good at learning them, helped by mnemonics taught me by my mother. When I was seven, attending the convent school and in the class of Sister Angela whom I adored, I had a meretricious triumph, my first of a quasi-public nature. An official visit was paid to the school by the Rt. Hon. Oliver Stanley, president of the board of education. He was the first politician I had seen, let alone met. Big, tall, fat, red-faced, genial and courteous, he shook hands during his classroom tour. Sister Angela introduced me as ‘a bright young man’. ‘Bright, is he?’ said the minister.

Stephen Schwartz

A threat to the world

With the foiling of the alleged conspiracy by radical Islamists to devastate transatlantic air travel — at the height of the US–UK tourist season — Britain has emerged, a little more than a year after the London Tube bombings, as the apparent main target for jihadist terror in Europe. This has little to do with British policies, poverty, discrimination or Islamophobia. Simply put, a million or more Sunnis of Pakistani background, who comprise the main element among British Asian Muslims, also include the largest contingent of radical Muslims in Europe. Their jihadist sympathies embody an imported ideology, organised through mosques and other religious institutions, rather than a ‘homegrown’ phenomenon, as

Allister Heath

Spectator/YouGov poll

When it came to fighting terrorists, Count Alexandre de Marenches, the legendary former head of France’s intelligence services, knew what he was talking about. In a prescient book published just after the end of the Cold War, he was the first to warn that a fourth world war had already begun — a war waged by ‘small, highly deadly units of terrorists’ with ‘the very real prospect of ending civilisation, at least Western civilisation, as we know it’. A lone voice, Marenches was ignored in Britain and America; it was far easier to believe in reassuring theories about the ‘end of history’ and the supposedly inevitable victory of liberal democracy

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Are biscuits a terrorist threat?

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified Aurora, Illinois I’m here to look at a particle accelerator. They’ve got a big one in Aurora, Illinois, all these neutrinos whizzing round and round, wishing they were anywhere but here — and with some justification. Aurora is too distant to properly associate itself with Chicago, 40 miles to the east, but sufficiently attached to the city to not exist in its own right. A desolate concrete ‘hi-tech’ suburb, a hastily tarmac-adamed prairie festooned with Taco Bells, pay-day loan outlets and anti-matter. A sort of endless

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Wine Club August Offer

How should wines be sealed? This issue continues to fret the trade. Those who believe in screwcaps correctly argue that they make it far less likely that wine will go off. Up to 5 per cent of all bottles are ‘corked’, as oxidation and sourness result from air penetrating an inadequate cork. Sometimes the effect is almost undetectable; sometimes it’s gaggingly horrible. We don’t get many complaints here at the wine club, but when someone writes, ‘This wine you recommended so highly tasted like vinegar’, I know the bottle was corked. Incidentally, all our merchants will change any bottle that’s off, without quibble. Supporters of cork say that the opening

Douglas Davis

This is only time out

During the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Jews were enjoined to recite Psalm 83. ‘Your foes are in uproar, and those who hate you have raised their head. They say, “Come let us cut them off from nationhood so Israel’s name will not be remembered anymore.” For they take counsel together unanimously … the tents of Edom and Ishmaelites, of Moab and Hagrites, Geval and Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia and the inhabitants of Tyre.’ No change there, then. As the guns fell silent in south Lebanon this week, there were claims of victory from both sides. Israel’s military brass claimed to have destroyed the infrastructure of Hezbollah, while Hezbollah,

Yahya Birt

We are not traitors in your midst

Yahya Birt — son of John, the former BBC director-general — says that those who choose Islam are not the modern-day equivalent of Soviet moles such as Anthony Blunt Converts to Islam are now under the microscope. Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker, has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11. The explanations reached for 7/7, about social unrest or cultural clashes between Muslim elders and youth, clearly don’t apply. In the past, the temptation might have been to explain away conversion to Islam as

Jaspistos

The dying inn

In Competition No. 2456 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the degeneration of the traditional English pub.The ideal pub in literature is surely the Potwell Inn, that Kentish riverside paradise where H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly found contentment at last with his pint and his punt and his plump landlady. I used to like some pubs; now I loathe them all, and I got the impression that you share my disillusionment. If you want no music, no game machines and no mobiles allowed, there’s only one pub I know in central London to go to — but you’ll have to pay through the nose for your drink. My advice

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 12 August 2006

Q. A good friend of my husband’s always addresses me as ‘Gorgeous’ or ‘my sweetie’, as he does many of his other female friends. After two years it is starting to grate and I would like him to start calling me by my given name. How can I get the message across without hurting his feelings? I can’t ask my husband to say anything as he is just too tactless and his friend does mean well, even though his efforts to be suave and charming fall flat. His friend considers himself a ladies’ man but sadly just doesn’t have the ‘necessary’ to carry it off!S.W., Swadlincote A. If your concern

Jeremy Clarke

Dramatic irony

Another reason why Trev should have gone on the stage instead of becoming a builder, apart from his love of the limelight, is the wonderful expressiveness of his face. Now, merely by giving me a level stare and bulging his eyes at me, he’s conveying that he is about to lose his struggle to keep the lid on his mirth. That he, Trev, should be suppressing an emotion merely out of politeness, and then confiding this, to me, via a subtle facial gesture, like some fastidious bourgeois, is in itself an example of this street-fighting farm boy’s highly developed sense of dramatic irony. What’s amusing him is the scene being enacted at

Robin Oakley

Classic dual

A vicar at a wedding I was at last week told of a driver who broke down with a lorryload of penguins. He flagged down another lorry and offered its driver £100 to deliver his consignment promptly to the zoo. His own vehicle repaired, he was alarmed when he got to town a few hours later to see 50 penguins marching across a zebra crossing. He berated the other driver. ‘I thought I told you to take them to the zoo,’ he said. ‘I did,’ came the reply, ‘but that was hours ago. There was still money left from your £100, so now I am taking them to the cinema.’

Simon Courtauld

King of the moor

The red grouse is a resilient little bird. Prone to an unpleasant disease called louping ill which is transmitted by sheep ticks, and vulnerable to attack by nasty, invasive little worms, its population may crash in some moorland areas for several years; and then it will reappear in healthy numbers as if nothing had happened. Grouse-shooting in Scotland has suffered a serious decline recently, due in part to the increased population of red deer, which may also be infested with ticks, and to cold, wet weather during the hatching season. (I have only just learnt that the Dr Edward Wilson who did so much valuable work in the early 20th

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 12 August 2006

A new Holocaust From Lucy MandelstamSir: Melanie Phillips’s mention of the ‘annual hate-fest’ on the streets of London filled me with despair (‘Hezbollah cells await Iran’s orders’, 5 August). Last month I celebrated my 80th birthday. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to live so long. I survived four years in Vienna under Nazi rule, and three years in concentration camps. After the end of the war I was a refugee for three years, spending those years mostly in displaced persons’ camps in Europe and Cyprus, finally coming to Israel. I had hoped to live out the rest of my life in relative peace. It was not to