Society

Saturday

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Singing in exultation

Every Christmas, I face the problem of choosing an official card. The National Gallery Company sends through the range of choice some time in June, when it all seems far off. I can choose from the ‘Wilton Diptych’ (well, it’s not very Christmassy apart from the fact that it has a gold background) to the Leonardo Cartoon (too well-known) to a Chardin still-life (too secular for my taste because I still feel that Christmas should be about more than a bottle of wine). This year I have chosen a detail from Velázquez’s ‘The Immaculate Conception’, in spite of the fact that, as a detail, it looks rather too reminiscent of

Joan Collins

A Star at Christmas

Having toured all over the East Coast of North America for the past four and a half months, I am more than a touch jetlagged, but incredibly impressed with the modernity, beauty and excitement of some of these US cities. Although Toronto is not in the US, it still is to me American in flavour (although I’m sure I’d be lynched there for saying that). In the seven weeks that Legends played there, we stayed in a divine section known as Yorkville. This area has an eclectic selection of chic boutiques, cafés and restaurants to rival St Tropez, Covent Garden and New York City’s Village. Not only was it a

Peter Ackroyd

Table Talk

The three of us were sitting around a table in the parlour of a small public house. The pub had an old-fashioned appearance, one of those strange survivals you find in the City. It was dusty, and it smelled of stale beer. The setting, however, is not important for this story. My companions were not mournful men, but they were not merry. They seemed preoccupied, and occasionally glanced towards the door as if they were frightened of being overheard. Perhaps it was just the time of year. The days before Christmas can make certain people uneasy. May I describe them to you? The first of them was of uncertain age,

Aidan Hartley

Inside story

Kibera Court No. 2 Normally, I would bribe a traffic policeman, but very occasionally it feels good to hit back against the system. ‘Go ahead. Book me,’ I said. The copper, a huge creature with rolls of fat around his neck and piggy eyes, sighed as if to say, ‘You poor dope.’ ‘OK, I’m taking you in.’ All because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. At the station, the officer demanded a large sum in cash bail. His curious mates turned up to see what other crimes they could nail me for. ‘Your name is JOHN HOLAG.’ ‘No, it isn’t.’ They took a book down from shelves piled with dusty ledgers

Jaspistos

Delusions

In Competition No. 2474 you were invited to supply, following the format and formula of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’, three stanzas which could aptly be titled ‘The Deluded Politician’.This is my favourite Carroll poem. People often miss it because it comes not from the Alice books but from Sylvie and Bruno, much less read. Anyway, it sparked off probably the most enjoyable comp of the year, a delight and an agony to judge. The only minus factor was the general tendency to attach the delusions to the same man, our present Prime Minister. After all, there must be many politicians, here and abroad, who are equally out of

Frank Keating

Sport | 16 December 2006

Ashes to ashes. Oh, England our England! First the football, then the rugby …and now the prettiest balloon of them all has been well and truly pricked so soon after its jingo-jangled and so jauntily buoyant launch. I sense blame about to be heaped on the wives and girlfriends, the dreaded Wags. Cricket’s lot have been landing in Australia all month. Comfort and compassion are suddenly the priority, not, as they’d thought, the top-up of their tans. At least cricket’s Wags seem less brazen and more softly simpatico than football’s slebby femmes fatales in Germany last summer. After his heroic bowling was so wantonly squandered in the debacle at Adelaide,

Wednesday

Ricky Gervais

A Christmas Flanimal

When he’s not starring in comedy shows, performing stand-up or picking up awards, Ricky Gervais is master of the world of the Flanimals — crazy and spectacularly ugly creatures, many of whom eat each other. Here is a brand new Flanimal, exclusively for Spectator readers Lumby Spud(Chavius Brum) This Brumboidian Chavloader is scuppered. He tries to shorten the depressing gap between birth and death by eating till he bursts. This is a slow method and he is at risk of having a meaningful thought before he splatters everywhere. Death brings him the last laugh as he has no TV licence. He’s up.

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 9 December 2006

Q. In the summer I became engaged to a sweet young thing. We did not wish to announce our good fortune in the newspapers and have not yet set a date for our wedding. As Christmas draws nearer we are wondering to what extent we should combine our cards. Many of my friends are scattered around the world and may not meet my fiancée in the foreseeable future (although most of them — and those of my fiancée — know of my good fortune) and we wonder if it might be appropriate to send cards signed by us both, presumably with an explanation for those unlikely to be in the

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 9 December 2006

I despair. All this nonsense in the papers about Sam’s £300,000 bonus totally misses the point of everything we’ve been trying to explain for the past year. MONDAY I despair. All this nonsense in the papers about Sam’s £300,000 bonus totally misses the point of everything we’ve been trying to explain for the past year. For the last time, all you Thatcherites at the back, wealth is not about money. Wealth is not City bonuses or share windfalls. Wealth is the smile on the face of a child who gets to see Daddy before bedtime. Wealth is the smell of organic chicken slow-roasting in the oven of an environmentally sound

Miriam Gross

Diary – 9 December 2006

I was completely taken aback by the brutality of Casino Royale. I had asked various friends who had seen the film, including two mothers who had gone with their children, whether they would recommend it. One mother told me that she and her 11-year-old boy had loved it — he had already seen it twice. The other found it boring but her boy had quite liked it. None of my friends had mentioned that the film was full of violent beatings and killings, nor warned me that it contained a scene of horrendous torture in which Bond’s testicles are whipped with heavy iron chains while he howls in agony. I

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 9 December 2006

A lovely framed photograph of some rhubarb, which Veronica took, hangs on the kitchen wall as I write — white where it has been pulled from the root, and then juicy red in the stalk against the fresh green leaves. So it was quite interesting to discover that when Thackeray wrote of a ‘rhubarb-coloured coat’ he meant one that was yellowish-brown. The rhubarb that Thackeray had in mind was the medicinal sort made from the root. This was the stock-in-trade of the old Jewish rhubarb-seller from Mogador interviewed in the mid-19th century by Henry Mayhew for his London Labour and the London Poor. The rhubarb-seller, in the speech represented by

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 9 December 2006

The green gospel From Paul Horgan Sir: I read the article by Allister Heath (‘It’s a wonderful world: richer, healthier and cleaner than ever’, 2 December) with interest. The author is correct to point out that the optimism of Indur Goklany’s book will be drowned out by the doom-mongering of the environmentalist lobby. I believe that the reason for this is simple. Environmentalism is the new religion of the Western world. It has replaced the scientific secularism of Marxism/socialism, which itself replaced monotheism when this began to be discredited by Darwinism. This Earth worship has all the hallmarks of Christianity, which is why it is so easily accepted by the

Adam LeBor

A map of the road to Hell

Few organisations reward incompetence as richly as the United Nations. Consider Kofi Annan, head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) during the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. In January 1994 he twice refused General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, permission to raid the Hutu arms caches, despite Dallaire’s warnings of the planned mass slaughter of Tutsis. In early July 1995, as the Bosnian Serbs advanced on the UN safe area of Srebrenica, Annan and several of his colleagues were away. The Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was travelling in Africa. Shashi Tharoor, head of the DPKO’s Yugoslav desk, was on holiday. General Rupert Smith, the British commander

Norman Bissett

Kofi

A limp soft-soaper, he wouldn’t say Booto a goose. Cautiously neutral, he triedemollience, thereby creating genocide —the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus. He similarly failed in Bosniawhere Unprofor, the UN mission, vetoedthe use of airstrikes to save Srebrenica.Now twenty thousand slain lie incognito’d. But from these holocausts was nothing learnt?Not in Darfur, whose people in their needwere raped, then disposessed, their hovels burnt —four hundred thousand slaughtered by the Janjaweed. What’s left? A peace prize. Eulogistic mention.Lavish farewells. A very handsome pension.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. The Faraday prize is given to those who communicate science with brilliance and verve to the scientifically ignorant, thick general public. Richard has done a lot of that, ever since The Selfish Gene in 1976. It is his job these days; he holds the Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford University. His latest wife, the actress Lalla Ward, has done her bit too, helping out various bereft timelords

James Forsyth James Forsyth

‘When bloodied, we bloody’

‘Innocent people can’t do any good in the world. First of all, there are no innocent people, and, second of all, exercising power is not an innocent activity.’ This is not the kind of straight talk you expect to hear in Brussels, but Bob Kagan is a man with little time for polite fictions. Three years ago he ruffled feathers by arguing that the trans-Atlantic falling-out over Iraq was not an unfortunate misunderstanding but a consequence of the fact that today Europeans are from Kantian Venus while Americans are from Hobbesian Mars. Now he has written a book claiming that the traditional view of America as an innocent, isolationist power

Melanie Phillips

A terror so great we forgot it at once

Dhiren Barot’s case faded because it revealed unbearable truths Dhiren who? Mention Dhiren Barot to anyone and the chances are that you’ll be met with a blank look. At best, some might say, ‘Oh, wasn’t he that guy who, er, that trial recently, yeah, bit worrying….’ Thus the British have somehow failed to register the significance of the conviction last month of a man who was one of al-Qa’eda’s biggest fishes, guilty of the most devastating terrorist plot ever known in this country and one which would have made 9/11 look like a minor warm-up act. This former airline ticket clerk plotted to kill hundreds of thousands of people in

Martin Jacomb

The solution is to privatise Oxford

Oxford University has become headline news again, with everybody chipping in to say how they think it would best be run. The reasons for this new-found interest are radical proposals put forward by its vice chancellor, John Hood, which suggest replacing the traditional system of governance with a more ‘top-down’ managerial approach. Vice chancellor Hood wants ‘outsiders’ to supervise the running of the university. After hanging in the balance for a while, these proposals were defeated last week by 730 votes to 456. This week it was decided that there should be a further postal ballot, but this may produce the same results. Changes billed as ‘modernising governance’ are not

The Spectator

The bitterness of Brown sugar

Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. This was a Chancellor setting out his stall for the top job, presenting himself as a peerless custodian of the economy who can now be entrusted as custodian of the whole country. But his smiling confidence was misleading. In his plans for the investment in and refurbishment of the nation’s schools, the Chancellor brought to mind

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

If Britain had its own Baker report on Iraq, this is what it would say

After so deftly avoiding any Iraq inquiry at home, Tony Blair will be cursing his luck to have walked straight into one in Washington. His talks with President Bush were planned months ago: it was a ‘happy coincidence’ (as his spokesman said through gritted teeth) that it should coincide with publication of the long-awaited Baker report on Iraq. But for once, the Prime Minister is ahead of the Americans. He did not need a ten-month report to get moving: the British withdrawal has quietly begun. The Americans were given no specific timetable for withdrawal in James Baker’s ‘which way now?’ report, but Britain’s was settled a fortnight ago. Of the