Society

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiling visionary

This year is the bicentenary of Samuel Palmer’s birth, and the British Museum, in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum in New York (where the exhibition can be viewed 7 March–29 May 2006), have pulled out all the stops in mounting this glorious show. Palmer is close to the art-lover’s heart for two main reasons besides his intrinsic aesthetic appeal: for being the subject of unworthy forgery by that old rogue Tom Keating, and for his benign influence on a generation of interwar British artists and poets. Notable among those Neo-Romantics are Graham Sutherland (whose work was shown to such good effect earlier in the year at Dulwich Picture Gallery), John

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Looking for Leipzig

David Hearsey, DFC, was a bomber pilot. Here he recalls participating in a raid over Leipzig in his Handley Page Halifax in February 1944. We set out on an easterly heading across the North Sea towards the Danish coast. I told the gunners, Wally and Ted, to test their guns and fire a few rounds — mainly because I found the smell of burnt cordite through the aircraft comforting. I have a theory that combatants can stand the awfulness of battles such as Waterloo or Jutland because the smell of explosives acts as an anti-depressant drug. The crew had many ways to contain fear. Steve, wireless operator, read cowboy paperbacks;

Jaspistos

Miss Mealy-mouth

In Competition No. 2421 you were given an opening couplet of a poem, ‘I knew a girl who was so pure/ She couldn’t say the word manure’ and invited to continue for a further 16 lines. The couplet comes from ‘A Perfect Lady’, a poem by Reginald Arkell (who he?) in The Everyman Book of Light Verse. The lady ends happily cured: She squashes greenfly with her thumb,And knows how little snowdrops come:In fact, the garden she has gotHas broadened out her mind a lot. This was the biggest entry ever. As usual in judging, when skill is equal I incline to the more original. The prizewinners, printed below, take

Christopher Fildes

I get a bung from the unjust steward — he must be due for an audit

Gordon Brown is a son of the manse, so he will have been brought up on the Parable of the Unjust Steward. As stewards have been known to do, this one, we are told, had been fiddling the figures, and realised that his accounts would soon be audited. When that day came, he knew, he would need friends — so now was the time to ingratiate himself with his customers. He hurried about to offer them rebates and discounts. Can it be that the Chancellor has borrowed this idea from holy scripture? First of all he sends me an entirely welcome tax rebate. Then he follows it up with a

Paul Johnson

Odd man out in the age of ‘celebs’

The world of mammon has never been more blatant and noisy. A businessman, a caricature plutocratic monster, pays himself a yearly dividend, from just one of his companies, of £1.2 billion: that is more than the total income of 54,000 people on average earnings. He is capitalism’s top celeb, a media hero, alongside the football managers, pop singers, fashionable harlots, TV academics, babbling bishops, political demagogues and the rest of the pushers and shovers who compete for attention in the headlines, and who dominate the world of ‘getting and spending’, as Wordsworth called it. Hard for anyone, however wide-eyed and virtuous, not to be infected by this pandemic of self-aggrandisement,

Andy Mcsmith

Why do my Labour friends send their children to private school?

A good friend said something strange the other day. Her daughter, who is approaching her final school year, has asked if she can leave private school and go to the local sixth form college because she would like to make some new friends. Her mother was brimming with pride as she relayed this news — pride, and relief, that her progeny should be so open-minded as to volunteer for the adventure of breaking loose from her peer group and entering a place where she will meet teenagers who are working class. I should include a brief social profile, to put the anecdote in context. Our friend has a salaried public-sector

Andrew Neil

Britain can learn from China

Of all the insights that Friedrich August von Hayek bequeathed to us, one in particular shines out today. It is that running through the ideological and political divisions of human history are two distinct and different ways of looking at the world. One Hayek called constructivist rationalism; the other evolutionary rationalism. Hayek spent a lifetime arguing that constructivist rationalism is economically and philosophically flawed because it assumes that ‘all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design’. He later called this The Fatal Conceit. Those who follow this route believe they have it within their power to build, organise and mould society so that it conforms

Peter Oborne

The triumph of tradition

British politics froze for about 12 years after 16 September 1992, otherwise known as Black Wednesday. Real movement between the two main parties was imperceptible. The Conservative party, dominant for most of the 20th century, embarked on a long period of semi-collapse, commanding the support of no more than one third of voters, perhaps rather less. New Labour, in sharp contrast, could rely on the goodwill of over 40 per cent of the electorate. The Liberal Democrats were the only real movers. They re-emerged as a healthy third party, steadily gaining ground at the expense of the Conservatives and, towards the 2005 general election, of New Labour. There were a

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 3 December 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was forced by the presence of protesters to have a cup of tea instead of delivering a speech in Islington on nuclear energy. After his cup of tea he said that energy policy was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’ while ‘round the world you can hear the heavy sound of feverish rethinking’. The government is expected to produce a preliminary White Paper on the matter next spring. Even before it was published, a report on pensions by a commission headed by Lord Turner was discounted by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a leaked letter. Later remarks by Mr

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 December 2005

One of the basic divisions in human character is between those who expect the imminent end of the world and those who don’t. This can take a religious form, but in modern times it often appears in other guises. In the early 1980s, the apocalyptists feared nuclear war. Martin Amis wrote that the idea of it made him feel sick, as if that were a knock-down argument against the Bomb. Today, when the danger from the Bomb is actually much greater because Pakistan has it, North Korea more or less has it and Iran is getting it, the millennial fear of it has not revived in the West, perhaps because

Interconnect

Just William

New York There was a disclaimer of sorts in the programme for William Buckley’s 80th birthday party and National Review’s 50th: ‘WFB guarantees never again to figure in any celebration in which he has a leading role.’ It is the kind of thing a pope or retiring president would announce, but then Bill Buckley is the pope of the conservative movement in America, one which has been hijacked, I might rudely add, by a physically disadvantaged group of gung-ho cheerleaders known as the neocons. Be that as it may, the party at the Pierre hotel was wonderful, poignant, in good taste, graceful and without the kind of hyperbole and mawkishness

Jeremy Clarke

Man with a grievance

We’d been excommunicated from the eBay auction site for over a year. Non-payment of fees. They said I owed £4.17; I maintained that I’d paid it. And because it’s easier to get in touch with God than it is with the eBay administration, that’s how things stood until a fortnight ago when I caved in to pressure from my boy and sent another cheque. At the weekend my boy comes to stay, as usual, and he’s logged on to eBay before he’s even taken his coat off. After lunch on Saturday I’m in the kitchen washing up. He comes in and advises me that he’s bid £500 for a car

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diary – 3 December 2005

The world is, suddenly and inexplicably, obsessed with the moral implications of penguins. The Christian Right in America, inspired by the documentary film March of the Penguins, argues that the life-cycle of the emperor penguin demonstrates the truth of ‘intelligent design’ and the importance of ‘monogamy, sacrifice and child-rearing’. Their enemies, in turn, make hay with the gay penguins of Central Park Zoo in New York, and suggest that penguins are prone to have affairs, and do not show much sign of minding if they lose the odd family member to hungry petrels. The debate’s only common predicate is that, whether liberal or conservative, you are expected to regard penguins

John Charmley

New virtues for old

It can be reliably predicated that few Spectator readers will disagree with the general thrust of the essays in this volume, which is that our society is a decadent one, in which an emphasis on personal virtue and responsibility is being replaced by the intrusive activities of the nanny state. In every sphere of our public and private lives, there has appeared an army of clip-boarded bureaucrats dedicated to ensuring that at no time does anyone act on their own initiative (this would lack ‘transparency’) or discretion. As Professor Minogue (whose essay shines out even in this distinguished company) argues in his chapter on ‘Prudence’, it is ‘the joker in

Eric Anderson

Gods and heroes made human

Nigel Spivey set out to write these stories for his children. He confesses, endearingly, that the children grew up faster than he wrote the book. Perhaps that was as well since the bookshops are well-stocked with Greek myths for children. What he gives us instead is a lively retelling of the main myths and legends for those who missed out on them during their education or for those of us who like to hear them again. The author is a Cambridge classics don, but clearly not a desiccated one. He writes with panache and recreates lively versions of the stories everyone used to know: Herakles and Perseus, the War of

Mary Killen

Dear Mary…

Dear Mary… Q. Despite misgivings, and only when further evasion would have been offensive, I accepted an invitation to a dinner party from a successful architect with whom I have a perfectly amicable business relationship. My wife and I arrived and were introduced to two other couples — friends of the hosts of apparently fairly recent standing — who proceeded to behave foully towards us, being consistently snide, hostile and argumentative. Our host remained seemingly oblivious, and made no attempt to protect us or to steer the conversation in more enjoyable directions. We emerged, numbed, from a thoroughly hateful evening. Despite a carefully worded thank-you letter, I continue to receive

Frank Keating

Simply the Best

Before both codes of rugby muscled in briefly with a flurry of Test matches, a month or so ago who’d have imagined the two most compelling contests at the top of soccer’s Premiership this first Saturday of December would be Bolton Wanderers against Arsenal and Wigan Athletic’s neighbourly barney at Liverpool. Olde-tyme top-of-the-table ‘six pointers’. While Bolton’s reclaiming of the heights has been worthily achieved of late, their name has an antique resonance as founders of the League in 1888; Wigan’s dramatic rise would be even more spectacularly heady if they were to beat Liverpool today and then stop in their tracks the strutting leaders, Chelsea, next weekend at Stamford

Jaspistos

New coinage

In Competition No. 2420 you were invited to invent words describing something familiar which fill a need in the English language. The germ of this competition was a book called The Meaning of Tingo which assembles ‘extraordinary words from around the world’, from which I learnt that the Japanese have a single word to describe ‘a woman who appears pretty when seen from behind but not from the front’ and another very useful one which means ‘to try out a new sword on a passer-by’. I make way now for your own glorious neologisms. Each item wins its inventor £4, and Nicholas Hodgson gets the bonus fiver. Nompathy: concern felt

Paul Johnson

Things to pray for in this season of Advent

This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I

The Spectator

Letters to the editor

Birth of the internet Martin Vander Weyer’s excellent piece (‘The UN and the internet’, 26 November) should also have pointed out that the internet was a US defence project. In the 1960s military analysts saw the potential for a fault-tolerant command-and-control network in the event of all-out nuclear war. In collaboration with major universities (including UCL in London) the US Defense Department funded MILNET, which in the late 1970s became the internet. It is therefore jolly kind of them to let us use it in all its derived forms without any royalty, in spite of what it cost the US taxpayer. Likewise, it is kind of them to let us