Society

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sometimes women share the blame

Rape is wrong, says Rod Liddle, but it is right to believe — as 30 per cent of British people do — that some victims are partly responsible There was a clever little opinion poll in your morning news-papers this week, courtesy of Amnesty International UK. The headline story from the poll was that about one third of British people thought that women were ‘partially or totally responsible’ for being raped if they didn’t say ‘No’ clearly enough, or were wearing revealing clothing, or were drunk, or had been behaving in a flirtatious manner. Usually opinion polls are, well, a matter of opinion: respondents tick a box expressing one view

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 November 2005

There was much speculation about the import of the government’s defeat, its first since it came to office in 1997, on a vote on the Terrorism Bill by 322 votes to 291, despite the jetting back from Israel of Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had only got as far in his visit as Tel Aviv airport. Some 49 Labour MPs voted against the provision to allow 90 days’ detention without trial; an amendment was then passed limiting detention to 28 days. Some commentators saw the defeat as a straw in the wind for the last days of Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister; others wondered how

Frank Keating

Red devils

From the 1870s, soccer’s insular ‘home’ unions had simply played among each other. Incredibly, England did not invite a foreign nation over here for a game for fully 50 years after they’d first played Scotland in 1871. Even after beating plucky little Belgium by 6–1 at Highbury in March 1923, the haughty English were not enamoured — over the next 22 years half-heartedly hosting only nine further games against various Continental neighbours while disdainfully totting up a total of 46 goals to 14. Of a sudden, the peace — and the bleak, monochrome, war-weary autumn of 1945’s bombed-out London — was lit up by the arrival at Croydon airport on

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. As an elderly art-lover, I was thrilled to be invited to the private views of exhibitions by both Julian Barrow and his brother Andrew. Alas, I see these take place on the very same night next week and, as I am now nearly 90 and practically bedridden, I really cannot risk the mid-evening trek from Julian’s landscapes at the Fine Art Society to Andrew’s alphabet collages at the Rebecca Hossack in Fitzrovia. As both brothers are hypersensitive, would it be tactful to chuck both parties rather than attend only one of them?E.E., London NW6 A. I have good news for you. I have consulted the galleries in

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 19 November 2005

In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers — that’s another old Borewich saying you’ll not have heard, I dare say. Come and meet my wife. A right Borewich lass. Garn thrixen. Better a troust ner a thoutch, eh?’ I was reminded of this inability to distinguish local peculiarity from the generally commonplace by the BBC wireless series Word 4 Word, which this

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 19 November 2005

Why children need us In attacking charities such as the NSPCC, the RSPCA and Cancer Research UK (‘Bullying for charity’, 12 November) Guy Adams also harms the beneficiaries. Both larger and smaller charities have a vital role to play in the voluntary sector. Each has its strengths and they complement one another. It is also wrong to assume that because the NSPCC is a national charity, it is not ‘local’. We have 177 projects across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands, all with strong links to the local community. Some of these projects work to help children rebuild their lives after abuse, and some work to prevent cruelty

Taki

Wild and crazy

New York I thought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than ever, I presume, her hubby having exposed those clowns passing themselves off as Her Majesty’s ministers. Jack Straw trembling in front of some hamburger-chewing American, and Prescott scratching his head about the Balklands. What a bunch of losers, oy veh! And speaking of losers, the bureaucrooks in Brussels want to introduce an emissions tax on

Jeremy Clarke

Match made in heaven

My friend and I arranged to meet outside the Boleyn pub, which is on the corner of Green Street and the Barking Road, 15 minutes before kick-off. I was about five minutes late and he wasn’t there. I had both our match-day tickets, so I couldn’t go in without him. I stood in the pub doorway and waited. If he didn’t turn up soon, we’d miss the start. I should have been gutted about this, because I’d flown across Europe that morning to get there, and he’d only had to come from Clapham, but the truth was I was just happy to be there. Being part of a West Ham

Simon Courtauld

Caviar crisis

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past 20 years. It would seem that the fishing in this sea was much better regulated in the days of communism in the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime in Iran. But the independent, not to say irresponsible, Russians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and Turkmen, and the fundamentalist Iranians, without any joint agreement to protect this hugely valuable

Alan Judd

Solid and dependable

Since its launch in 1989, Land-Rover’s popular Discovery has demonstrated that critical issues for motoring correspondents, such as handling and reliability, count for little when it comes to looks, comfort, usability and aspirations. Actually, that’s a little hard on the dear old Disco of that era. The V8 petrol version performed well and, although the early 200Tdi sounded and felt somewhat agricultural, it did the job after early problems were sorted out. The 2-litre petrol version is best ignored. The wallowing, on-road body roll of those early Discos — a consequence of their design for off-road excellence — never bothered owners as much as it did the motoring press. People

Miriam Gross

Diary – 19 November 2005

I’d never have guessed that there was a connection between Joan Collins and the novelist Anthony Powell, the centenary of whose birth is being commemorated with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. But there is, as I discovered quite by chance 20 years ago when I went to interview Powell to mark his 80th birthday. He and his wife Lady Violet had invited me for lunch before the interview; indeed he had himself prepared one of his famous curries and he greeted me at the door wearing a cook’s apron. At one point during lunch he asked me who had been my last interviewee. My heart sank. Would he feel

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spilling the beans on bankers, blondes, booze and boxers

A funny thing happened to me on the way to The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. The early crowd in the foyer of Claridge’s ballroom was largely made up of City guests invited by our excellent sponsor, Threadneedle Investments, while less well-mannered parliamentary and media guests arrived late or not at all. I recognised several senior figures from my own banking days, among them a former colleague. Since this column is, this once, about journalistic good manners rather than corporate name-dropping, I will not hint at his identity. We exchanged pleasantries until a third party in the conversation moved away; then he brought his face closer to mine, with

Jaspistos

Bouts rimés | 19 November 2005

In Competition No. 2418 you were given certain rhyme-words in a certain order and invited to write a poem accordingly. The rhymes came from Masefield’s ‘Where They Took Train’ which has a rather unexpected first line, ‘Gomorrah paid so for its holiday’. I hope the old Poet Laureate would be happy rather than horrified at the use his poem is being put to here. The combination of ‘holiday’, ‘inn’ and ‘sin’ inevitably suggested to many of you the scenario of a dirty weekend, so that I found myself awarding brownie points to those competitors who showed originality, not suggestibility. Mae Scanlan, Brian Murdoch, W.J. Webster and G. McIlraith pleased, but

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2005

The Normal and Adventitious Danger Periods for Pulmonary Disease in Children (1913) by William Carlos Williams The great American modernist poet William Carlos Williams was also a full-time paediatrician. He received his MD in 1906 and practised continuously until 1951. The rare booklet above is among his small corpus of medical writings, appearing originally in The Archives of Pediatrics in August 1913. In it he explores the possibility of a ‘danger period’ for children just before puberty, when greater growth in height in relation to chest capacity makes them more vulnerable to pulmonary disease. As he puts it, ‘The height always increases, relatively, at the expense of the chest …

The Spectator

Full marks to Blair

Over the past fortnight it has been necessary for this magazine to side with those who would like to bury Tony Blair. This week it is our solemn duty to praise him. No amount of disquiet over his illiberal — and happily failed — scheme to subject terror suspects to 90 days’ detention without charge will stop us from recognising that the Prime Minister’s foreign- policy speech at Guildhall on Monday was an impressive piece of statesmanship. In a month’s time members of the World Trade Organisation will gather in Hong Kong to continue the so-called ‘Doha round’ of negotiations over the liberalisation of world trade. The leaders of developed

Frank Furedi

The age of unreason

To this day I am astonished when I hear that sensible, biologically mature adults allow themselves to be treated as if they were incompetent dimwits by a new army of professional surrogate parents. In days of old, traditional authority figures, like priests, instructed us how to behave in public and told us which rules to observe. Today’s experts are even freer with their advice. They do not simply tell us what to do and think, but also how to feel. A new army of life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides regularly lecture us about the most intimate details of our

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 November 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, insisted on pressing ahead with a Bill to allow police to hold anyone suspected of a terrorist offence for 90 days without charge. The government prepared legislation to allow terrorists who had fled Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement to return to the province without prosecution. Six men were arrested in connection with the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast last December, and two were released without charge. The High Court heard a case for compensation by more than 5,000 serving and former officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), which they said had failed those

Frank Keating

The Sultan of Multan

The one-off splendours of Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq offer a spicy tang to England’s first post-Ashes Test match which begins today in his hometown of Multan. The contrast with that soft-showered, gold-leaved autumn evening of hurrahs at the Oval seven weeks ago will be immense. Ancient Multan pitches its wicket on the very edge of the Punjab desert where sands storm, a battering heat pervades every pore, and spiritual mysticism permeates every sense. The Haqs have long been landowners of style and importance there; the batsman’s rich deeds make him the venerable city’s undisputed monarch, the nawab; Inzy is, if you like, Sultan of Multan. Ursine or pachyderm, take your pick

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have an old and dear friend who lives abroad. She divorced her husband some years ago and lives alone. We are both very fond of her and are usually delighted to see her whenever she is in England. My wife has a timeshare in the Lakes which we go to at the same time each year. We often invite guests who have included our friend but from time to time we do enjoy going by ourselves. This year we hoped to do this, but our friend invited herself, making it a very difficult week. Worse, she expressed the intention of joining us again

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 November 2005

The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a few minutes’ rooting around. Deeper spadework showed how wrong I was. The Greek sukophantes, literally ‘fig-revealer’, had a picturesque derivation thrust upon it, sceptically retailed by Plutarch in his life of Solon. The translation by Thomas North (1579), used by Shakespeare, says: ‘Wee may not altogether discredite those which say, they did forbid in the