Society

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

Taki

Hot spot | 12 November 2005

New York When Jean-Marie Le Pen democratically won the right to challenge the incumbent Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, I wrote in this here space that happiness was to wake up and find Le Pen president of France. By the reaction I had, you’d think I had prayed for Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot — I list them in order of the numbers they killed — to have landed the top job in the land of cheese. Three years later, the chickens are coming home to roost, as they say in Clermont Ferrand. Paris is burning, or rather French cars are burning, and the people that Le

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Diary – 12 November 2005

There was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage that has overtaken the country in recent days. Cars seem to have had the worst of it. In the truest French bureaucratic traditions, somebody has even been keeping a countrywide tally of those destroyed: by Monday night the toll had reached 1,408 vehicles. On the same day a different news story caught my eye —

James Astill

A disaster waiting to happen

A few days after Baghdad fell to American soldiers, CNN aired footage of a harassed marine wrestling to contain an unruly mob, and yelling, ‘We’re here for your fucking freedom! Now back up!’ The occupation was already in trouble. Looters had grabbed their freedom with greedy hands, ransacking almost every state building left unbombed, stripping them of police records, Babylonian antiquities and porcelain urinals. And America had no plan, and no clue, of what to do with the broken and bitter country. In words often quoted, yet still amazing, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary nominally in charge of Iraq, saluted the madness: ‘Stuff happens and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A bad hair day for Tony Blair at the Chocolate Factory

Rivers of fudge are to be expected from corporate PR people, but the Cadbury factory at Bourneville has an unusually impressive one — an endless six-feet-wide flow of the soft, brown confection, about to be sliced into ribbons, then chopped into tiny rectangles, coated in chocolate and popped into Milk Tray boxes. Even more seductive is the assembly line for chocolate Creme Eggs — made in halves with the yolk in one half only, then neatly flipped together, sealed, wrapped and sent bobbing along the conveyors. But it was one of the robots in the packing section that earned a spontaneous round of applause from our tour party: simultaneously stacking

Jaspistos

Anti-hero

In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the first of a line of maladroit youths whose last mutation was Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. (I reread both books this year and found that the Huxley held up better.) The genre — what Mr Scogan in Crome Yellow calls ‘a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character’ — seems to have died

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The riots may be just what the French economy needs

Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too. Until the peoples of France and Germany are confronted by a palpable sense of national failure, they will never embrace the Anglo-Saxon model of market reform, and our continent’s economic logjam will never shift. For all its horror, and although no feeling person can welcome death and destruction, France’s convulsions this week could be for the French

Leo McKinstry

Young people are the business

Lazy, ignorant, shallow and irresponsible, more interested in taking drugs than in proper study, too apathetic to make it to the polling station but not to an ecstasy-fuelled rave: those are the images often associated with young people in modern Britain. Survey after survey shows widespread illiteracy and innumeracy among teenagers. At the ever-expanding universities, it is said that terror of placing too heavy an intellectual burden on students has resulted in remorseless grade inflation and undemanding degree courses like media studies and golf-course management. The anxiety about youth is graphically reflected in the current hysteria about binge drinking. A generation of young semi-alcoholics, whose entire lives are geared towards

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Profiles in courage

Have you ever escaped from captivity by removing from your boot the serrated surgical wire cunningly disguised as a shoelace and sawing through the windpipe of your hapless, squirming guard? Me neither, but I know someone who has. He’s a lovely old boy, gentle, thoughtful, slightly melancholy and, but for that unsettlingly sardonic smile and the gimlet glint in his eye, you’d never imagine for a moment that he could have killed anyone. But he did, quite a few times in fact, during his service in the second world war with the commandos. On this particular occasion, he had been captured with three of his comrades outside Dunkirk. One was

Patrick Sookhdeo

Will London burn too?

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has warned recently of ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Although he was not speaking principally about Muslims, they have become perhaps the most dominant group in British society. Divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Muslims are nevertheless united by their creed, their law and the powerful concept of the umma, the totality of Muslims worldwide. The process of migrating and establishing a Muslim community in a non-Muslim context has an important place in Islamic theology. The word hijra is used to describe such a migration, in particular the migration of Mohammed and his followers in ad 622 from Mecca, where they

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The crescent of fear

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV. The fatwa was issued on day 11 of the rioting,

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 5 November 2005

Nuclear hedge fund Andrew Gilligan (‘A terrifying plan for nuclear strikes’, 29 October) is being unduly alarmist about the future of Britain’s small nuclear deterrent. The development of so-called ‘usable’ nukes does not imply a wish or intention actually to use them, but rather is an essential element of effective deterrence. If you rely simply on the sheer awfulness of nuclear weapons for their deterrent effect (‘existential’ deterrence in the jargon), the person you’re most likely to deter will be yourself. You won’t then deter anybody else, which defeats the whole purpose of a deterrent in the first place. However remote and awful the prospect, you have to come up

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 November 2005

The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel Foote, the actor and satirist (1721–77). It came in a piece of nonsense that he invented to test a claim by the actor Charles Macklin (1699–1797) that he could repeat anything after once hearing it. Behind the challenge was a feud that Foote had begun with Macklin in December 1754. Macklin, who had been Foote’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 November 2005

Mr David Blunkett resigned as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after it was revealed that he had taken a directorship in a DNA-testing company called DNA Bioscience, after resigning from his previous Cabinet post, without consulting the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, as the ministerial code of practice stipulates. He had sold some shares he’d bought in the company, saying he wanted ‘to protect family and friends from further intrusion’. After a delay caused by a rift in the Cabinet, the government announced a Bill to criminalise tobacco-smoking in enclosed public spaces, apart from pubs not selling food and private clubs. Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 5 November 2005

After a week in Florence, astonished all over again by the unsurpassed beauty of its painting and architecture from 1350–1550, I wonder about the odd mixture of features which characterises a high civilisation. This includes: 1. A respect for what appears to be ‘useless’. Greek was barely known in the city until a teacher called Manuel Chrysoloras arrived at the university in the late 14th century, and even Latin was not commonplace. Someone somehow decided that learning what appeared to be dead would make people more alive. High learning was an innate good. This appears not to fit with … 2. Vulgarity. The unbelievable effusion of artistic display in Florence

Frank Keating

Dance macabre

Having cruelly blackwashed the combined British Isles Lions tourists just four months ago, New Zealand’s athletic young rugby sadists are back in the old country intent on inflicting further pain with a Grand Slam against the four ‘home’ nations on successive weekends, beginning today in a defiantly hyped-up Cardiff. It is a centenary show: on almost the same Taff patch in December 1905 Wales famously, disputedly, inflicted the solitary defeat on the fabled first All Black ‘Originals’ — a 3–0 whisker of a victory which has lodged enduringly in Welsh legend because in the following 100 years, club and country, New Zealand and Welsh XVs have played each other 73

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. You suggest (22 October) that scrap suppers be served on site following private views in art galleries. May I suggest the very same practice might well reverse the decline in numbers of young people attending classical concerts? For friendless, new to London perhaps, but unpushy lovers of classical music, it would surely be an incentive to know that, for an extra £10 on their ticket, they could eat a simple hot supper with a glass of wine, meet and chat to the musicians and mingle in like-minded civilised company following a performance. M.M., London W8 A. Of course you are right. Some administrators are already cottoning on