Society

Saturday

Michael Cockerell

Diary – 25 March 2006

It’s been quite a week for mistaken identity. It began with my partner sounding very excited on the telephone. ‘At last a chance to make some money,’ she said. ‘The Independent has a story about dodgy dealings by companies in Iraq — one of them is run by Tim Bell. And they’ve printed a photo of you, captioned Lord Bell.’ I emailed Bell: ‘Have you seen the Indie piece which accuses you of making squillions trading with Iraq? They illustrated it with what purported to be a pic of you — but it was me. Should you sue or should I?’ Ping! came the reply. ‘As long as you don’t

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 25 March 2006

MONDAYPanic and frenzy. Nigel is calling it Dave v. Goliath. Sebastian says if the first draft of Dave’s budget response is anything to go by it will be more like the ‘Ramble in the Jungle’. Focus group findings pinned to every wall — ‘If Dave was an alcopop, which flavour would he be?’ ‘Er, chocolate.’ The flatscreen playing a constant loop of Bush v. Clinton debates for inspiration. Every few minutes Nigel walks past whooping. He is wearing a Yankees cap. He asked me to get him a cup of coffee and shouted: ‘Go, go, go!’ This must be what Dave meant when he urged us to look within ourselves

Olivia Glazebrook

A quiet revolution in the studios

A book with the words ‘mavericks’ and ‘Hollywood’ in the subtitle should be a lot more exciting than this. After all, the movie business has been traditionally populated by monstrous egos with access to huge funds — a recipe for drama if ever there were one. Memoirs such as Bob Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, or Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again have described the film business we suspect is going on behind closed doors. The marvellous Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind confirmed that in the 1970s everyone in the movies had big sunglasses and a runaway coke habit — as well

David Rennie

Peter Mandelson: ‘my member states’

Brussels Almost the first thing you see, on entering Peter Mandelson’s office at the European Commission, is a bound set of photographs of Siberia resting on the coffee table. Are they a signal, a discreet protest from this most British of politicians at being sent into exile? Mr Mandelson would insist not. He had, by most accounts, an unhappy start in Brussels in November 2004, unable to hide his impatience with the collegiate, rather plodding ways of the 25-strong Commission. Recently Mr Mandelson has begun visibly to relish his new post, and his extraordinary powers to negotiate world trade on behalf of all 25 member states. Not that his taste

Frances Osborne

In unhistoric acts lies true history

Last week my four-year-old son gained a new classmate. She arrived in the middle of term as her mother has just walked out of Zimbabwe, leaving everything behind to start again from scratch here. I don’t just mean financial scratch — ‘we couldn’t bring a single penny’, she told me as she dashed off to an employment agency — but personal scratch too. When we exchanged mobile telephone numbers I asked her if she texted. She replied that she knew how ‘but I’ve nobody here to text me yet’. The decision of this well-connected graduate — who has worked for the Zimbabwean parliament, the Red Cross and the UN —

Matthew Dancona

The Da Vinci Code duo dinner

Matthew d’Ancona recalls a very odd meeting with the two men who have dared to take Dan Brown to court — and their spooky theory about the European Community Much the strangest journalistic encounter I have ever had took place more than a decade ago at the Westminster restaurant known in those days as L’Amico. It was the sort of bistro that old-fashioned Tory MPs found congenial, serving traditional Italian fare, with nooks and crannies in which to plot. The dinner in question took place in a private room, and the invitees were a motley right-of-centre bunch, gathered to give advice to two very unusual guests. And seeing the pair

Paul Johnson

Don’t put your daughter on the train, Mrs Worthington

This month I spent a weekend in Bruges, travelling most of the way by Eurostar, which for this kind of trip easily beats air travel for speed and is, of course, incomparably more comfortable. I love trains. All my early childhood in north Staffordshire, from four to 12, I travelled every day to school on a funny little LMS puffer on the so-called Loop Line, which went through the various Potteries towns and deposited me at Stoke, where it rejoined the main line. Historically, rail was the most efficient, cheap, safe and customer-charming form of travel devised for ordinary people. Like the 19th century which gave it birth, it promoted

Jaspistos

Holmes rides again

‘To the Royal Society of Needlework — and drive like the wind!’ Sherlock is speaking, Watson narrating. In Competition No. 2435 you were invited to continue from here. ‘Not …’ I gasped as we careered on to the Edgware Road.‘Exactly, Watson, our old adversary. Did you ever wonder in what subject the Professor gained his academic distinction? Crochet …’. I enjoyed this Moriarty moment in Derek Morgan’s entry. Mycroft Holmes, however, didn’t feature in any of your scenarios: perhaps it would have been too difficult to get him out of his armchair in the Diogenes Club and into a bumpy hansom. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the

Saturday

Taki

Lethal combination

If I told you I was skiing with a friend in the Swiss Alps last week, and my friend had been skiing in Iraq two days before that, you’d probably think I’d been smoking exotic cheroots, but you’d be wrong. Peter Galbraith is the son of Ken Galbraith, Harvard professor, writer, economist, ex-ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, and now, at 97 years of age, semi-retired from the political wars. His son Peter is also an ex-ambassador. He was Uncle Sam’s man in Croatia during the early Nineties, now lectures at the War College, and did stints with ABC in Iraq during the start of the great blunder. Peter

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 18 March 2006

Q. I am at a co-ed day school and have been going out with a boy in my year for six months. Last week he dumped me. What has made it worse is that everyone in school has reacted by saying that they could not understand why I was going out with him in the first place as I am — according to them — ‘fit and cool’ and he is not. If this is really true it makes me feel there must be something terribly wrong with me, which only someone going out with me would know. How can I find out what it is? My former boyfriend will

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 18 March 2006

Schools aren’t clubs From Nicholas NelsonSir: Have you given proper thought to the reason that we have an education system (Leading article, 11 March)? Our schools have an essential list of objectives which includes ensuring that young people absorb a body of knowledge and acquire skills that match their potential, and emerge as adults with an ability to assess their world critically and communicate with their fellow human beings. The way you would do this is to hive off 25 per cent or so into exclusive clubs so that they leave school with a strong body of knowledge but no clue about how to communicate with the other 75 per

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 18 March 2006

The restaurateur Oliver Peyton’s latest project is the National Dining Rooms at the National Gallery. It is situated in the Sainsbury Wing, although as Tesco has more or less blasted Sainsbury’s out of the water in every way you can think of in recent years, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Tesco takes it over, moves it out of town until everything in town goes bust, and then moves it back as the Tesco Metro Wing. Supermarkets. Aren’t they just so evil? Last week my car was broken into, window smashed and everything, and while I’m not one of those people who likes to blame supermarkets for

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 March 2006

The Dunblane massacre took place ten years ago. Its effects on the families of the victims are so terrible that it seems dangerous to speak about them. But there were secondary effects as well. In the aftermath of the horror, the then prime minister, John Major, invited the other party leaders, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown, to join him in visiting the town to pay tribute and meet the bereaved. The idea, surely right, was that this should be a grief which united people across politics. Watching the scene on television, I was struck for the first time by Mr Blair’s way of parading feeling, while everyone else, including the

Gyles Brandreth

Diary – 18 March 2006

Observation of the week: all too often a diary is the achievement of those without achievement. I was an MP and a whip in John Major’s government. My political career did not amount to much, but at least my diary provides a partial record of those years. I have been keeping a journal since 1959. In many ways, it keeps me going. Much that I do, I do because of it. I seek out people and experiences, not only for themselves but also — and, sometimes, solely — so that I can write them up. My diary is proof of my existence. As Alan Clark observed, ‘A day that goes

David Caute

God in the brain

Contemporary atheist writers are increasingly inclined to forsake purely rationalist or psychological arguments against the existence of God. The current bunch are gnawing at the edges of neurological and genetic explanations, with the implication that religion may emerge as a ‘natural’, built-in navigational error. The subtitles of the two books under review say more about the pitch they are making than the rather whimsical titles. The genetic approach suggests that religion could be a (sort of) virus inherent in the brain’s response to the human condition. ‘Sort of’ analogies abound in this experimental playground. Psychological explanations of religion were the norm among early 20th-century writers like Freud, Wells, Shaw and

Philip Longworth

A strange reluctance to be free

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 there was widespread talk of Russia soon becoming an open, democratic polity with a thriving civil society. Under President Putin such hopes have faded. The state has seized back much of the power it lost under Yeltsin, devolution has yielded to centralisation, and the prevailing tone is authoritarian rather than libertarian. Yet all this has been popular. Why should the Russian people prefer authority to liberty? The American historian Richard Pipes sets out to answer this question in his latest book. Montesquieu thought that autocracy was a function of Russia’s immensity. Controlling so vast a space with so low a population density encouraged

Paul Johnson

Bottle-beauties and the globalised blond beast

The hair colour gene MCI-R has seven European variants, one of them blond. It is rare and becoming rarer. A WHO survey calculates that the last true blond will be born in Finland in 2202. Do you believe this? Nor do I. A different lot of scientists argue that this gene emerged over a comparatively short period about 10,000 years ago, with food shortages — and shortages of men — speeding up the natural selection process to the advantage of blonds. A touch of old-style Hollywood here? Certainly not the present dump — which Betty Grable would find unrecognisable, Marilyn Monroe chilly and Mae West distinctly hostile — making bad

Jaspistos

Trochaics

In Competition No. 2434 you were invited to write a poem in the metre of Hiawatha entitled ‘Breakfast’. Trochaics have rarely been more amusingly used than in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, in which H. is exasperatedly trying to take portraits of a very tiresome and camera-conscious Victorian family. Mama is Dressed in jewels and in satinFar too gorgeous for an empress.Gracefully she sat down sidewaysWith a simper scarcely human,Holding in her hand a nosegayRather larger than a cabbage … See the New Oxford Book of Light Verse, edited by Kingsley Amis. The large entry was swelled by half a dozen 10-year-old school pupils, who showed plenty of talent even though

The Spectator

Time to think small, Mr Brown

Someone should remind Gordon Brown of the Hippocratic Oath before he stands up on Wednesday afternoon to deliver his tenth Budget to the House of Commons. Taking his cue from all good doctors, the Chancellor should above all strive to do no harm; in his case that means no new taxes and no more grandiose schemes to save the world. Such a plan of non-action would be a tall order for a Chancellor addicted to social engineering — but it would at least represent a first step towards the radical change of course that will be needed if the British economy is ever to be rescued from its slow but