Society

Saturday

John Laughland

A chat with Milosevic

John Laughland on a memorable encounter with the butcher of the Balkans at the UN detention centre in The Hague — and his claims of innocence to the last I was one of the last Western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. It was early last year. A fierce wind was whipping the cold rain straight off the sea and through the ugly streets of Scheveningen as I unbundled from my pockets the various secret cameras and recording devices which I had in vain hidden there, and made my way through the security checks at the United Nations Detention Unit. A series of doors clanged open and shut and there was

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 11 March 2006

‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity. In a publication like The Spectator, conventions have to be adopted to keep the herbaceous borders of language neat. It is house style to use a singular verb with collective nouns such as government, BBC, nation. If in British English it is normal to regard a company as plural (‘British Leyland are defunct’), that convention

Taki

Winning Wyoming

Gstaad I wrote this last week, as we’re going to press early. It seems everyone who is anyone is staying up late on Sunday night in order to watch the Oscars, and cheer for the gay western which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. I have not seen Brokebutt Mountain, but I hear that the film’s haunting musical score, ‘Homo on the Range’, is wonderful. But these are old, Fifties jokes, and beneath contempt. Mind you, not in Wyoming, where the author of Brokeback Mountain based her story. Wyoming is a wonderful place, where once upon a time my friend Professor Yohannes Goulandris was accosted by some ranchers who

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 11 March 2006

Q. I am in the process of restoring an old barn and want to use only environmentally friendly, locally available or recycled materials. However, the clipboard Nazis at the local council have told me I must coat my exposed beams with fire-retardant paint. I am very anxious to avoid the chemicals contained in these paints. Have you any suggestions, Mary?P.J.K., Cirencester A. Why not take a tip from Lady Bamford’s eco-spa at Daylesford just down the road from you? The spa, housed in an old farm building behind the fashionable shop, was transformed by architect Spencer Fung to a strict ecological brief. He too was instructed by fire officers to

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 11 March 2006

What sells wins From Peggy HatfieldSir: How exciting and unusual to see people in the media advising sexual restraint (‘Anyone for chastity?’, 4 March)! As Piers Paul Read reminds us, our culture is up to its eyeballs in sex — in films and also on the high street. But though I’m quite sure that most normal British people could secretly do without a bonking scene in every film, or vibrators in front of children’s noses in Boots, they daren’t say so, even to their friends, for fear of appearing ‘repressed’. How have we got ourselves into this unsettling state of affairs? Read suggests that feminism and the decline of religion

Frank Keating

Skippers of yore

Pitched suddenly into England’s cricket captaincy, it has been a delight to see Andrew Flintoff going about the job with a smile on his face. However the series ultimately pans out, wholehearted Flintoff’s ursine charms made for a winning start all right. Traditionally, of course, established England captains steered clear of India. The anointed monarchs of my boyhood (Hammond, Yardley, Brown, Hutton and May) never once led a tour to the sub-continent, hiving off the captaincy to such greenhorn amateur apprentices as Nigel Howard and Donald Carr. Later, stalwart county captains like Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher were given one-tour commands. I was on the latter’s trip in 1981–82. Unlike

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 March 2006

As so often with people in public life, the career of David Mills is beyond satire. If an anti-Blair left-wing playwright invented him, critics would accuse him of improbability. Mr Mills seems to have done almost everything which traditional Labour supporters hate. He has made a career of advising people, including the loathed Silvio Berlusconi, on how to create offshore tax-shelters. He has given questionable court evidence for him, allegedly for money. He facilitated a £300 million sale of tanks by Ukraine to Pakistan. He administered a company in the Isle of Man. He lobbied to prevent the ban on tobacco advertising in motor racing because of his former directorship

Joan Collins

Diary – 11 March 2006

Los Angeles When I boarded the plane for Los Angeles in New York last Friday to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar party, as well as several others, the beautiful Uma Thurman was just ahead of me, looking every inch the star (she is, after all, 6ft tall) even though she was sans maquillage. She sweetly turned to me and said, ‘I hear you and your husband are not sitting together — I’m happy to change seats with you if it helps.’ I thanked her, and explained it was OK, because the airline had just bumped Rosie Perez so that Percy and I could sit together. Each year, before the Oscar

Rupert Christiansen

The outsider who felt the cold

The journal ADAM — an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music — was the life’s work of a Jewish Romanian exile Miron Grindea (1910-95), who was its only editor. Embodying a style of cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, it represents a fascinating episode in the history of the London literary world, its bent being more internationalist than Bloomsbury’s and less Bohemian than Fitzrovia’s or Soho’s. Having started ADAM in Bucharest, Grindea arrived in London on the fateful day of 1 September 1939, re-establishing the journal in 1941 on the thoroughly insecure footing on which it steadfastly remained. But as it tottered heroically from financial crisis to financial crisis — at one

Christopher Fildes

Sayonara, Pilks — we’re short of owners with their hearts in the business

A sprig of the Pilkington family was saying goodbye to his hosts. ‘I’ve an early start,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got to be at the bloody glassworks in the morning.’ When he arrived, he found that the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, was there before him and had left a note on his desk: ‘My boy, it seems to me that your heart is not in the business…’. Family businesses need enough sprigs to allow for such pruning, and this one was a model. Then some stray aunts and cousins wanted a price for their shares. Now Pilkington is just another public company, and in Sir Harry’s place sits Sir Nigel Rudd,

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters

Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others. No doubt I shall be accused of prejudice in favour of my own profession. To demonstrate that I am an unbiased critic, however, I shall cite the work of a doctor who wrote very badly, execrably in fact, the late Dr David Cooper. He was an associate for a time of R.D. Laing, the talented but wayward and

Peter Oborne

Jowell’s torment is a gift from the gods to Gordon Brown

There has been an iron rule at Westminster since New Labour won power nine years ago. When Brown is strong Blair is weak, and vice versa. Imagine a seesaw. This weekend Brown is up, feet dangling in the air, smirking. The Chancellor is the big winner from the Jowell debacle, so much so that it is hard to see how the Prime Minister can ever recover. Blair’s premiership — like John Major’s only much more so — has ended up mired in sleaze. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, naturally, is taking full advantage. In marked contrast to Tony Blair and his allies, Gordon Brown is impervious to the trappings of

Paul Johnson

A.J.P. Taylor: a saturnine star who had intellectuals rolling in the aisles

AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said ‘Enter!’ Then you got a full, crowded hour, and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before

Jaspistos

No prob.

In Competition No. 2433 you were asked for a poem in which each line’s rhymed ending is a truncated word. When I’ve a syllable de trop,I cut it off without apol:This verbal sacrifice, I know,May irritate the schol;But all must praise my devilish cunnWho realise that Time is Mon. This verse from ‘Poetical Economy’ suggests that its author, Harry Graham, writing in the 1930s, was the inventor of this game, one which you played with brio. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Alan Millard, whose splendid final rhyme tickled me pink. I’ve never had a pretty bodAnd so I visited the doc’sAnd asked

The Spectator

Whose schools are they anyway?

As so often, Norman Tebbit has a point. ‘Three of my grandchildren have gone to grammar schools, as I did,’ he told the Observer recently. ‘Now it looks as if we are going to cut off that route in the interest of something probably called social cohesion. But we’re not going to cut off the route to go through Eton. Come on, chaps. Fair’s fair!’ Lord Tebbit is the opposite of chippy, a Tory Titan who helped to make the politics of envy disreputable. His point is not that private schools are bad — far from it — but that pupils at state schools deserve much better than the often

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Don’t mock the Prince’s ‘black spider’: it could save the albatross

Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the front of a newspaper above a giggly caption, but hardly differed from the exasperated marginal scribbling we all produce but never expect to see in newspapers. I found my mind wandering to a different scene. I had described it in The Spectator at the time, six years ago. I was wintering in the sub-Antarctic on

Nigel Lawson

DEEP THOUGHT: Climate of superstition

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.Schopenhauer Next week marks the deadline that has been set for reactions to the less than satisfactory discussion paper that has emerged from the government’s belated review of the important issue of the economics of climate change. It is important for David Cameron, too. For, while rightly giving the environment a high priority, he is in danger, over this issue, of making commitments which, in government, he would find it extremely damaging to honour. Crucial though the economics of climate change is, the starting

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why I hate British films

It was Colin Welland who first uttered those terrible words ‘The British are coming!’ at an Oscar ceremony, back in 1982 — clutching his gold-plated statuette in his northern paw and grinning from beneath his deeply northern moustache. Colin had won an Oscar for having written the screenplay to Chariots of Fire, a film about some British people who could run quite fast, particularly Eric Liddell (or ‘speedy uncle Eric’ as we were wont to call him). Chariots of Fire possessed all of the qualities we have later come to associate with British films — resolutely well-meaning, somewhat stilted, implacably middlebrow and moderately sensitive, utterly devoid of sex, sin and

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 4 March 2006

Q. I deeply fancy someone in my office who sits near me. Our exchanges have always been businesslike and I doubt she has noticed my interest. The other women I work with appear to find me congenial and we socialise outside the office although none seems to perceive me as a ‘sex object’. Having said that, former partners have never complained. I don’t want to risk ongoing embarrassment by making a move and being rejected, so how can I find out first if I have any chance? Name and address withheld A. Choose one of your female colleague friends to act as unwitting emissary. Confide that your concentration is being

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 March 2006

Genghis was a leftie From Daniel Hannan, MEPSir: Paul Johnson demolishes the ludicrous expression ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’ and wonders what the Mongol leader’s true politics might have been (And another thing, 25 February). I’d have thought Genghis was a clear-cut leftie. His tactic, on conquering a tribe, was to liquidate the aristocracy and elevate the lower orders. He was a proto-Europhile, mingling his subject clans so as to prevent the development of a sense of national identity. Where modern socialists want to use the education system to cut high achievers down to size, the Khan was more literal, forcing his vassals to walk under a yoke and