Society

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Mind your language | 11 February 2006

No, doctor, it’s not as bad as you think. I can keep it under control — my wife has been wonderful, don’t know what I’d do without her — it’s just that, well, sometimes it seems to take over my life. Oh, I have a job that’s quite demanding sometimes, and I manage to put it out of my head for up to 20 minutes, sometimes, but then it’s back. And I can’t stand it! No! I cannot tolerate the way that the makers of period drama constantly include phrases which are not merely anachronistic, but also as ill-timed as a bacon double cheeseburger in a Jacobean tragedy. When are

Frank Keating

Snow balls

A seasonal competition: which phrase will BBC commentators utter most over the next fortnight: a) ‘winter wonderland’; b) ‘mountain magic’; c) ‘oh, bad luck, Great Britain’? The Winter Olympics have begun: bobble hats, fur-collared greatcoats, frostbitten noses and hour upon hour of various forms of sliding. The media battalions easily outnumber the 2,500 competitors; the security army outnumbers both put together. Turin’s sublime pelmet of Alpine spires will be crawling with security snipers and sharpshooters as if it was a film-set for the latest 007 blockbuster. I know the hardy Scots love their skiing, but I’m a soft southerner (or rather, a wet westerner) and I am mighty relieved not

Paul Johnson

Did Timothy take Paul’s advice about water?

The headline on the tabloid said, ‘Britain running out of water’. I don’t believe this. Indeed, I never believe scare stories about the world going to pot. But water is a fascinating subject. Considering how important it is to us, we know extraordinarily little about it. G.K. Chesterton used to say, ‘There is something inherently comic in the fact that our water is brought to us by who knows what from who knows where, often hundreds of miles away.’ There are more than 1,408 million cubic kilometres of water on the earth’s surface, and this total has changed little in the whole of geologic time. But nearly all of it

Christopher Fildes

Round in circles and over the edge — that’s the way the money goes

This week’s message from the Confederation of British Industry: we’ll just die and then you’ll be sorry. I take this as more of a threat than a promise, but since it is all about pensions, anything is possible. Many (perhaps most) of the CBI’s member companies must now be stuck with underfunded pension schemes, the regulators want to set them a timetable for topping up their funds, and the CBI says that if this is taken literally, one company in every five will be put out of business. A perverse logic would work itself out: overstretched companies and underfunded schemes are always likely to go together. Companies like these would

Peter Oborne

Why Tony Blair wears that look of virtuous but irritable bafflement

The Prime Minister has long felt an unshakeable conviction that he brings to bear a unique insight into human affairs. There are great schemes to transform society and make a better world which he would undoubtedly accomplish if only circumstances allowed. Sadly they do not. A number of factors — dim-witted ministerial colleagues, unco-operative Labour MPs, an incompetent Civil Service, the mulishness of Gordon Brown and a cynical press and broadcasting media are probably the five which loom largest in the Prime Minister’s mind — have prevented him from carrying them out. Hence the look of virtuous though irritable bafflement that has gradually become Tony Blair’s most characteristic public expression.

Diana Winsor

What keeps my father going is the thought that one day he will be vindicated

In the Montblanc/Spectator Art of Writing Award last year, readers were invited to submit a short essay on the subject of immortality. Here is the winning entry. My father is old. He does not believe in God. He was 90 in December, an event celebrated with a family lunch at a hotel of his choosing. It was a very happy day, for both he and my mother are physically and mentally fit, but I was aware that he resists death. He will not go gentle into that good night, not because he is frightened of dying, but because he is afraid of the loss of his ideas. For half a

Daniel Hannan

Pick your own police chief

You’d be surprised how many champions Sir Ian Blair has. Ken Livingstone thinks he’s terrific. So does his Oxford contemporary and namesake, Tony Blair. The Guardian has devoted a huge amount of space to telling us what a good job he is doing. According to one of its columnists, the clamour against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has been whipped up by ‘the reactionaries in the force and their friends in the press’, who have never forgiven his enthusiasm for the Macpherson reforms. Hmmm. I’d have thought Sir Ian’s critics had plenty to go on without needing to dredge up what he said seven years ago. The shooting of Jean Charles

Jaspistos

Vice versa | 11 February 2006

In Competition No. 2429 you were invited to write a poem in praise of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was the Reverend Sydney Smith who, as Keith Norman appropriately reminded me, came down to breakfast smiling and announced that he had had a beautiful dream: that there were seven Articles and 39 Deadly Sins. Because we all willingly admit to it, sloth was the most popular sin. The poet James Thomson, who was said to be so lazy that he couldn’t be bothered to reach out to pluck a peach, nevertheless wrote a long poem entitled ‘The Castle of Indolence’. Avarice and envy proved hard to praise. Commendations

The Spectator

No joke

We are not publishing the cartoons which caused such offence after they appeared in Denmark, and we believe other British newspapers are right not to have published them. There is a history of irreverence at The Spectator, but there is a difference between irreverence and causing gratuitous offence. Why humiliate members of another faith by ridiculing what they hold most sacred? Some have said the cartoons had to be published, or republished, to uphold the right of freedom of speech. But this is not an issue of free speech; neither our government nor any other European government has sought to ban the publication of the cartoons. This magazine opposed the

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 4 February 2006

Q. Speaking of pellets, as you did last week, may I ask something else? Whenever I have eaten birds, it has always been quite an informal occasion where one didn’t have to worry about, well, what to do with shot. One could simply more or less neatly take it out of one’s mouth. But if one were dining more formally and the issue arose — is it necessary to swallow? B.T., Berkeley, California A. It is never necessary to swallow shot. Having worked it to the tip of your tongue, give your lips a swift wipe with your napkin and let the shot be swept to the floor as you

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 February 2006

Poles apart From Lady Belhaven and StentonSir: I understand why Mary Wakefield decided to speak to the Federation of Poles in Great Britain (‘The misery of the Polish newcomers’, 28 January), but Andrzej Tutkaj does not speak for the Polish community as a whole. She would have been better advised to have gone to the Polish Consulate, which is the organisation which looks after Poles over here and has to pick up the pieces when things go wrong. The Federation of Poles was formed during the Communist period when few Poles would have considered approaching the Consulate, and the Polish community needed an organisation which could help people in trouble

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 February 2006

The government was twice defeated in the Commons in votes on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, making its provisions less broad. The government produced a form with a box to tick for people who wanted to prevent life-saving treatment being given them in future; this was according to the Mental Capacity Act, 2004, which comes into effect in 2007. A White Paper on health proposed treating more people outside large hospitals; but a question of funding remained. Mr David Blunkett, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, said his ‘sense is that there is a new understanding’ between Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Gordon Brown about the latter

Frank Keating

More brain, less brawn

The basso thump of Six Nations’ rugby begins this weekend — today Wales are at Twickenham and Italy in Dublin, and tomorrow the French collide with the Scots at Murrayfield. The reverberating crash-bang-wallop continues till the Ides of March. Turn the BBC’s sound down; rugby is now as gruntingly noisy as women’s tennis. Oh for our old springheeled game of evasion, dodging and darting. Lately, it has become one unending wince as one man-mountain simply charges pell-mell at another: Pow! Pam! Ugh! — and pot luck on murder or suicide. England and France annually start as favourites; well, they each have by far the biggest supply of the biggest heavyweights.

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 4 February 2006

I ask Egon Ronay, the man who first put the rosettes into British cooking and who has just published his 2006 guide to the best restaurants in the UK, if he’d care to have lunch, show me how he judges a restaurant, maybe teach me a thing or two. (As if I needed it! Pull the other one!) He agrees and suggests we try Rules — ‘London’s Oldest Restaurant’ — which is fine by me, as I’ve never known whether it is simply a kind of top-of-the-range Angus Steak House for dimwit tourists of a dim-witted, touristy nature or properly good, genuinely worth going to. He doesn’t know either. He’s

Lucy Vickery

Hot Property | 4 February 2006

E17 may seem an unlikely candidate to be gracing the glossy pages of style magazines, but the area — birthplace of William Morris and home to the ‘greyhound racing stadium of the millennium’ — is blossoming. These days the association between Walthamstow and going to the dogs is, in one sense at least, an unfair one. At present, the new space-age bus station stands out like a self-conscious teenager amid the jumble of fast-food shops, discount stores and estate agents, but change is afoot. The 450-stall street market, which dates from 1885 (and where some years, apparently, you can see fire-eating daredevils breaking world records), is more Leather Lane than

Miriam Gross

Diary – 4 February 2006

The other day I went into the National Portrait Gallery gift shop to buy a postcard of George Orwell. There wasn’t one. I then looked for Anthony Powell. Again, no luck. V.S. Naipaul wasn’t there either. In the course of my search, however, I couldn’t help noticing that there were two versions of Helena Bonham-Carter and two of Michael Caine. Britain has again become a two-nation state. It is divided between those who watched Big Brother and those who didn’t. But this split is not between the elite and the masses, or between the more and the less intellectual (some of my most intellectual friends watched), or between those with

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 4 February 2006

In view of the new Tory leader David Cameron’s call for ‘social enterprise zones’, where local communities deal with local social problems, it may be worth reminding him of the alimentary schemes that the Romans developed for helping the children of the poor (alimentum, ‘provisions, maintenance’). The general idea was that private individuals and public corporations should work together to relieve distress. So, for example, in ad 97 Pliny the Younger promised his home town of Comum (on Lake Como) 500,000 HS (sesterces) — c. £5 million — for the purpose, but instead of giving them a lump sum, he transferred property worth far more than that to a local

Olivia Glazebrook

Very high dudgeon

Harold Cleaver is a middle-aged man at the pinnacle of his career. A ‘celebrity-journalist, broadcaster and documentary film-maker’, he has just interviewed the President of the United States, and asked him some pretty searching questions. This interview has earned Cleaver wide acclaim. Unfortunately, his professional success is overshadowed by a personal crisis. His eldest son Alex has written a book, titled Under His Shadow, which has received a good deal of publicity. The book is a cruel assassination of Cleaver’s character. It mocks his vanity, lampoons his egotism and viciously attacks his pomposity. Cleaver is horrified. He goes into a monumental sulk, and abruptly takes off for the Alps to

Paul Johnson

A winter’s day walk in the Quantocks

I shall remember Saturday 20 January 2006. What it was like elsewhere I do not know, but in west Somerset it was the perfect winter’s day. A great surge of happiness ran through me as I set off for my walk in the hills and coombs. It had been sunny the afternoon before but blustery. Now all was still and the sun was majestic in the cerulean sky, summoning his court. And they came! I swear a multitude of things had happened since the day before. In my garden were irises, peeping through the foliage, and japonica had just appeared, and winter jasmine and its coeval, honeysuckle. I found the

Peter Oborne

Cameron’s battleground against Brown: civil society versus the state

One of the most successful smear campaigns in the modern era concerns Margaret Thatcher. It was alleged that she stood for a narrow, selfish individualism without reference to wider duties and responsibilities. This claim was based in part on a single remark made by the then prime minister to the magazine Woman’s Own in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as Society.’ Her words were ripped out of context and then distorted. Read in their full form, it was clear that Mrs Thatcher was making a profoundly moral point, fully coherent with both the Christian tradition in which she had been reared and the most generous ideals of the Conservative