Society

Saturday

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

Jaspistos

Alcohol-free

In Competition No. 2428 you were asked for a piece of prose incorporating, in any order, 12 given words, using them in a non-alcoholic sense. Despite the fact that some of you occasionally groan at this type of comp, it always pulls in a big number of punters. The combination of sidecar and bishop generated a fair amount of gas (in the American sense) and gaiters. Shrub, since you ask, is a drink of mixed alcohol and fruit juice. I did not, of course, accept it or any other given word with a capital letter used as a surname. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, Richard Ellis takes the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Turning science into profit

Sir Richard Sykes of Imperial College tells Martin Vander Weyer that Britain’s world-class scientists hold the key to future economic success Approaching Imperial College through the long tunnel from South Kensington station, I recalled that the last time I met the College’s rector, Sir Richard Sykes, he was chief executive of Glaxo, the drugs group, and we were lunch guests of the industrialist Lord Hanson. Our fellow guest (forgive the name-dropping) was the broadcaster Selina Scott, and it would be fair to say that glamorous Selina was served a rather larger portion of Hanson’s charm and attention than Sir Richard or me. There was a particularly sticky moment when Sir

Julian Manyon

Life, liberty and the pursuit of terrorism

Julian Manyon on why the Palestinians voted for Hamas — and why the terrorists will not be transformed into politicians by the realities of power Jerusalem Fundamentalists of any stripe are not to my taste but the leading ideologues of Hamas have a grisly fascination. Mild-mannered, often well-educated, including doctors and scientists in their ranks, they are nonetheless subscribers to a Covenant in which ‘the Day of Judgment will not come about until… the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say “O Muslim … there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’ It is a world view firmly rooted in the Middle

The Spectator

Trust democracy

The success of Hamas in the elections for the Palestinian Authority has provided a joyous opportunity for that small but sizeable body of opinion in the West which considers the Arab world unfit for democracy. The sight of the terrorist leaders celebrating their election win tempts some otherwise sober people to sympathise with those malcontents on Oxbridge high tables who mutter longingly about the days when the world was ruled by kings and princes; by friendly, if not always benign, dictatorships. It is beyond question that the events of the past week have proved a huge embarrassment for the neoconservative project, and for President Bush in particular. American — and,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 28 January 2006

Mr Mark Oaten withdrew his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats and then resigned as its Home Affairs spokesman after the News of the World publicised repeated visits to a 23-year-old rent boy. Mr Sven-Goran Eriksson agreed with the Football Association to resign as the England football manager after the World Cup, and to take a £2.5 million pay-off. The News of the World reported that he had said to a journalist in disguise in Dubai that he was considering his future after the World Cup; Mr Eriksson also had talks with the FA’s so-called compliance unit because the paper had said he had named three unnamed premiership

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 28 January 2006

Q. Two years ago I dispatched a spoof Christmas letter to a select handful of friends thinking this might amuse them. I committed all the standard crimes: blow-by-blow accounts of (fictitious) holidays and activities; an insistence on the good looks, academic prowess and remarkable musicality of our children; my own successes; our soaring incomes; hilarity at the expense of the au pair; new kitchen and so on. I referred to the continuing asylum status of my daughter’s Afghan husband, sketching in how they had met when she was researching the impact of the previous year’s poppy crop on the local farmers for her forthcoming book, All Spaced Out and Nowhere

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 January 2006

A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light. My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as invisible as ever. I don’t know if it’s more extraordinary how many words we know the origins of, or the commonness of the words of which we remain ignorant — bun, bird and pig, for example. For dogs, hound is the word we once used, as hunting folk do now, but suddenly in the 11th

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 28 January 2006

Too much, too young From Judith HerefordSir: I agree with Leo McKinstry (‘Hate, hypocrisy and hysteria’, 21 January). To read the newspapers, you’d think that Ruth Kelly was singlehandedly responsible for all the outbreaks of paedophilia in Britain, when in fact it’s the fault of our debased culture. But let’s not forget that as Education Secretary Kelly contributes to that culture, especially with regard to the government’s sex education policy. If school teachers talk to children as young as seven about sex, telling them anything goes, why should they worry when another adult, in another place, broaches the same subject? When every magazine they open tells them about sex, how

Frank Keating

Hitting the target

The club records of a couple of soccer’s fabled old goal-scorers were levelled this month. Two nice round numbers, too, as the silky and sometimes sulky Frenchman, Thierry Henry, matched the 150 league goals banged in for Arsenal in the 1930s by the then boy wonder from Devon, Cliff Bastin; and aging thoroughbred Alan Shearer briefly perked up Newcastle United’s generally crestfallen supporters by reaching the 200 of Jackie Milburn, his predecessor as Tyneside’s dearly beloved totem in the No. 9 shirt. Of course, each of them has potted around half as many again outside league competition and for other teams, but neither has a realistic chance of threatening history’s

Robin Oakley

Mutual respect

Racing yards all have their own character, some pretty as picture books, some run like military camps. Down a muddy lane in deepest Hampshire Emma Lavelle’s stables are all about cheerful teamwork. At the top of her gallops last week we were reflecting how the great Vincent O’Brien insisted on having the straw in each box perfectly plaited, a bowl of water at the barn door to ensure his boots remained sparkling. At Emma’s Cottage Stables, the rooks were cawing in ivy-clad trees as the trainer stood in puffer jacket and jeans amid the circle of horses clattering on the tarmac, O’Brien might have raised an eyebrow at the cheerful

Simon Courtauld

Bargain brace

It is one of life’s little mysteries that, outside the circle of those involved in game shooting, so few pheasants are bought and eaten, in a country where between 15 and 20 million birds are reared each year. I have sometimes wondered whether the association of pheasants with wartime food — during the winter of 1940 the shooting season was extended into February to provide an additional stock of meat — may provide part of the answer. This may once have been so, but surely not now. The more likely explanation has to do with a fear of the unfamiliar, and of breaking a tooth on a random pellet which

Taki

Good enough for TT

To Harrow, the most heroic of public schools, for a speech about the press, probably among the least defensible of professions. I say the most heroic because Harrow lost 644 boys in the Great War, more than any other public school, I believe. One enters the building where I spoke about the unspeakable through a shrine, with a sarcophagus on the left and its surrounding walls carved with the names of those who fell on the field of honour. Passing through the shrine one enters a large space where a wreath of stone commemorates the dead of the second world war. Say what you will about the class system, public

Jeremy Clarke

Group therapy

I feel sorry for Gorgeous George. It was a terrific idea to go on Big Brother and turn himself into a popular icon and get his political ideas across to a young audience. Full marks for that. And it might have worked if our close scrutiny of his interaction with a random group of strangers had shown him to be the cool guy he imagines he is. Unfortunately, the horrible truth unfolding daily before our very eyes, made more vivid, perhaps, by cruel editing, is that Galloway is a vain, arrogant, prickly, two-faced, conniving, paranoid snob. I still like him, though. I admire his balls, which were on show the

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 28 January 2006

‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of

Nicholas Kenyon

The composer and his phoenix

One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household. David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations

Robin Holloway

Heaven and earth

I don’t really like Radio Three’s recent venture into blockbuster one-man blow-outs. It’s a bit sophomoric and anorakish, and the completism can reduce even the greatest composers to wallpaper. Bach is unquestionably one of the greatest. But during ‘Bach Christmas’ it often seemed as though one were switching on into the same piece extended on an endless loop: might as well have been Telemann! This impression was compounded by a tendency to prefer jogtrot ‘sewing machine’ performances. Many minutes must have been shaved off the project by going for modern high-speed baroque. In fairness, I must add that of course I couldn’t hear everything, and did catch some diversity of

Christopher Fildes

A foxy Chancellor knows many things, but a hedgehog learns the hard way

Tutti possono sbagliare: we can all make mistakes, as the hedgehog observed, getting down from the hearth-brush. Whether our prickly Chancellor is a student of Italian proverbs, I cannot say, but he could learn from this one. In the five and half years since he auctioned half the nation’s gold reserves, the price of gold has doubled. He was bid rather less than $280 an ounce, the hammer fell, and he put the proceeds into dollars, yen and euros — but none of them has been as good as gold. Looking on as the price soared above $560, I could only reflect on the timing that caused him to sell

Paul Johnson

‘Should there be a retiring age for writers?’ Discuss

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’ I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of