Society

Friday

Boris Johnson

Diary – 2 September 2005

It is always nice to get back and find you haven’t been burgled. The locks were secure, the windows intact, and with a song in my heart I opened my bank statement. It all seemed pretty satisfactory, if a tiny bit emaciated, and for a second or two I let my eye run down the list of outgoings. Funny, I thought. What was this ‘payment to Egg’? I seemed to have been making all sorts of payments to something called Egg. In fact, Egg had received several grand from me. I looked closer, the beginnings of suspicion frosting my heart. Lastminute.com — £754. Che? Two big payments of more than

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 27 August 2005

I think that, like a hosepipe ban, we might just be spared the permanent establishment of the term 7/7. After all, some people were inexplicably fond of the phrase Y2K, meaning 2000, and it seems as ridiculous now as platform soles for men. I find 7/7 distasteful. It is non-native, and it makes claims for an event that unfortunately are unlikely to persist. The bombs of 7 July were certainly not as important as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, nor will they remain as memorable. It is only by a fluke that 7/7 is as transparent to British English-speakers as to American, for they put their days and months

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 27 August 2005

The news blackout that Downing Street had asked newspapers to impose about the whereabouts of Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, on holiday, supposedly for reasons of security, was broken by the man himself when he popped up at a VJ Day commemoration on Barbados, where he had stayed previously at a house belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, the 64-year-old singer. There was a shuffling about for reasons to ask for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The brother of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian shot dead on 22 July by police who took him for a suicide-bomber, criticised the police for

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 27 August 2005

Scotch myth Andrew Neil’s lament at the decline of the so-called ‘Tartan Raj’ (‘The last days of the Tartan Raj’, 20 August) is a Scottish view of what, to the rest of the country, is a non-phenomenon. Englanders aren’t looking jealously over their shoulders at Scottish success, and never have done. Gordon Brown will be a wildly unpopular leader, not because he is Scottish, or Scotland-educated, but because he is surly and tax-happy, more concerned with shafting his ‘Scot-lite’ boss than doing his own job. Brown might resent Oxbridge, but Oxbridge is broadly indifferent to him. If the Raj was really as all-powerful as Neil suggests, then why didn’t it

Taki

Celebrity culture

Gstaad Sartre famously called hell other people, and he had not even been on a boat anchored next to a gin palace during the month of August. Yachting in the Med used to be a cliché, as well as a very enjoyable pursuit. No longer. In Simi, one of the least known and prettiest of Greek islands off the Turkish coast, some friends of mine got a dose of what Sartre meant. A stink pot came into the tiny harbour and its captain was told it could not anchor next to my boat because the spot was reserved for the ferry. A large American woman emerged and using the f-word

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 27 August 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My husband and I were guests at a five-day house party in Scotland. Most of the other guests were heavy drinkers and on the first night one of them actually entered our bedroom in the middle of the night and got into our double bed with us. Neither of us slept well after this because there was no lock on the door and we were on tenterhooks every night in case there should be a repeat incident. Everyone parted on the best of terms and we did enjoy the holiday, but we returned from it shattered. We are soon to go for a weekend with a similar

Frank Keating

The Lion of Vienna

Cricket’s ongoing red-hot Ashes opera has had the soccer season deferentially tiptoeing into its autumn overtures, but a backlash will be rude and raucous all right, should the England soccer team play as gormlessly in their two forthcoming World Cup qualifiers as they did in the practice match last week, when Denmark disdainfully won by 4–1. Similar slovenly ineptitude against Wales a week today, or four days later against Northern Ireland, and the scorn and ridicule heaped by the London media on soccer’s zillionaires will overwhelm any new tricks even the cricketers can conjure up for its grand finale under the Oval’s gasometers. Easily England’s best player in the Denmark

Frank Johnson

It is as well that Mr Blair did not in the end go to Blackpool for his holiday

Nr Pézenas, Departement de L’Hérault Random thoughts from mid-August abroad; not that they should be all that random. Now that BBC News 24, Sky and CNN can be viewed in the deepest Midi, where we are, and several British newspapers print ‘same day’ editions in Marseilles, which are on sale at 8.30 a.m. in our nearest village, most of us should be as in touch with events as we would be in London. But somehow, in deepest August, in Mediterranean lands, we cannot be. The sun and the wine make us think we are out of touch, that they know more in London. ‘Just ringing to find out what’s happening

Jaspistos

Nostalgiad

In Competition No. 2406 you were invited to write a nostalgic poem about commercial products or brand images that are no longer with us. ‘O my Brylcreem and my Trugel long ago!’ sighed Tony Dawson. ‘Just bring me my Seebakrascope,’ begged John Whitworth (for those of you too young to remember, this was a miniature periscope, advertised in the 1950s, which showed what was going on behind you). Ah, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Gibbs’ Dentifrice (to protect your ‘ivory castles’), Roboline, Elliman’s Athletic Rub, Fuller’s Walnut Cake, Spangles, the Bisto Kids, Bile Beans, the Rank Gong Man, Gripfix (the glue that smelt of almonds), Antiphlogistine for inflamed bronchials…. As Auden

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Devastating tactics

I spent most of last Sunday evening yelling insults at my TV screen. ‘Berk!’ I shouted. ‘Twat!’ Then later, ‘Oily creep!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Tosser!’ The first person to draw my ire was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hadn’t hitherto been that high on my list of historical hate figures — poor old dying polio bloke with his blanket over his knee, I used to think — but then I had not before seen part four of the excellent Warlords (Channel 4, Sunday). This final episode dealt mainly with the embarrassing way that Roosevelt’s bien-pensant, patrician optimism allowed Stalin to run rings around him in the last years of the war, with disastrous

Christopher Fildes

To make tax simple, low and compulsory, get at it with the heavy roller

It is all the fault of the fairy who came, uninvited, to Gordon Brown’s christening. Beside the scowling infant’s Moses basket, his godparents’ gifts of industry and ambition were assembled when this glittering creature approached him with a parcel of her own. ‘See, little man,’ she told him, ‘I’ve brought you the great gift of simplification.’ Then she curtsied, and presented it to him, upside down. After that, he grew up to be Chancellor and opened the parcel. Once in a generation, he announced, came the moment for a fundamental reform of the tax system. He set about it in his own way or, rather, in the fairy’s way. His

Paul Johnson

The ayatollah of atheism and Darwin’s altars

How long will Darwin continue to repose on his high but perilous pedestal? I am beginning to wonder. Few people doubt the principles of evolution. The question at issue is: are all evolutionary advances achieved exclusively by the process of natural selection? That is the position of the Darwinian fundamentalists, and they cling to their absolutist position with all the unyielding certitude with which Southern Baptists assert the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, or Wahabi Muslims proclaim the need for a universal jihad against ‘the Great Satan’. At a revivalist meeting of Darwinians two or three years ago, I heard the chairman, the fiction-writer Ian McEwan, call out,

The Spectator

Tolerating terror

‘My point to you is this,’ Tony Blair said of terrorists last month, ‘It’s time we stopped saying “OK, we abhor their methods but we kinda see something in their ideas or maybe they’ve got a sliver of an excuse or justification.” They’ve got no justification for it.’ The Prime Minister’s words must sound pretty hollow to the Hall family of Newchurch, Staffordshire, this week. The Halls have been driven to close their farm, which breeds guinea pigs for medical research, after a six-year sustained campaign of terror by animal rights extremists. Over that time they have been subjected to numerous death threats, a firebomb attack and hundreds of acts

Simon Heffer

Gunning for game-shooting

The first fortnight of the shooting season has not been as auspicious as it might have been. This is not just because the grouse themselves are in short supply. It is also because, having put on to the statute book a crass, pointless and probably unenforcable law against the killing of vermin with hounds, the animal rights fascists are now turning their attention to the killing of birds with guns. The RSPCA, which used to do good work in persuading children to be kind to furry and feathered beasts, and still does perform a valuable public service through its inspectorate in tackling the genuine and sickening incidences of cruelty to

Friday

Diary – 26 August 2005

By the time you read this, England and Australia will be playing at Trent Bridge, and the news may be good. Or bad. Channel 4 reported record viewing figures for the first three Ashes Tests. Barely countable millions, it seems, tuned in at all times of day (and night, for the highlights are invariably on in the small hours) to watch the two sides slug it out in the first real contests for years. But what, I would like to know, about the record numbers of people like me, who become so emotionally involved that they can’t bear to watch the Ashes? The barely countable millions so agonised by the

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 26 August 2005

These days the ability to understand and explain in public prints the aims of the people perceived as public enemies is likely to get you deported. So one wonders what our government would have made of that pillar of the Roman establishment Tacitus — consul, provincial governor and historian — who invented an extraordinarily sympathetic speech to put in the mouth of Calgacus, the Caledonian ‘terrorist’ who fought Agricola’s army somewhere in the mountains of Aberdeenshire in ad 83. Here is the first selection of extracts from it: ‘As often as I examine the reasons for this war and the crisis we now face, I am fully confident that the

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 20 August 2005

To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’ Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47. I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 20 August 2005

British Airways flights to and from London Heathrow were brought to a standstill for a day, and disrupted for days afterwards, by unofficial strikes by ground staff in sympathy with 700 staff sacked by a company supplying airline meals. Leaked documents showed that the Brazilian man shot dead at Stockwell in London by police seeking suicide-bombers had not vaulted over a barrier at the station, nor had he been wearing a baggy jacket. Mr Omar Bakri, a radical Islamic cleric who had left Britain after 20 years to visit his mother, he said, in Lebanon, was barred from returning by Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, who declared his presence

Robin Oakley

A feeling in your bones

Racing at Newbury on Stan James Day was more like yachting, once defined as standing in a gale tearing up £20 notes. Nor did it help when the heavens opened that my umbrella was in the stands 200 yards away and that, thanks to a back injury, I could only hobble at the pace of an asthmatic turtle. It just wasn’t my day. On the way from Kennington to Paddington I had been foolish enough to question the sainted Mrs Oakley’s navigational skills and only narrowly escaped being turned to stone in the froideur which followed. I had mistimed my trains and was bound to miss the first race anyway,

Frank Keating

Trent warfare

The Ashes are burning bright all right. A lot of cricket still to play. Two Tests remaining — the fourth begins at Nottingham on Thursday, and how might things stand as they go for the grandest of finales at Kennington on 8 September? The series has easily outstripped its ballyhoo billing, every dramatic switch and swash pinning back the ears of the nation. ‘What’s the score?’ is the ubiquitous question. In every high street you see huddles of the citizenry pausing on pavements, fretfully to peer through the plateglass shopfronts of premises which sell television sets. A month ago the Australian captain, with disdainful sauce, reckoned that only a solitary