Society

Saturday

Jaspistos

Playtime

In Competition No. 2390 you were invited to produce a poem which incorporates the titles of at least eight current West End theatrical productions. What with on the town, the anniversary, the birthday party, guys and dolls and blithe spirit, celebration was the keynote. ‘How we laughed to see the woman in white tights/Do cartwheels by the dresser in the hall,’ Tim Raikes recalled. He, Bernadette Evans, G.M. Davis, Shirley Curran and Brian Murdoch all sent in tempting entries, but the winners charmed me with a combination of an easy manner and a choice of the unexpected scene. I have had to take some things on trust, so don’t write

Andrew Lambirth

Revelation of space and time

Andrew Lambirth on an exhibition by one of the country’s foremost sculptors Forms in Light and Shade, an exhibition of Nigel Hall’s new work at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Dering Street, W1, until 14 May), confirms him as one of our foremost sculptors, who has received too little official recognition in his country of origin and residence. Significantly he is highly regarded abroad — in Europe, America and the Far East — which suggests that his work has an international rather than cosily local appeal. It does, but that is no excuse for the lack of a proper museum retrospective in Britain. Thank-fully, there are rumours of a substantial

The Spectator

Not Howard’s end

The Spectator appears as the electorate goes to the polls, and any analysis of the outcome must therefore be hypothetical. Some points can be made with assurance. The first is that if Michael Howard wins, he will be rated a miracle-worker. Never in the history of magic would so colossal a rabbit have been pulled from such a battered old hat. A victory for Howard would be a stunning vindication of his courage, resilience, patience, powers of organisation and penchant for spasmodic acts of apodeictic ruthlessness. Whatever happens this Thursday, the Conservative party owes Michael Howard a huge debt of thanks. At an age when his colleagues retire to wallow

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Losing their religion

Brendan O’Neill says that Lapsed, or Recovering, Catholics are wallowing in their victim status now that a traditionalist has been elected Pope Lapsed Catholics are sorely disappointed that the 265th Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, is — shock, horror — a strict Roman Catholic. The 20 million lapsed Catholics in America had hoped, according to an Ohio-based newspaper, that the Church would become a ‘friendlier place’ after the demise of John Paul II, and coax ‘hurt, angry and lapsed Catholics’ like themselves back into the pews. Lapsed Catholics in Britain also prayed for a new happy-clappy era under a less dogmatic Pope, who might, a friend of mine hoped, ‘bend

Stephanie Sprague

Girls just want to have boys

‘If my next child’s a boy, I’ll stop. If not, then I’ll keep trying until I get one.’ These words weren’t spoken by an Asian or Indian woman, desperate to give her husband an heir, but by a white woman, upper-middle-class and married to an investment banker. She spoke from the cosy confines of her flat in Hampstead two months after giving birth to her first child, a girl. Of course, she loves her daughter and she is a wonderful mother. Still, there it is: the disappointment that she didn’t bear a boy. This was not the first time I had met someone disappointed not to have a boy. A

Friday

Diary – 6 May 2005

I was sitting in Holland Park in the sun on Bank Holiday Monday. Just in front of me, a group of young people were having a picnic: crisps, processed cheese, tortilla chips, pepperoni — all washed down with Coca-Cola. There were about eight of them sharing this feast and half of them were seriously overweight. The rest looked pale and unwell. It reminded me that diet is becoming a serious issue in this country and it will not be too long before we face the same obesity problems as they do in America. Walking into a British supermarket is now a depressing experience: the aisles are full of crisps, sweets,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 30 April 2005

The Mail on Sunday claimed that before the war on Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, had warned Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a 13-page letter that it was questionable whether Britain could legally attack Iraq under UN Resolution 1441. A nine-paragraph summary of the Attorney General’s advice, containing no such caveat, was later published by the government, but it has refused to publish any fuller advice. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said that Mr Blair had ‘told lies to win elections. And he’s only taken a stand on one thing in the last eight years — taking Britain to war. And he couldn’t

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 30 April 2005

Fascism is a bigger part of this election than most people realise. We know about the BNP already, but the growing force is Muslim extremism. The tactics are nasty. Look at the website of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) and you will see lists of MPs whom MPAC wishes to make the victims of what it calls ‘political jihad’. MPAC had to apologise for attacking Lorna Fitzsimons, the MP for Rochdale, for being Jewish (she isn’t, in fact), but this does not seem to have cramped its style. Its aim is to ‘eliminate all pro-Israeli, Zionist MPs from power’. An item against Mike Gapes, MP for Ilford South, calls

Robin Oakley

Irish on top

Humphrey Bogart once complained that the trouble with the world was that ‘everybody in it is three drinks behind’. He would have liked the three Irishmen ahead of me on the track to Esher station after Saturday’s Betfred Gold Cup meeting ended the 2004–5 jumping season. ‘Jasus, it was cramped in there, never seen such a crowd,’ declared one, weaving left and cutting off my inside break. ‘“Too many tramps?”, you’re right,’ muttered the next, swerving right to close down the next gap that appeared. ‘There wasn’t a decent woman in sight.’ ‘A decent old run, to be sure,’ declared the third, clearly referring to the big race victor Jack

Taki

Making a stand

New York Happiness is a German pope succeeding the greatest pope ever, a Pole. Not everyone agrees with me. Blogger Andrew Sullivan, a Brit expatriate and gay-rights advocate, called it a ‘full-scale assault’ on liberal Catholics. If he is a typical liberal Catholic, he has just doubled my joy at Benedict XVI’s election. Fifty years ago, secular liberals predicted that education and science would do away with the opium of the people. They were as wrong about the power of faith as they’ve been wrong about everything else. An hysterical Irish–American, Maureen Dowd, writing in the Big Bagel Times, described the new pope as a hatchet-faced bully, a Cardinal No,

Frank Keating

Playing the footie card

Obligatory at election time are party leaders compelled to treat voters as dolts by declaiming lifelong devotion to the people’s game. In 1997 Mr Blair made a complete idiot of himself with a tear-inducing reverie of a childhood on the terraces at St James’ Park drooling over Newcastle United’s Jackie Milburn — but without checking first whether he would have been out of nappies when the black-and-white legend last played there. Shamelessly undaunted, Master T has played it safer this time, nominating a comparative modern — the eager pudding-basin scruff Peter Beardsley — as his favourite player and, for his most memorable goal, ‘Alastair [Campbell] tells me it has to

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 30 April 2005

Dear Mary… Q. Further to your letter regarding the telephone habits of foreigners, would they by any chance be Greek? Married for 20 years to a Greek, I am aware that no convention attaches at all to what we consider to be good manners. Calls will be placed and accepted at any place and any time without restraint on the length, volume or banality of the discussion. I have regularly been to dinner parties where invitees settle on the sofa, among other guests, and as many as two or three of them will make outgoing calls which are manifestly not urgent. Remonstration is received with puzzlement as there is no

Michael Tanner

Animal passion

ENO’s production of Berg’s Lulu, first mounted three years ago, is one of its outstanding successes. Richard Jones, the director, seems to feel a special affinity with Berg, to judge from his recent and wonderful Wozzeck for WNO. Yet Berg’s two operas couldn’t be more different. Stravinsky complained, as many people have, about the big orchestral interlude just before the final brief scene of Wozzeck, that it seems to be telling us how to feel. ‘As if there were any question about how we should feel!’ Stravinsky added. And, however much one loves that stretch of music on its own terms, it’s hard to disagree. Whereas the over-riding feeling I

Jaspistos

Pyjama game

In Competition No. 2389 you were invited to provide a short story or anecdote entitled ‘Mishap with Pyjamas’. The germ of this competition was a statistic presented to me on television: last year 22 cases of admission to hospital came under the heading ‘mishaps with pyjamas’. My mind grew feverish trying to imagine the different incidents which made up this alarming figure, and so I handed over to you. My own troubles with pyjamas, which I won’t bore you with, would never have got me into Accident and Emergency, though they might have landed me in a police station for the night. Commendations to Jeremy Lawrence, Basil Ransome-Davis, Keith Norman

Paul Johnson

Why beeches are better than other trees in the woods

In his book of proverbs, Blake writes, ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ That is true enough but it is not my tree-proverb, which runs, ‘An artist sees trees he can paint.’ When I look at trees, my eyes search instinctively for paintable ones, whose trunk and branches, leaves and swagger — for every worthwhile tree has pride of ancestry and wishes to cut a bella figura — I can get down on my paper and make lovable. Trees whose portraits I can paint. Trees are the nearest things in vegetable nature to human beings, with parents and offspring and lineage and long lifespans,

Peter Oborne

Victory will prove a humiliating experience for Tony Blair

Next Thursday Tony Blair will be re-elected with a fairly generous margin of victory: not less than a 50-seat majority, but probably not much more than 100. The Tories will make some progress, but not much. Anything more than 200 seats after 5 May, and Central Office should open a small case of champagne. This comparative failure is by no means a matter for despair. The Conservatives have fought a sound campaign. The personal performance of Michael Howard is beyond praise. He has shown stamina, resilience and guts. Twice he has faced desperate situations, once when he took over the Tory leadership in late 2003, then again in November last

Friday

Boris Johnson

Diary – 29 April 2005

Let no one say that this election is going to be the same as the last. We are winning back what I call the buggy vote. That is the middle-class mums and dads pushing prams. I don’t know quite why, but I attach terrific political significance to the opinions of these representatives of ‘hard-working families’. There they are, ferrying their precious cargoes, our nation’s future, and they must be heeded. They have reached the age — thirties, forties — when they are the pivot of society, simultaneously required to have a care to their parents and their offspring. Last time, as I recorded in 2001, I found they were almost

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 23 April 2005

Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring, with one named fellow terrorist and others unnamed, to cause a ‘public nuisance’, a common law offence said by the Crown in this case to have involved plotting to use poisons to cause ‘disruption, fear and injury’. Bourgass, an Algerian, had been an ‘illegal absconder’ since August 2001 when his application for asylum was rejected. Unknown to the jury, he was serving a life sentence for the murder with a knife of Detective Constable Stephen Oake during an anti-terrorist operation in Manchester two years ago. Inflation rose to 1.9 per cent. Some 5,000 workers at the MG Rover factory

The Spectator

Feedback | 23 April 2005

China is still a tyranny As usual Mark Steyn makes some good points, this time in his piece on globalisation (‘The sovereign individual’, 16 April). But he is mistaken in his praise of China, ‘the dynamic, advanced, first-world economy’. The Telegraph, for which Mr Steyn also writes, summed up China’s rulers in its leader of 16 April as ‘the tyrants in Beijing’ who have threatened all their neighbours and now are signalling a possible invasion of Taiwan. Is China really the inspiration for ‘sovereign individuals’ that Mr Steyn suggests? The rule of law there exists largely for the protection of the state, not, equally, to protect the individual from the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 23 April 2005

‘He has just had a lunch of eels and is in good spirits,’ wrote Mr Alistair McKay of Mr George Melly, in the Scotsman. ‘If he finds it tiresome to talk about himself, he does a fine job of disguising it. But the stories are worth waiting for and the louche music of his voice is compelling. He talks somewhat like a man blowing smoke rings from a rusty trumpet.’ It was the word louche that worries Mr Cecil Gysin from Farnham. He fears that writers do not appreciate its true meaning. ‘The Shorter Oxford gives us “oblique, not straightforward” and directs us to the French, where I find “squinting,