Society

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Everyone benefits | 19 February 2005

Natural environment and rural communities draft Bill published A Bill designed to address better the real needs of rural communities and the natural environment through modernised and simplified arrangements for implementing policy was today presented in draft to Parliament by Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Mrs Beckett said: ‘The Bill we are publishing today will be key in delivering our commitment to a better quality of life for all with sustainable development at its heart. The new integrated agency will lead the way in delivering an accessible and high quality natural environment contributing to the enjoyment and well-being of current and future generations.’ The

Boris Johnson

The end of part of England

As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen. In a daze, I mount the stool, held for me by Di Grisselle, joint master, shove one foot in the stirrup and try to swing myself over. Bertha chooses that moment to reverse, and I begin my first day’s hunting, in the last week of that ancient custom, by slowly and dreamily falling to the

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 February 2005

Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, proposed a points system, measuring desirable skills and suchlike qualities, to determine which immigrants from outside the European Community would be allowed to settle permanently in Britain. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) refused to return a man with alleged al-Qa’eda links to Belmarsh prison, where he had been driven mad; the Siac judge ruled that the Home Secretary had failed to prove ‘to the necessary standard’ his allegation that the man, known as G, had received two unidentified visitors at his home. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, proposed that prisoners should serve the whole of a minimum term specified

The Spectator

Feedback | 12 February 2005

RSPCA isn’t ‘anti-pets’ Jeremy Clarke’s article (‘Animals don’t have human rights’, 22 January) contains so many inaccuracies that it is virtually a fact-free zone. It is absurd to suggest that the RSPCA has an ‘anti-pet agenda’. Caring for unwanted pet animals and re-homing them as pets is the principal work of the RSPCA’s 52 animal centres and many of the Society’s staff and volunteers; in 2003 the RSPCA found new homes for 69,956 animals. We also publish an extensive list of pet care booklets, the express purpose of which is to help people care for their pets. We have four animal hospitals and a number of clinics. We provided 263,155

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 February 2005

Wednesday was the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, and it was also the Chinese New Year, the first day of the ‘Year of the Cockerel — Year 4702 in the Chinese calendar’ as a site on the Internet had it. The cockerel? What’s wrong with the cock? The answer is obvious, and so obvious, it seems, that the word can no longer be used. A cockerel is a young cock, but it does not serve a double life as a rude word. An alternative to cockerel is rooster, an Americanism (though this name for the cock was once usual in Kent). The London Chinatown Chinese Association calls this year

Jeremy Clarke

Hotel reservations

We’d had a tiff in the Strand and I’d stormed off. It was late. I didn’t have anywhere else to stay the night, and I live in Devon, so I had to storm off halfway across Britain to get home. I caught the last train out of Paddington by the skin of my teeth. Once aboard, my anger subsided. It was the last train headed for the west country and it stopped at every station in Berkshire, Avon and Somerset. This put it in a leisurely frame of mind and it also stopped in open countryside for long periods of time just because it felt like it. Finally, at Exeter

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 February 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I sent a thank-you letter for dinner to a couple whom I know only slightly. In the thank-you letter, I asked them to dinner. I have had no reply and the date has come and gone. Does this mean that they didn’t get the thank-you letter — in which case they will think me rude for not thanking them? Should I write again? Or does it mean that they are rude in not replying to my invitation? V.I., London W12 A. Rudeness is unlikely. If they live in London, where the post is now so bad that party invitations are frequently sent by hand or by email,

Frank Keating

Squashed!

One of Ian McEwan’s familiar set-piece exuberances in his acclaimed new novel Saturday — ‘undoubtedly his best’: Anita Brookner, The Spectator, 29 January — has neurosurgeon hero Perowne indulging in an intensely competitive game of squash with anaesthetist Strauss. The doc plays each desperately combative rally on the tightrope of his own mortality, as if every unsparingly venomous stroke might be his last. McEwan is spot-on: fiction as sporting verity. Forget the noisy, follow-my-leader courtesy of modern motor-racing, hectic hunting, or even madcaps’ mountaineering; I fancy that it is the sheer mental and physical ferocity of racket games played shoulder to shoulder in a cruelly intimate, confined space which, of

Jonathan Dimbleby

Diary – 12 February 2005

As the result of a hip operation (arthritis, but I encourage people to think it was made necessary by a riding accident), I won’t be able to follow hounds again before the ban comes into force next Friday. I used to hunt as a child but gave up the chase in my ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, we shall fight and we shall win’ chanting and marching days — by which time I had come to share Oscar Wilde’s feelings about ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. But once the bandwagon for the ban started to roll in earnest I found myself with Voltaire and joined the fray once

Jaspistos

Bizarre books

In Competition No. 2378 you were invited to supply an extract from a book entitled either How to Fire an Employee or How to Fill Mental Cavities. How not to fire an employee was once demonstrated by my friend H, a timid, kindly American publisher who was determined to get rid of a rebarbative member of staff. Hoping that alcohol would fuel his courage, he invited the doomed man to lunch. The brandy was being drunk and H felt the strength welling up in him when the victim leant forward, aimed his finger at H and announced waggishly, ‘You’re fired!’ A year afterwards, visiting New York, I learnt that he

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Everyone benefits | 12 February 2005

Government continues drive for better, more efficiently organised public servicesIn a guidance pack sent out today to Leaders and Chief Executives of all local authorities in England, the government outlines how local authorities will measure and report efficiency gains they have achieved by means of a three-stage self-assessment process. This method has been determined following consultation with a group of local authorities and organisations including the Audit Commission, Local Government Association and INLOGOV of the University of Birmingham. The pack offers guidance on how change agents such as the Regional Centres of Excellence will support local authorities in delivering efficiency gains.Local government minister Nick Raynsford said: ‘This is a real

Christopher Fildes

He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for Eddie’s sake

Bill McDonough once preached to Wall Street from the pulpit of Trinity Church, taking his text from St Matthew and reminding his astonished hearers of their duty to their neighbours. Lord George (Eddie, still, in the City) prefers to take his text from J. Fred Coots and Henry Gillespie, authors of the 1930s classic ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’. To an astonished banquet of bankers in Guildhall on Monday, he warbled his message: ‘You better be good, for goodness sake.’ A warning came with it: ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good.’ This was Santa, an example to central bankers everywhere. When Eddie was governing the Bank of

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters | 12 February 2005

Russian bandit capitalism — sorry, the joys of the free market — is reaching beyond the grave. Latest victim: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novelist’s great-grandson Dmitri has called foul on the lottery company Chestnaya Igra (‘Fair Play’), and is suing for £5,000 damages after images of his ancestor started appearing on its lottery tickets. As he points out, it is not in the best of taste to use the image of a notorious problem gambler to promote a lottery. Why not use Turgenev instead, he wonders: ‘The guy gambled more, spent more, lost more and had much more spare money anyway.’ Devils! Idiots! As well have the Russian prison service adopt

Paul Johnson

When copulating, beware falling into Deep Structures

I don’t give a damn for grammar, or syntax either. Having learned to ‘parse’ as a small boy, and done ten years of Latin and eight of Greek, I take it all for granted. But I love semantic and grammatical niggles and rejoice in the way some people get red in the face with rage at the lapses of others. Thus Earl Granville, when foreign secretary, telegraphed to Sir Stafford Northcote in Washington that the substance of the treaty between Britain and America (eventually signed 8 May 1871) was all right but that ‘in the wording of the Treaty Her Majesty’s Government would under no circumstances endure the insertion of

The Spectator

A model Prince

The Prince of Wales, it is said, employs a manservant for the task of squeezing toothpaste on to the royal toothbrush. The servant cannot have the most demanding of careers, but he is almost certainly providing greater public utility than are many of the state’s bean-counters. Saving money, or rather the attempt to do so, is one of the fastest-growing areas of the public sector. Our national army of audit commissioners, value-for-money officers and best-practice co-ordinators is truly impressive. It is just a shame that in spite of them — or perhaps even partly because of them — taxpayers face an almost certain £10 billion worth of tax rises following

Interconnect

Bush will not be mocked

Mark Steyn says it’s time for limp, languid Tory toffs to join the fight for freedom New Hampshire On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: ‘We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell’ — in perfect harmony. To modify Churchill, defeat may be an orphan, but defeatism has many fathers, and these three were in tripartisan agreement about what a disaster Iraq had been. You’d have got a better idea of how election day was likely to proceed from that week’s Speccie, which blared across its cover ‘Iraq — the unreported triumph: Mark Steyn

Interconnect

Die in Britain, survive in the US

James Bartholomew says American healthcare is an expensive muddle that leaves millions unprotected, and yet it delivers much better results — for everyone — than the NHS Which is better — American or British medical care? If a defender of the National Health Service wants to win the argument against a free market alternative, he declares, ‘You wouldn’t want healthcare like they have in America, would you?’ That is the knock-out blow. Everyone knows the American system is horrible. You arrive in hospital, desperately ill, and they ask to see your credit card. If you haven’t got one, they boot you out. It is, surely, a heartless, callous, unthinkable system.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 February 2005

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was reported to have warned ministers that plans to allow the Home Secretary to put suspected terrorists under house arrest were likely to be challenged and ruled illegal by the courts. A man known as ‘C’, suspected of terrorist activity, was suddenly released; another man, whom imprisonment had made increasingly mad, was released on bail. Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, issued advice on how to deal with burglars; they could be killed, he said, as long as it was done ‘honestly and instinctively’. The Association of British Insurers said that a third of the housing announced by Mr John Prescott, the Deputy

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 February 2005

Radio Four had a trailer programme for a series it will run in August called Word 4 Word. (Yes, it is a bit silly to have a visual pun on the wireless.) It is intended to contribute to Leeds University’s new dialect map of the United Kingdom, a splendid project. I am not sure how much Radio Four’s findings are contributing so far to the Leeds survey, since the programme encouraged interviewees to come up with what were in effect nonce-terms and jocular slang coinages. An example was five-finger disco for shoplifting — not a lexical item that is likely to find a long-lived place on the nation’s verbal atlas.

Jeremy Clarke

Under a lowering sky

Back on track with the abstinence regime after the debacle at the dog lunch, I treated myself last weekend to a guided walk on Dartmoor. The walk, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, was called ‘Crock of Gold and Childe’s Tomb’. Twenty Gore-Tex-clad people, some with ski poles, plus yours truly, dressed appropriately perhaps for a longish journey on the District Line, met at Princetown, under the massive granite walls of Dartmoor Prison. The guide introduced himself as Brian. He was clean-shaven, 50-ish and if you closed your eyes when he spoke he might have been Alan Bennett. The first piece of information he gave us was that there were nine