Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 4 June 2005

Q. I own a holiday cottage in Padstow in Cornwall. Sometimes I let the cottage, at other times I allow friends to stay there. I employ a local cleaning agency to come in on Monday mornings to clean up after each occupancy and get it ready for the incoming parties. My problem is that recently a great friend of mine, who is very fastidious, stayed in the cottage and informed me that she had left the place spotless on her departure — yet I still had the usual bill from the cleaning agency. It now occurs to me that other occupants may be equally fastidious, but since I live in

John Weston

Putting the ghosts to rest

In 1976, the year of Mao’s death, I went back to China when the British foreign secretary Anthony Crosland paid an official visit there. Asked what he thought of Mao’s colossal experiment in social engineering, Crosland replied, ‘It’s revolting.’ If you’re puzzled by this reaction from Old Labour’s leading thinker, you should read the new biography by Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday. The book breathes life from every page. In addition to extensive Chinese and non-Chinese written sources, the authors have conducted several hundred fascinating interviews with people who were close to Mao and his entourage or witnesses to events described. In public life we should never forget

Andrew Lambirth

‘How various he is’

The first question: why isn’t this Reynolds show at the Royal Academy, of which Sir Joshua was so famously the founding father? The short answer is that the RA mounted its own Reynolds exhibition nearly 20 years ago, in 1986, and thankfully doesn’t hold the monopoly. It’s certainly time for another in-depth look at him, and the Tate has never shown him solo. The second question is more troubling: what on earth is the Tate playing at? The press release has this to say: ‘He was a brilliant portraitist but also an impresario, a skilled networker, and a master of spin.’ Is this supposed to be a commendation? Does it

Jaspistos

House rules

In Competition No. 2394 you were invited to supply a rhymed poem offering four parental vetoes on children’s behaviour, followed by four juvenile vetoes on parental behaviour. Exhausted and sleepless, back two days late due to botched air travel, I shall cut the cackle. The prizewinners, printed below, get £20 each, except W.J. Webster, who takes £30. Bon voyage, this summer! Don’t spend a lifetime watching screens —There is another world outside.And music’s best not amplifiedUntil you can’t hear what it means.Self-cleaning rooms aren’t Nature’s trick,So don’t leave litter to decay.And ‘like’ is a word you shouldn’t sayWhen it’s just like ‘you know’ a tic.Don’t think you get away with

Peter Oborne

What’s ‘nasty’ about the Tory party? Nothing — except the modernisers

There is a weirdness about the Conservative predicament. The Conservative party has won all the great intellectual and political battles of the last quarter-century. It has defined — and continues to define — the public argument over the role of the state, the acceptable level of taxation, the nature of the economy, the power of trade unions, the scope of public services and the limits of the European Union. Looking back, with the aid of hindsight, it is possible to see that the Conservative administration of 1979–97 was perhaps the most illustrious and creative peacetime government of modern British history. It headed off economic collapse, gave security and prosperity to

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The worst of both worlds

Ross Clark says that the government’s PFI deals allow private companies to prosper at the public’s expense Imagine you are a left-leaning Guardian reader with a social conscience. You are not a communist, but your attitude towards private enterprise is less one of enthusiasm than grudging tolerance. If we are going to let private companies run things and make things, you believe, they must at least follow a Will Huttonesque paradigm of virtue, looking after their staff and the local community before distributing a few crumbs to their shareholders. And, of course, capitalists must be kept away from the things which really matter. It is one thing your local Indian

Interconnect

The counsel of Trent

Damian Thompson says that the new Pope wants to promote the Latin Mass — and radical purification Benedict XVI is the first pope in history to have gone about his daily life as a Catholic priest wearing a collar and tie. In this country, the practice is almost unknown; in Europe, it is the mark of a liberal theologian. But the other day the Catholic Herald printed a photograph of Fr Ratzinger dressed like a businessman that dated from 1977, long after his supposed conversion to hard-line conservatism. Apparently Ratzinger, as a professor at Regensburg, was merely following university convention. Even so, it’s a revealing detail, suggesting that, despite shared

Frank Johnson

A landslide in the Midi

Dept d’Hérault Our TGV, slipping through La France Profonde from Lille to Montpelier three days before the referendum, would now end its journey earlier, at N

Anthony Browne

Now for the British revolution

Anthony Browne says the French model has failed. Britain must now show the way forward — and save the European Union by her example Brussels You might feel safe reading your Spectator, confident that you will die in a bed, but I can reveal that yet another world war is about to break out across Europe, that genocide is stalking the land, and Islamist terrorists are about to blow up innocents by the trainload. I know this is going to happen, because Dutch MEPs warned of it in a TV commercial. Archive footage of Jews being herded on to trains, of mass graves from the Srebrenica massacre, and bodies lying

Friday

Alexander Waugh

Diary – 3 June 2005

Am I losing my puissance or has something gone disastrously awry with the nation’s young women? It used to be at this time of year — just as the sun started to shine and the first green blob of plum showed itself upon the twig — that they put away their shapeless cold-weather clothes in preference for a lighter, better fitting and more colourful summer garb. For that reason, how happy this time of year always used to be. But alas, no longer — not in the West Country at any rate. Down here the new fashion is to look as sickly and repulsive as possible. The teenage girls of

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 May 2005

An unquiet correspondent sends a ‘breath of rage’ all the way from Burrum Heads, Queensland. ‘I do wish you could manage to educate some of your fellow columnists,’ barks Mr Geoff Baker, adding a few paragraphs about ‘ignorance’, ‘solecisms, ‘disappointment’, ‘Bad English’, ‘after-hours adult education’. Goodness! What have we done? Why, we’ve used ‘or not’ after ‘whether’. Mr Barker’s gripe is that this introduces a culpable redundancy. That, however, is not the way the community of English-speakers has seen it over the past few hundred years. Whether had a busy private life even before it was written down in the Vespasian Psalter in ad 825, the earliest citation known, unless

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 28 May 2005

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, unveiled a £1 billion scheme to help first-time buyers purchase shares of new homes. He also announced plans to ‘cut red tape’ by merging 29 regulatory bodies into seven. It was revealed that four out of ten prisoners released early end up back in jail after reoffending. The Conservative party met to discuss how to change the rules for its increasingly frequent leadership elections; meanwhile, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, announced that he would not be a candidate this time around. There was a one-day strike at the BBC over proposals to cut 4,000 administrative jobs; audience figures for BBC1’s Ten O’Clock News

Taki

Richly traditional

New York To Roxbury, Connecticut, a tiny, beautiful village covered in leafy verdure and straight out of a black-and-white film from the Forties depicting white, Christian, innocent America. But, wait a minute: white, Christian, waspy, thrifty Americans did not drive turbo Bentleys worth a quarter of a million quid, did not employ discreet minders to protect them from overzealous fans, and did not serve vintage champagne and enough Ch

Jeremy Clarke

Rough trade

My boy’s mother’s boyfriend is in his mid-fifties, works his arse off six days a week as a builder’s labourer and spends next to nothing on himself. He’s honest, decent and kind. His only vice is the ten cigarettes, machine-rolled from smuggled duty-free tobacco, that he smokes every day. But somehow he’s always broke, always in debt. And now he’s got the Inland Revenue on his back. Last week he gathered together the most pathetic collection of bric-a-brac I’d ever seen, and laid it out at the weekly car boot sale. The car boot sale takes place in the leisure centre carpark. I sometimes have a quick scoot round before

Deborah Ross

Food

One evening I saw Gordon Ramsay on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross plugging his latest cookery book, Gordon Ramsay Makes It Easy, which is readily available from most bookshops, unlike Ramsay Makes It Hard which, I’m guessing, is available only from those adult shops with beaded curtains. Anyway, every time Mr Ross mentioned the book Mr Ramsay added: ‘And it comes with a free DVD!’ which totally got my juices going. What an inspired idea, I thought. A recipe book with Free DVD! so that you could play it on your laptop while you cook. It’ll be like having Gordon — a brilliant chef, whatever else you may think of

Frank Keating

Inking-in is out

A friend, a particularly mordant romantic, reckons the saddest thing about first-class cricket’s frantic attempts to ‘get with it’ — and appeal to everybody except those who love it dearly already — is that each team’s scorer is now ordered by Lord’s to use computer laptops to notch the runs and wickets. Leisurely, lovingly inking-into the summer’s book the ones and twos, the dots and dashes, the w’s, the c’s and b’s, the lb’s and st’s are all now strictly banned by St John’s Wood decree. Not only that; this summer, by all accounts, is the first in which not one of the 18 county sides employs a scorer who

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 28 May 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I own a holiday cottage in Padstow in Cornwall. Sometimes I let the cottage, at other times I allow friends to stay there. I employ a local cleaning agency to come in on Monday mornings to clean up after each occupancy and get it ready for the incoming parties. My problem is that recently a great friend of mine, who is very fastidious, stayed in the cottage and informed me that she had left the place spotless on her departure — yet I still had the usual bill from the cleaning agency. It now occurs to me that other occupants may be equally fastidious, but since I

Jaspistos

Maths lesson

In Competition No. 2393 you were given the first 101 numerals representing the value of π and asked to supply a piece of prose in which each word has the number of letters corresponding to the figures, zero to be represented by a ten-letter word. My thanks to Martin Kochanski for this idea. The consensus was summed up by Mae Scanlan’s final words: ‘Callous, diabolical, crafty villain, Jaspistos!’ Hilary and David Wade get the top £30, and the other prizewinners, printed below, have £25. I have included my personal effort (without reward) just to show that I’m prepared to swallow my own medicine. ‘It’s a maze. A prize conundrum. No

Peter Oborne

Why Blair and Howard are both lame ducks

In the normal course of events the start of a new parliament is marked by a strong sense of energy and purpose: new MPs finding their way about; freshly appointed ministers awash with ambition and ideas; a revalidated government secure of its democratic mandate and determined to drive things forward. But the start of this parliamentary term feels like the fag end of an old administration rather than the start of a new one. MPs have already started to congregate in small, conspiratorial groups. The Whips’ Offices of all parties already yearn for the recess, still eight weeks away. The reason for this unseasonal lassitude is easy to identify. The

Martin Gayford

Mad genius

Martin Gayford examines the extraordinary lives — and deaths — of great artists and suggests that there is a link between manic depression and creativity In the summer of 1667 the architect Francesco Borromini — one of the most brilliant figures of the Italian baroque — fell into what was later described as a ‘hypochondria’, complicated by fever. ‘He twisted his mouth in a thousand horrid ways, rolled his eyes from time to time in a fearful manner, and sometimes would roar and tremble like an irate lion.’ Doctors and priests were consulted, all of whom agreed that he should never be left alone, should be prevented from working, and