Society

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 16 April 2005

I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because… nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards, saying if we didn’t finish our ice-cream there would be no main course, absolutely not, no way, and even though our bedtime was meant to be 8 p.m. we’d all still be up at midnight when she would shout: ‘All of you… time for… CAKE! And I mean IT!’ So I loved Norma then and

Robin Oakley

Perfect timing

For the Beach Boys it was California Girls who were sans pareil. For Chas and Dave it was the Girls of London Town. But this column is dedicated to the girls of Merseyside. On Grand National Day at Aintree, it was wet and windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, racecards disintegrated to sodden pulp, rain seeped down inside your collar. But everywhere you turned there they were in their wispy little bits of silk and lace, spray-tanned midriffs frequently on view, dressed nine out of ten of them for a summer evening’s dance floor and still loving every minute of it. It was a pity that Carrie Ford, the 33-year-old mother

Taki

Let them reign in peace

New York It’s all over but the shouting, as they say in the Bagel, but bitchy British tabloids had nothing on the locals where Chuck and his bride were concerned. Call it envy, call it republicanism, but, wink-wink, the Yankee press had a field day. Tina Brown, an expatriate Brit who passes as an English aristo among the denizens of the Bronx, noted that Camilla reminded her of a governess. ‘Englishmen always marry their nanny…’ Quite so, but how would snide Tina know? I suppose the fact that Tina looks like one might have something to do with it. A ghastly old bag, Cindy Adams, wrote that Camilla resembled a

Frank Keating

Unlucky XIII

The Windsor wedding at least, one trusts, signalled the end of some tiresome weeks for the royal family. So trying, in fact, that it would certainly not have noticed a final pesky shaft before the dissolution of Parliament which had a group of northern MPs bleating about royalty’s apparent preference for rugby union over its cousins of the league code. (A jolly good game rugby league — tough, honest, regularly thrilling — but too often insecurely fretful of its status; even the mildest censure down the years has meant reams of green-ink death threats from north of the Trent.) The Labour MP for Wakefield and secretary of the parliamentary rugby

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 16 April 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am a picture framer. The other day I drove up to London to drop off a picture at the house of a client. While I was there, I asked if I could use the loo. Once inside I saw that there were some fairly nasty ‘marks’ in the lavatory itself. For my own purposes it was not necessary to make any contact with the lavatory bowl, so I settled myself swiftly and turned to walk out. As I opened the door I found another man waiting to come in. I did not like to insult my client by making any remark exculpating myself from the mess

Michael Howard

The old Prussian firm

One consequence of the continuing and unhealthy fascination in this country with the Third Reich has been an ignoring of the Second, whose Faustian story had yet more terrible consequences. At the beginning of the last century Germany could claim to lead the world; not only in industry, science and technology, but in what she proudly termed Kultur: philosophy, poetry, music, philology, historiography, law. As a welfare state Bismarck had provided a model that Britain was only beginning to follow a generation later. Germany’s constitution may have given too little power to the legislature to suit Anglo-Saxon tastes, but few people complained: the French, after all, gave rather too much.

Philip Hensher

That famous touch again

The most famous social encounter in British military history occurred in September 1805 in Lord Castlereagh’s vestibule, when the Duke of Wellington (as he then wasn’t) met Nelson for the first and last time. All we have is Wellington’s account of the meeting, told many years later to John Wilson Croker. At first Nelson did not know who he was talking to, and ‘entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me’. Suddenly realising he may have

Jaspistos

Enter the villain

In Competition No. 2387 you were invited to provide a sketch of a villainous character on their first appearance in an imaginary novel. I turned at once to Dickens, whose introductory descriptions of characters are usually so vivid, and was surprised that when Fagin enters we are told nothing about him except that he had red hair and was repellent-looking. The best male villain, for my money, is Count Fosco, that obese charmer with disconcertingly nimble movements; the best female one (and there aren’t many — Becky Sharp is a bitch, not a villain) is surely Charlotte in Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte, a really nasty bit of work

Christopher Fildes

Poor old dog — we’ve had to wait for a good day to bury Rover

To be watching the last days of poor old Rover is to intrude on canine grief. A wise vet would have put this dog down long ago. I was asking only last week when Rover would go under: after the election? Some means could surely be found, after all those years on and off life support, to make the patient hold on until Friday 6 May. The Prime Minister must have thought so too. Had he not sent John Prescott and then Gordon Brown all the way to China, to coax Shanghai Automotive into giving the dog a good home? Had he not himself picked up the telephone to exercise

The Spectator

Don’t be fooled by the Lib Dems

The nurses and midwives at St Thomas’s Hospital this week faced a rewarding task: to bring Donald James Kennedy into the world. They could have been as slapdash as they had liked, even pulled the poor chap out by the ears — knowing full well that nothing would have prevented his father bounding down the hospital steps and praising the care and dedication of NHS staff. Never mind Charles Kennedy’s boast that he was going to put parenthood before politics; only the extremely naive would think the Liberal Democrat leader incapable of appreciating the electoral advantages of becoming a father during a general election campaign. Our complaint is not that

Roger Scruton

INVESTIGATION: Shameless and loveless

Sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin’s famous poem, in 1963. Four decades have elapsed since then, and these decades have seen a growing recognition that sexual liberation is not the answer to the problems of sex but a new addition to them. Traditional sexual morality reinforced the society-wide commitment to marriage as the sole legitimate avenue to sexual release. It is easy to understand such a morality. It has a clear social function — ensuring stable families and guaranteeing the transfer of social capital from one generation to the next. And it has an intrinsic rational appeal in making sense of love, commitment, jealousy, courtship and the drama of

Douglas Davis

Anti-Semitic studies

Pay attention, Professor. If you support the proposed academic boycott of Israel — and if you are to remain intellectually honest — prepare for a radical lifestyle change. Firstly, unplug your computer. Good. Now switch off your interactive digital television set. Well done. And now throw away your mobile phone. Excellent. You see, Professor, these machines are not only the engine of the globalised, capitalist world but they also depend on technologies that have been produced by Israeli academics in the Zionist entity. Stop playing with your detached mouse, Professor, and concentrate. I’m afraid you may not use the British Library because it has been computerised by Ex Libris, a

Jules Evans

‘I made this revolution’

In a white room in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a tattooed man from Georgia is trembling violently. His eyes are rolled back to the whites, his spine is arched, his arms flail in front of him as if he is being electrocuted. Behind him stands another man, Asiatic, completely bald, with dark piercing eyes. He shouts, almost raps, into the convulsing Georgian’s ears, ‘Drive out the filth! You are a strong man, charged with energy! Help yourself out of this!’ He repeats this over and over until the Georgian has a spasm and collapses in a trance. He is put on to a stretcher, carried out of the room and laid in

Interconnect

The sovereign individual

The people of the world are moving on, says Mark Steyn, and leaving Western Europeans — and Canadians — far behind New Hampshire I was stunned to hear they were closing the Rover plant at Longbridge. Mainly I was stunned because I had no idea they still made cars at Longbridge. I was vaguely following things up to a decade or three back: I knew that ‘British Leyland’ had gone, and that Red Robbo was no longer picketing the plant every night on ITN and the BBC, and that various foreigners owned what was left of the British car industry. But the news that Longbridge is going out of business

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 15 April 2005

The death of the Pope has relit a number of arguments, few more contentious than the status of the foetus. Naturally, on a subject about which the Bible has almost nothing to say, the Church has taken its cue mostly from pagan thinkers. For the early Church, Pythagoras (6th century bc) set the tone, arguing that from the moment of conception the foetus was body and soul with every innate human capacity intact. This was in contrast to Empedocles (5th century bc), who thought the foetus became fully human only at birth (as did the highly influential Stoics much later). Yet most ancient doctors, observing the physical development of the

Olivia Glazebrook

Diary – 15 April 2005

Last week was dedicated to boosting morale. Having had my novel rejected no fewer than eight times in a fortnight, I have screwed the lid back on my pen until such time as I feel galvanised into a second assault. For now, it’s all about reviving my flagging spirits. First up, an attempt to make another kind of valuable contribution to society: I took myself off to the Blood Donor Centre on Margaret Street in the hope that dishing out a pint of my O-positive would make me feel a little less O-negative. But hang it all, even my blood was rejected. According to the nice young man I was

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 9 April 2005

The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles was suddenly postponed for a day because it clashed with the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II on 8 April. The Prince of Wales was to represent the Queen at the funeral, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to perform a service of dedication for the couple, also wanted to go to the funeral, as indeed did Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. Mr Blair said that he was postponing an audience with the Queen for a day as a ‘mark of respect’ for the Pope; after the delayed audience he announced that Parliament was

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 April 2005

People sometimes say ‘Easter Saturday’ meaning the day before Easter. In fact, it is the Saturday after Easter, and this year it was the day the Pope died. The first reading in the Missal for that day is from the Acts of the Apostles (iv 13–21). It concerns the reaction of the elders and scribes to the healing by Peter (the first Pope) and John of a lame man in the name of Jesus. The worried Sanhedrin hold a private conference, saying, in the Missal’s version, ‘It is obvious to everybody in Jerusalem that a miracle has been worked through them in public, and we cannot deny it. But to

Taki

Land of the depraved

New York Thirty-five years or so ago, William Buckley received an unexpected telephone call from one John Lennon. Intrigued, Bill listened while the John Lennon himself — with his Japanese wife blabbering away in the background — pleaded with him for help in remaining in the Land of the Free. Lennon had had a drug bust in his past, and some eagle-eyed Yankee immigration officer wanted him deported. The reason Bill was rung up by the Beatle was that Bill’s younger brother James was the junior senator from New York. Now I’m not sure about the dates, or even what happened, and all I know is that Bill referred Lennon

Frank Keating

Old man Wisden

Forget moons, suns, solstices and altered clocks, for half the world spring officially sprang on Wednesday when the 142nd edition of Wisden was launched with a banquet at London’s Inner Temple Hall. Eighteen-sixty-four was memorably busy: down the slope from the Inner Temple, they began building the Thames Embankment; Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened; General Gordon captured Nanking; Bhutans were boldly bothering Brits, and in Africa the Ashanti were restless; Dickens brought out Our Mutual Friend and photographs by magnesium flash were taken for the first time in Manchester; Oxford won the Boat Race by a rollicking 27 seconds; in his first-ever race a white-faced chestnut Blair Athol won the