Society

Saturday

Toby Harnden

A cat ate the face of the corpse

Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding it like this?’ he mused. ‘Oh, man.’ Every window in the cinder-block house was shattered. A 155mm shell had blown a large hole through the roof. The front gate had been crushed by a Bradley fighting vehicle and every door kicked in. Bags and suitcases left by the fleeing family had been emptied, their contents

Peter Oborne

The mean machine

Peter Oborne reveals that the Tories have a secret weapon — the Voter Vault — which has identified the 900,000 swing voters the party needs to capture at the next election According to all objective criteria the Conservative party leadership ought to be very low in the water. The assassination of Iain Duncan Smith almost exactly 12 months ago has brought about numberless benefits: a new mood among fundraisers; the restoration of discipline and purpose in the parliamentary party; much higher morale on the ground. But it has had no effect on the polls. The Conservatives remain exactly where they were before, becalmed in the low thirties, seemingly heading for

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 November 2004

The Saturday 17.35 Paddington to Plymouth train, operated by First Great Western, was derailed when it hit a car on a level crossing near Ufton, just before Aldermaston, Berkshire; the car driver and train driver and five passengers were killed and 150 of the 300 aboard injured. Three soldiers of the Black Watch were killed in a suicide bombing ambush 30 miles south-west of Baghdad, and another soldier in the regiment was killed later. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew off eagerly to Washington for talks with President George Bush. The full scale of the rejection in a referendum of plans by Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister,

The Spectator

Feedback | 13 November 2004

Israel’s rejected offers It is perhaps a bit unfair to single out Peter Oborne, because he is just one of many commentators to make the same error. He writes (Politics, 6 November) of the desirability of President Bush putting ‘renewed pressure on Israel to press forward for a settlement with Palestine’ — as though it was the Israelis who resisted reaching a settlement. The truth is the very opposite. Whenever an Arab leader has shown a desire to negotiate peace, Israel has seized the opportunity. It has also been willing to give up land as the price for securing peace. When Anwar Sadat offered Israel peace, Israel gave up the

Frank Keating

Names and games

Six Jones boyos were picked for the Wales rugby union XV which played South Africa last Saturday — Adam, Dafydd, Duncan, Ryan, Stephen and Steve. BBC commentator Eddie Butler said the knack had been to identify them by their hair — ‘blond, dark or ginger’. Eddie’s a better man than me — five of them were in the scrum in which all eight of them seemed to be identical shaven-headed Magwitches auditioning for the scary Act 1 estuary scene in Great Expectations. Saturday’s six broke rugby’s record of surname surfeit, held since 1939 when a quintet named Davies took on Ireland in Belfast. Last week’s debutant, Ryan, was history’s 73rd

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 13 November 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have written a perfectly good book and would like to see it published. I have, however, given up sending it to conventional publishers. They are not interested and I know this is because I have lived happily in Norfolk for 20 years and can’t be bothered to go to London. The upshot is that I am no longer on the so-called scene. I thought I would never stoop to having a book vanity-published, but now I learn that Felix Dennis has done just that but, rather than using one of the embarrassing imprints, he apparently got Hutchinson to do it for him. Could I too, Mary,

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 13 November 2004

First Gordon Brown removed billions of pounds from our pensions; now he is about to land 20,000 pensioners with vast tax bills by cancelling a perfectly legal ‘equity release’ scheme. Ancient Greeks and Romans would have thought it beyond belief that the main purpose of modern government was to remove money from its own citizens. Government had two functions in the ancient world: first, to protect its people from attack, whether from external forces (war) or internal forces (law-breaking), and second, to stay in power (because power = status and wealth). For both of these functions it needed money (or its equivalent). The question was: how to raise it? Since

Joan Collins

Diary – 13 November 2004

I broke my toe in Minneapolis. This is far from the glamorous image of leaving my heart in San Francisco and infinitely more painful. I stubbed it on a faux Chippendale dining-room table leg during a breakfast meeting at the hotel. It was a hot autumn morning and the traffic on the freeway was gently buzzing outside when my toe lightly brushed against the raw metal end-claw of the table leg which was sticking out menacingly, and my howl of pain pierced through the almost bucolic setting. After X-raying at the local hospital, the doctor announced, ‘Yup, it’s a severe fracture of the metatarsal, involving the metatarsophalangeal joint.’ ‘What can

Jaspistos

Themed eating

In Competition No. 2366 you were invited to describe the opening of a bizarrely themed restaurant in this country. Berlin features its restaurant for anorexics and one for the blind where customers eat in pitch darkness, served by blind waiters; also a café run by an Argentinian where you eat what you’re given, then pay what you think the meal is worth. At Andrew Wilcox’s non-PC restaurant (‘Berkshire’s first’) ‘the party next to us was asked to leave after refusing to light up between courses’; at Josephine Boyle’s The Acrostic Appetite ‘the menu is a crossword and you won’t know what’s on that evening until you’ve solved some clues’; while

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes

The Prince of Wales will be 56 on Sunday. So will Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail. It is interesting that these two men were born on the same day, since observing their parallel careers tells you quite a lot about modern Britain. There are superficial similarities between them. Both men are very rich and have large country houses and desirable residences in central London. Both have two sons, and both sent both their boys to Eton. At first glance, Prince Charles would appear to have the better deal. He has more and larger houses (as far as I know) than Mr Dacre, since there is also Birkhall in

Christopher Fildes

Handover day in the City as Cazenove gives up its war of independence

It had to happen. A few years ago I announced the demise of the City of London. The old place in its old form had enjoyed a great run but was on its way out, and would now be relaunched as Hong Kong West. As the flag comes down from Cazenove’s masthead, we can witness power being handed over. By nature independent to the point of idiosyncrasy, Caz now believes that this model no longer works, and is putting the core of its business into a joint venture with the vast American bank currently known as J.P. Morgan. The aspiration must be that JPM Caz will go straight to the

Theodore Dalrymple

Second opinion

What is the purpose of life? Is push-penny really as good as poetry, as Bentham contends? Surely there can have been few of us who have not sometimes wondered whether all our frantic activity — mainly getting and spending — is quite as necessary or important as we like to pretend it is. It is when I am faced by sullen youths, who tell me that life is pointless and not in the least worth living, that all my adolescent angst reawakens. Oh, I know perfectly well that the sullen youth with existential problems is really complaining that his declarations of undying lust for another equally sullen and unattractive youth

Peter Oborne

Now ministers are trying to win their case by dividing the bloodsports lobby

Events are now moving very fast. By this time next week, the Bill to ban hunting will have received royal assent. The fight to halt this oppressive piece of legislation is moving away from Parliament, into the courts and, probably, on to the streets. The government is preparing with great care for the looming battle. According to trustworthy accounts from rural communities, the police have already started work setting up a network of informers. They are offering cash. I know of one huntsman who was visited by a police officer and offered ‘a formal arrangement so that you won’t need to cover any expenses’. There is plenty of evidence that

The Spectator

Outsource those jobs

The defeat of John Kerry has been widely portrayed as a poke in the eye for liberal values and for prevarication in the face of global terrorism. Rather less has been made of the defeat of a third strand of Kerry philosophy: protectionism. One of the central policies of the Democrat challenger was to put a halt to ‘outsourcing’, the process whereby American companies are moving their manufacturing and some of their routine clerical operations to developing countries. This process, maintained John Kerry, was costing hard-working Americans their jobs. Making a stand against outsourcing, he calculated, would play especially well in the swing state of Ohio, where unemployment has been

Daniel Hannan

Accidental hero

Rocco Buttiglione talks to Daniel Hannan about homosexuality, homophobia and ‘the morbid totalitarianism of the Left’ Martyrdom often seems to bring, at the end, a sense of elation. Thomas More was plainly on a high as he was led to the block, getting off a couple of memorable quips to the headsman. Rocco Buttiglione is in a similar mood. Buoyed up by the unwonted attention that followed his exclusion from the European Commission, he is launching a pan-European campaign for liberty of conscience. Supportive emails are flooding in, people are cheering him in the street and, according to the polls, three out of four Italians back him. Shortly before leaving

Bruce Anderson

The silence of the generals

It sometimes seems as if we no longer know how to think about our soldiers, or how to treat them. Last week, three men of the Black Watch fell in battle in Iraq. A sad event certainly, but it was hardly a reason for national mourning. Yet much of the media became hysterical. Some of the men’s relatives, who could hardly be expected to reason clearly in such circumstances, were interviewed as if their grief had turned them into experts on military deployment and the Middle East. At the same time, a brave soldier was being gravely maltreated, and no one seemed to notice. Last week, Trooper Kevin Williams of

Boris Johnson

The beginning of hope in the Middle East

Boris Johnson says that the end of Yasser Arafat — the man who brought so much suffering to his own people — could be the opportunity for lasting peace But why did he do it? I asked the dark and bony young man in the yarmulka, still clearing up the scene of the murders. We were standing at the blackened steel counter of Shimmi’s cheese and olive shop, where three people had yesterday been killed by a suicide bomber and 13 seriously injured. It is a testimony to the vibrancy of the Carmel market, Tel Aviv, that business had resumed at the neighbouring stalls within minutes of the detonation, as

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 6 November 2004

The people of the north-east of England voted in a referendum on whether they wanted a regional assembly; they didn’t. Forty-seven Labour rebels voted for a complete ban on parents’ smacking when the Commons passed a Bill limiting chastisement of children. Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, told the Commons during the debate on the gambling Bill, ‘There will be no new casinos if local people don’t want new casinos.’ About 160 Crown post offices in high-street sites could be closed or sold off because the Royal Mail lost £70 million on them last year. The borough of Macclesfield was found to have the lowest concentration of

The Spectator

Feedback | 6 November 2004

Israel’s rapacious wall Anton La Guardia (‘A just wall’, 30 October) is spot-on in pointing out that Israel’s brutal wall is pushing the Palestinians ‘into reservations’. I have just returned from a week in Bethlehem, where I was warmly welcomed as a Jewish participant in the Olive Harvest Campaign, which calls on international volunteers to help the Palestinians harvest their olives in the face of harassment from the Israeli army and settlers. I have seen for myself how the wall is stealing Palestinian land and driving the Palestinians into ghettoes. However, I disagree with Mr La Guardia’s contention that the Palestinians are ‘co-authors of their own tragedy’ and therefore, he

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 6 November 2004

‘Whodunnit?’ asked my husband mildly as I threw The Da Vinci Code into the cardboard box intended for kindling, next to the hearth. ‘Whyreadit? That’s the question.’ The Da Vinci Code, which follows so many of the clichés of pulp thrillers, also employs the airport school’s convention for titling, which applies to films too. It entails the adjectival use of a proper noun attributively with some common noun that sounds possibly interesting. You know, The Shawshank Redemption, The Thomas Crown Affair, The China Syndrome. I should like to know who started it. Chaucer, to be sure, wrote The Canterbury Tales but he didn’t call ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ ‘Chicken Run’,