Society

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Splendours and miseries of the man on the alabaster elephant

If there is one material I particularly relish, it is alabaster. It is slightly soluble in water and therefore defenceless against a rainy climate. So it can’t be used for outdoor work on cathedrals and churches. For internal decoration, however, it is superb, being soft and easy to cut; it takes a high polish and can be painted with almost any kind of pigment including watercolour. In the Middle Ages, workable deposits were discovered in Staffordshire and near Nottingham, and by the mid-14th century English alabaster was famous, and religious figures and altarpieces carved from it were exported all over Europe. If you want an example of English skills at

Christopher Fildes

The Great Presidential Stakes turns into a trillion-dollar handicap

The man who got it right, in his way, was Al Gore. Quoting Al Jolson, he promised the voters: ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’ This was his message four years ago, when I was in New York, leaning over the rails to watch the two runners in the Great Presidential Stakes as they neared the line — then, as now, neck and neck. In those distant days, money was rolling in to the Treasury, and the candidates were competing to spend it. George Bush I had raised taxes and lost an election, so George Bush II was in favour of cutting them. Al Gore said that the age of prosperity

Stephen Glover

What next? Will Richard Desmond soon be lecturing us on declining moral standards?

When Richard Desmond acquired the Daily Express four years ago there was an outcry. That committed Christian, Tony Blair, immediately had the pornographer turned press baron round for tea, but perhaps that was only to be expected. Almost everyone else was appalled that a man who had made his fortune out of such publications as Spunk Loving Sluts should have acquired a national newspaper. Foremost among Mr Desmond’s critics was the Guardian, which ran a magnificent series of articles about him. It discovered that a company owned by him had registered a website which promised live heterosexual sex, live lesbian sex, as well as other images too disgusting to mention

Alistair Horne

Roots of terror

On the night of All Saints, 1954, a young honeymooning couple of French school teachers, dedicated to their work among underprivileged children, were dragged off a bus in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria and shot down. Their murder by the newly created FLN (National Liberation Front) marked the beginning of organised revolt against the French colonial ‘occupiers’. The eight-year-long Algerian war was to bring down six French prime ministers, open the door to de Gaulle — and come close to destroying him too. The war was the last of the grand-style colonial struggles, but, perhaps more to the point, it was also the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim

Theodore Dalrymple

Second Opinion

From time to time, our ward looks more like a police lock-up than a haven of healing. By every bed there are two policemen preventing the escape of the patient, and usually watching television at the same time. Sometimes they and their captives chat amicably; at other times there is a sullen silence between them. Last week we had one of the jollier type of suspects in our ward. He was what is known in the trade as a body packer: a man (or woman) who transports heroin or cocaine by swallowing packets and recovering them from the other end of his digestive tract a few days later, in the

Adrian Blomfield

Why I turned against the war

Adrian Blomfield went to Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of the White House Nairobi The other day, shortly after returning from a longish stint in Iraq on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, I had dinner with a staunch Republican friend at a restaurant here. I was expecting a stern rebuke, and she did not disappoint. ‘I thought you were fairly unbiased,’ she said. ‘Yet your stories became increasingly focused on the attacks. Why didn’t you write about the good things, about how Americans troops are building schools and restoring services?’ Many

Simon Heffer

What can you say?

Simon Heffer on the insidious new taboos that govern society — and how those who break them risk their careers and credibility It is hard to imagine that at the time when Britain entered what is now called the European Union, in 1973, there would have been such a fuss about the religious beliefs of Mr Rocco Buttiglione, the nominee for the post of Italy’s commissioner. In a predominantly Catholic community, the views for which he is now being vilified would have been regarded as perfectly reasonable. Even after the philosophical ravages of the Swinging Sixties, there would have been no shortage of people in the political class who believed

Friday

Melanie Phillips

Diary – 29 October 2004

I am currently sporting a plaster cast on my left arm which is further encased in a sling. People wonder solicitously whether I have been attacked by enraged human-rights lawyers or serial adulterers. Alas, the truth is rather less heroic. Having had a swimming lesson, I slipped on the changing-room floor; putting out my hand to break my fall, I managed to break my wrist as well. Apparently, I have something called a Colles’ fracture, where one bone is pushed into the other. ‘We’re going to have to pull them apart right away!’ breezily announces the casualty doctor. I inwardly curse all those pieces I have written extolling stoicism and

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 23 October 2004

The United States asked for British forces to be sent from the south of Iraq around Basra to positions further north to cover for American troops required to attack Fallujah, where insurgents have been in control; the government decided to send soldiers of the Black Watch. They would come under American command but retain British rules of engagement. Abu Hamza al-Masri, the well-known hook-handed Muslim cleric, was taken to Belmarsh magistrates’ court to answer ten charges of soliciting or encouraging the murder of others, ‘namely a person or persons who did not believe in the Islamic faith’. Mr Mike Tomlinson, a former chief inspector of schools, proposed in an official

The Spectator

Feedback | 23 October 2004

Liverpool replies I am a survivor of the Hillsborough disaster, so I imagine you can guess where this is going (Leading article, 16 October). Unlike 96 less fortunate people, I was rescued from the Leppings Lane terrace on 15 April 1989 and so am able to provide a little bit of an insight into what exactly happened. Suffice to say, the findings in Lord Taylor’s report regarding the responsibility for the disaster being with anyone but the Liverpool fans were accurate. I can confirm this not only because I have read the report but because, of course, I was there. Not in the press box, not in another part of

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 23 October 2004

The suburbs are perhaps not so despised as they were in my youth, now that every house costs £1 million. And I was delighted to learn that my friend and columnar neighbour Christopher Fildes is next month publishing a selection from his City and Suburban pages under the title A City Spectator (£12.99). ‘City and Suburban’ comes from Milton, or almost so, for in Paradise Regained the poet writes of ‘Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts / And eloquence, native to famous wits / Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, / City or suburban, studious walks and shades.’ John Betjeman used the phrase for his column in The

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 23 October 2004

Dear Mary… Q. As the father of two young daughters, I naturally want their upbringing to be as happy as possible and part of this, I understand, involves toys and dolls. However, my wife and I are forever being given our friends’ plastic cast-offs. We have reached the limit of plastic fruit, crockery, cutlery or Lego. Our little Fulham house increasingly resembles a municipal dump; my wife is constantly tidying up. How can I dissuade our ‘kind’ friends from off-loading their unwanted plastic on to us or buying yet more cheap birthday/Christmas presents that keep the girls occupied only for the time that it takes to rip open the paper?

Raymond Carr

The outsider who came in from the cold

Professor McIntire disowns any claim to have written a conventional biography of the Cam- bridge historian Herbert Butter- field. His book is a detailed, scholarly study of the intellectual odyssey of a complex character, who wrestled all his life with the problems of writing history. As such it is not an easy read.a His biographer presents his subject as a classic case of enduring parental influence. He ‘idolised’ his father. A textile worker, married to a domestic servant, the father was a deeply religious Wesleyan Methodist, forced by poverty to leave school at eight. The son, born in 1900, fulfilled his father’s hopes by becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Having

Aidan Hartley

Not my game

After work the farm labourers like to head for the football pitch. They go barefoot, or in their Bata takkies, and they play rough. The first ball I gave them was an imported silver Fifa-approved item of great expense and they impaled it on a nearby fever tree within days. After that I bought cheap balls in Nairobi. These still get punctured regularly on thorns. The giant of a goalkeeper is a man named Magoolgool — named, like many of his tribe, after a treasured bull — who specialises in thumping the ball with such force that it rockets into the stratosphere and bursts with a distant pop. I don’t

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

A hung parliament looks a lot more likely than most media experts allow

A growing band of us do not believe the opinion polls. We cannot entirely explain our doubt. We argue backwards from our hunch — that the voters do not wish to give Tony Blair anything like the thumbs-up they gave him before — to an array of rationalisations about how, whatever today’s polls may suggest, tomorrow’s general election could go wrong for New Labour. The relationship between the present Prime Minister and the British people has broken down. Repair is about as likely as the unsouring of soured milk. Conversations overheard — on buses, in aeroplanes, pubs and on the street — imply an attitude of widespread derision. Ministers on

Peter Oborne

The US holds the key to paying off Blair’s debts

I was brought up near Warminster in Wiltshire, and love this quiet, unassuming country town. Its proximity to the Salisbury plain has ensured it the role of local garrison, a position viewed with at best mixed emotions by the locals. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Royal Irish Rangers, unable to serve back home, incessantly returned to Warminster. The Irish Rangers, since disbanded, were brave men and fine soldiers, but they instilled a reign of terror in the local pubs and nightspots that is remembered with a shudder to this day. Now Warminster plays host to one of the British army’s most famous regiments, the Black Watch, or to be

The Spectator

All bets are on

You can’t please some people. The Daily Mail has spent the Blair years complaining about the nanny state. But when the government finally comes up with a measure to add to the gaiety of the nation, the Gambling Bill, the Mail suddenly turns nanny itself. ‘Gambling with our futures,’ it whined last week. ‘Trashy glitter and the lure of easy money to exploit the vulnerable …that Labour is encouraging super-casinos in every town would horrify the fathers of socialism.’ Actually, we suspect that to some extent the fathers of socialism may well have been in sympathy with the Gambling Bill, which seeks to correct the injustice of having one law

Sarah Perry

A little unexpected

The winning article in the 2004 Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize. There were more than 60 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Horatio Clare, Simon Matthew Kingston, Joanna Kavenna, Bertie Cairns and Barnabas William Erskine Campbell. In the Jollibee burger bar, Kuya Virgo held out his hands. Cradled in each palm was a duck’s egg, still warm from its boiling water. He looked at us expectantly; we looked back. My husband reached out first. ‘Thank you, po,’ he said smilingly. I followed swiftly, attempting a little bravado: other British visitors had apparently responded to the ultimate Filipino culinary challenge with enthusiastic fits of vomiting. Under Virgo’s instruction,

Beryl Bainbridge

Scouse honour

I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned to defend their country during the Six Day War. And that, following an unfortunate leading article in last week’s Spectator, is what I am now doing. The city I grew up in, a quarter destroyed by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, had once been a monument to trade and commerce. When my father was born,

Friday

Michael Beloff

Diary – 22 October 2004

The reverberations from my HMC conference speech on Oxford admissions have not stilled. With my crème de la crème PA Yvonne, I am chauffeured Sky-wards to be interrogated by Adam Boulton after Oliver Letwin and before Jackie Stewart. Cheerily greeting the demon driver, ‘Good to see you again’, I am stalled by his polite inquiry: ‘Remind me where we met.’ ‘Um …er …Chequers actually.’ (Cherie’s half-century party.) I admire Ollie’s manual gestures, slashing (without commitment) at an undergrowth of taxes, but decide to adopt a safer tactic of clasping my hands au Jonny Wilkinson. The Sunday press is predictable. To the Observer I am a humbug; to the Sunday Telegraph