Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 February 2005

Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, attempted to rush through Parliament legislation to put people suspected of terrorism under house arrest without trial. Mr Michael McDowell, the Irish justice minister, said that leaders of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland were also members of the Irish Republican Army’s seven-man Army Council: ‘We’re talking about Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams, Martin Ferris and others,’ he said. All three men denied the accusation. Mr Adams had earlier nuanced his opinion that the IRA was not involved in December’s £26.5 million raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast, saying, ‘The IRA has said it was not and I believe them, but maybe I’m wrong.’ The

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 February 2005

‘Chalk’n’cheese, hole in one, salt’n’pepper, three-in-one oil, sheep’n’goats, eyeless in Gaza, Swan’n’Edgar,’ said my husband, not pausing for breath, so that nature took over, and a sharp inhalation whisked some whisky into his trachea, bringing on a fit of coughing that turned him a plum colour. I hadn’t heard anyone say ‘Swan and Edgar’ for some time. It is the only familiar coupling from those lines in Princess Ida: ‘Let Swan secede from Edgar — Gask from Gask;/ Sewell from Cross — Lewis from Allenby!’ Gask and Gask, I learn from more reliable inquiry than asking my husband, were in Oxford Street; Lewis and Allenby in Pall Mall; and Sewell

The Spectator

Feedback | 26 February 2005

Miller’s genius Attention must be paid’ to Arthur Miller (Mark Steyn, ‘Death of a salesman’, 19 February) quite simply because he was the greatest dramatist of our lifetime. Briefly to answer Steyn, it was hardly Miller’s fault that his biographer failed to locate Norwich accurately; and having survived the McCarthy witch-hunt, it seems a little unfair to condemn Miller simply because he declined to join the far Right, where sadly Steyn now seems to belong. The fact that Castro and Gorbachev recognised Miller’s genius doesn’t necessarily mean that he recognised theirs. Nor was he even remotely unpatriotic — he just didn’t always care for the way his beloved country was

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 26 February 2005

Like thousands who met in the hunting field last Saturday, I was half-delighted, half-bewildered. Delighted because it was a gigantic show of defiance and the large number of foxes killed proved the absurdity of the ban. Bewildered because we seem to have moved into an era in which legislators happily pass laws which they know won’t work. Among our mounted field of 150 and the much larger crowd of foot supporters, two policemen wandered with a camera. Although one of them had the identification code ‘KGB’ on his back, both were thoroughly amiable but completely pointless. We presented them with the drag — a fox shot earlier — for them

Frank Keating

Old haunts

The opening two weekends of rugby’s Six Nations championship were listlessly lacking in panache or brio. England and France have been generally dire, pantechnicons juddering along on empty, while Italy and Scotland resemble my old prep-school reports: ‘tries hard with poor results’. With intermittent verve and a smattering of dandy Celtic dances, so far only Wales and Ireland have flickeringly illuminated the tournament. Genuinely permanent shifts of power might be logged, however, when Wales play in Paris today, and tomorrow when England square up in Dublin’s dear, dilapidated old patch at Lansdowne Road. Too often down the last century have Ireland come a terrible cropper when they’ve sensed England for

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 February 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My daughter, aged 19, is proposing to take out a student loan in order to have her teeth whitened. It is not the borrowing of money I object to so much as the fact that her own teeth are not in any way discoloured. Please help quickly, Mary, as I am certain her natural look really could not be bettered.E.O., London SW18 A. Since ‘Frankenteeth’, as they might be dubbed, look Tippex-white under strobe lighting, ask your daughter to attend a few discos and spot the flashers before she goes ahead. Like toupees being blown off in the wind, bleached teeth can cause great embarrassment when they

Simon Courtauld

Clam fan

If America can be associated with one shellfish more than any other, it must surely be the clam. I know that New England is supposedly the home of the clambake, but you can’t go far in any state without meeting clams in some form — raw in the shell, clam chowder, clam juice or that irresistible Clamato juice, of which there is far too little sold in this country. In Utah earlier this month (for the skiing, not the Mormons), I had a delicious dish of steamed clams in a thin saffron sauce with coriander leaves, and on another occasion, after a glorious day in the mountains, a thick clam

Taki

Sorry state

Gstaad I’ve been wondering how people like Tony Blair, Michael Howard and assorted busybodies would react if some concentration-camp guard sued Ken Livingstone for comparing him to a British journalist. I don’t think there are any German ones around, but surely there are gulag concentration-camp guards still alive and kicking, and most of them are proud of their profession. Go for it, Boris (I mean the guard, not the sainted one); perhaps the Court of Human Rights will hear your case. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. The whole thing has become so absurd; political correctness has forced intellectual dishonesty on otherwise reasonable people. Can you imagine anyone

Joan Collins

Diary – 26 February 2005

Las Vegas is America’s major playground, and the two days we spent there recently proved that. It’s a 24–7 town, unbelievably glamorous and exciting if you ignore the massively upholstered ‘middle’ Americans clad in uniform jeans and Tees who clutter the streets, then sit for hours hunched sadly over dollar slot-machines. What a mug’s game that is. We stayed at the Aladdin (soon to become the Planet Hollywood) in a spacious suite with an amazing view of the extraordinary ‘singing’ fountains of the Bellaggio Hotel, and of the ‘Eiffel Tower’, an exact replica of the original, set in the grounds of a hotel unfortunately named Paris. Apart from the gambling

Jaspistos

Vice versa

In Competition No. 2380 you were invited to provide a school report by a pupil assessing the qualities of a teacher. The comp title refers to Anstey’s once widely read fantasy (1882) in which a schoolboy magically changes places with his father, Mr Bultitude, and from then on the boot is on the other foot. My youngest son, whose verbal reports on his teachers have always interested me more than their written ones on him, helped me judge this lot. Some of the plums he picked out were: ‘He thinks Paris is the capital of France. He needs a good kick up the arse’; ‘Attendance: satisfactory, except for the time

Peter Oborne

At last the Tories are setting the political agenda, and Blair is running scared

Shortly before Christmas last year I went off to write a book about a malign modern trend, the rise of political lying. Regrettably, during the two months I have been absent, the lying has continued unabated. In other respects, however, British politics has changed. Back in December there was a widespread assumption, bordering on certainty, that Tony Blair was heading for a third successive landslide victory. You could tell this by the way the two parties were conducting themselves in public. In the case of New Labour, the real battle was the contest to succeed Tony Blair on some indeterminate date after the general election, while the election itself was

Leo McKinstry

Not ill — just naughty

Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you can still hold a conversation without being constantly interrupted by puerile screeching, crying, charging and table-thumping. And whenever I reach the Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais on the return leg of a trip to France, I know from the din of temper tantrums that I am once more approaching the land of the spoilt brat.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Upwardly mobile

Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That is perhaps why Gent — now Sir Christopher — became a great tycoon of the technology age and I didn’t. He moved swiftly on from that airless back office in Holborn where we first met. After a few more years in computers he joined a fledgling mobile-phone company which had been set up by Racal,

Dean Godson

Will Dublin turn on Gerry Adams?

Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most popular politician in the Irish Republic. His party seemed set fair to make huge gains in the next Irish general election and he was being widely talked of as the next president of this state. Even the foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, spoke of the republicans as potential partners in a future coalition. Southerners have historically

Interconnect

Time to fight back | 26 February 2005

It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most important news of the day. With all solemnity it announces that the Duchess of York has voiced support for Prince Harry in the argument about a swastika at a fancy dress party. How low can the BBC sink in obeisance to the triviality of the popular press? No one should blame the Duchess, who needs

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 February 2005

The Labour party made six so-called pledges: ‘Your family better off. Your child achieving more. Your children with the best start. Your family treated better and faster. Your community safer. Your country’s borders protected.’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, made a speech at a party conference at Gateshead in which he said his relationship with the electorate was like that of a man going through a bad patch in his marriage during which crockery is thrown at him; ‘I’m back and it feels good,’ he added. The Prince of Wales is to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles on 8 April in a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle, to be

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 19 February 2005

I go abroad for a week and what do I find when I get home? That Ikea has been stormed by large chunks of Edmonton! I was absolutely livid, not least because I’m one of the people who, some time ago now, not only campaigned against the storming of Ikea, but also went on the march and attended several candlelit vigils which were really, really boring and chilly, but such was the strength of my belief. I simply do not agree with storming Ikea, even though I totally accept it has its problems. The nightmare queues. The basement bit where you are seduced into spending £789 on silly candles —

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 February 2005

Tony Blair (who has introduced the most divisive law in modern times) thinks that George Bush ‘owes him one’ for his support over the Iraq war. But what form could the payment of the debt take? Bush’s backing, after all, might make Blair even more unpopular among those thinking of voting Labour. I think I know the answer and, not surprisingly, one detects the hand of Peter Mandelson in it. Bush is coming to Europe next week and will visit the institutions of the European Union in Brussels, the first American President to do so. I gather that early drafts of his speech for this occasion get him to endorse

Interconnect

Champions Chelsea?

Not that soccer’s ubiquitous hurly-burly has remotely gone away, but its yawping volumes are even increased next week with the resumption of serious international stuff and the two-leg frenzies of the Champions League. Setting sail with various degrees of strut and confidence are Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea. Anticipation of the latter’s contest with Barcelona especially zaps the taste-buds and riddles the spine. Chelsea have surely settled the Premiership and their consistent nous and narrow-eyed killer instinct has fair rattled the erstwhile monarchs, Arsenal and Manchester United, who thus begin in Europe’s knockout bouts with extra trepidation. The arrival at Chelsea from Portugal of the artfully refreshing pin-up Mourinho

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 February 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I like to attend parties if I am invited but, despite the fact that most of my friends are in their forties, they seem to have an unfortunate tendency to want loud music to be playing during these parties, even when there is no dancing opportunity. I find that this means I come away with a sore throat from shouting to make myself heard. What do you suggest, Mary?R.C., London W2 A. The best way around this is to trigger a verbal torrent from your interlocutor so you don’t have to use your own voice. There are various subjects which will encourage a decent outflow. Why not