Society

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Fact or fiction?

John Simpson is a television journalist. Indeed he is far more than that, being the BBC’s World Affairs editor, an amazing title that makes me think of Emperor Ming the Merciless, enthroned above the galaxies. Apart from the fact that Mr Simpson does not provoke calamity, their job descriptions are not dissimilar: the bombers go in, and there he is, in safari suit or burkha, white-haired, his face sleek with concern, presiding over the ruins of cities. The only thing is, what does he do with the rest of his time, when there are no bombers and the cities are merely falling apart? The answer seems to be that he

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 October 2005

The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club (1926) Dorothy L. Sayers And he replied: ‘The flames unquenchableThat fire them from within thus make them burnRuddy, as thou seest, in this, the Nether Hell.’ It is unlikely that when Dorothy L. Sayers produced the lines above she was thinking of mustard: unlikely, but not impossible. The distinguished translator of Dante (and creator of Lord Peter Wimsey) was, in her early career, a copy-writer for Benson’s, an advertising agency whose most important client was Colman’s of Norwich. While there, she wrote, among several other mustard-related items, The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club. The club was at first fictional, featuring characters such

Jaspistos

Lunary spines

In Competition No. 2413 you were invited to supply a poem such as might have been written by the Revd Spooner. William Archibald Spooner, the myopic, albino warden of New College, was not, as I had always imagined, a Victorian figure: his wardenship was 1903–24 and he died in 1930. As an educationist he would have been shocked if he had overheard his fellow Oxonian Wystan Auden referring dismissively to the poets ‘Sheets and Kelley’ and even more aghast had he lived to witness a feminist theatre group touring Britain in the 1970s under the name Cunning Stunts. My own favourite among his reputed blunders is ‘The Lord is a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If Katrina was the vengeance of Allah, what

So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have been remarkably silent. The earthquake struck during the onset of Ramadan in two of the world’s most devoutly Muslim countries. It is almost unbelievable that not a single bearded cleric from this most certain and steadfast of religions has offered some sort of explanation for the appalling loss of life and destruction of property. Is

The Spectator

Paternity madness

There were three news stories this week which might at first appear to be unrelated. The government announced that its forthcoming Work and Families Bill will give new fathers the right to take six months’ unpaid paternity leave. The BBC demanded that its licence fee rise at 2.3 per cent above inflation over the next eight years, perhaps taking it to £200. And Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned that the economy is heading for a bout of the 1970s disease: low growth and higher inflation. But of course there is a link between these three things. While the Chancellor of the Exchequer will inevitably blame

Richard North

Europe is costing us a bomb

The threat to our national security has seldom been greater. Not only are historic regiments being scrapped — or amalgamated — but the fundamental reorganisation of armed forces now under way is likely to undermine the special relationship with the United States, and thus a key element in our defence strategy. There is, of course, nothing wrong in principle with the reorganisation: it has been embarked on to accommodate a technological revolution in warfare. This revolution is as profound as the switch from horse to tank. The term for the new military technology is ‘netcentric warfare’ and it aims to meld high-tech weaponry with the power of computers, satellites and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Death, drugs and red tape

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty their lofts to send surplus possessions to Cancer Research shops, and many more will be stuffing ‘pinkie rings’ on to their fingers and toes in order to support work on breast cancer. In all, Britons last year raised £302 million for cancer charities, far more than any other country in Europe. As a result of

Friday

Douglas Davis

Diary – 14 October 2005

If you’re thinking of moving to Sydney, forget it. That slice of unsolicited advice was offered when I made my third visit in little more than a year. The idea of actually settling in Sydney has never crossed my mind, but for those who are contemplating such a move the advice is sage stuff. Sydney is a city in crisis: house prices are sky high, on a par with those in London; the urban sprawl has reached its limits; the roads are clogged, and the reservoirs are running dry. I suggest to a city shopkeeper that the airport authorities should hang a ‘No Vacancies’ sign under the ‘Welcome to Sydney’

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 October 2005

Mr David Davis, Mr Kenneth Clarke, Mr David Cameron, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Malcolm Rifkind displayed what attractions they could muster as candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Boots the chemist, with 1,400 outlets in Britain, announced a merger with Allied UniChem, with 1,250 outlets in Britain and Europe, to produce a company with 100,000 employees and a value of £7 billion. A takeover of Telewest by its rival British cable operator NTL was expected to produce a communications company with revenues of £3.4 billion. BP warned that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might knock more than £400 million off its third-quarter

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 October 2005

Blackpool ‘With his designer wife, his two children (there is a third on the way) and his Notting Hill home, Mr Cameron does not look like a traditional Tory,’ I read in the papers. In what sense is this not a traditional Tory set of attributes? True, most Tories do not have designer wives — either in the sense of ‘designer t-shirt’ or in the sense meant here, that Mrs Cameron is a designer (of handbags) — but it is perfectly normal for them to have two children with a third on the way and, if they are rich, to have a house in Notting Hill. The thought behind sentences

Frank Keating

Sven’s last stand

A revitalised Scottish team will cause a heck of a bonny din at splintery auld Hampden this afternoon — olde tyme optimism. Ditto Northern Ireland at venerable Windsor Park. Neither are likely to qualify for next year’s World Cup finals, but England are, yet the preliminaries to their match at Old Trafford against Austria have been imbued with jaundiced, fatalistic vapours. Should England come a cropper today the fuss will be fulminating and the fallout grievous as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team attempt to salvage something from the wreckage in their last-chance qualifier against Poland on Wednesday. If England fail to qualify for Germany 2006, their Swedish coach will be on that

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 October 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am the only child of parents in their seventies who are not super-rich but who do own a house in Dorset worth more than the £265,000 one is allowed to inherit before the 40 per cent inheritance tax comes into play. Ideally they would hand ownership of the house over to me now in the hope that they will live for another seven years (at least!), so I can avoid paying this tax, but I feel I cannot make this suggestion to them myself. Nevertheless it is impractical not to take what steps one legally can to prevent wasting money. What do you suggest, Mary? Name

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 8 October 2005

The case for Ken In last week’s issue you conducted a poll on how the public would view the Tory leadership candidates if they were better known, and concluded that ‘without the advantage of recognition, Ken Clarke would no longer be the front-runner’ (‘Clarke’s advantage fades away’). But surely what your poll actually shows is that Ken Clarke is, in fact, the only man for the job. It demonstrates both that Clarke is (leaving aside hypothetical situations) the only candidate people have heard of and how important this recognition factor is. How is it that Labour is in its third consecutive term? The fact is that the lies, broken promises

Taki

Spanish style

Madrid This is the sultriest city in Europe and, along with Paris and Rome, the most romantic capital of the old continent. When visiting Madrid there is only one place to stay, the Hotel Ritz, right in the heart of the city, opposite the Prado. There is a bucolic air about the Ritz, with the wide leafy streets that surround it and its beautiful garden-restaurants, which hint of romance and the forbidden pleasures of long ago. The past, of course, is what Spain is all about. Charles V had made it the most powerful country in Europe, imbuing his people with pride as well as melancholy, which his chronically depressed

Jeremy Clarke

Waiting for Mr Kurtz

The yellow plastic tables on the terrace outside the ferry-terminal bar faced directly into the afternoon sun. It was the last week of September and surprisingly hot. We’d been over to Roscoff for the day, from Plymouth, just for something to do, and we’d been uncomfortably hot all day, traipsing round in our sports anoraks and rucksacks. My boy said he was going for a wander, which I’m beginning to think is a euphemism for having a crafty fag. We’d seen all we wanted to see of Roscoff, a pretty little fishing town full of sprightly old French people, with an open-air food market, very expensive, with middle-class stall-holders. And

Graham Stewart

Business as usual

Reality television has demonstrated that it is no longer necessary to possess a distinguishing talent in order to enjoy celebrity status. Critics might argue that Simon Garfield has worked similar wonders for the diarist’s art. Where once we were treated to the inner demons of generals and statesmen, Garfield touts the daily musings of ordinary folk doing nothing much. For We Are at War, he has unearthed the diaries of five individuals who originally submitted their entries to the Mass Observation organisation in the first 14 months of the second world war. That clash of empires and ideologies has often been described as the ‘People’s War’. Yet, intriguingly, none of

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed company

The visitor to the depressing subterranean galleries of Tate Britain might be forgiven for feeling a trifle bewildered in the first room of an exhibition unashamedly titled Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. To the left is James Tissot and to the right a vast canvas of Paddington Station by the little-known Sidney Starr (1857–1925), who departed these shores for America in 1892, and perhaps made good. (Certainly, his dreary expanse of platform could profitably have been left undisturbed in Durban Art Gallery, rather than shipped over specially for this exhibition.) There’s even a large George Clausen in this first room, but where are the brand leaders? On the far wall a

Christopher Fildes

A soling and heeling for Boots, or just another round of hunt the thimble?

Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war …. Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the Western desert. The new plan is to merge with Alliance UniChem, thus giving Boots even more chemists’ shops. Until now, armchair strategists — the High Street is full of them — have assumed that Boots has quite enough shops. Its trouble has been to know what to do with them. What would people rather buy

Jaspistos

Competition | 8 October 2005

In Competition No. 2412 you were invited to supply a ‘jabberwocky’ poem beginning ‘’Twas brillig…’and containing new words of your own invention. By ‘jabberwocky’, which was deliberately lower case, I meant no more than surreal. I wasn’t inviting you to follow Carroll’s monster-slaying scenario, or his metrical scheme, only to match his inventiveness with neologisms in a wacky poem. Many of you over-egged the cake, throwing in so many invented words that I had only a faint idea of what was going on: in ‘Jabberwocky’ it is clear enough, even if you have to guess the meaning of ‘tulgey’ or ‘gimble’. It is almost impossible to write an amusing ‘nonsense

Paul Johnson

Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit physics interested him most. His friend Christopher Wren was a mathematician-scientist before he concentrated on architecture. Their colleagues in the Royal Society discussed all topics. When Diderot was compiling his Encyclopédie, he drew no frontiers between arts and sciences. As late as the year 1800, Humphry Davy, Coleridge and Wordsworth formed a trio of creators