Society

Saturday

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

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 16 October 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, coined the phrase ‘opportunity society’ to describe his objective in reforming social services and policing; National Health Service spending on independent providers of diagnosis and treatment would rise ‘significantly’, and specialist schools would become ‘near universal’. He also said, ‘We must change the culture that can write people off at 65,’ by which he meant people would have to work after 65 because of poor pension provisions. Mr Alan Johnson, the new Secretary of State for Pensions, said in the Commons, ‘Means testing is a crucial part of our policy.’ Mr Adair Turner’s government-appointed Pensions Commission revealed that the gap between what people needed

Taki

In defence of harlots

Boston The Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Universities Conversazioni on Culture is a stimulating series of talks which takes place every year in one of the three venues. This year’s topic was ‘Power Without Responsibility: Was Kipling Right? The Press.’ Yours truly was invited to be one of the speakers alongside worthies such as Andrew Roberts, Kenneth Minogue, Roger Kimball, Renata Adler, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. I was billed as giving ‘the occasional address’, which was a presentation defending harlots. If you remember the Kipling quote, used by Stanley Baldwin in a 1931 Westminster by-election, it ends, ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. I thought the quote

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 16 October 2004

Q. I am a lady d’un certain age. I am by repute convivial, kind, obliging and an excellent bridge player. Unfortunately I have introduced three very boring women to each other and they insist on playing very bad bridge with me. At the end of each afternoon they produce diaries to fix the next date. How can I avoid them without seeming rude? Name and address withheld A. I am delighted to be able to offer a life-enhancing solution to this problem. Charlie Hunter, of the recently launched London Bridge Club, with whom I have discussed it, informs me that potential new members are welcome to come to his club

Stephen Glover

Why might Dr O’Reilly want to sell 30 per cent of the Independent?

The news that Tony O’Reilly may be willing to sell 30 per cent of the Independent newspaper seems utterly astounding. It has enjoyed a considerable succès d’estime by going tabloid. From being a catch-up sort of newspaper which did not excel in any particular area, it has become a trendsetter. First the Times followed suit and produced its own tabloid version. Then the Guardian announced that once it has acquired new presses it will transform itself into a so-called Berliner — i.e., the same shape as Le Monde. The rejigged management at the Daily Telegraph will have to make up its mind whether or not to produce a tabloid edition.

The Spectator

Bigley’s fate

The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute’s silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored. Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood. There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 16 October 2004

The Conservative leader Michael Howard says he owes everything to Britain for saving his family from persecution by the Nazis. It is just a good job for him that his own manifesto on asylum and immigration was not in force in Britain in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the personal passages in his conference speech Mr Howard announced a truly nasty policy. If a Howard government takes office, one of its first acts will be to withdraw Britain from the 1951 UN convention on refugees. Presumably Mr Howard is calculating that this will curry favour with Ukip voters, who relegated the Tories to a humiliating fourth place in the Hartlepool by-election.

Henrietta Bredin

Australian odyssey

I must admit that the first arts event in which I participated on arriving in Australia was entirely by chance. Sitting in the sun on the restaurant terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, looking at the ferries bustling in and out of Circular Quay, I picked up a small printed notice that had been placed on my table. It told me that, as part of the current city-wide contemporary art show, the chair in which I would normally have been sitting had been swapped with one from a café in Hanoi. As I pondered on this and gazed across the water, the arm of a crane swung

Friday

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 15 October 2004

For my son’s eighth birthday, I invited all 18 of his classmates (according to diktat) to his exciting climbing party at the Westway sports centre. I sent a round-robin email to the parents. I pointed out how very easy it was to reach the sports centre from north London. I said that all their sons would be coming home from school that day with invitations to this exciting event. I should, for honesty’s sake, admit that I gave everyone only a week’s notice. ‘As you must know, Saturday is the day of atonement,’ said a mother, as she declined. Out of the 18 boys I asked, 17 had copper-bottomed reasons

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 9 October 2004

Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, speaking at the Conservative party conference, summarised Tory plans in ten words: ‘school discipline, more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes and controlled immigration’. Neither he nor Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, would make specific promises on tax, on the grounds that former promises had been broken. In a video, Dr Liam Fox, the party’s co-chairman, said his favourite pop group were the gay post-modernist Scissor Sisters. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, had an operation via a catheter to ablate a troublesome spot in his heart responsible for giving him recurrent superventricular tachycardia. Just before going into hospital

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 9 October 2004

‘Foxes’ tails are just like ladies,’ says Felix Graham, riding to a meet in Trollope’s Orley Farm. The spirited Miss Staveley replies, ‘Thank you, Mr Graham. I’ve heard you make some pretty compliments, and that is about the prettiest.’ ‘A faint heart will never win either the one or the other, Miss Staveley.’ ‘Oh, ah, yes. That will do very well. Under these circumstances I will accept the comparison.’ No doubt compliments to young women will soon be criminalised, but Trollope commits another crime in the eyes of some by writing ‘under the circumstances’. To object to the phrase was, in Henry Fowler’s eyes, ‘puerile’, but that didn’t stop its

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 9 October 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My problem concerns the wording of an invitation. My husband will be 50 years old in January and we are giving a party for about 300 people. Without wishing to seem ungrateful, he actually is the man who has everything, and he dreads being given hundreds of new things he doesn’t want, to say nothing of having to write hundreds of thank-you letters for them. Yet we both think there is something a bit killjoy about having ‘No Presents’ on an invitation. What is the most tactful wording, Mary? Or should I let people bring the presents and just divide them between our staff later?Name withheld, Stockbridge,

The Spectator

War and peace

The newsreader Martyn Lewis once complained that there is not enough good news on the telly. To judge by his forays into literature, he would quite happily have presided over a Nine O’Clock made up entirely of dog and cat stories, but he had a point. When there is a spot of bother anywhere in the world there is a queue of foreign correspondents waiting to get in. Come the aftermath, the gradual return to peace and normality, and they are all off again, enticed by the promise of trouble elsewhere. Take Afghanistan. It is three years since our television screens were bombarded nightly with pictures of al-Qa’eda training camps

Interconnect

A matter of whim and fashion?

Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students to imitate. He certainly isn’t that any more. The forthcoming exhibition of early Raphael at the National Gallery may cause his popular stock to rise again, but surely not to that extent. Raphael is a prime example of an artist whose renown has slumped; he isn’t unknown but nor is he ever likely to be

John Laughland

Putin the poodle

Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore piquant, although presumably unintended, when last week a hundred Western politicians and ‘intellectuals’ published just such a missive, addressed to the heads of state and government of the EU and Nato. In it, they attacked the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saying that his authoritarian behaviour rendered impossible any true partnership between Russia and Western democracies.