Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 3 July 2004

A fine old row broke out over an unpublished book, Off Whitehall, by Mr Derek Scott, a former economics adviser to Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. It detailed arguments between Mr Blair and Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. A spokesman for the Chancellor called it ‘deliberate peddling of lies’ and did not exculpate 10 Downing Street. Another book, Blair, by Mr Anthony Seldon, has Mr Brown shouting at Mr Blair, ‘When are you going to move off and give me a date?’ and ‘I want the job now!’ Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, demanded that Humberside Police Authority suspend the chief constable, Mr David Westwood,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 3 July 2004

As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying ‘well’, especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation. With conversation as its habitat, it naturally occurs frequently on programmes such as Today on Radio 4. I did see it the other day in a headline in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Champagne (well, English sparkling) for the men about to wreck Brussels’ — a reference to the UK Independence Party. In the Telegraph sense, well is what Dr Svartvik calls ‘an editing marker for self-correction’. It functions in a similar way

Jeremy Clarke

Space invaders

There is a Japanese concept known as ma. A loose translation of ma might be ‘the space between things’. In Kyoto, at the temple of Ryoan-ji, is a famous Zen garden. It is a dry garden of 15 rocks positioned on a surface of raked gravel, symbolising clarity and openness. (One of the 15 rocks, however, is always hidden from any human vantage point on the ground.) The exact opposite of ma would be the 15 or so fixed weight machines crammed into the small and stuffy space that is our local council-run gym. From the moment you drop your sports bag on the pile of other sports bags, under

Petronella Wyatt

Over the hill

The French have always enjoyed delivering snubs to les rosbifs. But now they have gone a step trop far. All red-blooded Englishmen, and loyal Englishwomen, should be inflamed this week by their shocking insult to our greatest rose anglaise, Miss Kate Moss. Miss Moss, the nation’s greatest natural product, has been dumped by Chanel as the face of its Coco Mademoiselle scent. The speculation in the fashion world is that Miss Moss’s motherhood and ‘partying lifestyle’ are partly responsible, but more still claim it is her advanced age of 30. Chanel, apparently, wants to replace her with an actress of whom I have barely heard — Scarlett Johansson, who is

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 3 July 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have been married for over 35 years and have four children and two grandchildren and parents still alive. My husband, of whom I am still fond, has been engaged in a long, weekday affair with a friend of mine, which is probably delightful for him, but hurtful and boring for me. I am quite used to allowing him a long rein. I live in the country and he is in London during the week, and the thought of a full-scale confrontation and the inevitable ensuing drama seems pointless and damaging for all who would become involved. However, I am finding it increasingly galling to let them,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In St Petersburg I glimpsed the hope and decency of Soviet communism

It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly. Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a 50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow. In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist ideal. My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight.

Peter Oborne

Things may be looking up for Blair, but it is still not certain that he will fight the election

As any investment banker will tell you, share prices in ailing companies rarely go down in a straight line. The process of decline is typically punctuated by periods of stagnation, known by technical experts as a ‘false bottom’. But these treacherous episodes are not nearly as perilous as the moment when a share price in long-term collapse starts to rally. The first two or three tentative bits of good news can be readily discounted. But gradually observers on the sidelines get drawn in, concluding that the stock really has turned the corner. Then the bears or short-sellers start to panic, hurriedly buying back stock to cover their positions, driving the

Charles Clover

Fins ain’t what they used to be

Charles Clover says that there’s only one way to beat the celebrity chefs who are wiping out every endangered fish in the sea: take a trip to McDonald’s In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century British and Norwegians did to the great whales, and what people in this century are doing to rainforests and bushmeat. This crisis is caused by overfishing. Given that the destruction of once renewable sources of food is a serious problem for the

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 2 July 2004

An American has done some ‘research’ to demonstrate what he claims no one has yet acknowledged: that hoi polloi know better than the experts. Ancient Greeks knew that some 2,400 years ago. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato makes Socrates wonder how it can be that, when technical matters like ship-building are being discussed before the sovereign Assembly (all Athenian males over 18), the Assembly howls down anyone who is not an expert; but when state policy is being discussed, any Nikos, Stavros or Giorgios can stand up and have his say. Clearly, says Socrates, they don’t believe that ‘policy’ (unlike ship-building) can be taught, otherwise they would demand that only

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 June 2004

‘What, what, what,’ said my husband, as if he had bought up a job lot of whats and wanted to use them up before the hot weather spoilt them. He was provoked by my having read out a sentence by W.W. Skeat: ‘Argosy is not really of Slavonic origin.’ Skeat (1835–1912) had meant to go into the Church, but an affliction of the throat cut that short. A lectureship in mathematics at Christ’s College, Cambridge ‘left him ample leisure’. He edited Langland and Chaucer in several volumes and made an etymological dictionary. In analysing a difficult word, he allowed three hours: ‘During that time I made the best I could

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 June 2004

David Westwood, the chief constable of Humberside, was suspended by the Home Secretary David Blunkett after an inquiry by Sir Michael Bichard found ‘fundamental and systematic’ flaws in Humberside Constabulary’s handling of intelligence; the force had deleted details of several accusations of earlier sexual offences by Ian Huntley, who killed the Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The Rail, Maritime and Transport Union announced a 24-hour strike next week, the first national strike for 10 years. A man called John Swinney resigned, having apparently been leader of the Scottish National Party for several years. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority ordered primary school teachers to write assessments on their pupils

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 June 2004

Dear Mary… Q. Living as we do far from the motherland, a particular problem arises with what are best described as ‘professional Englishmen’. These men, of often dubious past, make a living out of pretending to be ‘top-drawer’ English. They sport an old school tie and the appropriate accent and wind up being appointed to company boards and invited to the best parties. The recent cost-of-living increases in central London have meant that their arrivals on our shores have reached plague proportions. I myself was recently fooled into inviting one of the ersatz gentlemen to my own dinner table with disastrous results which need not concern your readers. Mary, please

Taki

High Life

Athens The birthplace of selective democracy is looking better than it has since the Fifties, when the modernists took over. The ancient capital will be ready on 13 August, the Games will take place, and the American basketball freaks will stay home, which is the best news I’ve had since Bill Clinton was impeached. (His tedious, long-winded 957-page self-indulgence is typical Clinton. Bill Clinton and Ahmad Chalabi, two of a kind, both desperate to win the title of greatest liar ever.) The Games are way over budget, but then they always are. Athens has been transformed by them, and in some miraculous way so have the people. Ten years ago

The Spectator

Fat controllers

It is a seldom acknowledged benefit of rail privatisation that for ten years we have not had a national rail strike. This happy situation will come to an end at 6.30 p.m. next Tuesday when, in the middle of the rush hour, 15,000 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) walk out on a 24-hour strike. In the best traditions of union militancy, the strike has been timed to inflict the maximum collateral damage to the general public with the minimum loss of pay to railwaymen. As far as commuters are concerned, the rail system will have been rendered useless for two whole days. It is even more

Mark Glazebrook

Giorgione’s artistic poetry

Mark Glazebrook on a magnificent exhibition of work by ‘Big George’ in Vienna Giorgione! A name to conjure with. Other names such as Vasari, Byron and Walter Pater have conjured with the Zorzi, Zorzo or Zorzon of contemporary documents, the exceptionally talented painter who died in his early thirties in 1510, the legendary Big George, the gifted musician and fabulous lover who came to Venice from Castelfranco, a large fortified village situated in a great broken plain at some distance from the Venetian Alps. His copses, glades, brooks and hills must surely have inspired the Giorgionesqe ideal of pastoral scenery. Now, more than 20 different living scholars are battling it

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

English hooligans are pussycats

Our soccer fans are by no means the most thuggish in the world, says Rod Liddle, and he’ll glass any smug Scotch git who says they are A rather smug, bearded Scotsman upbraided me the other day when I was queuing for a drink at one of those left-of-centre London wine bars where the staff look at you with opprobrium if you order the house Chardonnay. His complaint was with something I’d written about the Euro 2004 football championship — to the effect that it was OK, for 90 minutes, to loathe the opposition for their real or imagined national characteristics. It made the game more fun, I’d argued. ‘Don’t

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 June 2004

In local elections Labour did very badly, taking 26 per cent of the vote, compared with 29 per cent for the Liberal Democrats and 38 per cent for the Conservatives. ‘I am not saying we haven’t had a kicking,’ remarked Mr John Prescott, the deputy Prime Minister. In the European elections the UK Independence party took 12 of the 78 British seats, with 16 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives took 27 seats with 27 per cent of the vote; Labour 19 seats with 23 per cent; the Liberal Democrats 12 seats with 15 per cent. Asked what his hopes were for the European Parliament, Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk, a

John Nott

Diary – 19 June 2004

Chelsea Post Office, situated on the corner of Sloane Square, is a regular meeting place for us pensioners as we draw our weekly pension, in cash. Sometimes the queue sneaks down the King’s Road, but the long wait gives us the opportunity to catch up on local gossip and concerns. The ‘persons’ behind the grille are helpful and courteous, and we all know each other well. The government wants us to transfer our custom to Barclays, but if we had a problem it would involve an endless frustrating wait until ‘customer services’ respond from Bangalore or some equally puzzling conurbation. There is always some incident in the queue to keep

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 June 2004

Dear Mary Q. Can you tell me who all these people are who wear black eye-patches and look like pirates? One only has to look through the social pages of H&Q or Tatler and no party snapshot seems complete without some old boy or gal with an eye-patch. You never see these people at humbler gatherings, so are people of Social Class One especially prone to eye deformities? Are these due to polo or shooting injuries? I’m a doctor and I know you’re from a medical family, Mary, so can you enlighten me? C.T., Southsea, Hampshire A. Although their eye-patches may make them more visible, so to speak, than other

Stephen Glover

Isn’t it time British papers apologised for being wrong about WMD?

Unlike British newspapers, the New York Times enjoys beating its breast. It recently published a lengthy ‘editor’s note’ which acknowledged that its coverage in the months before the invasion of Iraq ‘was not as rigorous as it should have been’. The paper conceded that ‘articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display’ while other articles that called the original ones into question were ‘sometimes buried’. Many people may regard this apology as pompous and rather absurd. But if a newspaper gives the impression that weapons of mass destruction existed in profusion, and posed a deadly threat to the West, should it not apologise when it becomes