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Society

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Let’s go nuclear

I am not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that there is almost no oil left anywhere in the world. Out of a sort of childish spite, one is obviously delighted that soon enough countries like Saudi Arabia will have nothing with which to hold the world to ransom. And nothing has caused more environmental damage to our planet than the consumption of hydrocarbons (except maybe that comet which allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs). On the other hand, I am not sure that I wish my children to experience a rapid return to the Stone Age — which will be their future unless we begin

Friday

Charles Spencer

Diary – 20 August 2004

Summertime, and the house is open. Often people ask me what it is like having your home ‘invaded’ by the public. Well, it all comes down to attitude. If you see the approach of a coach, and the theme tune of Mastermind — ‘Approaching Menace’ — starts to well up in your brain, then you really should absent yourself from proceedings. If, however, you and those working with you can give a genuine welcome, then happiness is transmitted and received. Also, so many come who have their personal connections to Althorp: the centurion who was a housemaid to my great-grandfather, yet who had never before been allowed through the front

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 August 2004

I’m sure I can’t remember hearing it used wrongly before, and now I’ve heard it twice in a fortnight from politicians. Perhaps they catch it from each other. The phrase in question is in extremis and it has been used as if it meant ‘extremely’ or ‘in extreme circumstances’. In truth it means ‘on the point of death’, as the OED records. The earliest citation is from 1530, in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey about the Dean of St Paul’s, who was on his way out. Well, that is the earliest citation in English, as it were, though it has long been used in Latin with this meaning. The same

Taki

Elephant in the room

Gstaad Sorry to bore you, but more about Poles. In all the years I’ve been writing ‘High life’, no column of mine has had such a positive response as ‘Pole position’, of three weeks ago, which is a record for yours truly. Poles in general and Taki in particular are not everyone’s favourites, but this time it seems we’re suddenly the cat’s whiskers. Even here in Gstaad, the Mecca of the nouveaux riches and almost-famous, people have come up to me and thanked me for writing that the Poles are the best and bravest people in Europe. (I thank everyone who has written so kindly, especially Andrej Zatuski, who enclosed

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 August 2004

More than 140 cockle-pickers were rescued four miles from shore on the sands of Morecambe Bay after the tractors of two rival gangs collided. Four rowers attempting to break the west-east Atlantic crossing record were rescued on the 39th day after huge waves split their boat 300 miles off the Isles of Scilly. Five British men, five Portuguese and two Belgians diving in the Red Sea off Egypt were rescued, with the help of friendly dolphins, after a 13-hour search when they were swept 45 miles away from their boat. Mr Michael Howard, the Leader of the Opposition, said that police should not waste time recording the race of everyone

The Spectator

Feedback | 14 August 2004

Pole position As Simon Heffer says (‘It’s time to move on’, 7 August), there is no earthly reason why Britain should apologise to Poland for not doing more to help the Poles during the Warsaw uprising. Nor could Britain’s ally the United States have done anything. Prime Minister Belka thinks that Churchill should have dispatched Free Polish troops to help the insurgents under Komorowski-B

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 14 August 2004

Dear Mary… Q. What is the correct attitude to strike when a friend regularly inquires whether one has read the latest issue of The Spectator, the purpose of the inquiry being to draw one’s attention to correspondence from that person in the issue in question? As the friendship is dear, I would welcome your advice on a suitable, gentle put-down.J.V.B., St Peter Port, Guernsey A. This all sounds very Pooterish and I am tempted to tick you off for mean-spiritedness. However, you may have supplied me with insufficient detail, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Why not reply with enthusiasm, ‘Yes, and I saw your letter

George Osborne

While England sleeps

This week an unusual piece of junk mail joined the forest of pizza delivery leaflets and minicab cards on my doormat. It was a white envelope marked with six chunky coloured circles under which was written: ‘Inside: Important Information from HM Government’. I assumed the ‘important information’ would be that I had been specially selected to win a prize draw and almost threw it away. In fact it turned out to be a leaflet from something called the National Steering Committee on Warning and Informing the Public telling me ‘What to do in an Emergency’. This mysterious Committee obviously didn’t want to alarm anyone by telling them what the ‘emergency’

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The truth about journalism is that almost none of it keeps

Unless I am much mistaken, obituarists and tribute-writers have this week been poring over the Fleet Street archives, beset by a difficulty as unexpected as it has been puzzling. We have been looking for brilliant, extended passages of the late Bernard Levin’s writing to offer modern readers a sample (and older readers a reminder) of the work of a man who we all agree was one of the 20th century’s greatest British columnists. We remember his greatness. We recall the thrill as Bernard laid into the idiots and idiocies of the age. How we wished we’d said that! How we wished we had his courage, his effrontery, his learning, his

Peter Oborne

The best news for Michael Howard is that Blair has decided to fight the next election

On Monday, just as people settled down for the summer holidays, Michael Howard returned from his. He slipped back into Britain and at once set to work. He is already two thirds of the way through the probable term of his leadership. Just eight months remain until the general election, most likely to be called in May. So this may be Howard’s only summer as Tory leader, and he is determined not to waste a moment. There have been mutterings against Michael Howard in the past few weeks, but no one can challenge the dedication, commitment and passion that this battle-hardened 63-year-old brings to his job. This month, as Tony

The Spectator

First gold to Greece

Dick Pound, a senior member of the International Olympic Committee, speaks for many when he says of the Greeks: ‘They think things being ready at 11:59 is plenty of time. It drives the rest of the world nuts.’ It has become commonplace over the past months to portray the modernday Greeks as unworthy inheritors of the ancient civilisation with which they share their name. The Athens Olympics would never be ready on time, it was said with confidence, or if they were the stadium would have no roof and runners would choke to death on the city’s notorious traffic fumes. If the word ma

Andrew Lambirth

Postcards from the South Seas

If you consult The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists on the subject of William Hodges, the brief entry will inform you that he was a British landscape painter, pupil of Richard Wilson ‘and his most accomplished imitator’, and that not finding success in London he joined Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific as official landscape artist. That was in 1772–5. From 1780 to 1784 he was in India, and in 1790 he visited Russia. ‘Hodges’, we are told, ‘skilfully adapted Wilson’s technique and rules of composition to exotic material, while maintaining an air of documentary fidelity.’ I am a seasoned admirer of Yale’s Dictionary, expertly compiled by

Benet Simon

Ban this evil rag!

The last time I visited my cousins — three boys between the ages of eight and 13 — they were playing a new video game that their mother had bought for them. The eight-year-old had hooked the computer up to an overhead projector and was cruising city streets in an enormous tank, pausing occasionally to point a flame-thrower in the direction of passing pedestrians, policemen and prostitutes and burning them to death. The game was Grand Theft Auto 2, the creation of a company called Rockstar, and it is at the centre of a $246 million lawsuit in the US, accused of provoking teenagers to real-life violence. Making sure that

Katharine Whitehorn

Bernard Levin remembered

I knew Bernard Levin when we both worked on The Spectator at the end of the Fifties, during its uncharacteristically radical period. He wrote a parliamentary sketch under the name of Taper, and was about the first to treat the political scene as theatre — and amateur theatre at that — rather than a court of high seriousness, though the idea of doing it that way came from the editor, Brian Inglis. Bernard called it ‘the principle that you mainly record the slipping false teeth of those with whose views you disagree’. Inglis, the man who invented the phrase ‘fringe medicine’, had plucked Bernard from the magazine Truth, where he

Andrew Kenny

Another form of racism

Andrew Kenny says that the National party has met its logical end — in the bosom of the racist ANC Last week an Afrikaans man with a plump face, large spectacles and the nickname of ‘Kortbroek’ (Short Pants) announced that he was joining the ANC. Thus ends the 90-year history of the most radical and notorious political party in the history of South Africa. Thus ends the National party of apartheid. The writer J.G. Farrell once said that the greatest phenomenon of his age was the decline of the British empire. The greatest political experience of my life in South Africa has been the decline of Afrikaner power, which saw

Friday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Diary – 13 August 2004

The Pope is going to Lourdes at the weekend. But he has made it clear in advance that he is not going for a cure, even though he has Parkinson’s disease and for several years now has looked as if he might die at any moment. Rather, he is going to the world’s most famous Marian shrine ‘to praise God for his gifts’ (God’s, that is, not his own). So that’s that. It must be said that Lourdes is one of the very few places on earth where the Pope is likely to blend in. I’ve been only once, a couple of years ago, and I’ve never been anywhere that

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 13 August 2004

How Francis Crick, discoverer of the structure of DNA, must be enjoying himself in the Underworld! He had so much in common with the early Greek philosophers. These thinkers, who were natural scientists rather than philosophers, debated what the world was made of and how it came to be as it was. They established some basic rules of scientific debate — that the world was rationally constructed and could therefore be understood by the use of reason and argument from hypotheses, and that supernatural explanations for the phenomena under discussion were not allowed. Crick would have thoroughly approved of all this, especially of the fact that some of these thinkers

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 August 2004

Thirteen men of Asian appearance in their twenties and thirties were arrested by police investigating terrorism; the arrests were in north-west London; Bushey, Hertfordshire; Luton, Bedfordshire and Blackburn, Lancashire. Separate plans by al-Qa’eda terrorists to attack buildings in Britain were discovered after arrests in Pakistan, but the Home Office said no more than: ‘We are maintaining a state of heightened readiness.’ Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, came up with the idea of a new law to force paedophiles to take lie-detector tests when asked if they had been in contact with children after being released from prison. Mr Mark Palios resigned as chief executive of the Football Association over

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 August 2004

Shakespeare invented the words anchovy, well-ordered, worm-hole and zany. Or did he? I’ve been nagged at the back of my mind (a tender spot) by doubts about Shakespeare ever since I wrote (5 June) about Dr David Crystal’s remarks in his excellent book The Stories of English. Dr Crystal notes that of the 2,035 words (or ‘lexemes’) first attributed to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary, 743 are found elsewhere within 25 years of his using them, and that 900 words eventually fall out of usage. So how many coinages can we attribute to Shakepeare? Dr Crystal concludes, ‘Whether we assess his lexical contribution as 800 or 1,700, it is

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 7 August 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I am 16 and am looking forward to the delights of Daymer Bay in Cornwall, a meeting-ground renowned for its nightly teenage public-school gatherings. I am somewhat nervous as I do not smoke, and most of my friends use cigarettes as tools of entry into a circle of people. How, Mary, can I avoid the terrible prospect of being left standing alone, and thus immediately being classified as a loser? M.M.H., Wooton Rivers, Wiltshire A. I am reliably informed that the correct etiquette for those wishing to enter a conversational cluster on Daymer Bay is to simply walk into it saying, ‘Blahblahblah.’ This is an ironic nod