Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 May 2005

‘What does SIM mean?’ asked my husband, looking up like a sulky sunset from a mobile-phone instruction booklet. Well, I knew what it was, but not what the acronym stood for. This independence of word and significand allows the tiresome multiplication of new labels for new technological gadgets, but it also teaches old words to learn new tricks. The Queen Mary 2 still sails saillessly. And though I hate train station instead of railway station, at least the train part was used in the 15th century for the trailing part of a dress (as now), and in a bundle of connected senses of things pulled, extending to the retinue of

Frank Keating

Untimely obits

With a clamour of various cup finals due to close out the winter’s activities — and with anniversaryitis so fashionable — I am surprised to have read nothing on the infamous Khaki Cup final of 1915, especially as it was the first notable match played, in only their tenth year of existence, by the team of 2005: League champions and centenarians Chelsea. The springtime before Liverpool (the Champions League finalists) had also made their first appearance in the Cup final, losing 1-0 to Burnley at Crystal Palace. Within three months, on 4 August 1914, war was declared and a hullabaloo grew through the autumn as a new season of professional

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 14 May 2005

Dear Mary… Q. A man I cannot avoid at drinks parties is now sixtysomething and, after years of having been highly sought after by women, now lives without a woman and so has lost it slightly in terms of his personal grooming. That does not bother me. What does bother me is that he has a habit of chomping on nuts, crisps, canapes, whatever is available, but carrying on talking at the same time and consequently spraying the face of his interlocutor with quite substantial pellets of food. He seems to be gloriously unaware of the fact that he is doing this. How can I, without being unkind, discourage this

Anthony Daniels

One way of doing it

In his essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, De Quincey derides poisoning as an inferior method of bringing about the death of others. It seemed to him both sneaky and unmanly. However, the age that succeeded him was a golden age of poisoners, many of whose crimes are remembered to this day. De Quincey was wrong, or at least in a minority: everyone, except of course the victim, loves a good poisoning. Arsenic and antimony were the elements whose compounds were most frequently employed by Victorian murderers and murderesses, but the author also considers those of mercury, lead and thallium. Contrary to the title, he deals not

Jaspistos

Telly horrors

In Competition No. 2391 you were invited to offer six unappealing programmes, together with a TV critic’s unpersuasive recommendation. This week I feel, like Macbeth, that ‘I have supped full of horrors’. Ohne mich! as they say in Berlin. I have reduced the main prizewinners’ entries by one item each in order to include a few extra single felicities. So Brian Murdoch gets £30, the five other main winners get £20 each, and the single-time merchants £5 apiece. Thank you all. I was greatly amused. Mean City!: In the search for Britain’s most average town we go north of the border to see whether Cowdenbeath can match last week’s powerful

Taki

What’s in a name?

New York I Married a Princess is among the most embarrassing reality shows to have appeared on American television, which makes it unique in view of the garbage which fill the airways 24 unrelenting hours per day. The format is a simple one: a man and his wife and their small children spend their days being filmed saying nice things to each other. Children’s nappies are changed, the husband goes shopping for food, the wife cooks and opens some mail — it was so boring I had to turn it off. The banal horror takes place in Hollywood and the star is ‘Princess’ Catherine Oxenberg, with her real-life actor hubby,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The gentleness and courage of my friend Peter Campbell

The late Peter Campbell, sometime professor of politics at the University of Reading, would have enjoyed the irony. He died just before the general election. His funeral was hastily arranged for Friday 6 May, mid-morning, in Reading. For me these were a couple of days of little sleep and intensely hard work. So Peter will forgive my confession that when his executors asked me to give the eulogy at St Luke’s Church in Reading at 11.30, the timing did not seem ideal. But to speak for him was an honour. I am so glad I did. As all the ill temper of an exceptionally negative election campaign came to its

The Spectator

Floreat Notting Hill

They are Achilles and Patroclus. They are David and Jonathan. They are Wallace and Gromit. Not since the emergence of the youthful Blair and Brown has there been a pair of politicians who have been so evidently close in ideology and outlook, and who have so captivated spectators by their general voter-friendliness. In making George Osborne shadow Chancellor, and appointing David Cameron to be shadow Education Secretary, Michael Howard has naturally exposed these two young men to the epileptic jealousy of their elders. Among the punditocracy, and among their colleagues on the Tory benches, there will now be plenty of people who are willing them to fail; and the very

Alex Bilmes

Sachs appeal

Recently I found myself idling away an afternoon in Angelina Jolie’s Winnebago. Angelina and I were discussing books. More specifically, she was talking me through her taste in erotic fiction, which spans the centuries from the Marquis de Sade to ‘more modern stuff’. ‘Sometimes,’ she remarked, ‘you find a passage that works for you and you can go back to it over and over.’ Crikey! Glancing around her rather anonymous trailer, parked inside a vast hangar about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, I was disappointed to see no evidence to support her claim to an interest in mucky literature. Instead, there was only one book on her sofa, there

Jules Evans

Is Belarus next in line?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the drums of revolution beating once more in Washington. The neoconservatives have found another regime that needs changing, another enemy of ‘freedom’, and they are setting about putting matters right in their usual way. This time the target is Belarus, a small country in between Poland, Ukraine and Russia with a population of 10 million. Since 1996 Belarus has been run as a communist dictatorship by President Aleksander Lukashenko. All the usual precursors to a US-sponsored ‘revolution’ are in place: an influential Washington NGO — the US Committee on Nato — has said that fostering democracy in Belarus is an ‘essential, moral and

Peter Oborne

The end of Tony Blair

A peculiar arrangement prevailed in 8th-century France, during the final decades of the Merovingian dynasty. The power of the kings, once savage and formidable, had subsided and then collapsed. They continued to enjoy the title of monarch, but the real power was exercised by officers of the royal household, the so-called ‘mayors of the palace’. The mayors ruled, while the Merovingians, who were regarded with contempt, occupied a purely formal and instrumental role. This pattern of indirect rule, with its separation of real and titular authority, is by no means unique. Japanese emperors in the 9th century ruled in name only. The Fujiwaras, a dynasty of court officials, exercised the

Friday

Leanda De-Lisle

Diary – 13 May 2005

The trouble with country life is that it is so unhealthy. Where I used to walk to the Tube I now take the car. Where I used to go out and see friends I now ruin my eyes watching television. After 20 years in Leicestershire I am almost blind and I have no muscle tone. But I have determined to go on a health and beauty drive. My first stop is the optician, where I demand tinted contact lenses — only to be told I can’t have them. They say you should suffer to be beautiful but, apparently, if you are long-sighted, stabbing at your pupils without blinking doesn’t earn

Thursday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 12 May 2005

Les événements in France have provoked self-congratulation here. Apparently, the French model of assimilation is bad. If they had our multiculturalism, the celebration of diversity and ethnic monitoring, everything would be much better, it is said. The French are 20 years behind us, etc. It seems but yesterday that I read praise of France for its tough secularism which forbids anything religious in state schools and exalts being French above everything else. I also read that France would escape serious disturbance because it had been opposed to the Iraq war. It would be better to accept the truth that any European country with a large Muslim population faces serious unrest

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 May 2005

Britain held a general election, except in South Staffordshire, where the death of the Liberal Democrat candidate after ballot papers had been sent out required the holding of a by-election later. More than five million requests for postal votes had been met. The Conservatives had hoped that the result would be unexpected in the same way as that in 1970. The degree to which Mr Tony Blair was sweating prompted speculation that he would retire from domestic politics early on health grounds. Campaigning in Huddersfield before the election, Mr Blair said of David Blunkett, the disgraced former home secretary: ‘That is one of the most special people I have ever

The Spectator

Feedback | 7 May 2005

Made in Britain ‘Today, the Mother of Parliaments has lost half its power, with Brussels making half of British laws,’ says Anthony Browne (‘Parliament of eunuchs’, 30 April). My Conservative opponent in Rotherham goes further. His election address says that 70 per cent of UK law is now made in Brussels. The truth is more modest. According to the House of Commons Library — an impartial all-party outfit — in a report produced in March, less than 9 per cent of UK law originates in Brussels. Confusion seems to have arisen because under the EU’s Single Market there are common rules applying to all European business — many of them

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 7 May 2005

I was surprised by the number of people who disliked the Daily Telegraph’s headline on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy: ‘“God’s rottweiler” is the new pope’. I don’t think it was meant to be as rude as many thought. But what puzzled me was that I had never heard anyone refer to Ratzinger as ‘God’s rottweiler’. It seems to be a common failure of the whole press to assert that people are ‘known as’ some catchy nickname, when no one ever uses it. One might call it the Dubbing Fallacy. Dub, since the 12th century has signified the conferring of a knighthood, and by the 16th century

Taki

How to win

Trust Tony Blair to call an election the day after The Spectator goes to press: 5 May is a lousy day for conservatives the world over. Karl Marx was born 5 May 1818 in Trier, the Rhineland. The only good thing about the date took place in 1816, when ‘O Solitude’, John Keats’s first published poem, appeared in the Examiner. Mind you, bad day or not, I’m rooting for only two men, the sainted editor and Michael Gove. Both will be elected, and that’s my final word. Michael Howard I will not feel sorry for. Although I know nothing about business, I used to use a sports metaphor when my

Frank Keating

Kelly’s eye

Dotted about the house is the occasional sporting print. Flash, bang, wallop, what a photograph! At the top of our staircase is Herbert Fishwick’s imperishable study at Sydney in 1928 of Hammond’s pluperfect cover-drive -— coiled power, poise, omnipotence, and with the famous blue handkerchief peeping from his pocket. Among the family snaps and sepia descendants on the walls of the downstairs cloakroom is Neil Leifer’s bespoke, breathtaking birdseye shot of Cleveland Williams canvas-flattened by Ali at Houston in 1966, a memorable Neil Libbert evocation of that golden afternoon at Wembley in the same year, and a Patrick Eager 1/500th-of-a-second first-ball freeze-frame of Warne vs Gatting at Old Trafford a

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 7 May 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have been invited to an election-night party being given by neighbours of the opposite political persuasion to ourselves. We are very fond of these people but they are very much New Order and we are very much Old, so, to keep things harmonious, the subject of politics is normally given a wide berth. However, we cannot get out of attending this party. Should the worst happen and it becomes clear that New Labour will be swept back into office, how can we keep the despair and bitterness from registering on our faces and remain gracious during what will be a four-to-five hour alcohol-fuelled

Tim Congdon

Charity hopeth all things

Should rich nations give to poor nations? Put bluntly like that, the question of international aid demands the answer ‘yes’. Anyone who tries to qualify the ‘yes’ is liable to be criticised as selfish, unfeeling and inhuman. In his The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs sharpens the question. Should very rich people in very rich nations give to very poor nations, especially to the nations of sub-Saharan Africa? His answer is an unqualified ‘yes’. He urges all the leading industrial nations and, in particular, the USA to raise official development assistance to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals proposed at the