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Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 10 July 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, asked by the Commons liaison committee if he would apologise for going to war with Iraq for the wrong reasons, said: ‘It has got rid of Saddam Hussein and he was a tyrant. I do not believe there was not a threat in relation to weapons of mass destruction. I have to accept the fact that we have not found them, but we have found very clear evidence of intent and desire. Whether they were hidden, removed or destroyed, he was in clear breach of UN resolutions.’ Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said he would try again to introduce a law against inciting

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 10 July 2004

Dear Mary… Q. We have a house in Spain and the parents of one of our daughter’s schoolfriends asked if they could rent it for two weeks. We said, well, we don’t rent it; what we will do is lend it to you and ask you to give a cheque to our favourite charity. We said that people normally give two grand to the charity for each week that they take the house. This figure was agreed. The day of their departure was dawning and there was no sign of a cheque, so I rang and said that our driver would bring them the keys and could they give him

Nicholas Harman

An old buffer at large

Were I Lady Nott — a position for which I am ineligible — I would be a bit miffed. Sir John’s new little book is unremitting about his mild longings for young women. This, to be sure, makes it more fun than his last publication, the ‘controversial’ memoirs of yet another ex-minister. But he does go on about the girls, and the free bus pass he now has giving him a top-deck view into the knicker-shop windows. Nott was sent to parliament in the days before Mrs Thatcher and the marketing men, when the Conservative party put up gentlefolk as its candidates at elections, and therefore won them. Since he

Peter Oborne

Howard’s Conservative party has made astonishing progress in a very short time

Just before the 1966 World Cup the England manager Sir Alf Ramsey remarked that his talented midfielder Martin Peters was ‘ten years ahead of his time’. Peters himself was displeased by the observation, but Ramsey was in reality being flattering. He meant that his player was not truly at ease among the clodhopping defenders and midfield ‘hard men’ who set the tone in the 1960s. Peters’s fluid, complex, visionary style anticipated an era that had not yet arrived. Very much the same can be said of Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor. To the more primitive type of Tory back-bencher, Letwin is the object of contempt. Letwin refuses to use soundbites,

The Spectator

Boycott the NSPCC

Too much theory and not enough practice. Those were the words used this week by a lifelong shire Tory to describe what has become of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She meant that the two societies have become unhealthily politicised. The people who now run them believe it is not enough to do solid, unglamorous work to alleviate cruelty to children and to animals. They think they can only show they are serious, and can only appear on television and get their names in the newspapers, if they become lobby groups run along the

Andrew Lambirth

Cool, anonymous and morbid

If you were to wander round the Luc Tuymans exhibition at Tate Modern (until 26 September) without any previous knowledge of the artist (and with a disinclination to read the information panels), you might come away with the impression that here was a rather traditional painter, eclectic as to subject matter, with a distinctively pale, washed-out palette. The portraits, still lifes and occasional landscape would reassure with their pseudo-familiarity. The faded, emotive colours might even seduce aesthetically. You might enjoy what you construed as a fey poetic vein in the artist, or an attractive intimacy of statement. But you would be wrong. Tuymans deals in banality and horror, and his

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Invasion of the lawyers

Brendan O’Neill says that America’s first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq — the compensation culture. Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims, of individual complaints and class action lawsuits, for everything from physical and mental injury to destruction of property. Iraqis demand compensation for damage caused to their gardens by American tanks, or for the scrapes and dents to their cars caused by run-ins with speeding Humvees. American soldiers have threatened to sue the US military for

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 9 July 2004

As George Bush continues to battle with the problems of Iraq, he could do worse than read Virgil’s Aeneid (19 bc), in which Virgil applauds Rome’s world-wide dominion, but does not discount its human cost. Defeated by the Greeks, a band of now homeless Trojans under Aeneas flees the burning city and, assured by the gods that a new land awaits in the West, sets out on the high seas to find it. False leads take them to Crete and Sicily, and then a storm drives them to Carthage, where the queen Dido seems likely to persuade them to settle, till the gods warn Aeneas off and Dido commits suicide.

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