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Society

Saturday

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

Peter Oborne

Howard profits from the rise of the Notting Hill Tories

Parliament was never designed for glorious weeks of high summer like this one. Its book-lined corridors; its snug bars; its beery, false jocularity; the stench of thwarted ambition; those great thick walls; the badly kept secrets; the formal dress code; those fat, florid, middle-aged men: all this makes Westminster a winter place. Summer weeks like this are about beauty, flirtation, gaiety and sport. Sensible MPs, like Nicholas Soames, Robin Cook and David Cameron (this week singled out by Michael Howard as a man with a great role to play in the future of the Tory party) contemplated escape to Royal Ascot. But the others lingered, made do with drinking cheap

The Spectator

The flunking examiners

From Marks & Spencer to Network Rail, from Shell to Enron, this truth becomes daily more self-evident: it is not the poor bloody workers who cause the trouble, but the rich bloody management. The latest ‘senior management team’ to prove the point is a GCSE and A-level examination board. Last week the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) was, to its acute embarrassment, discovered to be nursing a closely guarded secret — that from June 2006, Latin and Greek would never again feature on its syllabuses. ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’ said Socrates. He would have been surprised to find an examination board disagreeing, but why should it care

Laura Gascoigne

Moments of experience

At its annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in May, the Royal Society of British Artists held a debate on the motion ‘This house believes that a found object cannot be a work of art’. The motion’s obvious subtext was that since Duchamp’s snow shovel the ‘found object’ has been digging away at the foundations of traditional hand-made art, with potentially catastrophic consequences. A team of speakers, including Julian Spalding (author of The Eclipse of Art), made impassioned speeches in the motion’s favour, and even those against seemed so half-hearted that Peregrine Worsthorne was moved to inquire from the floor: ‘Is there an argument here?’ If there is, it’s not

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 19 June 2004

The government wants to find ways of helping us to lose weight. It could start by ceasing to shower farmers with subsidies to grow sugar. Remarkably, given the public money that is spent on telling us not to eat fattening foods, the EU gave European sugar producers 819 million euros worth of subsidy last year, either in the form of guaranteed prices, direct subsidies for exports or in other help. Defra, for example, funds a Hertfordshire research centre, Brooms Barn, helping Britain’s 7,000 sugar beet growers to squeeze ever more subsidised sugar out of the East Anglian soil. For this exercise, British consumers have their wallets emptied four times over.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

One law for the Americans

One of my favourite quotes of the last ten years, for a public display of unintentional black humour, came from a spokesman for Noraid, the American-based organisation which raises funds for the IRA. This chap had been asked, a few days after 9/11, to comment upon the possibility that people might perceive some similarities of method between al-Qa’eda and the good ol’ knee-cappin’ Provos. The Twin Towers had collapsed and Americans were, for the first time, acquainted with the trauma of terrorism on their own soil. The Noraid man was quite outraged by the nature of the inquiry and eventually spluttered, ‘There’s no comparison at all. None whatsoever. The IRA

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 18 June 2004

As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue. In one of his ‘Table Talks’, Plutarch and friends are trying to work out whether brand new diseases could come into the world — as some doctors claimed — and if so, how: from other worlds, or what? The general conclusion reached is that, just as the facts of any case might allow one true statement to

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 June 2004

Britain went to the polls to elect members for the European Parliament, an exercise which the Liberal Democrats had portrayed as a ‘referendum on Iraq’. Thousands of postal ballot papers went undelivered in Bolton, and two men were arrested in Oldham after claims of fraud. London re-elected a mayor. ‘I am back playing the guitar now and I love it,’ Mr Blair said in an interview with Time Out. Heads of state from Britain, the United States, Russia, France and Germany marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day with ceremonies in Normandy. The first transit of Venus visible from Britain for 122 years duly occurred. Government figures showed that military equipment

Max Hastings

Diary – 12 June 2004

I spent Sunday in the BBC TV studio in Arromanches through six hours of live coverage of the D-Day commemoration. It would never do to tell them this, but I would have done it for nothing. It is 30 years since I took part in a big outside broadcast. The cliché is true: it brings out the best in the Beeb. No one else can do anything like it. Even when vulgarity has overtaken some other bits of the Corporation, the Events department has inherited from the Richard Dimbleby era an instinctive sense of national responsibility and an infinite capacity for taking pains. I was moved by how jolly and

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 June 2004

I heard the other day that the late Lord Hartwell, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, had once exclaimed that when he was at Eton he had been taught never to begin a sentence with the word but. He then found to his slight mortification that his chance remark had been set as an iron rule for the newspaper’s stylebook. God knows what material their stylebook is made of now. Something spongy, I think. Now Professor Canon J.R. Porter has written to me about a related question: beginning sentences with and. I had mentioned that sentence after sentence in the so-called Authorised Version of the Bible begins with and. The

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 June 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have an etiquette question for you. I came back from Egypt with a stomach bug the other day, was overcome by nausea on my way across Westbourne Grove, and had to choose between vomiting in the gutter or in the litter bin outside Agnes B. I chose the litter bin but have been told that that was wrong/inconsiderate. Can you rule, Mary? M.W., London W11 A. As the vomiter will be equally humiliated by either course, the point here is to minimise offence to the supporting cast in this mini-drama, so I am sorry to say this means the gutter would have been the better option.

Frank Johnson

There was nothing slow about Ronald Reagan. He spotted me for an Englishman right away

Ronald Reagan fascinated me from the moment he became governor of California in 1966. He was a right-winger who had won office. In those days right-wingers never won anything. Every office-holder or potential office-holder in every democracy — Labour, Tory, Democrat, Republican — seemed to be a liberal or a centrist. All the authorities said that that was the only way democracies could be governed. I had only just become interested in politics, and was bored by the subject already. If no one could do anything differently from anyone else, when would I witness any of the great clashes that I had just started reading about in books? Then came