Society

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Equitable takes its directors to court, so guess who the winners will be

Charles Thomson has achieved what I thought was impossible. He has provoked me to sympathise with the directors of Equitable Life: the gold braid, that is, on the bridge when the ship hit the iceberg. Our oldest life assurance office — set up in 1762, which made it Barings’ twin — had been holed below the waterline. I have not, until now, had a kind word to say for them. I accused them of trying to save the society’s skin at the expense of its reputation, and failing. After that failure, they were pushed overboard, and now their successors are trying to sink them. Next week, in the High Court,

Alexander Van Straubenzee

The stench of death

Lieutenant John Randall discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by accident. Sixty years ago, on 15 April 1945, Randall, then a 24-year-old SAS officer, was on a reconnaissance mission in northern Germany. He and his driver were heading down the road to L

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Everyone benefits | 9 April 2005

Thirteen local authorities have been chosen by the government to be Cultural Pathfinders, showing how culture and sport can help to deliver government priorities across public life. The government’s social, environmental and economic agenda is to be promoted through cultural initiatives at local level. In a joint initiative with the Local Government Association (LGA), the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has chosen Birmingham, Canterbury, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Liverpool, Manchester, North and South Tyneside, the London Borough of Richmond, Spelthorne, Sheffield, Somerset and Suffolk to: * Show how culture can contribute to other government work at local level in the fields of healthy living, community safety and social cohesion * Use

Norman Davies

God and mammon

Krakow The greatest churchman of modern times is dead; and the most Catholic nation in Europe is bereft. John Paul II, ‘Papa Wojtyla’ has passed on to a better life. His faithful compatriots must fend for themselves. Men and women weep without shame. Requiem services are celebrated every hour from dawn till midnight. Congregations spill out on to the street, kneeling on the paving stones. Thousands of candles flicker in their coloured-glass holders before makeshift shrines. Radio stations play sombre symphonies or take calls from distressed listeners. The TV channels which aren’t closed down flip endlessly between ‘St Peter’s Square — Live’ and long prepared films about the late Pope’s

Friday

Boris Johnson

Diary – 8 April 2005

This election is a swindle. It is a fraud on the electorate. We are asked to vote for one man, Blair, when he has explicitly said that he will not serve a full five years, and the chances must therefore be that the Labour machine will try, at some point in the next few years, to insert Gordon Brown. That would be utterly outrageous, not just because he is a gloomadon-popping, interfering, high-taxing complicator of life, but mainly because he is a Scot, and government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context. Not only is Scotland full of rotten boroughs, where Labour MPs are returned

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 8 April 2005

Great thinkers have recently been grappling with what ‘happiness’ is, and various answers have emerged that have surely never occurred to anyone before: ‘love and friendship’, to which ‘respect, family, standing and fun’ have been added. Who would have thought it? Ancient Greeks would have narrowed those six down to three. They would have matched ‘family’ with ‘friendship’ and seen both as aspects of philia, feebly translated as ‘friendship’ but actually meaning something like ‘being in a relationship with someone who makes common cause with you’ (philia is cognate with Latin suus, ‘one’s own’). Greeks famously divided society into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, and urged doing good to the one and

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 2 April 2005

Mr Howard Flight who, many were surprised to learn, was deputy chairman of the Conservative party, had the whip withdrawn and was told by Mr Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, that he could not stand for Parliament as a Conservative candidate after he addressed a dinner of the Conservative Way Forward association. When discussing savings in public expenditure identified by the James report, Mr Flight told the meeting, ‘The real issue is, having won power, do you then go for it?’ This was presented by Labour as an admission of secretly planned cuts. When Mr Flight refused to go quietly, the row overshadowed the embarrassment in the Labour party about

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 2 April 2005

The attempt by the Pope to pronounce his Easter blessing on Sunday and his failure in that attempt were so moving. On the day which, of all days, affirms life, John Paul II must particularly have longed to speak. As he struggled to do so, he looked like a strong man drowning, in sight of the shore yet unable to reach it. Some say that such a sick man should abdicate. But surely the Pope is fulfilling the vows which he made when he became a priest. He is trying to stand in the place of Christ, not usurping Him, but imitating Him. Against the humiliations which Christ endured, those

Taki

Untold suffering

Nemmersdorf is a village in East Prussia that was overrun by the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. After seizing the village, the Russkies raped all the women, regardless of age, and then crucified them. All of them. Men and children were clubbed to death or run over with tanks. Not a single person survived. It was payback for three years of Nazi atrocities during their invasion of Russia. German units counter-attacked and retook Nemmersdorf, and then invited reporters from three neutral countries — Sweden, Switzerland and Spain — to see what our Allies had done. German newsreels showed the horror non-stop. Which brings me to General George Patton, my

Frank Keating

Dream on!

Until the 1980s, England vs Northern Ireland was a calendar annual. Then the ‘Home’ championship was brutally abandoned. So to those of a certain generation last week’s soccer fixture seemed surreal. As surreal, I daresay, as the play which opens in Stockholm next Friday — British playwright Nick Grosso’s depiction of a randy Swedish coach of an England soccer team described, deadpan, by the theatre spokesman as ‘a relationship-comedy twisted into the realms of the absurd’. Methinks Nick will have to be on top form to ratchet any new ‘twist’ from our sexy Sven’s real-life relationship absurdities. England’s World Cup qualifier against Northern Ireland was followed closely by another in

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 2 April 2005

Dear Mary… Q. As a single person I invite many people over for dinner. Invariably the numbers are not equal, but I go to immense pains to get a mixture of guests who will find each other interesting, and also try to cook something special and delicious. The return invitations are invariably of the ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’ variety (‘Do come over. It’ll be Just Us. I don’t know what I’ll cook — probably pot luck’). To rub salt into the wound, at these suppers I am regaled with stories of the sparkling dinner parties my hosts have recently held, all featuring people who are fascinating but — most important — in couples.

Aidan Hartley

Don’t Worrie Be Happy

Swat, Pakistan The Swat valley’s apple orchards are in blossom even as the snow still lies thick on the mountains. It’s been the harshest winter in memory. I came here on the trail of my late friend Carlos Mavroleon, an extraordinary man who had many of his adventures in this part of the world. The ancients thought Swat was paradise. It must still have been lovely 30 years ago, when Carlos — just 17 at the time, on the run from Millfield and following the Magic Bus route East — descended the Malakand Pass to see the valley open out before him. Today, from the Grand Trunk Road turnoff to

Jaspistos

A tricky hand

In Competition No. 2385 you were invited to incorporate 13 given words into a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-card sense. Searching for Tolstoy’s ‘happy families’ quotation in my Bartlett’s, what did I find bang next to it? This from War and Peace: ‘The old man used to say that a nap after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.’ ‘Finesse’ was the tricky one: I didn’t think it sounded unforced on the lips of either Gerard Benson’s plodding policeman or Brian Murdoch’s violent burglar. Blackjack and poker led to a lot of GBH, but the top prize (£30) goes to Margaret Joy’s peaceful rural scene, in

Christopher Fildes

Ce que je redis au peuple fran

The trouble with a referendum, as Kenneth Clarke noted, is that people do not always answer the question you ask them. You want to know if they favour a bimetallistic approach to the currency, and they say ‘Throw the rascals out.’ Something of the sort may be happening to Jacques Chirac. He had the French all geared up to vote for Europe’s new constitution, the polls are now running against him, but it may be that the voters have tired of a President who keeps flying off to Japan to watch the sumo wrestling. Even so, a Non vote next month would halt the constitution in its tracks, and would

Paul Johnson

Going down to Kew in daffodil time

When spring finally reached London after those Arctic weeks with the bitter wind from the east, I hurried out to Kew to see what was happening to Nature. And there it all was: millions of daffodils in massed marching ranks, spreading golden carpets between the still bare specimen trees. The crocuses broke ‘like fire’ at my feet, as Tennyson says, and the magnolia blossoms were bursting on the trees with all the pent-up energy stored during the long, cold winter months: an extravaganza in ivory. But first I looked in at the parish church of St Anne on Kew Green. It is one of my favourite churches because it has

Peter Oborne

Mr Flight is a throwback to the age of representative democracy

Jim Callaghan, who died last Saturday, was the last British prime minister in the commonly accepted sense of the word. After him several factors — the degradation of the Gladstonian idea of a disinterested Civil Service, the collapse of Parliament, the emergence of a professional political elite and the rise of the media class were four of the most important — irrevocably changed the nature of the post. In other words Jim Callaghan was the last prime minister from the long age of representative democracy in Britain, which stretched roughly from 1867, the date of the Second Reform Act, till the general election of 1979 and the emergence of Margaret

The Spectator

Unfair but right

To the minds of many reasonable people the punishment meted out to Howard Flight, MP for Arundel and the South Downs, has been of unwarranted severity. No one — not even the genial Mr Flight — denies that his words were ill chosen. But his supporters would say that at heart they reflected nothing more than his general instinct for small government, and his general desire to stop waste and economise on spending — ambitions which all Tories should applaud. He was speaking at a private meeting, and did not expect to be reported. He was stitched up. Many reasonable people, not a few of them among his fellow MPs

Simon Heffer

Honi soi qui mal y pense

Ours would be a grim age if we were to deny millions of people cheap and satisfying entertainment, and so, therefore, perhaps we should be especially grateful to the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles as they approach their wedding day. Few people in Britain seem to welcome the happiness the couple clearly feel as they approach the regularisation of their relationship. However, the joy the public finds instead in engaging in acts of spite, hypocrisy, gratuitous vilification and outright republicanism seems to more than make up for that. Among politicians even one so supposedly senior as the oafish Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, allowed himself a sneer

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 1 April 2005

A Lithuanian girl arrived in England looking for work and was promptly sold for £4,000 to an Albanian. He raped her and put her in a brothel. She escaped, was recaptured, sent to another brothel, then sold for £3,000, escaped again, was recaptured again, sent to London, traded several more times and finally fled to the police. She was 15. This poor girl must feel her life has been utterly destroyed, but she must not give up hope. Even in the ancient world, where slavery and therefore trading in humans as commodities were commonplace, there were glimmers of it. Female slaves were regularly put into brothels (the Greek for ‘whore’,

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Diary – 1 April 2005

My husband and I have a week’s holiday, and we have told everyone who asks that we are going to Marrakesh. We haven’t bothered booking, of course, because we are disorganised and thus choose to believe the oft-repeated lie that there are these incredible last-minute deals on the internet. I try to buy tickets the night before we are due to depart, and there it is, the incredible last-minute deal: the price of a British Airways return flight to Marrakesh has risen to £900. We fly to Biarritz instead. Biarritz is a chic old lady who was once a rip-roaring good-time girl. The temperature is balmy but at this time