Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Charity begins at school

Among the many organisations which donors to Comic Relief have generously helped to support is Tar Isteach, a Dublin-based group of former IRA terrorists led by Tommy Quigley, who was jailed in 1985 for three murders. The group recently received £80,000 for its programme of events supposedly aimed at rehabilitating prisoners released under the Good Friday agreement, which consisted of, among other things, a ‘hill walk’ that just happened to retrace a route taken by escaping IRA prisoners, and a talk by Danny Morrison on ‘current developments in the struggle against a broad background of what is going on in the six counties’. It isn’t this use of charity money

Owen Matthews

Bagged by the USA

Owen Matthews goes on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s ‘Indian Country’ and sees them capture and interrogate suspects It was one of those wonderfully luminous Afghan days, the spring sky a vibrant baby-blue, the heat of the day cut by a breeze which blew though fields of poppies and winter barley. We were on the edge of the Khost highlands, where the fertile Khost plain starts to rise into the mountains of the Pakistani border — also known, not so affectionately, by the soldiers of Task Force One of the US army’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment as ‘Indian Country’. Band-i-Khel, the small village we had surrounded with our armoured

Rachel Johnson

Bum rap pinned on parents

Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of ‘reasonable chastisement’ but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please Well, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations, 180 MPs and peers, the Methodist and Catholic Churches, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Lib Dems, 71 per cent of the general public (according to our old friend Mori Z. Poll), Penelope Leach, a roster of the great and the good from David Aaronovitch to Benjamin Zephaniah, and

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 28 May 2004

Last week we considered a number of the arguments that ancient Greeks and Romans deployed to prepare themselves for death. Once dead, however, they had to be buried, and — more important still — someone had to eulogise them. For status-mad Romans, this was not something to be taken lightly; but help was at hand. Menander the Orator (c. ad 300), who is very sound on how to eulogise a harbour, suggests the following for a great man’s funeral. It all sounds quite ghastly. Encomia of the dead person, he tell us, should be based on the following topics: family, birth, nature, nurture, education, accomplishments, actions, Fortune, ending with consolation.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 22 May 2004

‘The task of leadership when things are difficult is precisely not to cut and run,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said at a press conference during a visit to Turkey. ‘We have the will, we have the leadership to do it, we will get the job done,’ he said, with reference to Iraq, but also in response to speculation that he might stand down as Prime Minister. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was observed to have spent 90 minutes in the carpark of the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Argyllshire with Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants to be Prime Minister. ‘Tony Blair

Leo Johnson

Diary – 22 May 2004

Cannes A year ago this week I tried to sell my idea for a blockbuster movie to Sam Goldwyn Junior. It was 12 noon, at the Majestic Hotel. I picked up my briefcase and strode past the upturned packet of Paprika Pringles on the floor. You don’t mess around before this sort of meeting. You prepare — numbers, market share, audience demographics. ‘Tell me,’ opened the mogul, ‘about your film.’ Without hype, but without understatement I laid it out. ‘Eating & Weeping is a Hollywood classic,’ I told him. ‘It is the mainstream, genre movie of Stanko the Bulgarian pastry chef, who accidentally causes the collapse of capitalism.’ Goldwyn looked

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 22 May 2004

‘High street stalwart Marks & Spencer is preparing to go head-to-head with the likes of Topshop,’ said a news report the other day. Never mind ‘going head-to-head’, a metaphor presumably taken from the life of the caribou or elk, and enthusiastically seized upon by people who like to speak of going ‘belly up’ or ‘pear-shaped’, or being ‘dead in the water’ or, more unpleasantly, ‘twisting in the wind’. It’s ‘the likes of’ that I find curious. It has in recent generations borne a derogatory sense. It would be used by a gruff constable to a suspicious person loitering in a public place, or in a pitifully self-depreciatory way by a

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 22 May 2004

Dear Mary Q. Here’s a solution to noisy New Zealand neighbours having barbies in the garden late at night. The last time ours had one my husband went over and told them the noise was absolutely fine by us, but there was a lunatic on crack in the assisted housing flats next to them. Said crack addict had come at him with a leafblower one evening when we’d had the gardeners in and actually smashed a pane of glass in the front door trying to kill him. The police came round and said they couldn’t do a thing about it, of course, which meant it was quite likely he would

John De-Falbe

A thick Celtic mist

Areview copy of Shade comes with two pages of admonitory blurb about what an important film-maker Neil Jordan is. This information might be useful for those with gossip columns to fill but it has no more bearing on the likelihood of this being a good novel than if we were told that the author is big in Morris dancing. Either John Murray is indifferent to reviewers in its new berth at HodderHeadline, or the message is, Don’t dare review this badly, pipsqueak, cos we can make sure you never work again … Then there is this quote from John Banville, Ireland’s best writer: ‘With this fierce, dark and yet luminous

Stephen Glover

Piers Morgan may be a charming and lovable rogue, but he was not a great editor

The sacking of Piers Morgan as editor of the Daily Mirror has been greeted with ululation from media commentators, former and existing editors and several newspapers. Piers, we are told by no less an authority than the legendary Harry Evans, was a great tabloid editor. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Greenslade can barely be consoled. Mr Morgan’s defenders concede that the pictures he published which showed British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners may have been fakes, but it is claimed that they illustrate a wider truth. The only discordant voice I have heard amid the general wailing and gnashing of teeth is that of Martin Kettle in the Guardian. What does

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In Peru llama incest is common, but this is

Last Sunday I collected a waistcoat made from my own pet. From the same source came a hat, gloves, scarf, and a teddy bear wearing a little waistcoat of its own, though (saucily) no trousers. A lady called Chan Brown, from Chesterfield, has organised this for me. I keep llamas, and she spins. She belongs to a group who call themselves the Spinsters and are sometimes to be found on a summer Sunday demonstrating their craft down at Cromford Mill, Joseph Arkwright’s magnificent and until recently neglected first mill, on the Derbyshire Derwent near Matlock Bath. The mill and its surroundings, which are beautifully situated, are being restored by a

The Spectator

Let the poor feed us

Amid the mayhem in Baghdad this week, it would be easy to overlook a significant development towards international peace and security. It came in a letter from Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, and Franz Fischler, agriculture commissioner, to the trade ministers of all 148 members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The EU, they wrote, is prepared to end export subsidies paid to European farmers who sell their goods abroad. By making this offer, the EU raises the possibility that the Doha round of world trade talks, which failed in Cancun last September, can be revived. The threat of trade sanctions is bandied about all too easily in international politics.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Cursed are the peaceniks

James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘The West is like the Great Satan’

Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like a smallish, zoo-kept hawk. ‘Well, his middle name is Cervantes, does that help?’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Sorry!’ I mouth at Sir Crispin. Cup of tea, Sir Crispin? Coffee? Neither. Since signing the open letter that warned the Prime Minister to ‘see better’ over Iraq and Israel, Sir Crispin has been caught in

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 21 May 2004

Last week, we observed ancient attitudes to wanting to live for ever. Being against it, the ancients developed many ways of dealing with death. Since there were no scriptures or creeds in the pre-Christian world, there could have been as many beliefs about death as there were believers. What generally emerges from ancient Greek literature is that religion was all about success and failure in this life, and success depended on having the gods on your side. Consequently, if one dishonoured the gods by e.g., refusing to acknowledge them, one would not have to wait till the afterlife for punishment — it would be visited on you at once. Further,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 May 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, apologised conditionally for crimes that British soldiers might have committed in Iraq: ‘We apologise deeply to anyone who has been mistreated by any of our soldiers.’ He and Foreign Office ministers denied having seen until very recently a Red Cross report of alleged Coalition abuses that was delivered to high Coalition officials in February. More evidence was found for the inauthenticity of photographs published by the Daily Mirror purporting to show British troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners. Mr John Scarlett was named as the next chief of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service; he had been chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee when he took control

Marcus Berkmann

Diary – 15 May 2004

Having once reviewed TV for a living, I obviously never watch the damn thing at all these days if I can help it. But like many males of my age and temperament, I was engrossed late last year by a series called Grumpy Old Men, in which celebrities railed in a futile but well-paid manner against some of the iniquities of the modern world. Some of these men were funny, others were just furious, while a few had obviously been chosen because they were celebrities, and not because they had anything of the slightest interest to say. But never mind. The extraordinary impact of this programme confirmed my own long-held

The Spectator

Feedback | 15 May 2004

Does Nanny know best? Of course Toby Church is right (‘More nanny, less tax’, 8 May). How did we ever come to swallow the notion that the NHS consumer has an inalienable right to receive costly treatment for continued self- inflicted poor health? Banning anything merely diverts it to an area behind the garden shed and is highly undemocratic to boot, and would clearly indicate that our politicians trust us even less than we trust them. One answer surely lies in encouragement; the tax rebate we used to get for health insurance subscriptions, plus rebates on subscriptions for regular gym attendance, etc., should be given in the next Budget, even

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 15 May 2004

To pronounce when reading aloud an entirely different word from the one written on the page might seem a more than Mandarin complication, or perhaps be reminiscent of the Hebrews’ reverence for the Name that prompted them to substitute ‘Adonai’ orally for the word represented by the tetragrammaton. Yet we do just such a thing with Mrs. Once it stood for mistress. Quite when the spoken realisation became missis is not easy to tell. ‘The contracted pronunciation, which in other applications of the word has never been more than a vulgarism,’ comments the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘became for the prefixed title, first a permitted colloquial licence, and ultimately the only

Jeremy Clarke

Units minus time

On Sunday, fielding in the gully, I passed some of the time between balls calculating how many pints of bitter I could allow myself when it was our turn to bat and drive home without being wildly over the limit. The arithmetic was fairly simple: the number of pints consumed, multiplied by two for the number of ‘units’, minus one unit metabolised for every hour we’d been playing. The delicious egg-and-cress sandwiches we’d stuffed down our throats at tea allowed me to massage the final figure slightly upwards. Though it behoved me, too, to take into account that I’d put one or both of my contact lenses in inside-out that