Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 20 November 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I don’t know whether you can help me but I thought it worth a try. About 15 years ago, I was charged, while on holiday in Australia, with a very minor offence which I felt was quite unjustified, and did not feel disposed to cancel my flight three days later and wait to appeal in court more than two weeks later. (I might also have lost my job, if I was three weeks’ late home.) I would now like to visit Australia again and am wondering if I will be turned back at the airport and/or charged with the original alleged offence and/or arraigned for skipping the

Danny Kruger

Diary – 20 November 2004

I’m in Sedgefield, County Durham, contesting the nomination for the Conservative candidate who will fight the Prime Minister for his seat in Parliament. I make my speech to the assembled Tories: tax, Europe, crime, education, pensions. Afterwards I go into the corridor and make agonising conversation with the other finalist. I smoke a cigarette. I go to the loo. I smoke another cigarette. They are taking an extremely long time. Eventually the chairman emerges and delivers the verdict. The other chap takes it well, slipping away with a smile and a handshake. The chairman takes me to the pub. In 1997 Mr Blair promised a low-tax government, to make education

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 20 November 2004

Government advisers are suggesting that religious education in schools should teach Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh beliefs. The purpose is to encourage ‘tolerance and respect’. Greeks and Romans would have found this incomprehensible. In the absence of divine and therefore authoritative scriptures, monotheistic, jealous gods did not exist in the ancient world, let alone ‘churches’ with a ‘priesthood’, imposing creeds, beliefs and moralities. Religion was a form of cult, hallowed by tradition, centred on rituals carried out in the right way at the right time. At its heart was sacrifice (lit., ‘making sacred’) when something useful to humans was made over to the god. With luck, the god

David Caute

What the President saw

A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Mark Feeley is also a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. I mention this because evidence has been accumulating these past 20-odd years that American Studies departments, like Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, of course, Media Studies are busily engaged in subverting that central but antiquated notion dear to traditional history departments — ‘because’. Causality is oldhat, it’s risible, and it’s out. The new history is virtual history, or ‘alternate’ history, the kind that did not happen but might have happened, just as novels and movies and genre paintings depict realities which somehow failed to occur. In some cases like Oliver Stone’s

Jaspistos

Greenery-yallery

In Competition No. 2367 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from the libretto of the flop musical Oscar Wilde. ‘I am going to stand my ground and fight,/ The things you two do just can’t be right,’ sang the Marquess to Bosie in that ill-starred production. Criticised for his lyrics, the author, Mike Read, loftily retorted, ‘Rhyming couplets didn’t do Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan much harm.’ There was a tricky contradiction in my request for something that would both amuse readers and make them squirm with embarrassment: some of you were too polished to embarrass and others too clumsy to entertain; still others offered lyrics that it

Paul Johnson

Dirge for the decline and fall of the Western intelligentsia

Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goose-stepping in force. In France the followers of ‘Jumping Jack’ Derrida were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were

Christopher Fildes

We do our best to measure our pleasure but somehow it’s lost in the post

The postman who calls at 30 Able Road may be a new urban myth but, as myths do, he tells a story. The people at number 30 found that they were getting post for 30 Baker Street, 30 Charlie Avenue, 30 Dog Mews, 30 Easy Street and so on. When they compared notes, they worked out that this postman could read Arabic numerals but was still at sea with English street-names. Disbanding the old guard and taking on helpers like this under contract must have given a boost, however temporary, to the Post Office’s finances. This week its omnipresent chairman, Allan Leighton, will take some time off from stalking Sainsbury’s

Stephen Glover

Sacking Johnson is by far the best thing Howard has done since becoming leader

One of the hazards of writing a column about the press is that sooner or later you are bound to be cornered by an editor or journalist whom you have teased. I shall never forget the time I was harangued in the street by the charming wife of my old friend Peter Stothard. Sometimes one is cut in the lavatories of clubs by people whom one has quite forgotten having written about. A worse experience is waking up to find that an editor whom you have ragged has been appointed to the editorship of the paper for which you write. Such was my fate when Sir Max Hastings was made

The Spectator

How to be generous

The last few days have seen some hysterical over-reporting of a minor adjustment in the personnel of the Tory shadow arts team, and a woeful under-reporting of an excellent new policy proposal. John Whittingdale, the Shadow DCMS secretary, has announced a plan that could help rescue the finances of museums, libraries and galleries, and encourage a new culture in this country, of generosity, philanthropy and pride. Until Mrs Thatcher’s economic and fiscal reforms of the 1980s, Britain was noted for its ‘brain drain’. This, thankfully, was halted, yet in its place has been formed a cultural drain. Paintings, manuscripts and other private chattels are still being whisked across the Atlantic,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Lies, damned lies and education

When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you. Easy though

Theodore Dalrymple

Second opinion | 20 November 2004

Many of my non-medical friends complain of the pointlessness of their jobs. What they do has no meaning, they say, no intrinsic worth, apart from paying the bills. My friends feel like caged mice which run incessantly inside wheels: an expense of spirit in a waste of effort. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘your job is worthwhile.’ ‘In what sense?’ I ask. ‘You help people.’ If only they knew. Compared with the doctors in a hospital like mine, Sisyphus had it easy. Light recreation such as his would come as a relief to us. There is, for example, a lady well-known to our hospital who attends every two weeks or so

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Death to Iraqis, not to foxes

In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell us that the future of a traditional country sport enjoyed by barely a quarter of a million people in a damp little island off the north-western corner of Europe cannot be of the highest importance. And yet the hunting controversy is also like a great sheet of lightning which has lit up the whole political

Anthony Browne

Speak your mind, lose your life

Even by the grisly standards of ritual killing, it was shocking. On 2 November in Amsterdam the Dutch iconoclast and film-maker Theo van Gogh was dragged from his bicycle in broad daylight and murdered. His killer, a bearded Dutch-born Islamic radical of Moroccan descent, shot him six times and, as he pleaded for his life, slit his throat through the spinal column with a butcher’s knife, almost decapitating him. The assassin then impaled a five-page declaration of ‘holy war’ into van Gogh’s chest. The slaughter of the film-maker — who was also a TV chat-show host, a Big Brother contestant, a newspaper columnist, and the great-great-grand-nephew of Vincent — plunged

Simon Jenkins

People power

The rebuilt town hall of the ancient Borough of Henley still stands brave over its market place. This was Henley’s forum and seat of government, a one-stop shop of civic welfare. From here Henley’s streets were lit, paved and policed, Henley’s traders regulated, Henley’s children educated and its poor relieved, all under the aegis of Henley people. Anywhere abroad this would still be the case. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and throughout America municipalities the size of Henley continue to exercise such power. Town halls and mairies remain centres of local politics and administration and their people like it that way. Yet in England such buildings are empty shells, as

Toby Harnden

A cat ate the face of the corpse

Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding it like this?’ he mused. ‘Oh, man.’ Every window in the cinder-block house was shattered. A 155mm shell had blown a large hole through the roof. The front gate had been crushed by a Bradley fighting vehicle and every door kicked in. Bags and suitcases left by the fleeing family had been emptied, their contents

Peter Oborne

The mean machine

Peter Oborne reveals that the Tories have a secret weapon — the Voter Vault — which has identified the 900,000 swing voters the party needs to capture at the next election According to all objective criteria the Conservative party leadership ought to be very low in the water. The assassination of Iain Duncan Smith almost exactly 12 months ago has brought about numberless benefits: a new mood among fundraisers; the restoration of discipline and purpose in the parliamentary party; much higher morale on the ground. But it has had no effect on the polls. The Conservatives remain exactly where they were before, becalmed in the low thirties, seemingly heading for

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 November 2004

The Saturday 17.35 Paddington to Plymouth train, operated by First Great Western, was derailed when it hit a car on a level crossing near Ufton, just before Aldermaston, Berkshire; the car driver and train driver and five passengers were killed and 150 of the 300 aboard injured. Three soldiers of the Black Watch were killed in a suicide bombing ambush 30 miles south-west of Baghdad, and another soldier in the regiment was killed later. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew off eagerly to Washington for talks with President George Bush. The full scale of the rejection in a referendum of plans by Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister,

The Spectator

Feedback | 13 November 2004

Israel’s rejected offers It is perhaps a bit unfair to single out Peter Oborne, because he is just one of many commentators to make the same error. He writes (Politics, 6 November) of the desirability of President Bush putting ‘renewed pressure on Israel to press forward for a settlement with Palestine’ — as though it was the Israelis who resisted reaching a settlement. The truth is the very opposite. Whenever an Arab leader has shown a desire to negotiate peace, Israel has seized the opportunity. It has also been willing to give up land as the price for securing peace. When Anwar Sadat offered Israel peace, Israel gave up the

Frank Keating

Names and games

Six Jones boyos were picked for the Wales rugby union XV which played South Africa last Saturday — Adam, Dafydd, Duncan, Ryan, Stephen and Steve. BBC commentator Eddie Butler said the knack had been to identify them by their hair — ‘blond, dark or ginger’. Eddie’s a better man than me — five of them were in the scrum in which all eight of them seemed to be identical shaven-headed Magwitches auditioning for the scary Act 1 estuary scene in Great Expectations. Saturday’s six broke rugby’s record of surname surfeit, held since 1939 when a quintet named Davies took on Ireland in Belfast. Last week’s debutant, Ryan, was history’s 73rd

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 13 November 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have written a perfectly good book and would like to see it published. I have, however, given up sending it to conventional publishers. They are not interested and I know this is because I have lived happily in Norfolk for 20 years and can’t be bothered to go to London. The upshot is that I am no longer on the so-called scene. I thought I would never stoop to having a book vanity-published, but now I learn that Felix Dennis has done just that but, rather than using one of the embarrassing imprints, he apparently got Hutchinson to do it for him. Could I too, Mary,