Society

Saturday

Stephen Glover

Why might Dr O’Reilly want to sell 30 per cent of the Independent?

The news that Tony O’Reilly may be willing to sell 30 per cent of the Independent newspaper seems utterly astounding. It has enjoyed a considerable succès d’estime by going tabloid. From being a catch-up sort of newspaper which did not excel in any particular area, it has become a trendsetter. First the Times followed suit and produced its own tabloid version. Then the Guardian announced that once it has acquired new presses it will transform itself into a so-called Berliner — i.e., the same shape as Le Monde. The rejigged management at the Daily Telegraph will have to make up its mind whether or not to produce a tabloid edition.

The Spectator

Bigley’s fate

The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute’s silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored. Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood. There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 16 October 2004

The Conservative leader Michael Howard says he owes everything to Britain for saving his family from persecution by the Nazis. It is just a good job for him that his own manifesto on asylum and immigration was not in force in Britain in the 1930s. Sandwiched between the personal passages in his conference speech Mr Howard announced a truly nasty policy. If a Howard government takes office, one of its first acts will be to withdraw Britain from the 1951 UN convention on refugees. Presumably Mr Howard is calculating that this will curry favour with Ukip voters, who relegated the Tories to a humiliating fourth place in the Hartlepool by-election.

Henrietta Bredin

Australian odyssey

I must admit that the first arts event in which I participated on arriving in Australia was entirely by chance. Sitting in the sun on the restaurant terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, looking at the ferries bustling in and out of Circular Quay, I picked up a small printed notice that had been placed on my table. It told me that, as part of the current city-wide contemporary art show, the chair in which I would normally have been sitting had been swapped with one from a café in Hanoi. As I pondered on this and gazed across the water, the arm of a crane swung

Friday

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 15 October 2004

For my son’s eighth birthday, I invited all 18 of his classmates (according to diktat) to his exciting climbing party at the Westway sports centre. I sent a round-robin email to the parents. I pointed out how very easy it was to reach the sports centre from north London. I said that all their sons would be coming home from school that day with invitations to this exciting event. I should, for honesty’s sake, admit that I gave everyone only a week’s notice. ‘As you must know, Saturday is the day of atonement,’ said a mother, as she declined. Out of the 18 boys I asked, 17 had copper-bottomed reasons

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 9 October 2004

Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, speaking at the Conservative party conference, summarised Tory plans in ten words: ‘school discipline, more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes and controlled immigration’. Neither he nor Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor of the exchequer, would make specific promises on tax, on the grounds that former promises had been broken. In a video, Dr Liam Fox, the party’s co-chairman, said his favourite pop group were the gay post-modernist Scissor Sisters. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, had an operation via a catheter to ablate a troublesome spot in his heart responsible for giving him recurrent superventricular tachycardia. Just before going into hospital

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 9 October 2004

‘Foxes’ tails are just like ladies,’ says Felix Graham, riding to a meet in Trollope’s Orley Farm. The spirited Miss Staveley replies, ‘Thank you, Mr Graham. I’ve heard you make some pretty compliments, and that is about the prettiest.’ ‘A faint heart will never win either the one or the other, Miss Staveley.’ ‘Oh, ah, yes. That will do very well. Under these circumstances I will accept the comparison.’ No doubt compliments to young women will soon be criminalised, but Trollope commits another crime in the eyes of some by writing ‘under the circumstances’. To object to the phrase was, in Henry Fowler’s eyes, ‘puerile’, but that didn’t stop its

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 9 October 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My problem concerns the wording of an invitation. My husband will be 50 years old in January and we are giving a party for about 300 people. Without wishing to seem ungrateful, he actually is the man who has everything, and he dreads being given hundreds of new things he doesn’t want, to say nothing of having to write hundreds of thank-you letters for them. Yet we both think there is something a bit killjoy about having ‘No Presents’ on an invitation. What is the most tactful wording, Mary? Or should I let people bring the presents and just divide them between our staff later?Name withheld, Stockbridge,

The Spectator

War and peace

The newsreader Martyn Lewis once complained that there is not enough good news on the telly. To judge by his forays into literature, he would quite happily have presided over a Nine O’Clock made up entirely of dog and cat stories, but he had a point. When there is a spot of bother anywhere in the world there is a queue of foreign correspondents waiting to get in. Come the aftermath, the gradual return to peace and normality, and they are all off again, enticed by the promise of trouble elsewhere. Take Afghanistan. It is three years since our television screens were bombarded nightly with pictures of al-Qa’eda training camps

Interconnect

A matter of whim and fashion?

Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students to imitate. He certainly isn’t that any more. The forthcoming exhibition of early Raphael at the National Gallery may cause his popular stock to rise again, but surely not to that extent. Raphael is a prime example of an artist whose renown has slumped; he isn’t unknown but nor is he ever likely to be

John Laughland

Putin the poodle

Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore piquant, although presumably unintended, when last week a hundred Western politicians and ‘intellectuals’ published just such a missive, addressed to the heads of state and government of the EU and Nato. In it, they attacked the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saying that his authoritarian behaviour rendered impossible any true partnership between Russia and Western democracies.

Peter Oborne

A question of trust

Since his sudden emergence in the 1990s Tony Blair has easily eclipsed three successive Conservative leaders: John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. No prime minister for a century has dominated his opponents in such an emphatic way and for so long. The 2004 party conference season has changed this landscape. It is now possible to assert something which it has not been possible to claim without risk of ridicule since 1992. The present leader of the Conservative party would make a more competent and reassuring prime minister than his Labour counterpart. There are two reasons for this confidence: the degradation of Tony Blair, and the simultaneous emergence of

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 8 October 2004

Any ordinary member of the human race is revolted by the beheadings in Iraq and longs for revenge: let us indeed return the people the terrorists want released, but with their heads cut off too. The Roman historian Livy might have repeated a story from his Histories to suggest otherwise. The Romans were besieging Falerii, and having little luck. Now a schoolmaster to the children of the leading families ‘used in peacetime to take his boys outside the town walls for play and exercise, and the war did not alter his practice…. One day he took them through the enemy outposts into the Roman camp and Camillus’ headquarters. This vile

Diary – 8 October 2004

I spent three weeks rehearsing Tynan, a monologue devised by Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers from Kenneth Tynan’s posthumously published journals. It’s a lonely business rehearsing a monologue. You sit on the stage in the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon like Jonah in the belly of the whale. My voice, which was also having to cope with King Lear’s nocturnal tirades at the RST, started to crack and rasp in protest. What is the function of a drama critic? Tynan defined it thus: ‘A critic’s job, nine tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad.’ This perfectly describes his own self-appointed task. The English theatre,

Saturday

Taki

Sex, lies and videotape

New York Except for the people, this is a wonderful time of year to be in the Bagel. Summer’s blistering heat has gone the way of Britain’s Davis Cup hopes — tiny Austria, using natives, has just eliminated big-bully Britain, which was using Gurkhas like Rusedski — the days are getting shorter but crisper, and Mother Nature is putting on quite a display of colours. Shades of yellow, red and gold, and orange are the order of the day. Autumn is by far the most colourful time of the year in the Bagel. It also inspires people. Take, for example, Paris Hilton, the monosyllabic hotel heiress. She has just joined

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 2 October 2004

The ‘execution’ of captives, instead of their ‘murder’, is a longstanding gripe of Mr Don Barton of Powntley Copse in Hampshire, who wrote to me before the current round of deadly abductions in Iraq. I’m just wondering about the derivation of Powntley, and I’ll have to make further investigations. The point for now is misuse of language. I mean that doubly: catachrestic usage that is not justified by precedent, and distortion of language for political motives. Mr Barton is quite right, historically. Execute has been around in English since the time of Chaucer, 600 years ago, first in the sense of ‘put into effect’. That usage has survived. On some

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 2 October 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a speech at the Labour party conference in Brighton, spoke of a ‘wholly new phenomenon, worldwide global terrorism based on a perversion of the true, peaceful and honourable faith of Islam’ with roots ‘in the extreme forms of Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia’. He also declared that Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was ‘a personal friend for 20 years and the best Chancellor this country has ever had’. Mr Brown gave a speech in which he connected socialist provision of welfare with an ethic of public service; ‘There are values far beyond those of contracts, markets and exchange,’ he said,

The Spectator

Feedback | 2 October 2004

Entrapped by Europe Niall Ferguson (‘Britain first’, 25 September) stands history on its head in claiming that ‘it was precisely the unreliability of the United States’ as both an ally and an export market which ‘convinced Britain’s political elite’ that they must ‘abandon the Churchillian dream of a bilateral Atlantic partnership’ by joining the EEC. On the contrary (as Richard North and I show in our book The Great Deception), Harold Macmillan’s greatest concern in 1961 was that if Britain threw in her lot with ‘Europe’, this might imperil the ‘special relationship’ with America. What finally convinced Macmillan was Kennedy’s assurance in April 1961 that British EEC membership could only

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 2 October 2004

Q. My flatmate recently departed for a fortnight’s holiday, leaving behind several days’ worth of dirty plates. When I asked if he’d mind washing them up before going, he replied that he had no intention of doing so, because he knew I’d do them if he left them. In this he was, unfortunately, correct. I am infuriated by this calculated act of selfishness, but do not wish to aggravate the situation. How can I prick his conscience and force an apology for this unacceptable behaviour?T.M., London W5 A. Go away for a holiday or a weekend yourself, and generate a pile of dishes for your flatmate to clear up in

Antonia Fraser

From Africa back to Scotland

The publishing world is full of romantic stories, not every one with a happy ending. (I was brought up on the tale, possibly apocryphal, that Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law, Edward Grant, kept a framed copy of his letter turning down Gone with the Wind in his office.) One truly happy story, however, so far without an end, is that of Alexander McCall Smith. With a day job as Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, he is the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, creator of the immortal Mma Precious Ramotswe, she of the ‘traditional’ Botswana build. Published originally in hardback by the small Edinburgh firm of Polygon,