Get a free copy of Douglas Murray’s new book

when you subscribe to The Spectator for just $15 for 12 weeks. No commitment – cancel any time.
SUBSCRIBE

Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Right war. Wrong reason

Every so often there is an event which confuses the usual prejudices of political folk. One such event was the rise of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who combined gay liberation with a dislike of immigrants, thereby scattering in all directions those on the Left whose belief systems are dependent on the assumption that all minorities have common cause against white conservatives. The publication of the Hutton report and the appointment of Lord Butler to conduct a further inquiry into the intelligence which took Britain and America to war with Iraq is another such event. Over the past week avowed enemies of Alastair Campbell and the Downing Street university of

Andrew Gimson

Cigarette lady

Lady Trumpington is on the warpath. At the age of 81, the author of the tremendous dictum ‘I’d rather be common than middle-class’ will deploy her formidable rhetorical powers to condemn a wretched piece of legislation. The ‘Bill to prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place’, as its long title runs, is now making its way through the House of Lords, and Lady Trumpington is one of the select band of peers who oppose it. For nearly 70 years she was herself a heavy smoker: ‘I started at the age of 11 and smoked 40 a day until two years ago. No

Max Hastings

How to lose the battle for Britain

Now that Mr Geoff Hoon has put his Hutton embarrassments behind him and emerged shining like a new pin, some of us hope that he will address his day job. Britain’s defence planning is in a dreadful mess. Unless the Secretary of State acts effectively, the services face a grim future — and they know it. Curiously enough, the issues have nothing to do with Iraq and the alleged equipment shortcomings which have attracted so many headlines since a critical National Audit Office report was published. It was indeed tragic that Sergeant Steve Roberts lacked the latest model of body armour when he was killed. But in the big picture,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 31 January 2004

The government narrowly carried the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, which makes provision for universities to charge British students an extra £3,000 a year. The vote was 316–311, with 72 Labour MPs voting against the government and 18 abstaining; Mr David Taylor, the Labour member for North West Leicestershire voted both for and against the Bill. Mr Jack Cunningham, a former Labour Cabinet minister, broadcast to the nation his view that the Labour rebels resembled the Militant Tendency. The next day Lord Hutton published a long report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the government expert on weapons. It said that the government was not ‘dishonourable, underhand

Fiona Millar

Diary – 31 January 2004

I feel a bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Having been sucked into a tornado and deposited for almost ten years in a technicolour world of high political and personal drama in the wake of my other half, Alastair Campbell, I am back, not in Kansas but in black-and-white north London whence I came: being a journalist, hanging out with the kids, rarely getting out of my jeans and trainers, even riding a bike, for God’s sake. I have even got my own version of the ruby slippers — a cupboard full of posh ‘state visit’ suits (essential in No. 10) never to be worn again. The thing

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 31 January 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have been invited to the 50th birthday party of a not particularly close friend. The party is to be held in a local sports centre, although we have been asked to wear black tie and evening dress. Enclosed with the invitation is a note requesting that we bring a cold main course, a salad or a cold pudding for 6 to 8 people with our name on the underside of the plate, so that we can take it home with us when we leave the party. We have also been told to call our hosts and advise them which dish we shall be

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 31 January 2004

Iain Duncan Smith, ex-leader of the Tory party, is evidently in a state of some depression at his humiliating rejection. Ancient philosophy must spring to his aid. Greek and Roman philosophers were primarily concerned with ethics: that is, they wanted to show their adherents what the good life was and, at a practical level, how to lead it. One of their most productive lines was dealing with failure and despair. On Tranquillity of Mind by the essayist Plutarch (46–120 ad) is a good example. He rejects the idea that tranquillity is best achieved by doing nothing, as if the best advice for a sick man was never to leave his

Stuart Reid

TRAVELItaly

Nothing is more important to a journalist than his integrity. The founders of the Independent were men of such unyielding principle that they would not allow their journalists to go on freebies. On other papers most journalists handled the integrity/freebie issue in the time-honoured fashion: by abusing any hospitality they were given — trashing a hotel room, getting weeping drunk, pawing the mayor’s wife — and then writing a mocking piece about those who had squandered fine food, wine and linen on them. That way, the hacks reasoned, nobody could say that they had been bought. Their honour was intact. These days I don’t have the energy for integrity. It’s

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Self abuse | 31 January 2004

Lloyd Evans believes that the lesson of Will Self’s success — which he envies — is that it is better to be a ‘writer’ than to write well It’s happened again. The other day I was deep in the Tube, powering my way through the loose maul, when a poster caught my eye. Will Self is promoting his latest book. At first glance the photo resembles an ad for a men’s magazine. Cool guy, cool clothes, cool chair, cool glare. Self sits sheathed in impassive black tailoring, with one leg casually thrown over the other; his intense skull and cold blazing eyes appraise you with a look of narcissistic derision.

Leo McKinstry

Straight and narrow

As I waded through page after page of interminable dogma and municipal jargon, one statement suddenly leapt out at me: ‘Some 50 per cent of people being approved of as adoptive parents in Brighton and Hove are from the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.’ Those words — from a policy document entitled ‘Sexuality — the New Agenda’, published this month by the Local Government Association (LGA), the umbrella body for local authorities — were followed by another disturbing sentence: ‘Brighton and Hove Council has also shown that it is committed to taking rigorous action against homophobia, including, in one instance, de-registering foster carers who stated that they opposed lesbians being

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The question that just won’t go away: is Sunday this week or next week?

Very occasionally in the life of a nation comes the need for a short period of dictatorship. Not for major reform: democracy can easily manage historic change. No, it’s the little things which dictators do so well. General Franco, for example, rationalised Spanish spelling. In the sorting out of obstinate silliness, democrats lose heart and autocrats alone can stay the course. Any populist can sweep away major injustice, but only a dictator can standardise plugs or bring back the proper use of the letter ‘z’. To remove the minor anomalies of life, decree absolute can be the only way. When I become Lord Protector of England, my first administration will

The Spectator

Bring back Gilligan

On Tuesday, 24 September 2002 Tony Blair stood up in the House of Commons and waved a dossier. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ he said. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ These words were vital, at the time, since many MPs believed this country had no business waging war in Mesopotamia. It was in Mr Blair’s interests to point up the threat from Iraq. ‘The document discloses that Saddam’s military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them,’ he wrote in the foreword. As Mr

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 24 January 2004

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, ordered a review of 258 convictions of parents for killing their children after the Court of Appeal ruled improper convictions based solely on expert opinions where two or more babies had died. Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, met Samantha Roberts, the widow of a sergeant shot dead during the war against Iraq after having been ordered to hand over his body armour for use by another soldier. Lord Hutton announced that the report of his inquiry into the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly would be published on 28 January. This is the day after the Commons vote on government

Stuart Reid

Diary – 24 January 2004

New York It’s as easy as pie to get through Checkpoint Charlie. The very agreeable Hispanic immigration officer at Kennedy asked me to place my index fingers, one at a time, on a scanning machine. My prints were instantly checked against the dabs of (I suppose) suicide bombers, anarchists, white slavers, drugs barons, porn kings, and those who, wittingly or unwittingly, have in the past 60 years engaged in genocide (on however small a scale). But… no match. I was clean; and I was through immigration faster than on any previous visit to the United States. The new security arrangements may be daft, but they are not yet burdensome. Now

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 24 January 2004

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle was practising her vowels for Rex Harrison as Professor Pickering in a bit of My Fair Lady that I came across on the television the other day. If Eliza was to pass for a duchess, it was a very sensible thing to do. But the film represented her pronouncing the names of the vowels instead of their sounds. From the start Eliza said the name of ‘a’ very much as Pickering did. It wasn’t that, but the give-away sound of ‘a’ in words like lady, that she would have to change. I noticed this little piece of illogicality when I was thinking about our names

Jeremy Clarke

Car spotting

Me and the boy are regulars at the weekly car auction near us. We never bid for anything. We just like to go and sit and watch the cars coming and going and seeing what they fetch. We don’t even comment on an excessively high or low price. We talk only about the soup. We always sit in the same two seats at the back of the steep little indoor grandstand, and we always buy a cup of soup each from the mobile caterer in the carpark beforehand. We’ve tried all the soups on sale, but I’ve now settled on the chicken and vegetable, and my boy generally has the

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 24 January 2004

Dear Mary Q. I believe I have fallen in love with another member of the VWH hunt. Whenever I go up to him on my horse, he has been friendly but since he hacks home I have only ever seen him mounted and with his riding hat on. I therefore have no idea what he looks like with it off, indeed whether he is totally bald. Neither do I know what he looks like in proper clothes, how tall he is or, most importantly, whether he might feel the same attraction towards me. I do know that he is unmarried, so what is my best course of action, Mary?Huntress of

Mark Steyn

How the Hulk exploded in Iowa

New Hampshire A little over a month ago, in the Wall Street Journal, I wrote that Governor Howard Dean looked ‘like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head’s about to explode out of his shirt collar’. On Monday night, Dean, a front-runner in the polls only a week ago, placed a very poor third in the Iowa caucuses — the first time, since he began his political career running for the state legislature in 1982, that the Vermonter has lost an election. He didn’t take it well. He came out on stage, took his jacket off and handed it to Tom Harkin, the

Aidan Hartley

Distance learning

Chalbi desert I am in Kenya’s Chalbi desert, where temperatures soar to 140 degrees. Out here east of Koobi Fora, the Cradle of Mankind, black volcanic rocks tumble down to badlands of cracked salt — so blinding white that on the flight in I had the impression that we were floating over snowy tundra. At the northern shore of the Chalbi, where rock meets salt, is the oasis of Kalacha. When I was a boy, safaris here with my father were pretty tough affairs. We’d spend weeks on end rambling on either side of Lake Turkana while Dad talked about livestock with the nomads. There were no tents or mattresses;

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 24 January 2004

The assortment of Snodgrasses and Ponsonbys who make up the British Committee for the Restitution of the Elgin Marbles have launched yet another chapter of their long campaign to return the fragmented statues to Greece. How very appropriate, they argue, if the arrival of the marbles were to coincide with that of the Olympic flame later this summer. That is, presumably, assuming the Greek authorities get their finger out and manage to finish the Athens stadium in time; sending the marbles to Seoul, which has offered itself as a back-up location, would seem a little odd. Were the committee’s campaign modelled around the idea of sending Greeks back to Greece,