Society

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Diary – 17 January 2004

Hurrah! At last we get the MP3 player we bought our son for Christmas to work. Four adults, working in shifts, couldn’t get it to work on Christmas Day. The same four adults, still working in shifts — very ill-tempered shifts — couldn’t get it to work on Boxing Day. The instructions, provided by Hyun Won Inc., and most loosely translated from the original Korean, were not of much help: ‘Pause now you are in shortly, stop.’ The Internet site we bought it from had shut up shop until well in the New Year. We tried the people at PC World. Utterly useless, predictably enough. We waylaid anyone who had

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The end of the Etonians

Forty years ago today, The Spectator published perhaps the most important and influential article ever to appear in its pages. That is a high standard. R.W. Seton-Watson’s reports before 1914 condemning ethnic oppression may well have led indirectly to the postwar dismemberment of Hungary, for better or worse. And in a leader, headed ‘On the side of liberty’, to mark this magazine’s hemiocentenary in 1978, the Times was flattering enough to say that The Spectator was then in the vanguard of a new libertarian spirit, which would (in the event) help Margaret Thatcher to her victory the following year. But Mrs Thatcher might never have become party leader in the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 17 January 2004

Is your food industry being forced out of business by nasty foreign importers who insist on selling a similar product at half the price? Don’t worry: just start a health scare. It’s cheap, it’s rapid and the World Trade Organisation hasn’t yet got to grips with the possibilities for promoting protectionism via fear. Last week the American journal Science published a paper by a team from the University of Albany, New York reporting high levels of various contaminants, including polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs), dioxins and DDT in Scottish farmed salmon. Already one Scottish salmon farm has been driven out of business. It turns out that this is not the first difficulty

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Three cheers for the renaissance of the provincial towns and cities of England

Bradford is to demolish huge swaths of its own centre. Acres of hateful Sixties concrete are to be pulverised in the year ahead, according to a tiny article in the Guardian this week. Much of Broadway, Cheapside and Petergate are to be bulldozed as part of the city’s programme of ‘reinventing’ its core. An architect, Will Alsop, has made plans for surrounding the Victorian city hall with a lake; a buried stream is to be uncovered; and great blocks of brutalist mid-20th-century building will be coming down, storey by storey. Three cheers for this news, almost unnoticed in London. A cheer for a dawning 21st century which has the guts

The Spectator

No need for an inquiry

At 6.20 a.m. on Tuesday, the serial killer Harold Shipman hanged himself in Wakefield prison. He tied a noose in a bedsheet, placed it round his neck, tied the other end to the bars of his windows and jumped off a radiator pipe. It is difficult to see what else there is to say about the matter, but no doubt Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, will already have some ideas. He has just been appointed to carry out an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the former GP’s death. Mr Shaw will do his job with professionalism. He will establish what Harold Shipman had for supper the night before

Ross Clark Ross Clark

V is for victory — and for vagina

Ross Clark wonders whether Iraqis would prefer clean water and electricity or Britain’s taxpayer-funded ‘gender advisers’ Following the successful liberation of their country from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, ordinary Iraqis are once more beginning to experience some of those things which we in the West take for granted: electricity, telephones, fresh running water and the likes of Deirdre Spart from the Haringey Women’s Collective. If there is still a lot of work to be done in establishing security in the country, one thing which isn’t being ignored is the agenda of Western feminists. Never mind that many women’s pressure groups were vociferous in their opposition to war in

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 10 January 2004

Mr Michael Burgess, the Coroner of the Queen’s Household, opened the inquest on Diana, Princess of Wales, the conclusion of which, he said, would not come for more than a year; he had asked Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to investigate her death, which was on 31 August 1997; as Coroner for Surrey, Mr Burgess also opened an inquest on Dodi Fayed. The Daily Mirror published a sentence from a letter written by Diana in October 1996 saying, ‘My husband is planning “an accident’’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury, in order to make the path clear for him to marry.’ Mr Ken Livingstone, the

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 10 January 2004

Six months can be an awfully long time in politics. When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under Iain Duncan Smith, few of them cared to admit that publicly. Even now, when the Tory coup has an eerie inevitability about it with hindsight, how many people can honestly say they guessed a year ago that Michael Howard would become leader by the year’s end? He has been compared with Disraeli; I don’t suppose many Tories remember John Bright’s words at the time of Dizzy’s accession to the Tory leadership. It was ‘a triumph of intellect and courage

Petronella Wyatt

Village gossip

Cape Town Cape Town is as different from Johannesburg as Cheltenham is from London. Actually, this is to insult Cape Town. But whereas Jo’burg, being the country’s business capital with a population of nearly ten and a half million people, is a sprawling, bustling metropolis, Cape Town is a virtual village. The proximity of so many people in Jo’burg, even if some of them might mug you, makes it a more hospitable city. Invitations fly in over the electric barbed- wire fences. In Cape Town, however, you are promised a vague invitation to dinner which is then cancelled as the sender has to mow his grass. Oh well, it is

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 10 January 2004

Dear Mary Q. Mary, please help. How can I stop cold callers shattering the peace of my home life with telephone marketing? Neighbours think it funny to pretend that the ‘homeowner’ is unable to come to the telephone because he or she is drunk, but I do not wish to be rude. What do you suggest?N.F., Richmond, Yorkshire A. It is correct not to be rude to these hapless callers, the very nature of whose employment suggests that their self-esteem must already be at an all-time low. Instead take advantage of the Telephone Preference Service whose number is 0845 0700 707. Simply ring this number and a robot will talk

Interconnect

The hubbub of the marketplace

In the 1960s a cosmopolitan collector friend of my father who had fallen on hard times took salaried employment with a Bond Street gallery. When asked how he was adapting to his new life, he replied serenely: ‘In the art world, there are the crooks and the supercrooks. I’m with the supercrooks.’ Today, he might not have found the transition so smooth. In the past ten years the art business has changed almost beyond recognition, especially in the field of contemporary art. The model of the contemporary art dealer is now closer to a market trader than a supercrook thanks to the boom in art fairs, which has shifted the

James Frayne

Cut taxes to show you really care

If you are lucky enough to be in Iowa next week, don’t miss a new TV ad campaign against the Democrat presidential candidate front-runner, Howard Dean, ahead of election primaries in the state. The ads, run by a right-wing pressure group, suggest that ‘Dr Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.’ Crude negative election campaigning of this kind makes Tory tax bombshells here in Britain seem pretty tame. The ads are not part of Bush’s $120 million campaign, which has not even begun. But there is little doubt that tax would be at the centre

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 10 January 2004

Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming, which, it asserts, is responsible for 2.4 per cent of cases of diarrhoea and 6 per cent of cases of malaria. And if we in the first world think we can feel smug, it adds, 25,842 Europeans died in last summer’s heatwave, while Britain sees a 12 per cent increase in salmonella cases for every one degree rise in temperature. But what about all the elderly and infirm people who would have died had this winter been as cold as those frequently experienced in Europe during the 19th century?

Stephen Glover

We have never been closer to state control of the press

I must confess that I have not watched the development of Ofcom with the care I should have. In the distance I heard the voices of colleagues muttering that the new media regulator would interfere in the freedom of the press, but I chose not to listen. I thought that Ofcom, as the successor of the Independent Television Commission, the Radio Authority, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Oftel and the Radio Communications Agency, would concern itself with issues which do not on the whole concern the rest of us very much. Dear reader, I have let you down. Ofcom opened for business on 29 December with a spanking new office and

The Spectator

The uses of adversity

On Sunday, Tony Blair told the troops in Basra that they were ‘new pioneers of 21st-century soldiering’. The praise was fully deserved and sincerely delivered. Over his years in office, the Prime Minister has become a great admirer of the armed forces. Even so, there was a slight problem about the way he chose to phrase his compliment. The emphasis on new century, new army could obscure a crucial point: that the British Army is so good because so many of its traditions and so much of its ethos do not change with the calendar. Tried and tested, they endure. This also applies to training methods, which have come under

Peter Oborne

The truth is he lied

Last Monday it emerged that the Saville inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings would carry on for at least another year. By the time it ends, supposing it ever does, Saville’s shambles will have taken nearly a decade, cost more than £200 million, and some of those most intimately involved will surely have died. Over Christmas and the New Year, Lord Hutton is said to have been at his home in Northern Ireland, not that far from Saville’s Londonderry base, drafting the final passages of his investigation into the death of the brave, public-spirited government scientist Dr David Kelly CMG. It will have taken six months, start to finish. Maybe

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Diary – 3 January 2004

The recent story in the Sunday Times about the hundreds of people who have declined honours in the past 50 or 60 years was fascinating. Contrary to the usual interpretation, it showed that the system is actually fairer than I thought. The list was dominated by people of immense worth whose apparent neglect by the establishment had seemed inexplicable. The other day the self-advertising poet and retired burglar Benjamin Zephaniah rejected an honour as a protest against colonial oppression (yawn). How much better to have the inward satisfaction, and the good manners, to refuse privately. Only one refusenik was well known to me, and that was the composer George Lloyd.

Petronella Wyatt

Behind bars

Johannesburg The South African sun is beating down on my brother’s garden. We have just returned from a shopping mall in Johannesburg. Jo’burg is full of shopping malls, massive American-style walkways. My brother and I have been sitting outside the Seattle Coffee Company watching people as they pass by. South Africans are averse to tanning. Some claim this is latent racism, others argue that in a country where the sun shines nearly every day they simply wish to preserve an element of youthfulness for as long as possible. My brother lives in one of those high-security compounds. It has walls with electric barbed-wire and armed guards. I am supposed to

Leo McKinstry

In defence of Wacko Jacko

In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie described the bed that the ‘rampageous’ boys made for themselves in their magical primitive home in Neverland: ‘It filled nearly half the room and all the boys slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin.’ Today, the sleeping arrangements at a modern version of this fantastic place have led to one of the most explosive prosecutions in recent criminal history. The singer Michael Jackson, who so loves the Peter Pan story that he named his own Californian ranch ‘Neverland’, is awaiting trial on charges of molesting a 12-year-old boy, Gavin Arvizo, who has cancer, and of using an ‘intoxicating agent’ to facilitate sexual contact.

Mary Killen

Your problems solved

Dear Mary… Q. Last year my husband and I bought a house on Exmoor which came with two cottages superfluous to our needs. We have been renting these out as holiday lets. Out of six recent lettings three of the punters, all of whom appeared happy while they were in situ, complained retrospectively and asked for money back and/or free weeks in the future. One complained of having been kept awake by an owl, another complained that she had been disappointed by the cottage because of the amount of Ikea furniture. We are sure that punters are just ‘trying it on’. How can we outwit future chancers?Name and address withheld