Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language

So many much-loved books have been badly done on television — The Irish RM, and just now The Young Visiters, which anyone could have seen would be difficult to do well on telly — that I wonder how much longer they can resist dear old Parson Woodforde. I’ve been reading bits of his diary again and wondering about some of his characteristic uses of language. Some are just strange, such as spelling off as ‘of’, like William P. Taplow in Private Opinions of a British Bluejacket. A puzzling usage was plumb in plumb-pudding. I half remembered Charles Lamb explaining in jest that he spelled plumb-pudding himself with a b because

Stephen Glover

Whatever Hutton reports, there is no case for getting rid of Andrew Gilligan

Within the next few weeks Lord Hutton will publish his inquiry. None of us can know where, if anywhere, his axe will fall. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, may be feeling his neck a little anxiously. So too will Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter whose story about Downing Street ‘sexing up’ the September 2002 dossier lies at the very centre of this drama. It is certain that the Hutton report will be at least mildly critical of Mr Gilligan. He has himself admitted, or almost admitted, to having made some errors. He was unwise to suggest on the Today programme on 29 May — since he had no proof —

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Détente is back in fashion, thank heaven, and the horrors of Bam could change history

Should liberal internationalists feel irritated when neoconservative hawks piggyback on to the successes of our own approach, and take the credit for themselves? No, we should feel satisfied that they want to, for it is a kind of repentance. Their tantrums past and the damage obvious, we can be pretty confident that they will not repeat such mistakes. We can feel quiet pleasure in their implicit acceptance that liberal internationalism works, after all. There will be no more Iraqs — you may count on that. Towards Tripoli, towards Tehran, and hopefully towards Damascus too, détente is back in fashion, thank heaven. The important thing is that the firebrands in Washington

The Spectator

No guns on planes

When, at the insistence of the US Department of Homeland Security, the first armed ‘sky marshals’ take to British transatlantic flights, it is to be hoped that the in-flight movie won’t be Goldfinger. For anyone who has managed to avoid seeing any of the 40 years’ worth of repeat screenings, the Bond film concludes with the sight of Goldfinger’s portly frame being sucked through a plane window shattered in a gunfight with 007. It doesn’t take any great knowledge of aircraft pressurisation systems to realise that guns and planes do not mix. The pilots’ union, Balpa, has come to the same conclusion. Even former BOAC pilot Norman Tebbit, who supports

The Spectator

Portrait of the week

Police in plain clothes armed with guns are being put on international flights thought to be at risk from hijacking, according to Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, and Mr Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport. Pilots’ unions opposed the scheme; it had been urged by the United States. The Foreign Office said it believed terrorists were planning attacks in Saudi Arabia which ‘could be in the final stages of preparation’. A man who said he came from Canada shot dead a policeman, injured another and fired at a third when he was arrested in Leeds. Dr John Reid, the Secretary of State for Health, proposed charging foreign

Theodore Dalrymple

Escape from barbarity

This year is the centenary year of the Entente Cordiale, and I intend to celebrate it by buying a house in France (the acte authentique, the final signing, takes place later this month) and, in the not very distant future, by living there. Whether this will improve Anglo–French relations remains to be seen. France is no terrestrial paradise, but I know from experience of living abroad that other country’s blemishes do not affect you in the same way as your own country’s blemishes, which weigh heavily on your soul. You can observe the failings of foreign politicians with amusement and the intractability of foreign social problems with detachment. It is

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 27 December 2003

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have been blessed with the arrival of a delightful baby boy. We have been inundated with soft toys from doting family and friends. We would like to do a cull and send many off to charities but don’t wish to offend the original donors, who may notice the absence of their expensive gift when next they visit. What do you suggest?Q.R.F., Maitland, NSW A. Cuddly toys nearly always need to be culled, since today most houses with children have an excess. Too many love objects can be a dangerous thing in the impressionable early years of life, as they will breed a Hugh

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 27 December 2003

January. Two young black women, Letisha Shakespear and Charlene Ellis, were shot dead during a party at a hairdresser’s at Aston, Birmingham. Eli Hall, a gunman surrounded by police for 15 days at a house in Hackney, was found dead after a fire. The Fire Brigades Union planned strikes. An Underground train was derailed at Chancery Lane. The FT-SE index fell to a seven-year low. Lord Jenkins of Hillhead died, aged 82; Lord Dacre, aged 89; Gianni Agnelli, aged 81; General Leopoldo Galtieri, aged 76. The Pope said: ‘War cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option.’

Michael Howard

Diary – 27 December 2003

Last Wednesday I went straight from Prime Minister’s Questions to RAF Brize Norton to catch a VC10 to Iraq. I wanted to thank some of the British troops facing Christmas far from home and also meet as many people as I could in Baghdad to gain a better understanding of the challenges facing the Coalition Provisional Authority. The VC10 was full of a mixture of regulars and reservists. Some were on their first trip to the region. There were also several police officers on their way to train the Iraqi police. They were all pretty cheerful. After less than six hours we landed in Basra, headquarters of the Multinational Division

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 27 December 2003

I’ve just looked up foxglove in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, not because I expected it to tell me the word’s origin, but because I hoped it would give a false origin. I love Brewer, but it tells the reader not the facts of history and etymology but what the widely educated High Victorian thought were the facts. This is very useful in understanding references in 19th-century books. To me it also means that an edition from the lifetime of E. Cobham Brewer (1810’97) is more valuable than a modern revision. One never knows with what shockingly correct facts the reviser has displaced former baseless myths and popular etymologies.

Taki

A hell of a coup

New York And now for Rosebud, the single childhood incident that will illuminate us as to why Saddam did what he did. His was the kind of life Freudian complexes are made of, except for the fact old Saddy had no complexes. If I were to guess, I imagine some North American Man Boy Love Association member abused him when he was tiny in Tikrit. If I were Saddy I’d use that defence in a jiffy. It’s got everyone else off the hook, so why not him. Mind you, I haven’t seen such chest-banging over his capture since Uncle Sam victoriously invaded the Grenadines, or was it Grenada? Let’s face

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Temples of culture under siege

A couple of years ago, I was walking up Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Ivan Gaskell, a curator at the Fogg Art Museum, when he asked if I had ever met Jim Cuno, the director of the Fogg. I hadn’t, so we knocked on his door and left three hours later, having embarked on a long conversation which I have continued, at intervals, ever since. Cuno was meditating about some of the implications of 11 September 2001: the sense that the public was beginning, once again, to seek out the therapeutic value of great museums; the hubris attached to the decline in the number of visitors to the Guggenheim;

Andrew Lambirth

Strolling round Siena

We were fortunate with the weather in Siena. At first it was warm enough to sit outside having a drink, a treat in early December, but then the temperature fell rapidly and freezing northerly winds buffeted the ancient edifices in this most compact and beautiful of Tuscan hill towns. The cold did not affect the passeggiata, the ritual evening perambulation, in which everyone takes part in order to see and be seen. In fact, there now seems to be no particular hour sacred to it – it takes place all day long and into the night, or did when we were in Siena, with different generations gossiping and strolling at

Stephen Glover

Whatever happens, the Telegraph must not seem to be edited in Washington

There seems scarcely to be a person alive who does not hope to acquire ‘ or know someone who hopes to acquire ‘ the Telegraph group in the coming year. The names of former Daily Telegraph editors and managing directors, and even one or two still on the payroll, are associated with this or that possible bid. The Barclay brothers, who own the Scotsman, are said to be making inquiries. The interest of the Daily Mail and General Trust and of Richard Desmond, owner of the Express group, is, of course, already well known. American publishers are being cited, though none has so far said that it will make a

Andrew Gimson

Honour bound

The inanity of minuting these conversations! The madness of putting on paper derogatory remarks about such very distinguished people! These were among the chief exclamations made at the Christmas party held by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, where much of the conversation concerned the leak of a paper in which the merits and demerits of 38 candidates for honours were ruled upon with extraordinary frankness by a committee of top civil servants, including the great Sir Hayden Phillips (profiled in this magazine on 16 August). People’s reputations were assessed in this Cabinet Office paper, which was meant to remain secret for ever, in a wonderfully dismissive way, as if they

Mark Steyn

The triumph of George W. Bush

New Hampshire Timing is everything. Leafing through our issue of two weeks ago, I feel it would be kindest to draw a veil over page 26 (‘Correlli Barnett says that the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq serve as object lessons in how not to conduct an anti-terrorist campaign’) but that guy buried away on page 38 seems shrewder than ever: ‘It’s been a good year. Twelve months ago, Saddam Hussein was sitting on his solid gold toilet. He’s now on the run, moving every few hours and unlikely ever again to feel even a standard black plastic seat against his bottom.’ There didn’t seem to be many ‘facilities’, as the

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 December 2003

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found new ways of increasing taxes to cover government deficits in his pre-Budget report; but he declared that he wanted to help small enterprises. British Gas is to raise prices for its gas and electricity by 5.9 per cent from next month. Rail fares will go up by an average of 4 per cent in January, with higher examples such as the company c2c increasing by 10.3 per cent peak-time travelcards between south Essex and London, and WAGN increasing cheap day returns for journeys between Cambridge and King’s Cross by 9.1 per cent, bringing the fare to £19.10. The United States dollar

Boris Johnson

Diary – 13 December 2003

I’m not sure about this old ship business,’ said Marina. ‘Where’s the love-interest? Why can’t we go and see the Hugh Grant thing?’ ‘No no,’ I said, ‘I know it’s all about ships, but it’s gonna be great. Trust me.’ And I was right. They must be wizards, the people who filmed that Master and Commander. If we were to believe our senses, they had constructed two fully working ships of the line and sailed them into the mountainous seas off Cape Horn. As for the battle scenes, you haven’t seen such hyperkinetic violence since Saving Private Ryan. Every cannonball’s passage was traced with a whoosh of splintering timber and

The Spectator

Feedback | 13 December 2003

Comment on You have been warmed by Tom Fort (06/12/2003) The climate changes. The effects of sunlight on the earth’s surface, varies with location, cloud cover, air movement and pressure and the radiant properties of a cocktail of trace gases (measured in parts per million or billion) in the various levels of the gas envelope we all live in. Global warming caused by anthropogenic gaseous production, carbon dioxide and sulphur from burning of fossil fuels, methane from livestock, fluorocarbons from sprays all affect, as one might say, is a burning issue in science today. Superficially, it is portrayed, invariably by simple-minded people, i.e. politicians, as a “simple” issue. However, the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 13 December 2003

This year we have seen a word born like one of those volcanoes off the coast of Iceland. The word is issue, in a new and puzzling meaning. It had been looming through the seawater for many months before, but now it has come hissing and steaming above the surface. I had become used to people, usually employed in the social services, speaking of issues around things like race, ‘gender’, poverty, class, alcohol. The adoption of the pronoun around was pretty annoying, and since many of the people who used issues around were fools, I quickly came to assume its use was foolish. Moreover the meaning of issues in this