Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 24 July 2004

The film Around the World in Eighty Days, though identified as a turkey by the taxonomists of the critics’ circle, took more money in Britain last week than any film but one, with incalculable effects on the English language. But before I drone on about that, let me mention a satisfying sighting of well reported by Mr Robin Taylor of Blackburn. It is from Thomas Hardy’s poem on the loss of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Mr Taylor mentions it as an example of Hardy incorporating everyday speech, but I was surprised by the proportion of elevated ‘poetic diction’ in the composition, even if Hardy knew what he

Jeremy Clarke

Best of friends

I was looking for the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca, and lost my bearings in the maze of narrow side streets that comprises the old quarter of Perpignan. In a street so narrow I could span it with outstretched arms, a youth on a motorbike roared past me doing a wheelie. Further up the street, a man relaxing in the doorway of a stationery shop was happy to direct me. ‘English?’ he said, wanting to talk. I admitted as much. He nodded towards a portable TV set on the counter just inside his shop. On the screen, in glorious sunshine, the band of the Grenadier Guards was marching down

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 24 July 2004

Dear Mary Q. I am commuting to Italy most weekends this summer and, unlike Charles Dunstone, am an ‘Easy’ rather than a ‘Net’ jet user. What do you suggest I do when without asking the passenger in front tips his seat back into my face? I have thought of various measures such as prevention — walking to my seat with a stick pretending to have a bad leg — or revenge — allowing runny honey to drip down the back of the seat. Or should I accept the growing ‘pikeyness’ of air travel? Cabin staff seem to be there to extract cash from passengers and enforce the increasingly draconian rules

Anthony Sampson

South Africa: rejection and rapprochement

This book, republished after almost 40 years, has survived as a South African classic while most other memoirs about life under apartheid have been forgotten. It’s not just because it’s beautifully written, in a plain, unpretentious style, but also because it conveys, with acute observation, the combination of ordinariness and danger which is implicit in any totalitarian state. The author quotes W.H. Auden: ‘Suffering…takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.’ And she quietly conveys her own suffering as a political activist who was also a dedicated mother of young children, facing growing persecution, fear and eventual exile. Hilda Bernstein was a

Frank Johnson

The Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed — and a good thing too

If only the assassination attempted 60 years ago last Tuesday had succeeded, we have heard all this week. But what was the conspirators’ idea of success? In particular, what did the awesome man whose sonorous name we have heard this week really believe? Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg was of his time and his class, we are told. What then was his attitude to, say, Slavs and Jews? But first, to recount what happened 60 years ago last Tuesday. It is untrue that Stauffenberg and the other leading conspirators resolved to kill Hitler only once they knew that Germany was going to lose the war. They had long been

The Spectator

Bring back the Sixties

As the 1960s drew to a close, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon, pop’s dopeheads were experimenting with ten-minute-long guitar solos, and a mop-haired Tony Blair was in the sixth form at Fettes where, in between canings for insolence, he was railing against fagging. Now, we are led to believe, the Prime Minister has decided that the decade of his youth was all a ghastly mistake. Launching his government’s latest five-year plan on crime, he declared the ‘end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order’. In other words, he was wrong and the likes of ‘Bugger’, as one especially cane-happy beak at Fettes

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why the British are so mean

Much as I sympathise with those caught up in petty local government bureaucracy, every so often there emerges a sob story which somehow fails to tug the heartstrings. Last week in the Daily Mail, cancer fundraiser Ipek Williamson was moaning that Cotswold District Council had wiped out the profit from a garden party she had held in the grounds of her 17th-century manor house in Kempsford, near Cirencester. She thought she had made a profit of £160, to be divided between Macmillan Cancer Relief, Marie Curie Cancer Care and the local cottage hospital, but her takings had been turned into a loss of £10 after the council demanded she buy

Rachel Johnson

Read me a dirty story, Mummy

Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues ‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me. Back in my room, I tear off my pyjamas and rip them to shreds….’ Well, it’s not nice, this extract from a children’s book called Georgie by Malachy Doyle, I know. I’m sorry to share it with you. I do hope you’ve already eaten. But it’s in my ten-year-old daughter’s bedroom, along with the rest

Anthony Browne

The triumph of the East

There’s no plot, says Anthony Browne: Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all A year ago I had lunch with an eminent figure who asked if I thought she was mad. ‘No,’ I said politely, while thinking, ‘Yup.’ She had said she thought there was a secret plot by Muslims to take over the West. I have never been into conspiracy theories, and this one was definitely of the little-green-men variety. It is the sort of thing BNP thugs claim to justify their racial hatred. Obviously, we

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 23 July 2004

Aitios in ancient Greek means both ‘responsible’ and ‘culpable’. Since Greeks were well aware of the distinction, they would have much enjoyed the nuances of the Butler report and the responses to it. The Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 bc) comes up with some fascinating general statements about the problem. First, Demosthenes recognises that a wrong policy might be recommended because the relevant facts were not known and the situation was not understood. In that case, the politician is not to be blamed: ‘Suppose that a [politician] has done no wrong and made no error of judgment but, having devoted himself to a cause approved by everyone, has failed in it,

Interconnect

Diary – 23 July 2004

To Portcullis House at Westminster, to take part in a Reuters debate on war and journalism. I notice John Reid, the Prime Minister’s most prominent capo regime these days, lurking at the back. His minder tells me that ‘the boss would like a word’ but a division bell saves me from finding out whether I am to sleep with the fishes. John Redwood asks a question founded on the premise that ‘the UK fights too many wars’, and I notice several Tory heads bobbing up and down in the audience. No doubt about it: the Conservatives are completely rethinking their instinctively robust attitude to military intervention. On the other side

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 17 July 2004

Lord Butler of Brockwell published his report into the intelligence failures that led to the government claiming, in a dossier published in 2002, that Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and could deploy them within 45 minutes. Lord Butler described the dossier as ‘seriously flawed’ and criticised some of the language used by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, but declined to blame any individual or call for anyone to resign. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, unveiled his latest ‘comprehensive spending review’. More than 84,000 Civil Service jobs in London will disappear by 2008 and £30 billion of redundant government property will be sold, hopefully

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 17 July 2004

The summer flowers are blowing, and I was reminded yesterday of a slightly outlandish-sounding line in the summery poem Pearl which speaks of the plants ‘gilofre, gyngure & gromylyoun’. I am still not sure what gromylyoun is. I know it’s gromwell, but I haven’t got any in the garden, and my husband has never had occasion to use it, despite its medicinal reputation in the Middle Ages. I thought I knew what gillyflower was, though — the wallflower, with its candy popcorn scent. But Michael Quinion has disabused me. He is the author of an excellent new book called Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Myths (Penguin, £12.99), which explodes

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 17 July 2004

Dear Mary… Q. What advice can you give to a boy of 16 (my brother) who has not been out with a girl before? He fancies one at his school but although I have told him he is cool he does not have the nerve to ask her out. He is almost more worried about her saying yes than no. He says he wouldn’t know where to take her or what to say. D.C., London W6 A. Rather than asking her out, your brother should ask her to help him dye his hair. Girls cannot resist the chance to conduct a cosmetic experiment, and since the procedure is soothing for

Stephen Glover

The FT can no longer be described as a British newspaper

Ever since he became editor of The Spectator, which must be about five years ago, Boris Johnson has been urging me to write a column about the Financial Times. It is a subject which seems to drive him towards apoplexy. As Boris sees it, the FT is run by leftist énarques whose hearts are very far from the businessman struggling with cashflow problems in Nuneaton or, as it might be, Henley. It is a newspaper for sharp-suited Eurocrats and fat cats on the early morning shuttle to Brussels or Milan, not the hardworking capitalist stuck in his dingy office with the VAT man menacing outside the door. I am sure

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Do you ever get the strange feeling you’re being watched? You are

Tom and I borrowed our friend’s Mini to drive to Canary Wharf. We had been lent it to collect for him a consignment of lighting fittings ordered from John Lewis, which he had no time to collect. This was kind of us. Motivated thus by charity we drove off towards the smart new shopping centre within the Docklands development on the Isle of Dogs in east London. We must have looked an odd pair. Tom, who (it is fair to say) does not over-dress, is twenty-something and resembles a younger Hugh Grant dragged through a hedge. My habit is to throw on whatever assortment of clothes lie on my bedroom

Peter Oborne

Butler has found Scarlett guilty — so why has he been promoted?

You can tell when high summer comes to Westminster. Smartly dressed groups, lost and ill at ease — the women in hats and best frocks — wander through Westminster Hall in search of Buckingham Palace garden parties. The Catalpa trees in New Palace Yard burst into bloom, and their viscous, sickly scent spreads everywhere. These are always dangerous, fretful weeks. The whips hate them; they sense trouble, and yearn to close politics down and send their MPs away to the safety of family holidays. Last week MPs and ministers moved about in little groups. The Blairites clung to each other for protection against the supporters of Chancellor Gordon Brown, angry

The Spectator

What Butler missed

The most blissfully satirical moment during Lord Butler’s press conference was his remark that Iraq contained ‘a lot of sand’. His point was that the fabled weapons of mass destruction might yet turn up, buried in the dunes. The former Cabinet secretary is known as a man of boundless optimism. It may be that all kinds of long-lost objects will be excavated from the desert: the plane of Amelia Earhart, perhaps, or the racehorse Shergar. If we delve deeper into this abundant sand, we may find Lord Lucan, keen to join Lord Butler in service on the red benches. But there can be hardly anyone, surely, who now believes that

Bruce Anderson

Abortion is a matter of aesthetics

Pictures are more powerful than principles. A few weeks ago, newspapers published photographs of a 12-week-old male foetus. It was not a blob of tissue but a proto-human. Yet for a further 12 weeks after the pictures were taken it would have been legal to kill this pre-baby in the womb. Other stories appeared. A child had been born at 23 weeks. That is within the legal limit for abortions. It had lived. Nor did all aborted foetuses die in the womb. Occasionally, mistakes were made and little creatures emerged alive. They were put on one side, until they alleviated everyone’s embarrassment by expiring. The photographs and the details led

Andrew Gilligan

Bit by bit, Blair is forced to face the truth

It is curious sometimes how life comes full circle. Exactly a year ago I was sitting in an office at the BBC, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. As I write this, I am sitting in an office at the BBC, waiting to be interviewed, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. Their task is rather harder than it was before. Lord Butler’s committee has pronounced on the great question — did the government mislead us all over the reasons for war? To the vast majority of the public, this is an issue about as opaque and mysterious as the religion of the Pope or the sanitary habits of