Society

Saturday

Niall Ferguson

Britain first

Niall Ferguson says that Tony Blair and George W. Bush are perfect partners — Christian soldiers armed with Bibles and bazookas — but Britain now has more in common with Europe than with the United States ‘I kind of think that the decisions taken in the next few weeks will determine the rest of the world for years to come. As primary players, we have a chance to shape the issues that are discussed. Both of us will have enormous capital and a lot of people will be with us.’ — Tony Blair to George W. Bush, March 2003. Barring some act of God — an authority both men are

Friday

Jemima Lewis

Diary – 24 September 2004

The imminent ban on fox-hunting saddens me mainly for reasons of nostalgia. I am far too much of a sissy ever to have hunted: I would fall off my horse as soon as it moved, and cry if the poor little fox got caught. But I am romantic enough to love the Olde Englishness of the hunt: the Surteesian image of pink-coated squires racing across a pastoral landscape. Although I am a total townie, hunting is part of my family mythology. My grandmother grew up on a Gloucestershire farm amid rabid blood-sports enthusiasts. Her father — a terrifying, hawk-nosed domestic tyrant who once bit his son on the leg for

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 September 2004

Mr Stephen Byers, a former Cabinet minister, popped up on television to talk about Mr Alan Milburn, the new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with undefined responsibility for drawing up Labour policy before the election; ‘I think he would be an excellent leader of the Labour party and an excellent prime minister.’ Mr Frank Dobson, a former Cabinet minister, said the backbenches were ‘covered in failed prime ministers’. Miss Ruth Kelly became a minister for the Cabinet Office and Mr Kim Howells became minister for higher education. Mr Michael Howard took the opportunity to bring back Mr John Redwood into the shadow Cabinet; Mr Damian Green, Mr John Bercow

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 September 2004

‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number. ‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What does Gresham’s Law mean?’ my husband has said, ‘Ah, you don’t understand.’ That is surely what I had admitted by asking the question in the first place. I knew Gresham’s Law said: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ But what that meant or how it could happen were blanks to me. I need only have looked

Jeremy Clarke

Caught out | 18 September 2004

The cognoscenti will tell you that the best time to visit the south Devon coast is the autumn. The vulgar summer hordes have departed, the weather in September is generally reliable and accommodation is cheaper. Unfortunately for them, word has got out. The lanes round here were more congested with traffic last week than in July and August, and in town the pavements were packed with cognoscenti looking askance at one another. Mirroring this trend were this year’s bookings for the holiday let attached to our house. For three consecutive weeks in July, the flat was vacant, yet from now till the middle of November it’s fully booked. I’m not

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 18 September 2004

Dear Mary… Q. Interrogatives like ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ are gauche and unhelpful. Likewise ‘What does your partner do?’ or, to a third party, ‘Is your friend attached?’ When, increasingly, the lack of a ring signifies nothing, even among the more mature, perhaps, Mary, you might offer a discreet means of establishing a person’s status. I.S.W., Inverclyde A. You can trick people into revealing their romantic status by asking if they play tennis or bridge. If they reply in the affirmative, say ‘Oh great — do you have a partner who plays too?’ If they say no, say, ‘Oh, what a shame. You don’t have a partner, as they say,

Graham Stewart

Evangelism on the march

When Robert Goizueta, Coca-Cola’s boss, attempted to justify his $80 million annual income to a meeting of shareholders he was interrupted four times — with applause. Attitudes to wealth and opportunity, as to so much else in the United States, are far removed from the prevailing mood in Britain and Europe. During the Cold War, many of these differences were overlooked in the common cause against a yet more alien ideology. The illusion of unity has disappeared with the Warsaw Pact. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in The Right Nation: Why America is Different, ‘it is rather like two relative strangers who fight off muggers and then go

Lucy Vickery

Property Hot property

Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over with a pang of guilt-tinged longing. Once the province of spivs, gangsters and noxious tanneries, this tangle of warehouses, wharves and printworks, Victorian railway arches and council housing has, since the mid-Nineties, emerged as a hip and thriving artists’ quarter. The past decade has seen a stampede of arty urbanites moving in, seduced by the

Mira Barhillel

Property English Heritage

Over the summer, television viewers were treated to a series hosted by the photogenic chief executive of English Heritage, Simon Thurley. In Lost Buildings of Britain, Mr Thurley made a bit of a fool of himself attempting to ‘recreate’ lost architectural treasures based on old drawings and other clues. One superb building which did not feature in this series was the historic Baltic Exchange in the City of London, described in its prime as ‘a veritable fairy palace’ and demolished three years ago. But Mr Thurley will not want to remind anyone of it, as its loss was entirely the fault of English Heritage. When it was built to house

Gerald Cadogan

Property Hungary

Hungary entered the EU in May, 15 years after the fall of communism. Already Budapest is a new place, and everyone has a car. But don’t be put off: the city’s old pleasures — the music, the thermal spas and boating on the Danube — will stay for ever. If you’re buying a house in Budapest, the first question is shall it be Buda, or Pest? Or their suburbs? Buda is the city’s steep acropolis, with the royal castle (rebuilt after 1945) on top and a lower town below beside the great river that separates Buda from Pest. Linking the two is the 1840s Chain Bridge, a suspension bridge designed

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 18 September 2004

Don’t you just love those socio-economic league tables which put Britain a miserable 25th, virtually down among the developing nations, while Scandinavian nations emerge on top? The first time I went to Denmark I wasn’t quite prepared for the frumpiness, so often had I seen its social democratic model depicted by left-leaning academics as a paradise on Earth. The Left has another such table over which to bleat about the misery of modern Britain: a Geneva-based organisation called the International Labour Office (ILO) has compiled an ‘economic security index’ which it claims measures health and happiness around the globe. Sweden emerges top, followed by Finland, Norway and Denmark. France is

The Spectator

Open the gates of Vienna

The chief recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’eda is not George W. Bush but Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch EU internal market commissioner. Speaking last week on the possibility of Turkey joining the EU — and thus Muslims one day coming to outnumber Christians within it — Mr Bolkestein commented that were this to come to pass ‘the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain’. For those unsure of the reference, Vienna was besieged in July 1683 by a force of 200,000 Ottoman Turks. The siege was crushed on 12 September of that year by the joint Polish and Austrian armies, thereby saving Christendom from further incursion by Islam. As

Interconnect

What’s that on your head?

Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour. Yes, it was worrying, but in hindsight it was also a time of high comedy. After three weeks of treatment, I went on holiday to Cornwall. My young children looked a little more appalled each day and my wife Philippa pretended not to notice. After the holiday the treatment went on for another three weeks:

Margaret Lenton

Litigation, litigation, litigation

I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending and insuring against legal actions. Head teachers do, on occasion, have to exclude pupils. Parents are sometimes reluctant to believe that their child can do any wrong. In one case, a parent having chosen my school, which advertises discipline and strong sanctions, stated that discipline should not be imposed in any circumstances. He complained that

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 17 September 2004

The middle classes are apparently abandoning the work ethic in favour of leisure. Aristotle would have strongly approved — on condition that they knew what to do with it. ‘The dignity of labour’ is not a concept Greeks would have understood. There are two reasons. First, they did not have any unified concept of ‘work’ as one of man’s great functions. Instead, they saw a multiplicity of different occupations, one as boring as the next, whose purpose was simply to keep one from penury. In other words, work had no positive value. Second, Greeks did not distinguish, as we do, between a person and what he had to offer. So

Justin Marozzi

Diary – 17 September 2004

Before I relocated to Baghdad to participate in the reconstruction effort, several friends said they didn’t want to see me paraded on television in one of those natty orange boiler suits pleading for American and British troops to withdraw from Iraq with a rusty Swiss Army knife at my throat. Not a very original joke and I was grateful for their concern, but this beheading thing has sown a disproportionate fear among otherwise rational people. Yes, it’s extraordinarily dramatic and gruesome, hence the headlines all over the world that the terrorists so crave, but statistically it hardly figures. By my calculation, of the approximately 200,000 Coalition forces and foreign contractors

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 11 September 2004

‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played a larger part in the folk consciousness of England than the rabbit. The rabbit, or coney as it was called, was introduced by the Romans perhaps, but was popularised as a reserve of meat and fur by the Normans. I rather think the Anglo-Saxons, before they settled on the British mainland, were familiar with hares.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 11 September 2004

Mr Andrew Smith resigned as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. This added interest to a Cabinet reshuffle by Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and provoked reheated speculation about his rivalry with Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Queen gave a donation for the people of Beslan, through the British Red Cross. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said of the murders by terrorists at Beslan: ‘There are some things which happen amongst human kind which are almost inexplicable according to any basic moral norms — Nazism was and this is.’ Mr Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the editor of the al-Arabiya satellite network, said on BBC

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 11 September 2004

Q. Some time ago I introduced a friend of mine to a very distinguished journalist. Their friendship has clearly blossomed, because in a recent article the journalist glowingly described him as ‘the Essex historian and thinker’. My friend, for all his qualities, is a Toad of Toad Hall-like figure, both physically and mentally. The only recognisable part of the description is the word ‘Essex’; his only claim to being an historian is his ability to recite endless tedious lists of events and dates (focusing on those which show the French in a bad light), while his ‘thinking’ is confined to planning his next (gargantuan) lunch/dinner/cocktail or arranging his shooting calendar.

D J-Taylor

Where the funny meets the horrible

A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased, lugubriously breakfasts, having just committed a sexual act with an unappetising fellow-guest known only as ‘Mr Wispy’. However close its moral proximity to one of those Victorian temperance hymns with titles like ‘Don’t sell no more drink to my father’, A.L. Kennedy’s third novel is, in its relish of bedrock-level physical detail, quite thoroughly up