Society

Saturday

Petronella Wyatt

Putting on L-plates

It seems a bit odd, learning to drive in one’s thirties. Readers will wonder why I have put it off for so long. The answer is that, as Eliza Doolittle thought, it is jolly nice being driven around in the back of a taxi. The expense of the fares was justified by the cost of car insurance, petrol and Ken Livingstone’s road toll. In Italy where I spend my holidays it was oh so much easier driving a motor scooter, particularly as a motor scooter could take you to parts that other vehicles couldn’t reach, such as the marina or the old port where there is very little space to

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 6 September 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Our 15-year-old daughter was invited as a guest to accompany a schoolfriend on holiday with her friend’s father and stepmother (whom we have not met) as the elder sister did not wish to go. In a telephone conversation to discuss possible dates that would not conflict with our own family holiday, my wife offered to contribute towards the cost of the holiday, suggesting that we pay the airfare, as we have for our son when he has been invited to stay with friends abroad. Out of the blue we received a letter two months later informing us that they were booked into a five-star hotel for two

Andrew Gimson

Cat flap

We got word that our house in London was infested with fleas as we drove north on holiday in glorious weather through the borders into Scotland. Sid, who very kindly and conscientiously looks after our cats while we are away, sent a series of increasingly alarmed text messages, in which he informed us that he was suffering flea attacks of unbridled savagery on his ankles every time he went into the kitchen or sitting-room. He is not the kind of man to take that sort of thing lying down, and he requested an immediate transfer of funds so that he could buy a full suit of protective clothing and launch

Paul Michael-Wihbey

The end of the affair

America is disengaging from Saudi Arabia. To many observers this seems shocking, to others it is unthinkable, but all the evidence points to a dramatic change in relations. A few weeks ago, the last of America’s bases, Prince Sultan Air Base, was closed and the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing deactivated. This coincides with claims that there are direct links between the House of Saud and America’s arch enemy, Osama bin Laden. The current issue of Time magazine says that Abu Zubaidah, the leading al-Qa’eda terrorist captured in Pakistan last year, was supported by members of the Saudi royal family. While it lasted, the alliance worked well for the two countries.

Neil Barnett

Catch me if you can

Will Osama and Saddam ever be found? If they fare as well as the Bosnian Serb mass murderers Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, perhaps not. In July the desperate duo celebrated eight years on the run from indictments by The Hague Tribunal, and the smart money has them at large a while longer. Mladic seems to have vanished, but the hunt for Karadzic goes on. It goes without saying that no one is quite sure where the bouffant-haired psychiatrist and cod poet is, but best guesses have him roving the remoter parts of Republika Srpska (the Serbian bit of Bosnia) and Montenegro. The hunt drags on under the aegis of

Interconnect

The new imperial vision of Silvio Berlusconi

The Spectator began by asking Berlusconi whether he has mended fences with Chancellor Schröder, after he likened the German Social Democrat MEP, Martin Schulz, to a Nazi camp commandant? It was I who was offended, my government and my country. I replied with a joke. I wanted to be humorous. The whole of the parliament laughed. My reply was taken and exploited against me. But you know what? It was a reply that was virtually impossible for me to resist because I once broadcast 120 episodes of Hogan’s Heroes in which there was this Sergeant Schulz. You remember? I didn’t even think about it. Schulz was shouting at me –

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 30 August 2003

Some people who didn’t exist have entries in the Dictionary of National Biography and some words that don’t exist have entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. One such is primet, which was ‘erroneously stated by Prior to occur in the Grete Herball as the name of the primrose, and used by him to suggest an etymology for privet. No such word is there found.’ That Prior was Richard Prior, author of Popular Names of British Plants (1863). Some of this worries Mr Noel Petty, the great competition winner. He has sent me a couplet from a madrigal, ‘Trust not too much, fair youth, unto thy feature’, by Orlando Gibbons: Sweet

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 30 August 2003

The Hutton inquiry into the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi weapons, heard evidence from Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, and Mr John Scarlett, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee, who said that on 4 September the committee heard that an intelligence source indicated that in Iraq ‘from forward deployed storage sites, chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes’. On one day alone the inquiry released 9,000 pages of evidence on the Internet. A virus called Sobig.F alarmed email users but failed to cause

Michael Moorcock

Diary – 30 August 2003

San Andreas Bay Back from a flying visit to friendly, overheated Britain, we begin the annual migration north. Like thousands of other Texans, we are escaping our terrible weather. Some of us go to Maine, others to Oregon. My wife, Linda, and I go to northern California. It’s a radical change of political climate, too, and we have to cross a desert or two to get there. The drive from Texas to California can still stir romantic chords: hundreds of miles of semi-desert relieved by an occasional distant butte. This She Wore a Yellow Ribbon territory was once commanded by fierce Apache tribes, like the Chiricahua, who gave us Cochise

Taki

Soldiering is for others

Gstaad All Quiet on the Western Front was written in 1929 and became an instant best-seller; in Germany alone more than 3 million copies were sold within 18 months. Hollywood made a film of it the following year and it won an Oscar for Best Picture. I read it during the closing days of the second world war, my great uncle, a German scholar, helping me along. I saw the film in 1949 and never forgot the haunting scene when the hero, Paul Baumer, kills a Frenchman who had randomly jumped into his foxhole in no-man’s-land. Baumer bayonets him in the throat, after which he watches the man die slowly,

Jeremy Clarke

West End manners

Two tickets, booked over the phone, in row L of the stalls: £87.50. At the box office in the theatre’s foyer we were handed our tickets by a condescending, black-shirted woman. An unpleasantly condescending black-shirted girl at the top of the stairs demanded to see our tickets before allowing us to go any further. When I humbly showed them to her she snatched them out of my hand and crossly scrutinised them before grudgingly allowing us to proceed. We had time, if we knocked it back, for a quick drink. In the tiny downstairs bar two more black-shirts were unhurriedly and condescendingly dispensing fantastically expensive drinks. No one in the

Petronella Wyatt

Wit and women

At a dinner-party in Italy, from which country I have now returned, a question came up. This was, are women really bitchier than men, and, if so, why, when their behaviour can be so much more exemplary? For some reason this question was addressed to me. I hadn’t recalled, alas, saying a bad word about anyone that evening, but perhaps as the only female journalist present I was rashly considered by the others as some sort of oracle with regard to members of my sex. The women sitting around me were surprisingly quick to agree with my rather obvious assertion that, yes, most intelligent women had sharper tongues than men

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 30 August 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I regularly enjoy Sunday lunch at a premier hotel here in Bangkok. The food is exceptional and the Thai service staff friendly and professional. Staff recognise and greet me on arrival with a warm, formal ‘Good morning, Mr Smith’. A couple of Sundays ago, chatting with an attractive waitress by way of a little innocent flirtation, I suggested she call me ‘Michael’. Since then I am greeted with ‘Hello, Michael’ on arrival by all and sundry at the hotel. Clearly she thought this was my preferred form of address and advised her boss accordingly. Being Thai, they were not aware of the subtlety. Mary, how can I

Noel Malcolm

Some things never change: the Euro-enthusiasts are still avoiding serious debate

If a week is a long time in politics, how long is 12 years? The last time I wrote this column was in September 1991. Tony Blair was just a front-bench spokesman on employment; Gordon Brown ditto on trade and industry. These I had at least seen and heard. But if anyone had said to me, ‘Geoff Hoon’, I would have had to answer, ‘Geoff Hoo?’ He was not even an MP, just a Derbyshire MEP with an improbably large moustache. The biggest recent political excitement was the fall of Mrs Thatcher in 1990. (If people ask,

The Spectator

A true conservative

Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday, needs no memorial beyond his own books and photographs. These will live for as long as mankind is interested in the traditional societies of which he left such a brilliant record. Nobody can ever again write that kind of book or take in such abundance that kind of photograph, for those societies no longer exist in the form in which Thesiger knew them. But it is worth asking why it should have been Thesiger, rather than anyone else, who acquired the knowledge needed to write about the members of the Rashid tribe with whom he spent five years travelling on camels in the

Mark Steyn

Leave it to America

New Hampshire Usually in Iraq, the Westerners getting blown up are American and British soldiers. So the world’s press, lacking any local angle and not being terribly interested in the poor bloody infantry at the best of times, cuts to the chase: the death of Private Wossname is yet more evidence of what a disaster Bush has made of Iraq …bogged down …quagmire …lessons of Vietnam, etc., etc. But the fellow who blew up the Canal Hotel left aid workers from many lands among the dead and injured, and so for once the media took time to mourn the loss of the individuals involved. Among the victims was the dapper

Anthony Daniels

The perils of Pauline Hanson

Sydney In his heart of hearts, everyone believes in long prison sentences; it is just that no one agrees about who should receive them. The three-year sentence handed out last week to Pauline Hanson, the former fish-and-chip shop owner who for a time was Australia’s answer to Jean-Marie Le Pen, has excited a lively, if not always entirely lucid, debate in Australia. Political liberals who usually cannot wait to forgive criminals for the harm they do to others now crow in vindictive triumph, while the hanging-not-punishment-enough brigade, of whom Hanson herself was once a prominent member, are outraged by the severity of the sentence. Pauline Hanson irrupted on to the

Adrian Hilton

Render unto the Pope…

This realm of England is an Empire …governed by one Supreme Head and King.’ So proclaimed Thomas Cromwell in his most critical piece of legislation, the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533. By calling England an empire, he designated it a sovereign state, with a king who owed no submission to any other human ruler and who was invested with plenary power to give his people justice in all causes. Interestingly, the Act’s critics in Parliament were not so much concerned by its doctrinal corollaries, as by the fear that the Pope might retaliate by organising a European trade embargo against England. The Pope, of course, laid claim to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The hand of history is pointing to the door

The government brought the Hutton inquiry into being by its own shoddy actions. The lying and dissembling of No. 10 has so eroded public trust that, says Rod Liddle, the man responsible – Tony Blair – must go It seems as if we have another thing for which to thank the beleaguered BBC journalist, Mr Andrew Gilligan. According to Britain in Europe, that tautologically entitled pro-euro pressure group, there is no longer even the slenderest chance that the Prime Minister will attempt to drag us all into the single European currency before the next election. Ian Taylor, a Conservative MP and a board member of BiE, told the Daily Telegraph,

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 29 August 2003

Year by year at exam results time, every Candice in the world points to her sheaves of A-grade A-levels and from the depths of her Pot Noodles ululates her indignation at the manifest injustice of her rejection by Oxbridge. Greeks would have thought such youths deranged: did they not know what it meant to compete? The ancient Greek for ‘contest, competition’ is ag