Society

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Forget that frontier spirit stuff: Australians are neither adventurous nor subversive

New South Wales The name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could read the sign ‘Thirroul’. Wasn’t that the little seaside town where D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife, Frieda, and where he began his novel Kangaroo? Did the couple not stay in a bungalow here close to the Pacific and where the story starts? I did not much care for Kangaroo when I first read it. But as with Patrick White’s work, I later found that having thrown the book aside, thoughts it had aroused stayed pulsing strongly in

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 8 May 2004

The European Union’s social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no surprise to find the US presidential candidate John Kerry seeking to emulate it. Not that he intends to saddle American businesses with more red tape, mind: he wants to try to strangle the booming Chinese economy through a kind of international social chapter. Kerry says that on taking office he would launch an ‘immediate investigation into China’s repression of workers’ rights’ and increase state funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, a government agency which campaigns ‘to create a more stable and prosperous international economic system in which all workers

Interconnect

A sign from the gods

John Craxton (born 1922) is a painter who has spent much of his life in Greece. Growing up in an intensely musical family in Hampstead (his father was the first pianist to play Debussy in England, his sister was a celebrated oboist), he was aware from a very early age of the infinite and magical connections between sound and the visual image. His subsequent work as a painter has all the structure one expects of a great composer: his are paintings which sing of their substance. Craxton first went to Greece in 1946, staying on Poros, an island renowned for its ravishing charm (Lawrence Durrell called it ‘the happiest place

Julian Manyon

Worse than Vietnam

Baghdad As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as ours are expected to link its outpourings to London so that reassuring messages from American officials and their Iraqi allies can be pumped directly on to British television screens. It could be called ‘Good news from the bunker’. In truth, after the most disastrous month since the invasion, good news is hard to come by.

Bruce Anderson

‘Female soldier’ is an oxymoron

Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women Anyone who wants to understand the peoples of Arabia and the surrounding regions ought to start with Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. He was writing about the late 1940s and, as he knew, the world which he described was about to vanish. This provides the modern reader with a necessary perspective. It should make him aware that in the whole of human history, no major region has undergone such profound changes in such a short period. Today, the Maktoums of Dubai fly the world in their private

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 1 May 2004

Fifty-two former ambassadors, high commissioners and governors criticised Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, for supporting an American policy in Iraq that was ‘doomed to failure’. ‘The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement,’ their open letter said. It also spoke of ‘one-sided and illegal’ policies over Israel, which meant ‘abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land’. The letter was co-ordinated by Mr Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Libya, and its supporters included Sir Crispin Tickell. There was a certain amount of grumbling among

Jonathan Aitken

Diary – 1 May 2004

Washington Not since Randolph Churchill’s The Fight for the Tory Leadership has any book of political reportage caused as much of a stir on either side of the Atlantic as Bob Woodward’s latest bestseller Plan of Attack. In the last few days I have listened to detailed dissections of the gospel according to Woodward. I have discussed his book in the West Wing of the White House, at student seminars at Georgetown University, during dinner with my fellow columnists of the American Spectator and at the hospitable home of its editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. I even had a conversation about Woodward in a place where his fierce anti-war opponents would no

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 1 May 2004

Well, the Poles are in the European Union, and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Already Tesco and Carrefour are flogging the poor things centrally distributed comestibles with sell-by dates on them. From my archives (a bundle of post extracted from a pile of unread medical magazines to which my husband subscribes as part of his ‘ongoing education’), I retrieve an interesting letter from Mr Peter Kassler of Haslemere. ‘We noticed recently,’ he writes, ‘in a Carrefour supermarket in southern France that a lack of mineral water on the shelves was explained by a printed card as a result of “mouvements sociaux à notre plateforme de

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 May 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My parents, sister and in-laws are all devout Roman Catholics. I myself was raised a Catholic but have been an atheist for over 20 years, a fact of which all my family are aware. Naturally our family life involves attending numerous RC church services (weddings, baptisms, funerals). Joining in with the religious actions (genuflecting, kneeling to pray, taking communion, making the sign of the cross and so on) makes me feel bogus and uncomfortably self-conscious. However, I worry that not joining in would be seen as an ostentatious rejection of beliefs which are dear to people I love. How can I politely attend these Roman Catholic religious

Jane Ridley

Jumping for joy

Jane Shilling is a Times journalist and single parent who lives in Greenwich with her 12-year-old son. One day, for no particular reason, she decides to take up riding lessons. She turns up at a livery stables at Rooting Street in Kent, an establishment run by a formidable lady named Mrs Rogers. Jane Shilling had never swung her leg over a saddle before. ‘I kept thinking of poor, mad Zelda Fitzgerald and her loopy attempts to train as a ballet dancer years after it was too late to begin.’ She was too old, ‘well into middle age’ (she never lets on exactly how old, but she must be 40-something), her

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 1 May 2004

Ten new members join the European Union on Saturday and thousands of economic migrants are queueing up at the borders, raring to go. I refer, of course, to Western European property investors hoping to make a killing on property markets in the East. While we have heard a lot of grim warnings in the press about Eastern Europeans descending on Dover by the busload to take our jobs, steal our women and eat our children, buy-to-let investors have received nothing but encouragement: last weekend’s property sections were brimming with suggestions as to where to invest, what to buy and how much rent it is possible to screw out of your

Peter Oborne

Blair is already thinking about when to go. Summer might be a good time

Everyone knows that moment in the Bugs Bunny cartoons when the rabbit dashes over the cliff. For a few moments the creature remains aloft, suspended in space, little legs busily pumping away. Then he makes the mistake of looking down, realises the gravity of his predicament, and starts to plunge precipitously downwards. Tony Blair is over the edge, and about to begin his descent. There is neither direction nor purpose in Downing Street. Above all there is no political will. Poor Blair has reached the status of a posthumous prime minister. The EU referendum shambles was one example of this terrifying drift, Tuesday’s panicky speech on immigration another. As ever

Theodore Dalrymple

The lies of the land

Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption Dame Shirley Porter is the unacceptable face of corruption, a rich woman taken in gerrymandering (had she started off poor, no one would have minded). But though the sum of money she was initially required to pay Westminster Council in restitution was enormous, and the sum she agreed finally to pay pretty substantial by the standards of 99.99 per cent of humanity, these sums are small beer by comparison with what the thorough-going moral and intellectual corruption of the British public services costs the taxpayer

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 24 April 2004

A referendum on the proposed constitution for the European Union will be held, the government conceded; the next argument was over the timing. ‘Parliament should debate it in detail and decide upon it,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the Commons, ‘then let the people have the final say.’ After meeting President George Bush of the United States in Washington, Mr Blair said that they would seek a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorise a ‘central role’ for the UN in Iraq after America relinquishes nominal control on 1 July. In raids intended to catch terrorists, 400 police arrested six men and a woman in Greater Manchester, one

Alice Thomas-Ellis

Diary – 24 April 2004

As I lead a life of more or less untroubled serenity and I am in perfect health (except for a slight cough), it was unsettling to learn that I had cancer and that it looked inoperable. It wasn’t, thankfully, and a most delightful surgeon cut it out. Cancer is a strange disease and I am aware that it may still be lurking around biding its time, but there is nothing to be gained by fussing. Anyway, I still feel in perfect health and so when people ask if I feel better I have to explain that, so far, I haven’t felt ill. When the locals learned of my condition, as

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 24 April 2004

‘A light, pleasant, and digestible food,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition: the best). ‘Come off it,’ said my husband, and for once I agreed with him. The food in question was tapioca, which is a starchy derivative from the cassava plant. The word is Brazilian, the thing is disgusting. The frogspawn particles are agglomerations that formed when it was dried. This knowledge will, I hope, remain academic, but a related and more practical question arose while I was tucking in to some couscous with a friend. She asked if couscous was the same as semolina, and I didn’t know. I eat but don’t cook couscous and do neither to

Jeremy Clarke

Tummy trouble

Under ‘large floral patterned chamber pot, used once, slightly damaged, £5 ono’ I came across ‘Abmaster stomach exerciser, boxed, unwanted gift, £10.’ I’d been looking out for a stomach exerciser in the small ads for a long time, so I dialled the number. A small inarticulate child answered. Was the Abmaster still for sale? There was the sound of laboured breathing, then she went away, and after a while an adult male came to the phone. I repeated the question. There was a long contemplative silence. He didn’t know nothing about no Abmaster, he said, then he too went away. Next a woman came to the phone. Obviously the dynamo

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 24 April 2004

Dear Mary… Q. As a child I largely complied with my parents’ wishes and there was no question of baiting them ad infinitum as my own children do me. In my day there was still the fear of smacking but, needless to say, my own children, a boy aged nine and a girl aged seven, have never been smacked. They do love each other and usually get on well, except during long journeys, when they fight like cat and dog. Over Easter I arrived at various destinations totally drained from breaking up fights. I am now developing travelphobia in anticipation of long journeys scheduled for the summer holidays. My husband,

John De-Falbe

Outposts of the imagination

This novel, translated from the Afrikaans by André Brink, was offered to me for review with an apologetic note advising me to abandon it at the first onset of boredom. Seven hundred and fifty dense pages later I can report that it is riveting throughout. Based on the first 50 years of Dutch settlement in South Africa, it is a monumental, vividly imagined epic that, in spite of its huge cast and range, maintains its balance and direction. It may give some idea of the book’s scale to observe that the central character, Pieternella, is not born until page 154. She is the first half-caste to be born in the

Stephen Glover

Don’t worry: the ‘tabloid revolution’ is not going to carry everything before it

It is becoming a commonplace that the ‘tabloid wars’ between broadsheet titles are transforming the newspaper market. There is a widespread belief that in producing tabloid editions the Independent and, to a lesser extent, the Times have stolen a brilliant march on their rivals. The Guardian is accused of having fallen asleep on the job, and one excitable commentator has suggested that the paper is doomed. The Daily Telegraph is also thought by many to be fatally missing out on the revolution. As soon as it finds a new buyer, it is suggested, it must unveil the tabloid edition with whose prototype frustrated executives have been tinkering. Such is the