Society

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Late Spanish election result: the anti-bullfighters got 65,705 votes

Those awful bombs in Madrid rather overshadowed a less sensational little story unfolding during the Spanish general election just passed. My brother-in-law stood for the office of senator on an anti-bullfighting ticket, and though he stood no chance of winning and never expected to, he did exceptionally well. Here I must pause. I do not want to upset a good friend. My affection for my brother-in-law is equalled only by the affection and regard in which I hold Tristan Garel-Jones and his wonderful family. And Lord Garel-Jones, as the world knows, is the bullfighting correspondent of this magazine. Before you (and he) cry, ‘That is not the title under which

Damien Mccrystal

City and Finance Special

If asked to name the visionary behind the development of Canary Wharf, most people who know anything about it would come up with the late Michael von Clemm of the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, who spotted the potential for office developments while scouting for small industrial space on behalf of the Roux Brothers restaurant group in 1984. But go back further, to 1980 and these words, ‘I believe that this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital, having cleared away the outdated. We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity. No other city in the world has got

Jeremy Clarke

Britain’s most reviled man

A bouquet of red, white and blue flowers tied with a royal-blue ribbon has recently appeared among the scores of tributes tied to railings in the street in Pollockshields, Glasgow, from where 15-year-old Kriss Donald was abducted and later murdered, allegedly by an Asian gang. ‘In our hearts,’ the message says. ‘From the Southside British National Party.’ On Saturday the BNP leader Nick Griffin went to Pollockshields and was greeted with the usual abuse. Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell said that Griffin and his party were ‘poisonous’. Others described Griffin as ‘inhuman’, ‘opportunist scum’ and ‘evil’. It’s the same wherever he goes. Mr Griffin must be the most reviled person

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 March 2004

In the eighth budget of his career, Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed to narrow his deficit by cutting 40,000 public-sector jobs and selling off assets, including land worth £5 billion. The Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise would merge, making 14,000 people redundant. There was much tinkering. Duty on beer up 1p a pint, wine up 4p a bottle; spirits, champagne and cider stayed the same. Duty on cigarettes went up by 8p a packet; petrol duty up by 1.9p a litre. In consideration of the burden of council tax, people over 70 would get an extra £100 from the government. Stamp duty on house sales

Anthony Howard

Diary – 20 March 2004

By now they must have finished sifting the 79 applications and be drawing up the actual shortlist for the chairmanship of the BBC. Nothing as remotely exciting has ever happened in that strange Trafalgar Square annexe of government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is, of course, an absurd ministry, originally invented, if under the different name of National Heritage, by John Major to oblige his mate David Mellor. (Memo to prime ministers: it is nearly always a bad idea to create ministries to suit the convenience of individuals — Mellor soon proved that and so, if in a different way, did George Brown at the DEA in

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 20 March 2004

Q. My wife and I recently attended a wedding after which we sat down to a formal dinner. It was all going very well until the best man’s speech. This particular chap — a barrister, who should have known better — proceeded to bore for England with an utterly tedious and humourless waffle that lasted for three quarters of an hour. As guests, we were all too embarrassed to do anything except sit tight and inwardly groan. But by the time the fool had finished, he had pretty well ruined the evening. I am puzzled as to what anyone could have done to get him to shut up. And who

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 20 March 2004

Statistics show that in the United States more people die in hospital because of medical blunders than from Aids, breast cancer and car accidents combined. But who carries the can? Ancient Greek doctors are remarkable for being prepared to describe their failures as well as their successes. We read of one Autonomus who ‘died from a head wound on the sixteenth day. The stone, thrown by hand, hit him on the sutures in the middle of the bregma (front of the head). I was unaware that I should trephine, because I did not notice that the sutures had the injury of the weapon right on them (this became obvious only

John De-Falbe

Blundering after a bird

Anyone who gave themselves the pleasure of reading Death and the Penguin should certainly treat themselves to this sequel. And if you missed it, never mind, read this one anyway: it’s delicious; it will not detain you long and you can always go back and catch up later on its predecessor. The earlier book left our hero Viktor somewhere near the Antarctic. He had intended to repatriate his penguin, Misha, but a spot of bother made it expedient for him to go there himself and leave Misha behind (complete with his new heart). Now he wants to get back to Kiev and find Misha. Kurkov fixes things briskly at the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 20 March 2004

At last, some good news for the anti-war lobby. British servicemen will not be forced — in fact will not be allowed — to do America’s dirty work for it. That is my interpretation, at any rate, of Dodd Amendment no. 2660 to the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, passed by the US Senate last week by 70 votes to 26. The amendment prohibits companies working on federal and state government contracts to outsource work abroad. The Senate isn’t even bothering to try to dress up its actions as a security issue: this is a shameless piece of protectionism. American unions have cried foul that companies are increasingly cutting costs

Stephen Glover

Is Gannett poised to swoop on the Daily Telegraph?

Amid all the chatter about who may buy the Telegraph Group, the names one hears most often are those of the Daily Mail group, the Express group and Richard Desmond, and the Barclay Brothers. Occasionally various venture capitalists are also mentioned. The one company that is hardly taken seriously, though it appears on most lists of possible bidders, is the American publisher Gannett. And yet Gannett, it seems, is in pole position to buy Hollinger International, whose main titles are the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and last, though not least, The Spectator. It is not obvious why Gannett should have been virtually ignored

The Spectator

Truth and consequences

In a democracy, the sovereign people are entitled to sack the politicians who serve them. But this was a dangerous moment for the voters of Spain to exercise that right. They have not only dispensed with a successful government that had a sound economic record in favour of an opposition that never expected to win and which can offer little more than slogans and vagueness. The Spaniards have also given an impression of weakness. This is wholly misleading, but no less dangerous for that. Among Islamic fundamentalists it is an article of faith that Westerners are decadent and cowardly. The events in Spain will confirm that impression. In the short

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Einstein of maths

The odds are that the name Alexandre Grothendieck will mean little or nothing to most Spectator readers. It’s a name I heard for the first time in high summer two years or so ago, not long, as I remember it, after the film A Beautiful Mind had come out. I was in the garden of my friend Umar’s house in Cambridge, and we were waiting for his ancient cast-iron barbecue, Camp Freddie, to cook some sausages. Umar is a mathematician of considerable braininess, and when we are together we often end up talking maths. That is, I tend to ask him to explain what he does, and he tends to

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 March 2004

The House of Lords voted by 216 to 183 to refer to a special select committee, and thus delay, the Constitutional Reform Bill, which seeks to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor and to set up a Supreme Court to replace the Law Lords; a week earlier Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, had called the Bill ‘exchanging a first-class Final Court of Appeal for a second-class Supreme Court’, but he changed his tune. The government said it would not compensate policyholders of Equitable Life, the troubled mutual society, after a report by Lord Penrose found it was the ‘author of its own misfortunes … policyholders were effectively powerless, and

Michael Heath

Diary – 13 March 2004

I see that the papers have finally given a name — ‘chavs’ — to the new working class. They are the type of people I have been drawing for years: trailer trash covered in bling bling, wearing Burberry baseball hats, white tracksuit bottoms and white trainers. They couldn’t be more different from the docile ‘pint-of-mild-please’ working class of the 1930s. I remember Mass Observation and the films by Humphrey Jennings, which collated their behaviour as if they were animals in a wildlife documentary. Try doing that now: ‘Wot you looking at?’ ‘Er …nothing. I was just observing you drinking a large Jack Daniel’s and Coke so as to understand the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 13 March 2004

Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish word chaval, meaning not ‘a pikey’ but ‘a bloke’, comes from the same source. And so it does, I find on inquiry. Corominas’s six-volume Spanish etymological dictionary confirms this, though it quotes among its supplementary authorities George Borrow. Now Borrow was a brave linguist, but he was neither exact nor comprehensive in his linguistic analyses

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 13 March 2004

Q. When my husband is behaving badly I sometimes think I would like to know exactly how much I might receive in a divorce settlement, just so I could have an unnerving little smile playing about my lips, safe in the knowledge of what I am ‘worth’. How can I get this information without actually consulting a solicitor? I don’t want to wash my dirty linen in public or set any inexorable process in motion. Name and address withheld A. An inexorable process would not necessarily be set in motion. Two of the very top divorce lawyers in the country, Fiona Shackleton and Roger Bamber, both sit their clients down

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 13 March 2004

The Gender Recognition Bill plodding its way through the House of Commons does not deal with hermaphrodites. Bad mistake. Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. Ovid tells how the nymph Salmacis fell madly in love with him when she saw him strip and dive into a pool. She did the same, wound herself round him and, as he struggled to free himself, prayed that the gods would ensure that they were never parted. Her prayer was granted, and their two bodies were fused into one, so that they seemed ‘both male and female, and neither, at the same time’. In his Natural History, the elder Pliny (ad 23–79)

Raymond Carr

Secrets of the parsonage

Of the hundreds of books I have reviewed in the last half century only two could be classified as definitive. Margaret Smith’s three volumes of Charlotte Bront

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Shouldn’t the peaceniks just shut up and move on?

After writing this I shall set out for Iraq. The Times is sending me there, I am enormously lucky to go, and hope to see as much as possible in the ten short days of my trip. The prospect has concentrated my mind on something which has vexed me and others who opposed the US–British invasion all through the year of trouble and tragedy that has followed. It is the question of whether we peaceniks are right to persist so doggedly in our criticism of the Prime Minister and the US President, and in our pursuit of their answers to unanswered questions about the reasons and justifications for war, now