Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Help the aged

Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned this week, so he says, in order to spend more time with his family. Or maybe he was peeved at some of the comments made about him by his colleagues. What is certain is that he didn’t resign for the reason he ought to have done: that the government’s policy on pensions has been a failure. In 1997 our pension pots were brimming. Alone in Europe we looked forward to a well-heeled old age without impoverishing future taxpayers. Just seven years later, however, many seem doomed to a retirement on baked beans — bought with means-tested benefits. The change in fortunes for

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

A free market in religion

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing in front of St Michael’s church I can see the roof of the Reverend Keith Ward’s house. Cumnor isn’t quite the sort of parish you’d expect to find the former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a liberal intellectual whom the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘a much loved and admired thinker’. In his book The

Frances Osborne

Lilla’s war with China

Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing-paper and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’. My great-grandmother, Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of 100, after an extraordinary exchange of correspondence lasting 30 years and consuming many sheets of Basildon Bond, she succeeded in extracting a cheque from none other than the communist government of China. And when I was writing Lilla’s Feast, the story of her remarkable life, I discovered how she did it. Lilla had long been tough.

Mark Steyn

We still don’t get it

‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it. That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like

Friday

Diary – 10 September 2004

As somebody who loved model trains as a kid, and who took a year off school when he was 20 to work as a lineman for the Canadian National Railway, I got on the GNER train at King’s Cross for a trip to the Scottish Borders with a warm sense of familiarity and expectation. The carriages are like old Pullmans, which had a foot of concrete lining their bases to steady the ride and kept the cars upright in case of a derailment. The GNER cars have the smooth, fast ride of an old, comfy Cadillac. The trip to the Borders, an area with one of the world’s great set

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 10 September 2004

Today’s rich are not, apparently, giving enough of their wealth to good causes. The ancients would have known why. Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — had always been seen as a virtue of the well-born Greek (for Aristotle it was an act that characterised the ‘magnificent’ man). It was, therefore, highly popular among the great and good of the Hellenic world, as the vast number of inscriptions and statues attesting such ‘euergetism’ indicate, whether erected by the euergetist himself or a grateful people. The culture spread to Rome too. Pliny the Younger, for example, endowed his home town, Como, with a school and a library, and in his will bequeathed it

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 September 2004

The Royal Mail paid £50 million in compensation after meeting none of its 15 targets in the first quarter of the financial year, delivering only 88.3 per cent of first-class letters on time between April and June, against a target of 92.5 per cent; Oxford saw only 68 per cent delivered on time. By July Glasgow still had one in five first-class letters late. The Electoral Commission recommended that all-postal voting should be dropped in British elections after reports of abuse and disorganisation in the pilots in June undermined public confidence; Mr John Prescott’s all-postal referendum on regional government for the North East on 4 November would have to go

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 4 September 2004

New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us neglect, or lump with Australian English. Oxford University Press has published a dictionary of New Zealand English and one of its slang, but popularly we still tend to conflate the two. Here are some examples I have found in newspapers or on the Internet: bach ‘small holiday home’; bludge ‘to sponge’; chook ‘chicken’; dairy ‘corner

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 4 September 2004

Dear Mary… Q. Last week I arrived to stay with some English friends near St Remy and was shown to a most delightful and certainly ‘best’ spare bedroom — with glorious views over the Camargue and beyond. You can imagine my astonishment when, on climbing into my luxurious bed later that night and folding the essential but always romantic mosquito net around the bed, a pair of extra-large men’s boxer shorts dropped on top of me. (I, incidentally, am a single woman and was travelling alone.) The pants had clearly been left behind by the guest immediately before me and had got muddled up in the mosquito net. My dilemma

Stephen Glover

It is now up to Lord Black to prove his innocence to the rest of the world

The excesses of Lord Black, former proprietor of the Telegraph Group, which owns this magazine, are mind-boggling. Of course they have not yet been proven in a court of law, and Lord Black continues to deny the allegations in his characteristically orotund language. But the author of the 500-page report condemning Lord Black is Richard Breeden, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in America, and his colleagues are equally well respected and disinterested people. Moreover, they have certainly provided chapter and verse to a level of detail that must — or should — be mortifying to Lord Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel. Lord Black may continue

The Spectator

Jobs for life

To the parents of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died in 2000 after being battered by her great-aunt and great-aunt’s boyfriend in a seedy Haringey council flat, the disciplinary procedures employed by British local government must seem to take place in a parallel universe. On Wednesday morning, listeners to Radio Four’s Today programme were treated to the pained tones of Lisa Arthurworrey, the social worker who had been responsible for Victoria’s welfare and who is now to appeal against her sacking by Haringey borough council for gross misconduct. Ms Arthurworrey complains that although she made mistakes she was misled by doctors and let down by her managers, and that

Friday

Simon Heffer

Diary – 3 September 2004

Whenever I feel psychotically depressed about this country — which, as I contemplate another nine years of Labour rule, is more and more often — I find myself being thankful that I do not have as my head of state President Chirac. I have come to believe that he is the price France pays for having Ravel, Manet, Cheval Blanc, Paris, foie gras and all those gorgeous pouting actresses. At the time of writing, slimy Jacques has not resolved the latest problem facing his country, the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. Their captors have demanded that France drop the law forbidding the wearing of religious symbols in schools:

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 28 August 2004

Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, visited Sudan, seeing some refugees in one of the better camps in Darfur, and meeting the Prime Minister and minister for foreign affairs; he confirmed that British troops would not be sent to Sudan. Sir Mark Thatcher Bt, the son of Lady Thatcher, was arrested by South African police investigating an attempted coup against Equatorial Guinea. Nearly 140,000 immigrants from outside the European Union were granted leave to settle permanently in Britain last year, 20 per cent up on the year before; the total in five years is about half a million. The proportion of 11-year-olds reaching the expected level in English at school

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 August 2004

The term ‘Middle England’ has been drifting a bit in the last few years, but never so far, so fast as under the impulsion of Mr David Miliband, a young minister in the Department for Education. He said last week that educational ‘improvements have released the potential of Middle England’. This sudden reference to ‘Middle England’ — in recent years the misty lost domain of the Daily Mail — baffled Mr Ed Stourton on Today one morning, and it puzzled the Daily Telegraph, for which Middle England was ‘mortgagers in Cheshire with a Renault Espace in the drive’. According to interpreters of his own private language, Mr Miliband merely meant

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 28 August 2004

Dear Mary… Q. Could you help with a problem that regular users of the ‘quiet’ carriages on trains are too often confronted with? How does one get compulsive talkers to shut up and observe the companionable silence which 95 per cent of the carriage’s occupants cherish? Users of mobile phones and personal stereos can legitimately be asked to absent themselves, but it is a moot point whether talking (even continual chatter at top volume) can be treated as a similar offence. On every journey recently we have been afflicted by people who talk for the duration without drawing breath, in voices that carry to the other end of the carriage.

Aidan Hartley

Cargo cult

Laikipia I watched tribal warriors invade private farms on Kenya’s Laikipia plateau this week, driving vast herds of cattle before them. The phalanxes of il moran looked magnificent in their ochre and beads, and my spine tingled at the sight of their spears flashing in the sun. When Nairobi’s government quite reasonably moved to evict them, saying this was not a ‘Zimbabwe-like situation’, they lit bushfires and left a trail of wanton vandalism. Wielding tomahawks, knives and knobkerries, they clashed with security forces, and in the m

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why I am glad to have broken my vow never to ride a horse again

‘Put your left foot here, into this stirrup’ — I glanced down at a decorated steel half-shoe hanging on a leather strap — ‘and grip this stubby thing with your left hand….’ — I looked up at a sort of leather knob about the size of an orange set into the prow of the saddle — ‘and now lift your weight on to your left foot in the stirrup, swinging your right leg over the back of the horse.’ A bit of an effort, this, but it was how I was taught to get on to a boy’s bicycle and I found I still could. ‘Put your right foot into

The Spectator

The abuse of power

The impeachment of Tony Blair would form a fitting end to a prime ministership which opened with the promise to be ‘purer than pure’, but ended in the arrogant deception of the British people. This ancient form of trial, which has lain disused but not defunct in the armoury with which we defend our liberties, is the means by which Parliament can humble a chief minister who has arrogated grotesque quantities of power and has treated with contempt the constitutional forms which ought to have restrained him. Eminent among those forms or conventions or traditions is the dictum that ministers must not lie to or mislead the House of Commons.

Daniel Wolf

Poster killer

According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the implacable revolutionary, with the beret, the Comandante star, the wispy hair and beard. I remember particularly a sickly poster version in psychedelic colours — mauve and turquoise and green — taped to the wall of a friend’s room. Even then, I thought, Che Guevara was unlikely to have had much to recommend him, a mythic

Interconnect

High crimes and misdemeanours

Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord Palmerston, while foreign minister, had entered into a secret treaty with Russia. Nevertheless, impeachment remains part of parliamentary law, a recourse for desperate times. Many MPs feel certain that the moment critique has now arrived. They remain in a state of despair at the way the Prime Minister systematically misled the House of Commons and