Society

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Is green the new blue?

Phew! Made it! Just in time, mind. And not without a rather costly rearrangement of the flights back from the Far East, I might add. And a holiday cut short as a result of a lamentable slip of the memory. But all worth it, in the end. Like you, I suspect, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d missed the chance to vote in this week’s crucial local government elections. As with most people, rarely a day goes by without my pondering what, exactly, is the best formula for calculating the amount which should be raised through rates, or the council charge, or council tax, for provision of our

Andrew Gimson

Hoon: we have to find those weapons

We could go and invade some country none of us has yet thought of and destroy the regime there while leaving the rest of the country intact. That is not quite how Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, put it when I interviewed him on Monday afternoon in the presence of three members of his staff, but it emerges clearly from what he said. Mr Hoon sees a world in which warfare has changed far more profoundly than most opponents of the Iraq campaign have yet understood, and in which amazing possibilities have opened up. Question to Mr Hoon: ‘Can you reassure us that we won’t be taking part in any

Boris Johnson

The fear, the squalor …and the hope

Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I heard shouting and saw the Americans using their carbines like staves to push back some of the customers, who were evidently trying their luck. Just then a black sergeant near me started shouting at an Iraqi. ‘You, I’ve told you to get away from there,’ he said, swinging his gun round. The Iraqi appeared to be a phone technician, with pliers and a handset. He was standing before

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 2 May 2003

The Americans say they have no plans to attack any other foreign power – at the moment. To judge by the Iraq conflict, however, it will not be St Augustine’s concept of the ‘just war’ that controls that decision, but that of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. In his de officiis (‘On Obligations’, 44 bc), Cicero discusses how justice should be applied in a range of cases, including war. Arguing that there are laws of warfare which must be strictly observed, he continues, ‘Since there are two ways of settling a dispute, by discussion or by force, and the former is characteristic of man, the latter of animals, we

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 April 2003

The Daily Telegraph said that documents found in the ruined Iraqi foreign ministry in Baghdad by a Daily Telegraph reporter were said to discuss payments to Mr George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin. Mr Galloway said: ‘I have never solicited, nor would I have accepted had I been offered, any financial assistance of any kind from the Iraqi regime.’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the Sun how he had explained to his children that a Commons vote on the Iraq war might bring him down: ‘I did sit down with them at one point and I explained that this was going to be extremely difficult and it

Simon Heffer

Diary – 26 April 2003

As an atheist, I am reluctant to intrude into the private affairs of the Church of England, despite having been baptised into it (I was six weeks old at the time, and had little say in the matter). However, conscious as I am of its residual cultural significance, I have been dismayed by aspects of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. His bleeding-heart views on the late war were only to be expected; it was the extreme beard that really caused me to despair. I consoled myself that perhaps it betokened a proper regard for the ideology of the Old Testament; but I fear I may be mistaken. However delightfully prehistoric

The Spectator

Feedback | 26 April 2003

Comment on The dawning of a new Europe by Tim Congdon (19/04/2003) What an excellent article by Tim Congdon. It is so good to see a coherently argued case for UK withdrawal from the EU. I agree entirely that the case must be made in a way that is not narrow and jingoistic so that its advocates are seen to be forward looking and positive. However I do not agree with Professor Congdon that the UK can keep its Treaty of Rome obligations as a matter of “good form”. The Treaty of Rome makes UK law subsidiary to EU law and hence impinges upon the sovereignty of Parliament. The UK

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 April 2003

A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he’d seen a programme dated 1862 for an ‘Enthronization’ in the cathedral. Well, I thought, perhaps that was for the American market, although transatlantic tourists must have been rare then. The event must have been the enthronement of Archbishop Longley. The ceremony had been revived by his predecessor Archbishop Sumner in 1848. Before that the last archbishop enthroned in person was Wake in 1716.

Taki

Tough guys

New York Flaying the Frogs has replaced baseball as the national pastime in this here great country, with Murdoch’s minions doing most of the flaying, using elegant words such as weasels, yellow-bellies and slimeballs to describe our Gallic cousins. It is strange how Marianne’s reluctance to join Hopalong Cassidy for target practice against a bunch of schmucks using Winchester 73s has spoiled a once beautiful relationship quicker than you can say Lafayette. Forget about Europe, shriek the all-conquering ones, only Britain and Israel matter. ‘We saved the French twice in one century, but they still think they have the right to follow their own foreign policy.’ Well, however true that

Jeremy Clarke

Toasting Dr Atkins

The moment I heard on the radio that Dr Atkins was dead, I was in a caravan next to the beach at Polzeath, in north Cornwall, eating tinned spaghetti on toast. Me, my boy, and my boy’s half-brother were there for a fortnight’s surfing – well, body boarding anyway. On three consecutive days in the first week there was a heatwave. I went brown, Mark went pillar-box red and Dan stayed about the same pale-green colour. It was at teatime, during one of these astonishingly hot days, that we heard it on the news. Dr Atkins, author of Dr Atkins’s Age-Defying Diet Revolution (Feel Great, Live Longer), had slipped on

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 April 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I am shortly to give lunch to a number of high-profile people. Two of them have rung to inquire how late they can leave it before giving me a yes or a no. Do you agree with me that this behaviour, with its assumption that a better invitation may come along in the meantime, is outrageously rude?M.W., Wiltshire A. On the contrary. These days only the retired and low-profile can state with certainty whether they will definitely be available on a certain date. It is an unfortunate fact that the very reason why certain modern people are ‘high-profile’ is their ruthless insistence on flexibility where social arrangements

Paul Robinson

The people must decide their fate

In 1825 Russian Decembrist revolutionaries in St Petersburg tried to inspire the peasant masses with the slogan ‘Constantine i constitutsia’ (Constantine and a constitution) as they pressed for Tsar Nicholas I to abdicate in favour of his brother Constantine. Unfortunately, their pre-spin audience simply assumed that Constitutsia was Constantine’s wife, and failed to see the advantage of a different Romanov and his lady over the one already reigning. Here today, Britain is about to get its first ever written constitution, drafted by the obliging Eurocrats of the Convention on the Future of Europe, and binding on us all. Yet ‘we the people’ in whose name this document is being produced

Aidan Hartley

Missing out

Laikipia Living in the Kenyan highlands during this war in Iraq I’ve felt like those Japanese soldiers who thought they were still supposed to be fighting when they were plucked out of Pacific island jungles in the 1970s. In the middle of Laikipia we live without TVs, telephones or newspapers. Visitors bring us news, but people up here are more interested in the prospects of rain than the latest from the Baghdad battlefront. We do have a radio, a special satellite one with an antenna, but halfway through Tony Blair’s speech the other day, a vital cable got tangled around my chair leg and snapped when I yanked at it.

The Spectator

Scrap targets

There is no task more difficult than that of educating British children. To the natural indiscipline of youth has now been added the indiscipline of parents, many of whom interpret any reports of wrongdoing in school on the part of their offspring as a personal affront, or as the manifestation of the malice of teachers. The teachers themselves have changed out of all recognition in the past few decades, thanks to the long march through the institutions by indoctrinating, and indoctrinated, intellectuals bearing pernicious gimcrack radical ideas. While many are respectable and learned men and women, who view it as their vocation to induct their charges into a civilisation, a

Susan Moore

Business as usual in London

There is a certain irony in the fact that the art market least affected by the fallout of 11 September was probably Islamic art. After all, the big players in this small, specialist field are unlikely to have incomes dependent on the Western stockmarket – and they are as rich as Croesus anyway. Biggest of all is Sheikh Saud bin Mohamed al-Thani, cousin of the Emir of Qatar, who has spent hundreds of millions in just five years – hoovering up everything from Islamic metalwork to Mamluk glass, manuscripts, Isnik pottery, and Indian and Arab jewellery, much but not all destined for a projected national museum and library. He is

Joe Queenan

Dying for a cigarette

New York Fifty-three years ago, Frank Loesser wrote a famous musical about the refusal of New Yorkers to kowtow to the demands of earnest reformers and implacable do-gooders. Since Guys and Dolls bowed, New York has survived J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, Rudy Giuliani and the ministrations of a host of other civic-minded zealots determined to force the city to clean up its act. But it could not survive Mike Bloomberg. On 30 March of this year, Mayor Bloomberg finally got his wish when a citywide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants came into effect. Smokers were branded as the enemy of the people; sinister curs whose

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Lions betrayed by donkeys

Don’t be silly,’ said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a bit of a gallop.’ It looked, from the newspaper photographs, as though Bruce might be right. Covered in tribal face-paint and with skulls daubed on their helmets, our boys and America’s went whooping off in their tanks and planes. Cities fell, civilians looted, and patriots like Bruce knocked back a few bottles of port in

Mark Steyn

Why I nearly resigned

New Hampshire The UN should be appointed overseer of the peace not because that organisation possesses planning skills which America does not, but because to shut it out will cause resentment in the Arab world. However irritating are many of the do-gooders among its ranks, the UN has the advantage of being seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism. After reading those words in The Spectator’s leading article of 12 April, I hurled the magazine across the room and typed up my letter of resignation. A nervous dependant pointed out it might be wiser to line up alternative employment first. It quickly emerged that no other British publication would

Saturday

The Spectator

Feedback | 19 April 2003

Comment on The end of the beginning by Michael Ledeen (12/04/2003) Michael Ledeen’s analysis of how the United States will approach other ‘evil’ states, namely Syria and Iran, shows signs of hysteria from the start. Ledeen tells us that ‘Today, both Iran and Syria are engaged in a desperate terrorist campaign against coalition forces in Iraq.’ Yet the evidence suggests that Iran has shown a complete lack of interest in events over the border, and that Syria has helped a few hundred zealous young men to their deaths in Baghdad. This hardly constitutes a ‘desperate terrorist campaign’. He claims later that Iran and Syria will kill us in Iraq and

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 April 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I am a consultant to, and former partner of, a professional firm in the suburbs of London, where I do four days a week working in an extraordinarily happy and democratic environment with political incorrectness to the fore. A problem has arisen of a very delicate nature, where it has been alleged that a newly employed secretary – who is extremely popular, hardworking and efficient – suffers from the dreaded BO. How on earth does one address this issue, if at all?M.W., Gillingham, Dorset A. To deal with this problem, you must recruit two volunteers without ego problems from within the office. Ask these two to set