Society

Wednesday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The US is bringing Liberty and Equality to Iraq, but not Fraternity: that would be sexist

Inside Baghdad there is another Baghdad. It is called the Green Zone and my Times colleague Richard Beeston wrote about it in The Spectator a few weeks ago. I visited the Green Zone last month. This was virtual reality. Outside lies a dirty and dangerous country. Within, you encounter a magic park where newly planted young trees wave in the breeze and hopeful Americans with perfect teeth speak only of freedom. I had come to attend one of the regular press conferences at which the US generals commanding the different military zones report progress in their sector. Inside are marbled halls built by Saddam for an international convention which never

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 March 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the bombings in Iraq that there was ‘a struggle between good and evil’ going on there. Before the bombings, Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it was withdrawing support from the Butler inquiry into intelligence on purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the inquiry was to be conducted in an ‘unacceptably restrictive fashion’; Mr Michael Mates, the Conservative MP on the Butler committee, said it was his duty to continue. Miss Clare Short was asked on Today on Radio 4 about spying on the United Nations and said: ‘These things are done. … In fact, I

Bill Bryson

Diary – 6 March 2004

June. My first day back in Britain after eight years in America and I couldn’t be happier. The sun is shining and I have a large cheque in my pocket with which to conclude the purchase of a nice house in Norfolk. Things could not be better. Setting off from Gloucester Road Underground station, I join a throng waiting for a Circle Line train that never comes. Silently we wait and wait — for ten minutes, then 15 — but nothing happens. ‘I remember when trains used to go by here,’ I remark brightly after a time to the man beside me. By chance he is a fellow American, but

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 6 March 2004

According to that very annoying programme Woman’s Hour (one minute being militantly gynaecological, the next giving recipes for butternut-squash soup), a mother complained to a school that allowed her son to say toilet instead of lavatory. A vox pop discovered more people in the street were at home with toilet than with lavatory, which one respondent identified as a word used only by those unfamiliar with English. Then they got on to napkin against serviette. Here, I think, one cannot ignore the fact that most people do not use table napkins. Perhaps there is an idea that serviette more properly applies to insubstantial paper objects. Certainly in Spain every bar

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 6 March 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I find that I can’t remember somebody’s name for longer than 30 seconds after I have been introduced to them. It is worse at a party where I recognise people’s faces and suspect I know them well, but cannot remember who they are. Recently, at a fashion party, there was a typical worst-case scenario when I saw an old friend from university who now moves in fashion circles, and his name completely eclipsed [sic] me. Can you recommend a foolproof procedure that will work every time to prevent me from having these problems? I do not want to have to go on a five-day memory improvement course.

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 6 March 2004

However one regards Mrs Gun after her betrayal of the Official Secrets Act — selfless heroine of Antigonean stature, or self-important, sanctimonious little twerp — her actions raise an important question: the security of the written word. In classical Greece, inter-state politics were usually carried out verbally, either by well-briefed ambassadors or by messengers with orders committed to memory. Personal letters between heads of state were long regarded with suspicion. First, they were seen as secretive; unlike a messenger, a letter could not blab about its contents to its fellows and, in a world where literacy was not universal, a sealed letter was a convenient way of keeping information from

The Spectator

Competition – terms and conditions

1. This prize draw is open to residents of the UK, 18 years or over, except employees of The Spectator 1828 Limited their associated, affiliated or subsidiary companies, and their families, agents or anyone else professionally associated with the draw. 2. Details regarding how to enter as published form part of the terms and conditions. It is a condition of entry that all rules are accepted as final and that the competitor agrees to abide by these rules. The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into. 3. Only one entry per person. Late, illegible, incomplete, defaced or corrupt entries will not be accepted. No

Stephen Glover

The most important thing now is that the Telegraph should be sold soon

So the Barclay brothers’ bid for Conrad Black’s controlling share in Hollinger International has been vetoed by an American judge. We are back to square one. A lot of time has been wasted. Meanwhile the patient itself — i.e., the Daily Telegraph — is ailing. Mercifully its journalists have called off a strike, though they remain sunk in gloom. But the paper is losing sales (though not on a Saturday) as some readers defect to the tabloid Times or the tabloid Independent. The Telegraph’s management has its own tabloid plans, and a budget of £15 million to launch the thing, but dares not push the button until it becomes clear

The Spectator

Gordon’s great con

Aspiring actors are, by tradition, advised by their mentors never to work with children or animals. Budding politicians, on the other hand, should be advised at all costs to avoid pensioners. They make lousy photo opportunities and they have a tendency to fuss over irritatingly small amounts of money. On the other hand, it doesn’t look good when old folk get sent to jail as a result of government policy. This is exactly the embarrassment now facing Tony Blair’s administration. Up and down the land, leathery ladies in silly hats are vowing that they would sooner do time in Holloway than fork out for another hefty rise in council tax.

Matthew Reid

Travel Special: Australia

When I arrived in Sydney it was raining. Throughout the 23-hour flight from London, where it was also raining, I had fantasised about walking off the plane into a wall of heat and heading for the beach. Just my bloody luck, I reflected, as I stood in the airport carpark and stared sulkily at the grey sky. ‘Where’s the sun?’ I asked the friends who picked me up at the airport. They were not sympathetic. ‘It’s what we need, good droppa rain. Cool things down a bit. Stop the bushfires.’ My disappointment seemed selfish and petulant. But I wasn’t disappointed for long. Within a couple of days the sun had

Ferdinand Mount

One nation under Her Majesty

As of last Thursday, multiculturalism was officially declared dead in this country. The funeral took place in Brent Town Hall in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Home Secretary and was accompanied by the National Anthem and the theme music from Four Weddings and a Funeral. Although the event was not billed in these terms, these were symbolic obsequies as emphatic in their way as the pouring of the ashes of English cricket into that fragile urn in 1882. English cricket smouldered on, of course, occasionally flaring into a brief revival, but its old unquestioned dominance was gone for good. In the same way, we shall still

Ian Thomson

Nightmare in the Caribbean

Shortly after Christmas I went to Haiti for the first time in 13 years. The collapse of the Aristide regime was still two months away, but the Caribbean republic was already descending into chaos. At the airport of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the familiar smells of drainage and burning rubbish hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away. Haiti’s history — a vicious cycle of coups d’états — had not changed either. Last Sunday the airport was the scene of a hurried departure as Haiti’s President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, flew out of the country into exile. In an armed uprising backed by the US, he had been

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 February 2004

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, proposed internment without trial for those suspected of terrorist offences, and other measures such as wider telephone-tapping. The government said that migrants from countries joining the European Union on 1 May will not be able to claim some benefits until they have worked in Britain for a year. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: ‘If they can’t support themselves, they will be put out of the country.’ But the criteria sounded unclear and open to legal challenge, as the European Commission lost no time in pointing out. Applications for asylum in the past year fell to 49,370, 41 per cent lower than 12

Joan Collins

Diary – 28 February 2004

I’ve always considered myself a working actress and like about 98 per cent of my fellow thespians spend a great deal of time ‘resting’ involuntarily. It therefore irks when great swaths of the media refer to actors disparagingly as ‘luvvies’ and represent us as parasites and people who love swanning around and dressing up. I’ve just started rehearsing Full Circle with the nicest, most hardworking and dedicated group of people you could find, and that is how I’ve found most actors to be. Because they love working in a vastly overcrowded profession, they often get paid far too little. For rehearsing six days a week, eight hours a day, and

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 28 February 2004

Dear Mary… Q. I have three bolshie children and at this time of year I like to start writing dates in the diary for the summer holidays, since I know that without a carefully pre-arranged schedule the children will start making inconvenient arrangements of their own. However, my problem is that for the last two years we have rented a house in Cornwall with another family. They have made no mention this year of repeating the experience and, although we like them very much, neither have we, for fear of being pushy and turning the thing into an inextricable annual arrangement. I am now paralysed, not knowing whether to wait

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 28 February 2004

If atheism is now to be taught in schools in the RE slot, the Greek essayist Plutarch (46–120 ad) would want to teach superstition as well — to warn against it even more vehemently. In the ancient world, atheism was associated with the fifth-century bc Greek intellectuals known as the sophists. Claiming to be able to teach men how to make a success of their careers, they encouraged them not to be constrained by normal social conventions but to use logos (‘reason, argument’) to advance their cause, whatever the implications for traditional belief (nomos). As a result, religion in particular, which the Greeks acknowledged rested entirely on nomos, came under

Stephen Glover

Why I believe there are 100,000 people willing to buy a new quality paper

The editor of this magazine has asked me to write about a new publication I am planning. You may possibly have read about it. Two weeks ago John Gapper of the Financial Times telephoned me to say he had heard that several people, including myself, were proposing to launch a new upmarket national daily newspaper loosely based on Le Monde, and provisionally called the World. I could hardly deny it. I told Mr Gapper that we had not yet raised the £15.4 million we are seeking, and suggested that he would be jumping the gun if he were to set pen to paper now. Would anyone be interested if we

The Spectator

Closed minds

If staff at the Lancet ever go on bonding weekends, they should avoid rock-climbing, canoeing or any other activity in which they would rely on the trust and loyalty of their colleagues. Last weekend the magazine spectacularly turned against the author of one of the most controversial papers it has ever published. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 raised suspicions that the MMR vaccine was responsible for causing autism, was told by the magazine that his study should never have been printed. Editor Richard Horton said that Dr Wakefield’s research was ‘fatally flawed’ because its author had failed to declare a conflict of interest: that he was also conducting work on

Walter Ellis

Survival of the richest

New York As British universities lurch from funding crisis to funding crisis, the jealous eyes of the academic establishment focus obsessively on the United States as the role model for future success. The assumption is that if UK universities charged ‘realistic’ fees, they would recreate themselves as ‘world class’ — or, at any rate, superior — institutions, like those in America. But what is the truth about American universities? Are they really so much better than those in Britain? Are US students in general better educated? Does the US profit from the enormous sacrifice made each year by parents and students? Some — perhaps 20 or 30 — American universities