Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 April 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a statement to Parliament about the war in Iraq, said, ‘There is upon us a heavy responsibility to make the peace worth the war. We shall do so …with a fixed and steady resolve that the cause was just, the victory right, and the future for us to make in a way that will stand the judgment of history.’ Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said during a stop in Kuwait: ‘There is much evidence of co-operation between the Syrian government and the Saddam regime in recent months.’ But in a press conference in Bahrain he said, ‘We have made it clear that

Piers Morgan

Diary – 19 April 2003

If I meet one more smug, smirking pro-war protagonist who greets me with that ‘Hey, peacenik – you must feel a right prat’ look, I fear I shall arm myself with a few of those elusive WMDs and take out whole swaths of Wapping, Kensington and Downing Street. If there’s one thing worse than the world’s most powerful military force waging an unlawful, unethical war against a clapped-out old tyrant’s ragbag excuse for an army, then it’s surely the quite absurd rash of gloating and triumphalism that has engulfed large parts of our country. I am all for saluting the efficiency and bravery of the armed forces in doing their

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 19 April 2003

‘What do you mean, “gapering”?’ asked my husband during a pause from shouting at the television. ‘Is it like capering?’ He wasn’t following, because he had been busy excoriating a television reporter for invoking global warming on the local news. (Local news means uninteresting things that have happened near you. It is even worse in London, since a lot of real news happens there, so the criterion is to save the chaff for the local bulletin. I only have it on while waiting for the weather forecast.) Before picking up my husband’s dropped stitch, I’d like to apologise to Dr Christopher Heneghan, the anaesthetist barrister, for spelling his name wrong.

Taki

Forked tongues

New York Just as well I never made it down south. For the last three weeks I’ve been feeling kinda funny, finding blood on my pillow in the morning and having headaches, things I attributed to my Karamazovian hangovers. While waiting to fly to Iran, I decided to go to see a doctor. He took one look inside my head (via an MRI) and told me I had to have an operation right away. The mother of my children flew over, held my hand, the doctor cut out a tumour of sorts, and I’m now home recuperating and happy as a lark. I shall know next week whether this was

Jeremy Clarke

The remains of the day

At our first terrier, lurcher and ferret club show of the new season, I was stewarding the ferrets again. I always get given the ferrets. I’d rather steward the terriers or the lurchers, or even stand at the gate taking the entrance money. But when the stewarding jobs are allocated at our pre-show meetings, no bugger else wants to do ferrets so they give it to old muggins. The ferret steward’s job is to shout out the name of the class, take the 50p entry fees and ferrets from the competing owners, place each ferret in a numbered showing cage, then assist the judge by passing him a ferret when

Petronella Wyatt

Wise move

I had my half-brother Pericles staying here in London for the first time in four years. Pericles, who is my father’s son by his third wife, Moorea, went to live in America when I was about 14. It was a very brave move at the time, as he was only 18 and had no qualifications, but it has turned out to be a remarkably wise one. He and his precariously pretty wife now run an extraordinarily successful RV park/ waterworld in Arizona. In the winter it takes 500 motor homes of up to 40-ft long and in the summer, when the weather is too hot for campers, it becomes a

Stephen Glover

Independent readers wanted bad news from Iraq; Mirror readers didn’t

This was not a good war for newspapers. I am not so much thinking of the journalism. Much of it was excellent, though newspapers are obviously at a disadvantage to 24-hour rolling news channels, which not only provide breaking stories but also analysis from people who surprisingly often know what they are talking about. Newspapers scarcely put on sales during the war, and those that did appear already to have lost them. This is very disheartening to editors who have burnt the midnight oil, to reporters on the spot who have risked life and limb, and to publishers who have spent tens of thousands of unbudgeted pounds only to see

Michael Prodger

The word made flesh

Alongside the Easter Week story of sacrifice and salvation runs a second narrative – the story of Christ’s body. Each stage of Jesus’s spiritual journey – from the entry into Jerusalem to the Ascension – has its corporeal counterpart. As the last few days of his earthly life passed by so his physical appearance deteriorated: he was stripped, scourged, crowned with thorns, crushed by the weight of the cross, crucified and pierced by a lance. It is no surprise that Christ’s death should become the single greatest life-giving force in art – from the first depiction of Jesus on the cross in about 420 and for the next 1,000 years

Simon Hinde

Another kidney

Thor Andersen is something of a pariah, or so you would think, to read the denunciations that have been heaped on his head recently. His actions, we were told, were ‘abhorrent’, their consequences ‘tragic’. He was conscienceless, selfish. How, wondered one commentator, did he sleep at night. What had he done, this dreadful specimen of humanity? Well, save his own life, actually. Mr Andersen, a 33-year-old London-based property developer, had suffered complete kidney failure. For a year he had been on dialysis, which for those who don’t know is a kind of miserable half-life, requiring the patient to be connected to a machine three times a week for six hours

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The day of the jackals

The Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting of antiquities in Baghdad took place. For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from Saddam’s cruel and iniquitous yoke simply by throwing garlands of flowers at advancing US marines. Far better, far more impressive, was the idea of heading straight for the Iraqi National Museum in downtown Baghdad with a pick-axe handle and a crowbar and a Kalashnikov or two. Once there, this well-organised criminal gang reportedly threatened the museum staff with

John Gibb

Out of control

In the late 1990s, the US Postal Service identified 75,000 members of a Texas-based paedophile website named ‘Landslide’. Credit-card references showed that 7,272 of the subscribers were British. In the naive belief that their personal details would be secure, they had paid £21 a month to download pictures of children being seriously abused. Once they had collected images on their hard drives, they began to trade them with like-minded people. Today, five years later, men from every sector of society and from all over the UK are either under arrest or shaking in their boots, waiting for the early-morning hammering on the door. They will mostly be respectable men –

Simon Heffer

Stop this evil tour

In what used to be thought to be the gentleman’s game of cricket, a brisk handshake was usually enough to end any disagreements. With the Zimbabwean team scheduled to arrive here on 29 April to play two Test matches, various one-day internationals and games against some counties, you might think that doctrine was once again in operation. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that England threw world cricket into what the sports pages call ‘turmoil’ by refusing, for security reasons, to play a one-day match in Harare. Some Zimbabweans were outraged. A swingeing fine, thought to approach a seven-figure sterling sum, is being negotiated with the International

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 18 April 2003

What will be Middle Eastern historians’ judgment of Saddam’s regime and its enforced collapse? Is there a Tacitus among them? In his Histories, Tacitus describes the traumatic ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ (ad 69) that followed the death of Nero, a year when general after general attempted to seize power by force, and the Roman world seemed to fall apart. There is an especially dramatic description of the fall of the third brief tenant of the imperial throne, Vitellius – an end which may yet mirror Saddam’s. When Rome was captured by the troops of his successor, Vespasian, Vitellius was taken by chair through the back of the palace to

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 April 2003

Dear Mary… Q. My husband’s 87-year-old father is greatly enjoying the Iraq war. With an understandable sense of personal invulnerability, he has been sitting in his ‘safe house’ in Cornwall, watching virtually every news bulletin and revelling in ‘the deep satisfaction of seeing rockets hitting their targets’, et cetera. We are taking our children, aged 9, 11 and l3, to stay with him for Easter. The house is not particularly big, but he has told us that all normal decorum will be suspended for the duration of the war, so he will have the television on nonstop in the one small sitting-room. Since he is deaf, it will be blaring

Andrew Gimson

The Arab street

Londoners have no need to travel to Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus or some other city of the Middle East in order to experience the sensation of being in the Arab world. A visit to the southernmost stretch of the Edgware Road is quite sufficient. The dozens of Arab cafZs, restaurants and shops which line the straight and otherwise dreary main road from Marble Arch to the Marylebone Flyover are thronged with customers, especially at night and especially during the summer, when thousands of Arabs come on holiday to London. To sit here and drink a cup of mint tea, while Arab television, music and conversation fill your ears and around you

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Anglican miracle

Ten years ago, a priest at the Brompton Oratory began a sermon with the words, ‘At last, we are witnessing the final disintegration of old mother damnable, the Church of England.’ At about the same time, Paul Johnson suggested that the cause for which Thomas More was martyred and Cardinal Newman preached was ‘now in sight of victory’. Cardinal Hume, throwing his usual caution to the winds, speculated that the Elizabethan Settlement was at an end. The Protestant nostrils of Ferdinand Mount detected ‘an intrusive whiff of incense’ in public life: writing in The Spectator on 29 January 1994, he said it would be ‘much nicer if some of our

Kim Sengupta

The hero of Baghdad

Baghdad We shall slaughter them all. God will barbecue their bellies in hell. We trap and beat them everywhere. I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.’ The last declaration was made while a US army Abrams tank could be clearly seen blazing away across the Tigris. Welcome to the world of Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, who until Tuesday was Iraq’s minister of information. During the war, Sahaf was by far the most high-profile member of Saddam Hussein’s regime: television viewers from Tokyo to San Francisco became accustomed to him boasting how the Iraqi forces had inflicted stunning defeats on the ‘mercenary lackeys of the Zionist entity’. During

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 April 2003

Dear Mary… Q. My parents-in-law have taken to dropping round uninvited. While I do not dislike them, they always seem to appear at an inconvenient time, when either the house is looking horribly dishevelled or I am. My husband doesn’t see anything wrong with this and gets very offended when I mention it. How can I ensure that they come by invitation only? They’re driving me mad!M.P., Colchester, Essex A. Teach yourself the yoga position ‘the corpse’. Read a few paragraphs about the benefits of yoga. Then you will be well equipped to reply, when next they ask how you are, ‘Really well. I’ve started doing yoga. It’s very soothing,

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 April 2003

An ICM poll in the Guardian found that 52 per cent approved of the war and 34 per cent opposed it; among Conservatives approval was 61 per cent, among Labour supporters 59 per cent and among Liberal Democrats 31 per cent. Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, told Parliament that, with 45,000 British servicemen already sent to the war, ‘what I am ruling out, at this stage at any rate, is the necessity for any substantial increase’. Mr Robin Cook, who resigned as Leader of the Commons before the war started, wrote in the Sunday Mirror: ‘I have already had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary

Antony Beevor

Diary – 5 April 2003

I used to be amused and appalled by the Pentagon-speak which developed during the Vietnam war. But now the almost Stalinist euphemisms and aggressive acronyms have given way to a less extreme form – a military version of corporate-speak. Perhaps this is Donald Rumsfeld’s influence. The new form of allied blitzkrieg is termed Rapid Decisive Operations. A few years ago, it would have been Rod or Raid. But these terminological subtleties make little difference to the grunt on the ground: he is just trying to cope with the shock of war. ‘You go through all that training,’ said one American the other day after coming under fire for the first