Society

Saturday

Stephen Glover

Nobody really knows how the war is going, partly because our governments lie

One of the paradoxes of this war is that most of us do not have very much idea of what is going on. That is at any rate what I feel. There are hundreds of brave and talented journalists in Iraq who address us every hour of the day and night on television, and fill untold acres of newsprint in the press. But although I have spent countless hours slumped on my sofa watching the box (last night I tore myself away from Fox News at two o’clock in the morning), and almost as much time poring over the newspapers, the fog of war clings to me wherever I go.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

I feel a cold anger at the stupidity of this war

Last Sunday evening, weary from digging, I staggered in to wash and eat, and then, cup of tea in hand, slumped down in my kitchen chair by the Rayburn to listen to the radio. The clocks had gone forward and it was just after nine. I enjoy digging. Since early childhood I have been fascinated by trenches, tunnels, gutters, dams and watercourses. My place on a Derbyshire hillside is a dream for anyone so inclined. Named ‘The Spout’ after the constant spring that supplies the water, the property is crisscrossed by underground streams. Wherever I dig, I seem to come upon another old land drain, and, just at present, new

The Spectator

A fickle public

If the assault against Saddam Hussein is not quite going to plan, that fact seems to have been lost on the many shadow war cabinets meeting in session down at the Dog and Duck. Six weeks ago, when the troops were still gathering at the Iraqi border and the world believed that Baghdad would very likely fall to insurrection within 72 hours of an invasion, just 29 per cent of the British public, according to ICM, approved of war with Iraq. Now that coalition forces are digging in around Baghdad waiting for reinforcements, and larger numbers of Iraqi citizens than many expected are being caught in the crossfire, support for

Nick Herbert

Pointless, damaging tax

Pollsters talk about the tipping point – the moment when public opinion changes. They think one of these might be about to happen in relation to tax. I’m certain of it. Together with 100,000 other residents, I tipped last week when Westminster’s council-tax demand thumped on to my doormat with a 28.1 per cent increase. I confess that I had not noticed a 28.1 per cent improvement in this Tory-controlled council’s services; 28.1 per cent more litter, yes, and probably the same increase in the number of Special Brew-swilling drunks on our doorsteps. The council has been complaining that a quarter of its residents have vanished from the electoral register.

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 4 April 2003

Commentators are complaining that the Iraqi army is refusing to confront the coalition forces head-on. Very sensible of them. Quintus Fabius Maximus (charmingly known as Verrucosus, ‘covered in warts’) would have applauded. In 218 bc Hannibal brought his Carthaginian army (complete with elephants) from north Africa, across Spain and southern France, and over the Alps down into Italy. His purpose was to take revenge on the Romans for the Carthaginian defeat in the first Punic War (265-241 bc). In battles at Ticinus, Trebia and Trasimene, he thrashed the Romans in open field, at a cost to the them of about 50,000 casualties. The Romans were appalled at this turn of

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 29 March 2003

That we will encounter more difficulties and anxious moments in the days ahead is certain,’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in the Commons after four days of war against Iraq, ‘but no less certain, indeed more so, is coalition victory.’ On the seventh day of the war he flew, with Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, to the United States for talks with President George Bush and Mr Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations. RAF Tornados attacked radar systems around Baghdad, and B52 bombers based at Fairford, Gloucestershire, flew nightly sorties to release computer-guided missiles against targets in Iraq. Television viewers were able to see powerful

Ann Leslie

Diary – 29 March 2003

Breakfast with Frost (the actual breakfast, not the programme which precedes it) is usually a rather jolly affair. Uniquely in today’s cost-conscious BBC – where, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a plastic cup of some thin brown liquid called ‘coffee’ and a dusty artefact described as a ‘bun’ – Sir David’s star status entitles him, J.-Lo. style, to accountant-mocking extravagances. Like, for example, the Great British Breakfast Fry-Up, complete with fine napery and waitresses; amazingly, for the sternly non-smoking BBC, heretical ashtrays are scattered everywhere. Sir David is partial to a breakfast cigar or two, which allows us lesser mortals to indulge in a quick drag on a fag once

Jeremy Clarke

Political fantasy

I couldn’t sleep. I turned over again and opened my eyes. Her Majesty the Queen was there, as usual, between me and the 105-year-old lady I’m sleeping with at the moment. Her Majesty is sitting in a high-backed chair with floral brocade pattern. In the background is an arrangement of slightly out-of-focus crimson and yellow chrysanthemums. Her Majesty looks really lovely. She’s just had her hair done and she is wearing lipstick and earrings. Her smile to camera is wide, natural and direct, revealing six fairly even upper-front teeth. The light of humour in her eyes unmistakable and the lines on her face show that she smiles easily. Whoever designed

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 29 March 2003

Dear Mary… Q. At a party the other day a friend of mine took a canapZ off a loaded plate that was being carried by someone she thought was one of the catering staff, only to realise, on account of the woman’s astonished look, that she was a guest and the plate a private one, as it were. What should my friend have said?L.B., London W8 A. The normal response from the woman carrying the plate would have been to laugh pleasantly at the mistake and use it as an opening gambit in conversation. However, since the woman’s body language was clearly giving off waitress signals, she might well have

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 29 March 2003

Although much overshadowed by the war in Iraq, environmentalists, businessmen and charity workers met at the World Water Forum in Kyoto last week to discuss why 1.2 billion people still have no access to clean water. The United Nations has set a target of reducing this by half by 2015. But Michel Camdessus, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warns that the target will not be met because only $80 billion a year is being invested annually in the global water supply against the required $180 billion. Returns are too low thanks to corruption and mismanagement in the Third World. Part of the problem is that Western

Stephen Glover

Anti-war journalists hope for the worst – because the worst will prove them right

We journalists think pretty highly of ourselves. I don’t mean the chap who touches up photographs of Page Three girls; he may have a proper sense of his place in the universe. I mean columnists, leader writers and foreign correspondents. I mean the undoubtedly brave men and women who stand in the desert in Iraq (a country most of them have not visited before) and pronounce on the progress of the war (a subject about which many of them know rather little). I mean the editors who tell us what to think. Most of us draw comfort from the thought that the job we do is a vital one. We

Peter Oborne

The US faces a terrible choice – start killing civilians or hand the initiative to Saddam

Lenin remarked that there were decades in which history would stand still, and weeks when it would move forward by a decade. This is one of those terrible weeks when history is on the march. At this stage it is impossible to discern with any assurance the outcome of the war. But so much is already clear: coalition planners have miscalculated. It was assumed in both Washington and London that the Iraqis would not resist with anything like the skill and ferocity that they have shown so far. It was taken for granted that Saddam, hated by his own people, would be brought down amid a series of popular uprisings.

Mira Barhillel

Property Special: Agricultural landKilling fields

So just what was that Matt Crawford up to in Midsummer Meadow? For the benefit of the one or two of you who are not Archers fans, a villain of a property developer straight out of central casting (sleazy accent, lap-dancing clubber) was about to buy some meadow land from the saintly David and Ruth (Archer, natch), ostensibly for the use of his lady wife’s horses. It was soon suspected that Crawford was, while offering to pay agricultural prices, hoping to employ a planning loophole and get permission for some country house designed by a fashionable architect with the right connections. When the upright David Archer suggested a clause giving

Karen Robinson

Property Special: DublinBlarney market

A recent news story in the Irish Times began: ‘A court has been asked to settle a dispute between a Dublin lesbian couple over the proceeds from their e470,000 [£320,000] former home.’ Those not familiar with the changes that have swept through the Irish capital over the last few years would have to wonder which feature of that arresting introduction was the more remarkable: the matter-of-fact reference to a same-sex relationship, or the impressive market value of an average house in one of the city’s outer suburbs. A house that, even more astonishingly, was worth only £265,000 a year ago, and £175,000 four years ago. While the English market –

Rachel Johnson

Property SpecialThe battle for Notting Hill

John Prescott’s plans to erect hundreds of thousands of new homes on – I’m going to use that disgusting word – ‘brownfield’ sites has not, so far as I know, caused a further outbreak of nimbyism in my neighbourhood. In Notting Hill, there is an embarras of new building already. Aubrey Square in W8, by St James Homes, is one of several ‘high-end’ developments nearing completion. I’ve wanted to snoop round this for ages. One, it forced the closure of my old tennis club, Campden Hill (that didn’t bother me, though I did resent being told off for not wearing ‘regulation tennis socks’ by a spotty male member of the

Laura Gascoigne

Cobra’s heroic self-belief

Unlike the old Co-Op building on the Newcastle bank of the Tyne, which has rebranded itself the Hotel Malmaison, Gateshead’s new Centre for Contemporary Art has kept the name of Baltic Flour Mills. The original 1950s tiles forming the giant black letters have been scrupulously cleaned of decades of kittiwake droppings and the culprits – a protected species – rehoused in a kittiwake tower downwind. The Baltic is proud of its industrial heritage. Clad in the dignity of past labour, it stares down its poncy new neighbours across the water in their ludicrously over-designed office blocks auditioning as stage sets for Aida. When the Romans came they settled first in

Mike Dewar

A breathtaking achievement

Over the first week of the war in Iraq there has been a quite extraordinary mismatch between the perceptions of the coalition commanders on the ground and the expectations of the media. The fact that a very small number of British and American soldiers have been killed, wounded and captured is not unexpected. What is quite extraordinary is how few casualties there have been. Media talk of ‘significant casualties’ is ridiculous. Again, the absurd emphasis on the significance of the small bands of Iraqi irregulars that are operating behind allied lines in southern Iraq is misleading. Some of these elements may be around for months to come. With the relatively

Tim Butcher

This is no cakewalk; this is war

Umm Qasr The shriek of artillery shells has died away from Umm Qasr, the first city in Iraq to be taken by allied troops, but another whining sound can already be heard here. It is the sound of the doubters and sceptics at home, wringing their hands on short-wave radio programmes and satellite television broadcasts because this war has not already been won and Saddam’s regime toppled. The last Gulf war was won after 100 hours of ground fighting; Kosovo was secured without a shot being fired by allied troops; and an entire African country, Sierra Leone, was effectively saved within two days by a battalion of British paratroopers. The

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 22 March 2003

British troops joined the American assault on Iraq, after a Commons debate in which an anti-war motion was defeated by 396 votes to 217 (including 139 Labour rebels), and a government motion seeking ‘all necessary means’ to disarm Iraq was passed by 412 votes to 149, a majority of 263. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in the debate that if Parliament voted to pull out British troops, ‘I would not be party to such a course.’ Earlier in the week, on 16 March, when it had become clear that France would veto in the United Nations Security Council a resolution on Iraq tabled by the United States, Britain

Gerald Kaufman

Diary – 22 March 2003

One day last August, with the dust-motes swirling in the summer heat, I ran into Robin Cook in a corridor of the House of Commons. The place was almost deserted during the long recess, whose length Cook later truncated as part of the sweeping reforms he brought in when Leader of the House. The Spectator had just published an article by me expressing my misgivings at the prospect of a war on Iraq, and Robin told me he agreed with many of the points I had made. It therefore came as no surprise to me that his own doubts should have surfaced steadily to the point where he resigned from