Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 July 2003

Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence scientific expert on Iraqi weapons, was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire with a cut wrist and a container of pain-killers. Hours earlier he had appeared before the Commons foreign affairs select committee and, when asked if he was the main source for an article by Mr Andrew Gilligan that blamed Downing Street for ‘sexing up’ the government dossier on Iraq last September, he said, ‘My belief is that I am not the main source.’ Mr Andrew Mackinlay MP had said to him in a rough manner, ‘I reckon you’re chaff. You’ve been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever

Dylan Jones

Diary – 26 July 2003

I am invited to the Oxford Union to speak in the last debate of the term. I had originally been invited to speak on the death of feminism earlier in the year, but as I couldn’t go they kindly invited me back. The motion is less onerous – ‘Life is too short to drink cheap wine’ – and I am speaking for, along with Peter Stringfellow, among others. I have been preparing for weeks, soliciting everyone I meet for jokes and anecdotes, and obsessively honing my speech. Two days before I’m due to speak I make the mistake of running the final draft past three of my friends at dinner.

The Spectator

Feedback | 26 July 2003

Comment on No flies on Bush by Mark Steyn (19/07/2003) I read Mark Steyn’s article on the harmlessness of the lies told by the USA and the UK on the world stage and tried to be reassured by his joviality. After all, I thought, what’s a few thousand dead people when, as your poll showed, the people ‘liberated’ by us, know that we are really after their oil. Who else is going to notice a few lies (about Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaida, promises that Iraqi oil money is controlled by Iraqis and the creation of democracy (shouldn’t this happen before the country is privatised?) except mad anti-war activists and

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 July 2003

Britain invented lasagne, according to a front-page report in the Daily Telegraph. The claim came from organisers of a mediaeval banquet at Berkeley Castle. They appealed to ‘the world’s oldest recipe book’, The Forme of Cury, compiled under Richard II in 1390. It seems the Berkeley banqueteers meant that not just the food but the word itself were English, for the dish concerned was called loseyns. At this point I smelled a rat. To me loseyns looked like a medieval form of lozenge, and so the OED confirmed it to be. Under the word lozen, ‘a thin cake of pastry’, it actually quotes The Forme of Cury. Part of the

Taki

Matters of fact

St Tropez Like Rick, when asked why he would come to Casablanca for its non-existent waters, I presume the hack was misinformed. An item in the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary had me announcing that I had gatecrashed Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s party for the Clintons. ‘Dearest Taki,’ writes Lynn. ‘You lied! Of course you were invited…’ A kind and sweet note from Lynn, except for the fact I never said it. At my age one simply doesn’t gatecrash, but hacks have been known to make things up. Oh well, it wasn’t very serious. What was serious and sad was the death of Philip Heslop, the Silk who brilliantly got me

Petronella Wyatt

Leave her alone

I have a summer cold. My eyes feel as if they have been rammed into the back of my head by pokers, my chest tells me that a boa constrictor has wrapped itself around it, and the rest of my body is convinced that it does not belong to me but to the Michelin man. Why are summer colds more painful and more difficult to shake off than proper winter ones? Perhaps germs thrive in warm weather or maybe it is simply nature mocking one, as others happily chatter outside street-corner cafés, and the victim lurches from room to room in a dressing-gown. Feeling sorry for yourself, on top of

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 July 2003

Q. A colleague who sits next to me at work has a propensity to break wind violently whenever he feels inclined to do so. Far from being embarrassed by these eructations, as I imagine most people would be, he seems to see it as a social indelicacy on a par with coughing or slurping coffee; that is to say, not necessarily polite but certainly nothing to apologise for. Needless to say, I feel rather differently. How do I broach the subject without awkwardness? I have tried getting up and walking away every time the malodorous offences are committed, but he doesn’t take the hint. Whether this has anything to do

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 26 July 2003

Anyone who believes that the anti-competitive ethos in state schools originates with a handful of ideologues in our local authorities should take time to study the United Nations output on education. The UN Commission on Human Rights’s ‘special rapporteur on education’ recently attacked British schools for being too competitive. Katarina Tomasevski, a Swede, complained that the Department for Education’s regime of tests for seven-, 11-, 14- and 16-year-olds breaches Article 29 of the Human Rights convention. Forcing children to sit down and take exams, she says, perverts the aims of education, which should be ‘directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Being on the radio was a welcome relief from duck husbandry

Let me tell you the story of the Docklands Eight, otherwise known as the Docklands ducklings. They came into my life briefly and by chance, ushered in by Kim. Kim helps me keep my London flat, by the Thames in Limehouse, clean and tidy. A great animal-lover, she comes in on Monday mornings bringing new stories of the family of ducks which has been hatching on the stones in a shallow section of canal near where we live. Last year there was a disaster when a water-disinfecting operative eliminated a whole generation of ducklings in a single morning, so this year Kim has been watching over the brood and feeding

Andrew Lambirth

England’s national saint

Shakespeare is all things to all people. The greatest writer we have, he was subtle to the extent of ambivalence. As a man he was sexually fluid, politically ambidextrous and not prepared to commit himself on anything, least of all religion. It’s sometimes said that the son of a provincial glove-maker could not have had sufficient knowledge or experience to write the plays and poems he is credited with. These people perhaps forget the quality of imagination. Shakespeare is imagination and he was naturally a master of disguises. Those who say his plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon may be forgiven: they weren’t, because Bacon didn’t have the imagination.

Leo McKinstry

Boycott Britain

The British tourism industry appears to be gripped by a form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are told that holidaying in Britain has never been more fashionable, with hotels and resorts enjoying a boom this summer. ‘Suddenly our seaside towns are the places to be. Santorini is out. Scarborough is in,’ gushed the Sunday Times last weekend. On the other hand, it is barely a month since we were warned that domestic tourism was facing its deepest ever crisis. Overseas bookings were plummeting, down 15 per cent in April compared with the same period in 2002, revenue was falling and the government was urged to bail out the

Bruce Anderson

My hero

Few Tory MPs set off for the summer recess in a confident mood. There is unease about the opinion polls, and the leader. There is also grumbling about IDS’s failure to sharpen up the shadow Cabinet, though it would have been hard for him to do that. The obvious candidates for the sack are Quentin Davies, John Hayes and Bernard Jenkin, the shadow Defence Secretary who makes Geoff Hoon look like Bismarck. But they are also IDS’s closest political allies. So instead, he merely made minor changes to the back row of the front bench. Yet one of these, even if unlikely to transform the party’s short-term fortunes, has provided

Paul Robinson

Sword of honour

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one ‘asshole’. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason

Simon Heffer

‘Good things are happening in Iraq’

There are no cloud-capped towers, but it is a gorgeous palace – or, rather, ranch. King Hamad of Bahrain, a short, stocky but powerfully built man in his early 50s, strides out of his marble hall to shake my hand on his distinctly palatial doorstep. It is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in this desert kingdom, so we head for the air-conditioning as swiftly as possible. His Majesty, who succeeded his father as Emir in 1999 and became King two years ago after establishing a constitutional monarchy, is between rides. He is wearing a green polo shirt with a discreet gold crown on the left breast, jodhpurs and

Theodore Dalrymple

Black-eyed monster

If you exclude the hypothesis that most British official statistics have been manipulated for one political purpose or another, the latest crime figures appear strange and mysterious: while crimes of violence against the person have risen by 20 per cent in a single year, other forms of crime have fallen somewhat. Since most serious crimes are committed by people who also commit many lesser crimes, and clear-up rates are at an all-time low, the figures are surprising, to say the least. The most parsimonious explanation I can think of (other than that people now know there is no point in reporting lesser crimes to the police unless it be for

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 25 July 2003

Poor old Archbeard of Canterbury! Who will rid him of these infernal gay priests? Or infernal anti-gay priests? Ancient Greeks would have found the whole issue baffling. First, consulting gods for their views was a straightforward business: one examined entrails or sent a delegation to an oracle. If they got the interpretation wrong, the god would let them know soon enough. Greeks would have wondered what sort of Christian god this was who was incapable of alerting his followers to his will. Second, ancient gods were interested only in being honoured, not in overseeing human morality. So Greeks would have found it strange that gods should be concerned about what

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 July 2003

Miss Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said the government would build thousands of offshore wind turbines to supply up to a sixth of homes with electricity by 2010; the sites are in the Thames estuary, the Wash, and off the north-west coast between the Solway Firth and Rhyl. A government Bill to limit jury trials was defeated in the Lords by 210 to 136. Mr Tony Blair played host to 13 centre-left heads of state and government at a ‘Third Way’ conference at Bagshot, Surrey. He then had dinner with Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, who had asked Britain to deal not

Interconnect

Diary – 19 July 2003

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s worth it. There’s something called a ‘walking upstairs policy’, which means that no one is allowed to walk upstairs unless they are accompanied by a member of staff. I had arrived before Barbara, who was made to wait until someone could escort her up to join me, while I waited. A gobbledyspeak-trained comis brought some

The Spectator

Feedback | 19 July 2003

Comment on Girls just want to have funds by Rachel Royce (12/07/2003) Rachel Royce gives women a bad name when she accuses men of greed yet expects a return of between 200% and 800% on her “investment”. Simple logic will tell her that it is not men, but elementary maths that make a pyramid scheme unsustainable. A seasoning of gender, class and libertarian polemic should not be allowed to disguise the spuriousness of her argument. Hearts and their ilk are called “gifting” schemes, not “investment” schemes for a reason: money only flows up the pyramid, not down. That is why the unfortunates at the bottom will ask for their money