Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 1 March 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, in an emergency statement to the House of Commons on Iraq, that 100 per cent co-operation by Saddam Hussein was necessary, and ‘anything less will not do’. A day’s debate followed in the Lords and Commons, where many Labour members were prepared to vote against the government. Mr Blair had visited the Pope in the company of his wife, and became the first serving prime minister to attend a papal Mass. At the General Synod of the Church of England, on the eve of the enthronment of Dr Rowan Williams as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, prayers were offered for the British Prime

Sarah Sands

Diary – 1 March 2003

I have written a novel about Middle England’s love affair with female newsreaders. I was struck by a survey which showed that viewers of these grave messengers of world events could remember only the first 30 seconds of what was said. The women newsreaders really are talking heads. My implicit thesis is that press journalists are superior to broadcasters: they are all form and no content; we are all content and no form. But the truth is that our invisibility is a matter of public courtesy. When the BBC began its highbrow fourth channel it recruited presenters from the press, who subsequently wrote of the channel with high regard. Viewing

Petronella Wyatt

Personality factions

I hardly spend my life attending dinner parties given by the chattering classes. But I will admit to attending dinners given by people who chatter – though not in the Hampstead/Islington fashion but more in the Tory manner, if it exists any more except in muddled gobbledegook. Most of these people have been scathing about Tony Blair ever since he came to power and now they are more scathing than ever. The irritating thing about their criticism is its hypocrisy. Blair’s crime used to be that he was a hollow man, with no convictions, whose only ambition was popularity and whose only policy was to follow Sun opinion polls. (His

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 March 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I rather prefer the use, however dated, of the English version of foreign place names, such as Leghorn, Peking and Bombay. I recently had occasion, in conversation, to refer to Majorca, whereupon my interlocutor pointedly (and from the point of view of clarity of meaning, needlessly) repeated the name, very elaborately, in its Spanish form. Naturally, at the time I let this pass, but I wonder whether there might be some way, without being reciprocally rude, in which this kind of smart-arse response might be trumped. S.M., Linton, Cambridgeshire A. With Majorca, for example, one could say, ‘Oh, thank you for putting me right. So is MYORCA

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 1 March 2003

The debate grinds on about whether to bid for the Olympic Games to be staged in London. It is time to apply a little ancient wisdom. Alcibiades, darling of the Bright Young Things in 5th-century bc Athens, was very proud of his achievements in the prestigious chariot race at the Olympic Games (he entered seven teams, finishing first, second and fourth). He argued that, since his performance generated tremendous regard for Athens’ power, it could hardly be regarded as a ‘folly’, as some had said. But Alcibiades was talking not about staging but about winning the Games, something Brits rarely do. And even winning was pooh-poohed by the poet and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Terror-free zones

The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all bad news in the property world, however. Real-estate agents in Finland and New Zealand could not be happier. American ex-pats, more used to life in the cosmopolitan districts of London and Paris, have discovered a taste for living in the world’s backwaters. Pick up a copy of the Offshore Real Estate Quarterly, the bible of

Sebastian Deckker

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Ski resorts

I have just returned from a trip to the Alpine village of MegŒve, situated in the heart of the Haute-Savoie, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, where I successfully introduced my three-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter to the pleasures of skiing. It occurred to me, while out there, that there has never been a better time to head for the hills and buy a place in the mountains. According to the International Residential Department of FPDSavills (020 7824 9030), ‘a nervous stock market and low interest rates have led many people to look at alternative investments, especially in overseas property offering both pleasure and profit’. Olivier Beumer, an associate, comments that much of

Matthew Leeming

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Where no birds sing

Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself. He chose the highest glacier as the true source. I prefer the source of the biggest volume of water, christened Lake Victoria in 1835 by a British army officer. Both are found at the end of the Wakhan Corridor, that thin finger of Afghanistan that pokes out towards China. Marco Polo called it the ‘Roof

Andrew Lambirth

Titian’s touch of genius

Walking around this exhibition is a humbling experience. We are privileged to have a display of paintings of this quality in London, and it is an incredible achievement to have obtained loans of such distinction. One of the pictures scheduled for the show is not in fact available, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ from the Villa Borghese in Rome, but two late additions more than compensate for its absence. One is the ‘Crucifixion with Saint Dominic’ from Ancona (which was so last-minute that it hadn’t yet arrived when I previewed the exhibition), and the other is the magnificent ‘Flaying of Marsyas’ from the Czech Republic. When ‘Marsyas’ was last seen in

Peter Oborne

It’s sad in a way, but Michael Portillo is no longer a serious figure

The prospect of war now eclipses everything at Westminster. To use the narrow, though reassuring, boundaries of the English racing calendar, hostilities are unlikely to break out before the final day of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March. But they will probably have ceased, at any rate as far as the initial stage of the conflict is concerned, by the time the Grand National is run on 5 April. From a parochial perspective, the next few weeks will go far towards determining how the Blair premiership is judged by historians. Since the 2001 general election the government has on a number of occasions given the impression that it will inevitably

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 22 February 2003

Perhaps a million people rallied in Hyde Park after a march through London in opposition to war against Iraq. Meanwhile Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech to a Labour spring conference in Glasgow, ‘I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership, and the cost of conviction.’ He later announced he would go to meet the Pope in Rome. Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan was charged under the Terrorism Act after a hand grenade was allegedly found in his luggage at Gatwick airport after a flight from Caracas. Since 11 September, 304 people have been arrested in Britain on

Alistair Campbell

Diary – 22 February 2003

Good old Boris! What a guy! I write to ask him to sponsor my charity run in the London Marathon, and back comes the offer of 44Hp a word for a Spectator diary. So here it is (those last few words work out at more than 20p a letter – brilliant). And Boris being so personally loaded with his multimedia earnings, like columns, books, quiz shows, supermarket openings and appearances in Parliament, there’s no doubt a big personal cheque to follow. Top man. Boris is not the only press magnate to respond to my appeal. Mark Seddon, editor of cash-strapped Tribune, has offered a great item for auction – George

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 22 February 2003

Mind your language In They Came to Baghdad, a topical-sounding novel by Agatha Christie, the heroine, Victoria Jones, finds ‘all was above board, mild as milk and water…. Various dark-skinned young men made tentative love to her.’ Or so I am told by Mr Bruce Harkness from Kent, Ohio. He also has, on occasion, to write footnotes explaining Conrad novels, and for Almayer’s Folly he found he had to explain the following phrase: ‘whether they made love under the shadows of the great trees or in the shadow of the Cathedral or on the Singapore promenade’. The problem was that readers took make love to mean ‘engage in sexual intercourse’.

Jeremy Clarke

Birds of a feather

Goodness it was cold here last week. I was sitting by the fire reading an old newspaper when a robin flew past and alighted on a framed sepia photograph of my grandfather. My grandfather loved birds: he kept quails and finches mostly, and once he had a tame jay, so it was an apposite choice for a perch. In the photograph, my grandfather is dressed in the uniform of the Machine Gun Corps and about to entrain for Flanders. He doesn’t look a bit worried. With his nut-brown outdoor face and his huge hands, one imagines that my grandfather will be shooting his machine-gun at the oncoming Germans with roughly

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 22 February 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I was driving my wife and children to the Warwickshire countryside. My mother followed us in her car. At a slanted T-junction, I stopped to allow some far-off traffic to pass. My mother, thinking, perhaps, that I was still driving like the boy racer of my youth, accelerated straight into the back of my Mercedes. The result: damaged bumper, knackered tow-bar, car in need of repair. Do I: a) claim on her insurance – with all the associated form-filling and grief? b) Claim on my comprehensive insurance and risk a premium rise next year? c) Get the car repaired and send her the bill? Please help.M.F., Nethercote,

Stephen Glover

Carole must have known her film would damage Tony – so why is she still Cherie’s best friend?

In the media age, life is a soap opera. For a time we are obsessed with a particular storyline. Then it is resolved, we move on to the next story, new characters are introduced, and the old characters on whose every word we once hung are phased out and forgotten. Two months ago the country was convulsed with ‘Cheriegate’, and it seemed that nothing else in the world mattered. Day after day the tabloids and broadsheets screamed their headlines, which said that Cherie was not telling the truth and that the Prime Minister himself was threatened. Pages one to ten were cleared. Andrew Marr and Adam Boulton camped outside No.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Blair would have been wiser to rely on blind trust than to have issued that dossier

No popular impression is more precious to those who govern than the impression on the part of the governed that more is known than can be divulged. William Whitelaw understood this better than most. When I was a callow young Tory MP in the 1980s, and he was home secretary, I was briefly caught up in a flutter of backbench concern about telephone-tapping. More of this, it seemed, was going on than had been supposed, and the means of democratic oversight did not seem to exist. A small group of us on the government benches, all backbenchers, asked if we could talk to Willie about the problem. Alongside my friends,

The Spectator

NO PROFIT, NO CURE

Modern-day wizards in the laboratories of the world’s pharmaceutical companies should take a day off from tending their test tubes and concoct a new word for ‘profit’. It is needed because the existing word has been demonised to the point at which Western businessmen hardly dare utter it in public. At the World Trade Organisation in Geneva this week, a consortium of anti-globalisation pressure groups and well-meaning scientists launched their latest attack in the war against profit. They accuse Western pharmaceutical companies of condemning millions of Africans to an unpleasant death by opposing the production and distribution of cheap anti-retroviral drugs used to treat Aids. The protesters’ argument is this:

Susan Moore

Slipping through the safety net

If a French national museum wishes to buy a work of art at auction, it simply exercises its ‘right of pre-emption’. Substituting itself for the final bidder, which is what this means, is less fair than it sounds – word invariably gets out about the museum’s intentions and few bother to bid. In France, as in Italy, Germany and Spain, any work of art deemed of national importance cannot legally leave its shores, a circumstance which once again significantly reduces its market value. Good news for the cultural patrimony, perhaps, but rather less cheery for the owner. Britain’s approach, in contrast, is the most liberal in Europe – its system

John Laughland

Hands off Northern Cyprus

A trip to Northern Cyprus is a trip to the 1970s. While the Greek South of the island – home to the Russian Mafia and to the ecstasy-induced raves of Ayia Napa -seethes in corrupt prosperity, the Turkish North indulges in the gentler delights of crazy paving, the New Seekers and Ford Capris. Neither the dried flowers nor the lurid earthenware lamps in my hotel had been changed since the current Turkish manager took the place over from its unfortunate Greek owner; while the second-hand bookshops in northern Nicosia have clearly had no new stock since partition, and are consequently full of paperbacks about Harold Wilson and the dangers of