Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 15 February 2003

Dear Mary.. Q. I have a very dear friend who lives in increasingly bohemian circumstances in the country. He and his wife have repeatedly asked us to stay with them on one of our visits to England. The fact of the matter is that their standards of domestic hygiene are not particularly high. Suffice it to say that after using their lavatory a couple of years ago my wife went into something approaching a catatonic trance and was unable to speak for three days. So far we have managed to conjure up sufficient excuses to justify our absence, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are deliberately avoiding their

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 15 February 2003

James Tooley recently wrote in these pages of the success of private schools in Africa and India, which in the past few years have exploded in number, offering an education for as little as £3 a term – which even the poor of Somalia can afford. In contrast, he recounted how pupils of government schools in Ghana are left waiting on the doorstep while their teachers play truant, and how pupils of government schools in Hyderabad are forbidden to learn English and are forced instead to do the domestic chores of the teachers. Having made a convincing case for private education, Mr Tooley ended his piece with the question, ‘What

The Spectator

POLL TAX ON WHEELS

The government has a thing about the mediaeval period. Charles Clarke complains that universities ‘have governance systems that stretch back to mediaeval times’. David Blunkett complains that the law takes ‘a mediaeval view of marriage’. The Ministry of Agriculture apologises for using ‘mediaeval’ pyres during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. The implication, one presumes, is that mediaeval times were coarse, cruel and elitist – the very anti- thesis of the enlightened age that is Britain under New Labour. But, from Monday, those driving into central London will suffer an inconvenience and indignity that would never have been tolerated in mediaeval times: being charged to use the Queen’s Highway. Drive up Cheapside between

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

What do they want? Victory for Saddam

I’m bursting with excitement. I can hardly get the words down fast enough. There was an amazing occurrence in Hackney last week at a meeting of the Stop the War coalition. I swear this happened. A protester said something perceptive. You don’t believe me? No, really, I was there. He was an old guy with white hair and a lovely crinkly face. ‘The bigger the march,’ he said ruefully, ‘the bigger the insult when they ignore us.’ I almost fell off my chair in astonishment. Nobody at the meeting disagreed. No one suggested a change of tactics. And none of that surprised me at all. For several months, out of

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 February 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, returning from a meeting at the White House with President George Bush of the United States, said, ‘I believe there will be a second resolution,’ referring to a further United Nations Security Council vote for action against Iraq, the advisability of which he had tried to convince Mr Bush. Mr Blair then flew off to Paris to try, with little apparent success, to persuade President Jacques Chirac to back a new UN resolution; he took with him four Cabinet ministers – the secretaries of state for the home and foreign departments, for defence and for education – as well as Sir Michael Boyce, the

Adam Boulton

Diary – 8 February 2003

George Bush is a reformed alcoholic, and takes staying on the wagon seriously. I have recently discovered that you can’t get a drink at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, since it’s located in the dry gulch of prohibitionist counties. As we wait for the Bush-Blair show to begin, I find you can’t get a drink in the White House itself. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the programme will commence in two minutes,’ bark the loudspeakers in the White House hallway. Up close, W. is small and dapper, with a far from friendly glint in the eyes. You can tell he’s a martinet, even before he turns meanly on an American reporter: ‘You

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 8 February 2003

‘Are you interested in penises, darling?’ I asked my husband. ‘Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?’ The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by a tired old joke resorted to with ever-increasing frequency by journalists, often in headlines. It is to write ‘Size does matter’ or some variant in an article that is not about sexual performance. Oddly enough, the Guardian, which one might think would be sensitive to silly sexist sniggering, is given to this sort of thing.

Jeremy Clarke

Called to account

The tax man, a Mr Matthews in my case, rang the other day. He said, ‘Why haven’t you answered our letters for the last four years, Mr Clarke?’ I’d been dreading this phone call for so long that it was almost a relief. I wasn’t much of a letter writer, I told him, which is the truth. Well, things have got to the stage now, said Mr Matthews, where bailiffs could seize my assets. Did I have any seizable assets? Only my laptop, I said. And a monitor. But if they seized those, I said, it would be a bit of an own goal as I wouldn’t be able to

Petronella Wyatt

Who’s who?

As I wrote last week, Florida, not to mention the United States, is full of surprises. Many practising Christians show a marked lack of opposition to scientific advances that cause hysteria in Britain. One of these is cloning. Expressing my distaste for recreating human beings I used the specious argument that, surely, for the religious, God was meant to create man, so was it not wrong for the latter to usurp that role? This met with the response that God created man in His own image and cloning was simply creating more human beings in His own image. I was also enlightened during conversations with some of the matriarchs of

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 February 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I am in my gap year, have been travelling to Vietnam and the Far East already, and was supposed to have gone off travelling again, this time to Eastern Europe, shortly after Christmas. This trip has now been postponed for various reasons, including waiting to see whether a war will start. In the meantime, I am kicking around the house all day. Can you recommend any reasonably well-paid work, other than cold-calling, that an as yet unqualified 19-year-old can start and stop at short notice, and even do from home if necessary? L.C., Andover, Wiltshire A. One in five public schoolchildren is currently infested with headlice resistant

Stephen Glover

Unless Piers Morgan is careful, Richard Desmond could buy the Mirror

Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, is an opponent of the coming war against Iraq. Fair enough. Many of us are unhappy about it. But he has taken his opposition to extreme and, I would say, imprudent lengths. To use a military analogy, he has fired off his biggest nuclear missiles without first going through the range of lesser weaponry. Last week there was an enormous picture of Tony Blair on the Mirror’s front page with his hands covered in blood. It referred to an inside rant by John Pilger. The previous day the front-page headline had told George Bush to ‘Cool it, Cowboy’. Day after day the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The answer to Tony Blair’s problems is staring him in the face

Brainwaves are unusual in the governance of men and it is rare that a knotty political problem invites a simple solution nobody had thought of before. But a conversation last week with The Spectator’s newly appointed bullfighting correspondent (Lord Garel-Jones deplores the term but there is no other) has led us to a Eureka! moment. If anyone can see a flaw let him declare it, but his lordship and I are confident. The dilemma we can crack runs as follows. Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Gordon Brown wants to be Prime Minister. Mr Brown is under the impression that Mr Blair has promised to make way for him, and Mr

Peter Oborne

Cook the Martyr now has the luxury of resigning on his own terms

There is a moment in the Uncle Remus stories when Brer Rabbit is finally cornered by Brer Fox, who genially informs his victim ‘I’m going to barbecue you today, for sure.’ Then Brer Rabbit started talking mighty humble. ‘I don’t care what you do with me, Brer Fox,’ says he. ‘Just so you don’t fling me in that briar patch. Roast me, Brer Fox,’ says he, ‘But don’t fling me in that briar patch.’ Brer Fox duly ‘slung him right in the middle of the briar patch’, whereupon the cunning rabbit got up and ran away. There was a moment, in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 general election, when

The Spectator

THE CURSE OF MANAGEMENT

Everyone knows that the National Health Service employs too many managers and too few nurses. Enter any saloon bar in the land and you will be told as much. But this popular wisdom finds shockingly emphatic confirmation in a new pamphlet, Resuscitating the NHS, written by Dr Maurice Slevin, a cancer consultant, and published by the Centre for Policy Studies. Dr Slevin points out that since 1995 the number of senior managers in the NHS has increased by 48 per cent, and the number of managers by 24 per cent, while the number of qualified nurses has increased by only 7.8 per cent. In September 2001 the number of management

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Black is best

Here’s something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: ‘We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.’ We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift in the perceptions and expectations of a certain tranche of educationally subnormal white-trash football supporters. Whereas, some years ago, black players were a rarity to be derided by not-that-small-a-minority of the crowd whenever they touched the ball, they are now happily prominent in pretty much every club throughout every league in England. The dribbling, shell-suited

Paul Robinson

A dodgy constitution

I once heard of an Ivy League professor who had written 50 constitutions. All of them collapsed, including the one for the college boat club. If that gentleman is not now advising the Convention on the Future of Europe, someone very like him surely is. On the opening day of the convention in March 2002, its president, ValZry Giscard d’Estaing, bravely compared the congress to the Philadelphia Convention, which wrote the US constitution in 1787. One might equally make a comparison with the conferences which created the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the constitutions of the Ivy League professor, the products of those meetings have stood the test of time. So,

Mark Steyn

Let’s quit the UN

New Hampshire Earlier this week, on NBC’s Today Show, Katie Couric, America’s favourite wake-up gal, saluted the fallen heroes of the Columbia: ‘They were an airborne United Nations – men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli….’ Steady on, Katie. They were six Americans plus an Israeli. And, if they had been an ‘airborne United Nations’, for one thing the Zionist usurper wouldn’t have been on board: the UN is divided into regional voting blocs and, Israel being in a region comprised almost entirely of its enemies, it gets frosted out from the organisation’s corridors of power; no country gets so little out of its UN membership. Say what

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t feel sorry for the City

Here are four connected facts. First, on Monday, Standard Life – one of Britain’s most respected investment institutions – cut the value of its payouts to 2.3 million pension savers by 15 per cent. Second, some 30,000 people have lost their jobs in the City of London this winter – including Alex, the cartoon archetype invented by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, who was given the heave-ho by ‘Megabank’ a couple of weeks ago. Third, also on Monday, Gordon Brown gave a rambling speech to the Social Market Foundation in praise of his own economic policies, in the midst of which he made a single, brief reference to investors, claiming

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 February 2003

Dear Mary… Q. The story of Red Chris in last week’s issue brings to mind another tricky issue about house parties, and that is the subject of bringing presents. As a host who occasionally entertains in the country, I do not expect guests to arrive with a gift but am nevertheless delighted to receive one if they do. My pleasure does not, however, extend to receiving second-hand goods. A good friend of mine, the owner of a hilltop estate in Wiltshire and a schloss in Austria, recently came to stay with his wife and four children, and presented me with a box containing a small bar of soap and three