Society

Saturday

Tim Butcher

How shellfish is that?

Hermanus You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller. Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world’s most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads. The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation

Simon Heffer

Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. ‘The idea,’ he went on, ‘that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.’ He also said that he didn’t care too much whether anyone studied the classics any more, and even added it might not be such ‘a bad thing’ if there were to be a decline in highbrow subjects at university altogether. So, nearly 150 years after Charles Dickens invented – and pilloried – Mr Gradgrind, with his ‘facts, facts, facts’,

Boris Johnson

Blunkett the authoritarian

That Lord Woolf, he has a bit of a cheek, doesn’t he? I don’t know if you caught his intervention in the Criminal Justice Bill debate the other night, but it was the usual stuff. He excoriated the politicians (David Blunkett) for trying to fetter the discretion of the judges. He was appalled, said the Lord Chief Justice, by the attempts of these vote-grubbing politicos to erode a vital judicial freedom. ‘The present proposal will have the effect of increasing political interference,’ he said. Well, much as we may admire his liberal instincts, it strikes me that his lordship’s words admit of a paradox. Where was he situated when he

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Crippling burden

There is something a little reckless about having a go at the disabled lobby. I can happily question the zealousness and rectitude of the Commission for Racial Equality, Stonewall and any of a multitude of women’s groups, safe in the knowledge that I am not about to be rendered black, gay or female in the foreseeable future. But disabled? Hell, who knows? This is one lobby group not to be messed with. Disablement could happen at any moment; there but for the grace of God, etc. In fact, when you study the qualifications required in order to call oneself disabled, it seems almost impossible that it won’t happen in the

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 20 June 2003

A spate of books is being published to explain the many useful lessons that businessmen can learn from the great figures of the past. One of the figures is Alexander the Great. Well, yes. But then again, no. In 334 bc, with a formidable army at his back, Alexander set out to take revenge against the might of the Persian empire for having dared to attack Greece 150 years earlier. By 331 bc he had driven the Persians out of Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Judaea and Egypt; by 330 he had conquered Iraq and Iran (the Persian homeland) and defeated the Persian king Darius. Mission accomplished? Not for Alexander. In 330

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 14 June 2003

Dear Mary… Q. An adored friend, with whom I regularly have lunch, always insists on ‘supporting’ his club. These lunches are deeply enjoyable but, as the member, my friend is the only one allowed to settle the bill. I have tried pressing cash on him when off the premises but, although he knows I have more funds at my disposal than he does, he always refuses outright. As he simply won’t go elsewhere, I have no opportunity of returning the hospitality. I know I am not the only beneficiary of this largesse (which he can ill-afford) and that, frankly, his wife feels rather tight-lipped about the whole business. What can

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 June 2003

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Parliament that only one of the five economic tests that would allow Britain to join the eurozone had been met; this was whether the City of London would remain Europe’s leading financial centre. But Mr Brown said that at the next Budget he would ‘consider the extent of progress and determine whether on the basis of the five economic tests which – if positive next year – would allow us at that time to put the issue before the British people in a referendum’. A Bill, stating the question to be asked, will be published this autumn. Mr Brown showed dissatisfaction

Michael Vestey

Diary – 14 June 2003

One of the most exquisite houses I know lies at the head of a valley in Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. It is not so much the 18th-century architecture of Ashcombe, though it is the surviving portion of a once-grand country house, but more the position, secluded and yet facing down the long, twisting valley to the south, surrounded by hills as if in a three-sided amphitheatre. It was once the home of Cecil Beaton and the subject of his book, Ashcombe: A l5-Year Lease, first published in l949 and reprinted by Dovecote Press four years ago. On seeing the lilac-brick fa’ade, Beaton wrote, ‘I was almost numbed by my first

The Spectator

Feedback | 14 June 2003

Comment on The noble feat of Nike by Johan Norberg (07/06/2003) Though I would not describe myself being anti-globalisation, I do think some qualification of Johan Norberg’s article (the noble feat of Nike) is required. Admittedly, I have no information on the conditions in the Vietnam factory that Norberg refers to, but such conditions are far from universal. If, as he says, workers are so desperate to work for Nike factories, why were 300 striking workers beaten by police in riot gear outside the Kuk Dong factory in Atlixco, Mexico in January 2001? Apparently because they wanted to form a union for better wages and food. In the same country,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 June 2003

Veronica has been playing Hail to the Thief, I won’t say non-stop, but as obsessively as one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn’t got a big enough run and keeps pecking at its reflection in its water-can. She is revising simultaneously. I’d have thought she was too old for this sort of thing, but apparently Radiohead yokes the generations in a sort of spirit of the Blitz. Far be it from me to criticise the music of Thom Yorke and his chums, but what of the lyrics? Remember when Bob Dylan was compared to Keats. Absurd; Keats is a feeble lyricist – fancy using been as

Taki

Bewigged buffoons

So good to be in London, if only to get away from the Hillary Clinton publicity machine which has blanketed the Bagel. This shrewd and shark-like operator makes greedy Cherie look small time. Worse, I predict the book la Clinton didn’t write will go straight to the top of the best-seller list. Eight million big ones for recounting eight million whoppers to some flunky: good work if you can get it. But even I thought it rather rude when a late-night comedian said that Chelsea is homely because Janet Reno is her father. Oy veh! Mind you, I had hardly touched English soil when a friend got me all excited.

Jeremy Clarke

Anger management

The psychoanalyst I’m seeing thinks I’m mad. At least I think she’s a psychoanalyst. If I ask her what she is exactly she goes all bristly and reels off some unfamiliar acronyms. She sees me once a fortnight for an hour in a small room at the local doctors’ surgery. A duty doctor referred me to her. I’d gone to see him for another month’s worth of happy pills and he’d intuited that half my trouble is that I am angry all the time. In fact when I came through the door of his consulting room, he said, I looked so angry he was afraid. All I really needed, in

Petronella Wyatt

A place of refuge

There seems to be some question as to whether Saddam Hussein’s two daughters, Raghad and Rana, and their nine children aged between seven and 16 will be allowed to apply for asylum in Britain. Their sponsor is a cousin of the family, a Mr Izzi (Izzard)-Din Mohammed Hassan al-Majid. This gentleman, who is a businessman, apparently lives in a bungalow in Leeds. If Saddam’s family were granted asylum here they would live on a council estate in the town at the taxpayer’s expense. It transpires that Saddam’s former wife would like to join them. Should she manage to smuggle herself into the country, the government has admitted that it might

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Banned Wagon | 14 June 2003

Sir Edmund Hillary has demanded that the Nepalese government closes Mount Everest for a few years to ‘give it a rest’ and thereafter opens it only to serious climbers. Tourists who pay £40,000 to be led up Everest by experienced guides are not real mountaineers, he says, and they have no right to be there. It is entirely logical that Sir Edmund should be happier at the idea of Everest being put out of bounds. Was his ascent of Everest really such a big deal, he perhaps fears people will ask, when pot-bellied American tourists and beer-swilling students are doing it every day? But why Nepal should be expected to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why the world would be better off if Saddam were still in power

What would you have done? Would you have left Saddam Hussein in power? The inquiry, familiar to all of us who opposed the war, is put in a finger-stabbing sort of way – as though that clinched it; as though the answer is so obvious that the peaceniks can only stammer. Just ask them what they would have done and watch them squirm! Elsewhere, the tactic is more typical of left-wing polemicists than of the Right. ‘How could you stand by and see…?’ is a favourite way of arguing for state intervention (and taxpayers’ money) for any amount of expensive interference with nature. Any Tory with guts learns to summon

The Spectator

Bloody ridiculous

Any day now, you can expect Downing Street to announce that there will be a public inquiry into the Third Crusade. Did Richard the Lionheart exaggerate the threat posed by Saladin? Was unreasonable force used at Acre, and what benefit was there to England in any case, when Richard’s time could have been better spent attending to outbreaks of scrofula at home? It may seem far-fetched, but an inquiry into the crusades is slightly more likely than Tony Blair announcing a public inquiry into the publication of the ‘dodgy dossier’ which foreshadowed the House of Commons’ vote on war in Iraq. During his six years in office, the Prime Minister

Roger Highfield

Science & Nature SpecialNanotechnology

Once again we have the Prince of Wales to thank for alerting us to the latest apocalypse that scientists are planning to unleash upon mankind. Having attacked GM foods in the past, and after much hand-wringing over how scientists are reducing the world to a ‘laboratory of life’, the Prince has turned his attention to nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at scales of a nanometre (a billionth of a metre). As you will have read over the last few weeks, Prince Charles’s great worry is that swarms of ‘nanomachines’ will reduce everything in their path to ‘grey goo’. And if the idea sounds like a cracking storyline for a

Zac Goldsmith

Science & Nature SpecialEcology

Until quite recently, if it could be found at all in shops, the Ecologist magazine, which I edit, would invariably have been wedged somewhere between Motor Digest and Computer World at the far end of the lowest shelf in a magazine rack. That may have had something to do with the magazine itself. But not exclusively. Survival of the planet, it goes without saying, is the ultimate priority. If only half the reports on the state of the world are true, then logically we should all be environmentalists. But we aren’t, and environmentalism remains a ‘niche’ concern. Newspapers, terrified of upsetting the corporations that subsidise them, are partly to blame,

Carl Gierstorfer

Science & Nature SpecialThe chimp genome

Everyone knows that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe and that mankind has descended from the apes. But what about this: according to the latest estimates, we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with the chimpanzees. What distinguishes us from our closest living relative is due to a 1.2 per cent genetic distance. Now the race is on to decipher the chimp genome, a draft of which will be published later this year. By superimposing the human genome on the chimp’s, researchers hope finally to shed light upon the genetic basis of human nature. In fact, some hints of genes underlying uniquely human traits, such

Michael Hanlon

Science & Nature SpecialAstronomy

One way to throw an astrologer into confusion – well, even more confusion than that under which they normally labour – is to find a new planet. When Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto in 1930, the third oldest profession found itself in a tizzy. So when a tenth planet, beyond Pluto, was announced a few months ago, the astrologers again let out a collective groan and started redrawing their charts. But it isn’t just the stargazing charlatans who were bothered by the new discovery; the rest of us were just as bemused, not by the planet itself but by its name. Quaoar. Qua-oh-what? Hard to spell, harder to say. The only