Society

Saturday

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

We peaceniks are going to have to pay a heavy price for Allied victory

The high-water mark for modish opposition to the invasion of Iraq may this week have passed. Those who, like me, remain unconvinced of the case for war should prepare for a spell of unfashionability. I write on Tuesday. I do not know whether by the time you read this the Iraqi defence effort will have begun to crumble, but it is very possible that within a week the beginnings of such a collapse will be evident – and we of the peace camp will be thrown on to the defensive. Many in that camp have persuaded themselves that, in the event of war, the case against is likely to be

The Spectator

Freedom from fear

Fear and hope are the two great motivators of human action, and neither untempered by the other leads to wise decision-making. Paralysis by unreasonable fear is as much to be avoided as the foolhardiness induced by groundless hope; but, of the two, fear is the more easily generated. It is certainly more common nowadays than unbounded optimism. How easily unfounded fear is provoked has been demonstrated this week by the appearance of a new disease in China of unknown causation. No sooner had nine people died of it, out of a global population of six billion, than the end of the world, or at least of humanity, was deemed in

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 March 2003

Britain joined the United States and Spain in tabling an amendment to the draft resolution before the Security Council of the United Nations, reading: ‘Iraq will have failed to take the final opportunity afforded by resolution 1441 unless on or before 17 March 2003 the Council concludes that Iraq has demonstrated full, unconditional, immediate and active co-operation with its disarmament obligations.’ Miss Clare Short became the first Cabinet minister to threaten resignation if Britain went to war without securing a UN vote; to add injury to Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, she accused him of recklessness over Iraq and being ‘reckless with our government, reckless with his own future,

Antonia Fraser

Diary – 15 March 2003

A non-stop drive for housing: when my father, then Frank Pakenham, fought as Labour candidate for Oxford in 1945, he hired a pony and cart and, stuffing his numerous children in the back, set forth along the streets with this striking placard. Unfortunately, the pony came to an abrupt halt quite soon and would not be budged. The stop as opposed to the non-stop was commemorated in a photograph in the Oxford Mail. Such is the emotive power of photography that I remember it well, as Maurice Chevalier would say, including the discomfort of the crowded cart, the tiresome behaviour of my scowling siblings, my mother in the cheerful red

Jeremy Clarke

Bores and whores

Bored witless, I go into town with no particular intention other than to get out of the house. I think about going to the pub but each one I look in is empty. The streets of the town are empty, the pubs are empty and I’m empty. The only place with any sign of life in it is the British Legion club. Through the first-floor window I can see people with pool cues moving around. I press the buzzer and am let in. My friend Rick is in there. He’ll have a pint of mild, he says, but he can’t buy me one back. He’s a bit skint at the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 15 March 2003

Dear Mary… At a recent literary prize-giving, after three short and elegant speeches covering the shortlist and the award, the winner – for the first time in his life, it seemed – had the microphone. And did he not enjoy it! The assembled company of around 150 guests looked at one another in horror as the speech went on and on and on; those near the door began to slip away, the chairman hovered – looking as though he might grab the microphone – but no, we had to wait a full 20 minutes before the torture ended. It is not the first time I have experienced an overlong speech

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 15 March 2003

In his already classic sociological study of the Hooray Henry in last week’s Spectator, Professor Oborne did not have space to explore in full the ancient precedents for this style of behaviour. Herewith, then, a humble footnote to his marr-sterful overview, together with a forward-looking proposal. The Professor was right to mention the importance of the drunken riot, k

Sebastian Skeaping

Where the wild things are

Aldo Leopold once wrote, ‘There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.’ John Lister-Kaye’s Song of the Rolling Earth – his first book for many years and undoubtedly his finest to date – is written by one who cannot live without wild things, but makes essential reading for those who can. After a promising start in the early Seventies – The White Island (an account of his last days with the dying Gavin Maxwell) and The Seeing Eye were well received – Lister-Kaye’s writing career tailed off. Now we know why. Part Wordsworthian memoir comprised of spots of time, part lyric Whitmanesque homily (the title

Frank Johnson

What the United States and the German and Tsarist empires have in common

Two weeks ago, I argued here – I hope without any suggestion of great originality – that all crises produce the same people. That is, doves, hawks and a majority which is moderate or opportunistic according to taste. Thus it was possible to compare the present crisis over Iraq with the 1914 crisis over Serbia. But great powers behave similarly too. More specifically, their component parts do. There is something which links today’s United States to other great powers of the not too distant past. It is the existence, within the state, of a faction which wants to spread what it sees as the state’s essence. It is the desire

Susan Moore

Exhausting but exhilarating

The art and antiques business is as unpredictable as an English summer. And it is not only the works of art that confound market rules and crystal balls. The fairs that serve as the dealers’ collective showcase similarly defy expectations. Who would have thought, for instance, that fair entrepreneur David Lester could put up a tent on a forlorn intersection in West Palm Beach – not only on the wrong side of the tracks but just feet away from them – and find himself with one of the most glamorous and successful art fairs in America? Or that a charmless convention centre on the ring-road around Maastricht – a town

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Don’t expel Dr Hook

A dingy community hall in the back streets of Bethnal Green on a cold and miserable winter’s evening. We’re all here waiting for the weird, hook-handed fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri, the most loathed man in Britain, who is about to hold a public meeting. When I say ‘we’re all here’, I mean the infidel scum from the Daily Mail, a bunch of whores from the BBC, a cockroach from the Standard and a lower-than-cattle news agency chap. We’re all present and correct. What we’re really short of at the moment is fanatics, fundamentalists or, indeed, Muslims of any gradation of fervour. When I last looked in the

Daniel Kruger

The case for colonialism

The West might be superficially divided between hawks and doves, but there is a deeper division: between foxes and hedgehogs. In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin said the division was ‘one of the deepest’ among human beings. The distinction applies just as well to politicians and governments. Foxes, said Berlin, are sophisticated, pluralist, usually atheist, and distrustful of absolutes. Hedgehogs are anti-intellectual, single-minded, often religious, and comfortable with certainties, chief among which are ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Foxes think many small things; hedgehogs think one big thing. The UN and the EU are fox heaven. They stand for multilateralism and the ‘post-modern’ world order, for negotiation, containment and compromise.

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 8 March 2003

Dr C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as ‘Caucasian’. She wondered what connection she was supposed to have with a mountain range. She might well. We are all familiar from American cop shows on television with Caucasian as a racial label. But as far as I can tell, a German was to blame for the category. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) thought that the ‘white’ races came from the Caucasus region, and he was acknowledged as the founder of physical anthropology. Actually, that is what

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 March 2003

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech in Swansea: ‘In 1938 Chamberlain was a hero when he brought back the Munich agreement. And he did it for the best of motives. He had seen members of his precious family, people he loved, die in the carnage of World War I. He was a good man. But he was a good man who made the wrong decision.’ This followed a motion in the Commons on action against Iraq passed by a majority of 194, but opposed by 199 MPs – 121 of them Labour – who supported an amendment stating that the case for war was ‘as yet

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 8 March 2003

The EU has recently proclaimed that, for the purposes of its statistical analyses, Britain is not an island. That poses an interesting question: when did it become an island? It has recently been argued that it became one, in Roman eyes at any rate, on 21 July 54 bc, at 9.21 p.m. The historical and archaeological record shows that, in the 1st century bc, Britain enjoyed very close commercial and political ties with Europe. This, indeed, is probably what attracted Julius Caesar to it in the first of his expeditions here in 55 bc, for which he was officially thanked by the Senate in Rome. But it did not work

Archie Cotterell

Where the buck never stops

It is a seductive idea to assess ‘the invention of America’ through the history of the dollar, for no other country’s conception of itself is so intrinsically bound to its currency. The biggest brand in the world, from its introduction the dollar has financed capitalism and conflict in equal measure. In the process it has shaped the American psyche. Goodwin’s narrative, which elegantly recounts the difficulties preceding its arrival as an instrument of global hegemony, establishes that from the beginning the dollar was symbolic of – and a receptacle for – the aspirations of the American people. This will come as little surprise to those who equate Americans with vulgar

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Mr Blair is being timid in not joining the nations now resisting the hawks of Washington

The Prime Minister is right. The whole credibility of the United Nations is at stake this week. If the Security Council buckles under the US blackmail to which it is now subject over Iraq, we can discount the organisation as an independent force for international order. Among Spectator readers there are still one or two of us who, prey to instincts we flatter ourselves to call Conservative, mistrust proposals for ruinous and dangerous military adventures. In a way we dare think consistent with remaining Tories, we doubt not America’s goodwill but her judgment in world affairs. We find ourselves stumped for words at the cheating to which our Prime Minister

Andrew Lambirth

Farrago of multiple choice

Days Like These is only the second Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, so the reader may be forgiven for not being altogether familiar with the set-up or its purpose. It’s intended as a kind of alternative or extension to the Turner Prize, offering a representative cross-section of contemporary art practice in the British Isles. This particular show (which runs at Tate Britain until 26 May) features the work of 23 reasonably diverse artists, and reveals – and I quote the press release – ‘the breadth of thoughtfulness, humour, subtlety and complexity in contemporary British art’. Oh, that it did. The artists seem to have been selected almost at