Society

Saturday

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

Rachel Johnson

A land unfit for heroes

Things have to come a pretty pass, eh, when an institution as self-consciously august as the University of Oxford has to headhunt a perjuring philanderer to be its next chancellor; even if the felon happens to be the President of the United States (there are no former presidents, of course, just as alumnae of St Paul’s girls’ school are Paulinas till their dying day). Not since the Albanians asked C.B. Fry, the English cricketer, to be their king has there been so dismal an admission of the lack of home-grown talent. So whom do we have so far? Are any of them going to set the world on fire? The

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 15 February 2003

I am excited by a letter from Kensington, but before that let me notice a fearful symmetry between Martin Bashir’s interview with Michael Jackson and the advertisements that punctuated it. These were intended to appeal to young people. One, for the Disney rehash of Treasure Island called Treasure Planet, has the animated Jim Hawkins saying, ‘How cool is that?’ – not a sentence of Stevenson’s. I mentioned this phrase a fortnight ago, and so I was bound to notice it all over the place. But I didn’t expect it to be quite so ubiquitous, for, immediately after the commercial break, we heard poor old Jacko remark, ‘How ignorant is that?’

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 February 2003

Thousands prepared to march to Hyde Park in London to demonstrate opposition to war against Iraq; they included Mr Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party. About 400 soldiers from the Grenadier Guards and Household Cavalry with armoured cars began to patrol Heathrow airport, authorised by Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. The England cricket team decided not to play in the World Cup in Zimbabwe out of fear of a death threat, they said. On television Mr Blair gave Mr Jeremy Paxman an undertaking about the number of applications for asylum being made: ‘I would like to see us reduce it by 30-40 per cent in the

Minette Marrin

Diary – 15 February 2003

If diaries are all about name-dropping and indiscretion, and they usually are, perhaps I should say that I had lunch on Tuesday with the Prime Minister at No. 10. This is the sort of thing that no diarist could bear to suppress. On the other hand, the unwritten rules of journalism dictate that I can’t say anything about it. So does my editor at the Sunday Times. What a miserable dilemma. And in the very week when The Spectator asked me to write this diary. I suppose I can at least reveal that we had lamb stew followed by fruit salad; both were simple but good. Presumably the purpose of

Petronella Wyatt

No gratitude

I am not in the least bit surprised that the Americans are furious and bewildered by the churlish actions of France and Germany which are now threatening to destroy Nato. As has been pointed out, not only did hundreds of thousands of US servicemen, many of them little more than boys, die liberating Western Europe in the second world war, but American support for Nato during the Cold War and up till the present day has bestowed upon its beneficiaries a great deal more than a mere defence system. Consider the vast amount of money America has poured into Europe. This has saved European governments from having to spend more

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