Society

Saturday

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

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