Society

Saturday

Jeremy Clarke

Game over

I’m over the limit so I’m driving home down the back lanes to avoid the police. You have to drink-and-drive round here because we’re a bit isolated and the decent pubs are all in town, 20 minutes away. Wrong of me, I know. But if I go home the back way it’s single-track country lanes with grass growing up the middle all the way, and, more to the point, there are no police. Badgers yes. Foxes occasionally. Police no. I’m barrelling down these narrow lanes with the car radio going full blast. My radio-cassette player was out of action last year. It’s one of those ‘key code’ radios that have

Petronella Wyatt

Diet of despair

Ihave been singing for my supper here in Italy in a big way. For the first course, the pasta, the entrée and the gelati. The manageress of the hotel, Il Pellicano, heard from a well-wisher (one can only hope it was a well-wisher) that I can just about croak out a few Cole Porter standards, once some alcoholic refreshment has been poured down my gullet. As a result the guests appear to be getting thinner – an exodus from the bar and dining area being the minority reaction. Otherwise the hospiti are evidently listening so intently that stupefied admiration has played havoc with their digestive systems. This is not surprising

Aidan Hartley

Trust me, I’m a doctor

Laikipia My mother’s house on Kenya’s coast in August is my favourite place to decompress. After a month in London and Edinburgh, it was such a relief to kick off my squeaky black shoes, discard my trousers and wear nothing but a kikoi wrap for a few days. This time my old friend Eric, who is over from China, joined me. We ate only fish and rice and drank a lot of ice-cold Tusker beer. We surfed on a reef break a mile out to sea where the waves were clean, big and blue. We went deep-sea fishing, tagged a sailfish, saw turtles mating and gasped when the great spangled

The Spectator

The common enemy

The murderous attack on the United Nations in Baghdad has brought some clarity to the situation. It has exposed the essential community of interest between the UN and the United States. Those two entities often disagree so radically about methods that the fundamental similarity of their aims is easily overlooked. In Iraq, they are engaged in a liberal imperialist exercise which has the aim of bringing the blessings of democracy to people who until earlier this year suffered under a most vicious tyranny. The UN and US suffer, therefore, from the paradox which has always afflicted the liberal imperialist, namely that in order to bring freedom to people less fortunate

Interconnect

Paying the penance for Culture

Impossible to estimate how much the Scots have enriched the Life of Man. They gave us the Telephone (sorry, wrong number), Penicillin (much better today, thank you, doctor), the Television (but there’s nothing good on any more), and the Wandering Dipso (K’you spear us fufty peents, pal?). To this we must add their latest innovation: the weather-proof, bomb-proof, completion-proof building. The new Scottish Parliament is emerging, with Darwinian slowness, at the base of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. A pair of Y-shaped cranes stand over the scattered rubble, their huge limbs ladylike and prim, like fantastical herons dipping and pecking at the concrete. The award-winning architect, Enric Miralles, is as Scottish

Tom Stacey

The all-purpose bogeyman

One has to be careful of saying anything nice about people like Idi Amin, even when they are dead and gone. It is easy to get a reputation for being deliberately provocative, or for seeking compassion kudos like the late Lord Longford, who befriended convicts for the sheer magnitude of their infamy. For many years, Idi Amin was the civilised world’s stock example of ‘pure evil’. Nearly a quarter of a century after the end of his outrageous tyranny, everybody still knows about him. Not so long ago, after spending a long weekend in Idi’s company in seaside Jeddah, I was collecting a roll of developed film from Happy Snaps

Michael Hanlon

Bark, don’t bite

Modern life is full of terror. We quake at global warming, Arab terrorists, gene-tinkered foods and rogue vaccines. New plagues from the East, our mobile phones and our railways all have the ability to induce panic. These are all new fears of new things. And all, to a greater or lesser extent, are irrational. But there is another, and I would argue even greater and more insidious, fear that has crept up on us in the past 20 years or so. The object of this fear is not new; but the fear itself is. And it is making life for a significant number of us quite miserable. What is it

Theodore Dalrymple

Sick, thick and dangerous

As a conservative, I am against all unnecessary change, of course, but I welcome innovation that improves the quality of life. Thus I rejoice to learn that certain doctors in my neck of the woods are now conducting clinics for difficult and challenging (i.e., violent and dangerous) patients in local police stations. This will improve the quality of clinical care no end. Naturally, the principal beneficiaries of this innovation will be the doctors themselves. They will no longer sit in fear and trembling behind their desks as their young male patients, decked out in the uniform of modern British savagery, make their unreasonable demands, compliance with which they are prepared

Deal W-Hudson

The Gospel according to Braveheart

Washington, DC We were an odd sight to the young crowd in the pool hall late on a Sunday night. A couple of middle-aged family guys don’t exactly blend in, at least not in Adams Morgan, a hip young neighbourhood in Washington, DC – especially when one of them is Mel Gibson. It was the night before the screening of Gibson’s controversial film about the Passion of Christ. The man better known as Mad Max, or William Wallace, was relaxing in the pool hall after his long flight from Los Angeles. There was little relaxing elsewhere in the room, however. Women hoping for an autograph, a game of darts or

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 22 August 2003

Schools minister David Miliband, condemned to a life of perpetual enthusiasm for New Labour policies as he attempts to climb the greasy pole, has drawn an analogy between students getting As at A-level and Paula Radcliffe beating a world record; while the gay cleric Canon John, recently rejected as Bishop of Reading, finds a ‘true analogy’ between homosexual use of the body parts in love-making with unconventional methods of painting a picture (e.g. with the feet). Both had better read Aristotle on the subject before they get carried away. Aristotle sees analogy as a sort of paradigm. These he divides into three groups: historical paradigm (‘do not let the Persian

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 16 August 2003

Dear Mary… Q. What should you answer when a lady whom you have not seen for 30 years greets you with the question, ‘You do not remember who I am, do you?’ when you don’t?P.S., Cornwall A. You should not worry. Such a lapse in memory is not the offence it was in the days when circles of friends and acquaintances were more manageably sized. Thirty years ago it would indeed have been hurtful not to remember someone who remembered you – particularly if that person had conceived a romantic longing for you and spent hundreds if not thousands of waking hours daydreaming about the possibility of your union. To

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 16 August 2003

Lord Hutton began his inquiry into the events leading to the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Mr Andrew Gilligan, who had used Dr Kelly as his source for a report on the BBC about the ‘sexing up’ of the government’s September dossier on Iraq, made available notes made after meeting him; part said, ‘most people in intel werent happy with it because it didn’t reflect the considere view they were putting forward Campbell real info but unr. incl against ur wishes’. Miss Susan Watts, the science editor of BBC’s Newsnight, said her shorthand notes of Dr Kelly’s remarks about the claim that

Joan Collins

Diary – 16 August 2003

I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had played the female lead but by Hong Kong she was deemed by the Hollywood hierarchy to be too old, so I was cast to play Bing’s love interest at almost 40 years his junior. Bing was taciturn and grumpy through most of the movie in stark comparison with Bob, who was a bundle of laughs

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 16 August 2003

It is by no means clear to me which words are acceptable in what social circumstances. I mean words from bloody southward. It was, 20 years ago, the case that in the grown-up surroundings of The Spectator it was all right to use for good reason strong language that the BBC could not abide. Now, on the stroke of 9 p.m., television makes fuck the most common of lexical choices. My husband doesn’t give a damn, but is shocked on my behalf. It doesn’t have to be 9 p.m. Shortly after 10 the other morning a rather sincere young person on Woman’s Hour was advocating our women’s standing up to

Taki

Family Courage

Gstaad I remember it as if it were yesterday. Rodney Solomon, a friend no longer with us, came into the Clermont club all huffy and puffy and dressed in a morning coat, refused an invitation to lunch, and announced that he was off early to the wedding of ‘my great friend Sally Curzon to Piers Courage’. The Clermont back then, it was 1966, belonged to John Aspinall, who was known for his friendly abuse of all and sundry. ‘Go on with your social climbing, Rodney, and tell that racing driver that real men don’t race but gamble…’ or words to that effect. I did not join in. In fact I

Jeremy Clarke

Fair play

I was running the Whack-the-Malteaser stall yet again this year. My sister put me on it the first year I helped out at the ‘fun day’ she organises every summer at the day centre for people with learning difficulties, and I’ve been running it every year since. This year I asked if I could go on the lucky dip instead, but she said no. Her clients don’t like change, she said. Because they are used to seeing me on the Whack-the-Malteaser stall, they expect to see me on it again this year. This is true, I suppose. People with learning difficulties are remarkably conservative. In fact, one could almost say

Stephen Glover

Why some newspapers will always demonise Andrew Gilligan

What is the view of the Andrew Gilligan affair at the Frog and Firkin? It is some time since I have been down to the Frog, but I feel I know its ways so well that I can be pretty sure what they are thinking. Most of its denizens are stuck somewhere between boredom and bewilderment. They feel as though they have been asked to take a paper in astrophysics with half an hour’s preparation on the subject and the aid of a blunt pencil. Of course, there will be some who believe they understand the whole thing perfectly. The landlord, who happens to be a Labour councillor, is certain

The Spectator

Bring back failure

It has become customary to preface any comment on the government’s policy on school examinations with a glowing tribute to schoolchildren who have worked hard for their grades. The school standards minister David Miliband goes so far as to cite the hard work of school pupils as an excuse for avoiding debate on the issue of ‘grade inflation’ altogether. Nobody complained when Paula Radcliffe broke the record for the London marathon, he argued the other day; therefore, nobody should dare to insult schoolchildren by questioning the integrity of A-level examinations, the results of which are announced this week, and of GCSEs, whose results are announced next week. There is an