Society

Saturday

Interconnect

Diary – 19 July 2003

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s worth it. There’s something called a ‘walking upstairs policy’, which means that no one is allowed to walk upstairs unless they are accompanied by a member of staff. I had arrived before Barbara, who was made to wait until someone could escort her up to join me, while I waited. A gobbledyspeak-trained comis brought some

The Spectator

Feedback | 19 July 2003

Comment on Girls just want to have funds by Rachel Royce (12/07/2003) Rachel Royce gives women a bad name when she accuses men of greed yet expects a return of between 200% and 800% on her “investment”. Simple logic will tell her that it is not men, but elementary maths that make a pyramid scheme unsustainable. A seasoning of gender, class and libertarian polemic should not be allowed to disguise the spuriousness of her argument. Hearts and their ilk are called “gifting” schemes, not “investment” schemes for a reason: money only flows up the pyramid, not down. That is why the unfortunates at the bottom will ask for their money

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 19 July 2003

On one of those discussion programmes, not about books but about buying books, Mariella Frostrup has just said, ‘We shall be discussing that momentarily.’ If only that had been true. Now what I really want to write about is a grammatical solecism I have been convicted of. In the politest possible way, Andrew Wilton, a reader from email land, points out that in the following sentence the grammar is all wrong for the sense: ‘Veronica is behaving like one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn’t got a big enough run….’ Mr Wilton acknowledges that such constructions have been used by reputable writers for a century or

Taki

Halcyon days

St Tropez My father died on 14 July, 1989, in an obvious if somewhat self-defeating gesture against the 200-year celebration of the French Revolution. I always think of my dad on the infamous day which is France’s national holiday, especially when I’m on the Riviera, a once magical place where he first took me as a boy in 1952. Those were great times. Very few people had boats, and even fewer people among the haves had bad manners. Everyone dressed for dinner, and fast women tried desperately to act like ladies, outside the sack, that is. Life was very cheap if one had dollars, a large suite at the Hotel

Jeremy Clarke

Torquay trauma

When I got back from Pamplona I hadn’t slept in a bed or washed my hair for a week. There was a red stain around my neck where my sweat had mixed with the dye in my St Fermin neckerchief. I was badly sunburned. There was a suppurating graze on my shoulder and a cold sore on my lip. Also, near the end of the feria I’d been robbed of all my money and credit cards by two, or it might have been one, very small women and I was destitute as well as dirty. Imagine how my heart leapt, then, when I walked in the door and was told

Petronella Wyatt

Roman research

The Italians are an easy-going lot as a rule. Except when it comes to domestic matters. I do not refer to politics, of course, but to matters pertaining to the household. When my parents owned a house outside Pisa, they employed a cook called Amelia and a maid whose name is now a long-distant memory to me. What is not a distant memory, however, is how those two scrawny-looking women with skin like Egyptian papyrus fought each other. The maid would clonk Amelia over the chops with a broomstick and Amelia would retaliate with a spaghetti fork. These rows were usually about Amelia’s husband who drove a bakery van. Amelia

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 July 2003

Q. Having just sold a flat, I have some spare cash which I wish to put to good use for my family. My grandson George recently had a nasty operation on his knee, and my daughter was, at the time, not quite sure how much the medical insurance would pick up. I sent her a cheque for £5,000 to lessen her worry — and I also said that if she didn’t need it now to put it into a separate account in case of complications. I know that my letter arrived, but I now find, three weeks later, that she has not paid this cheque in. Is she lazy, forgetful

Aidan Hartley

More than heaven

Mount Kenya, at altitude Among my many defects is the inability ever to be satisfied. We have two children and I want more. I have 29 cattle and I want a lot more. I live in the most beautiful part of Kenya and I covet other people’s big ranches. I walk into other people’s houses and I think, ‘Hmm, I’d like this. I wonder how much it costs?’ I want, I want, I want. And when it comes to big boys’ toys I’m like Toad in Wind in the Willows. My latest infatuation is a $2 million helicopter owned by Jim on the neighbouring private game reserve of Loisaba. Now,

Stephen Glover

Mr Rusbridger has no more right to be cross than any other middle-class malefactor

Last week the Press Complaints Commission delivered two judgments which, taken together, seem highly perplexing. It exonerated the News of the World for paying £10,000 to a convicted criminal who was implicated in the alleged plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham. And it censured the Guardian for paying £720 to a former criminal for writing an article about life in prison alongside Jeffrey Archer. As a result of this second ruling, the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, has reportedly blown several gaskets and has had to be soothed in a darkened room. The News of the World’s escape is fortunate, to say the least. Readers may remember the case. The paper’s legendary

The Spectator

Iraqi common sense

We all know what we think. Week in, week out, we hear what the British view of the war in Iraq is, and the polls tell us that we are becoming ever more sceptical. We know what the Americans think. We know what the French think of it all (not a lot). Now, for the first time, we have a scientific attempt to survey the opinion of the people whose country was fought over, and in whose name the battle of Baghdad took place. To look at the polling returns from Iraq is frankly to have a sense of relief; relief not just that they do not all want an

John Laughland

My secret garden

It was those trips to the Balkans that started it. As we hard-core Europhobes know, one of the main joys of leaving EU Europe is that the food tastes incomparably better wherever the writ of Brussels does not extend. Although the hard-skinned, white-membraned Dutch tomato has already started to colonise the humble Skopje salad in Bulgaria — agriculture in the bread baskets of Eastern Europe is being comprehensively closed down in preparation for EU membership — there are still pockets of resistance south of the Danube, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, where a cucumber does not taste the same as a carrot. There, I consume vegetables with something bordering on

Peter Kellner

The voice of Baghdad

Peter Kellner analyses the first systematic opinion poll of Iraq, and finds a population full of anxiety — but also convinced that war has made their future brighter Baghdad is on a knife edge. Three in four of its residents say the city is now more dangerous than when Saddam Hussein was in power. Two in three fear being attacked in the street. Most think that we went to war to grab Iraq’s oil and/or to help Israel. Yet despite these deep concerns, only a minority oppose the American and British invasion, and as few as one in eight want the invaders to leave the country straight away. They want

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 July 2003

Tony Blair insisted that weapons of mass destruction will still be found in Iraq, even though none has been discovered yet. A committee of MPs acquitted Mr Blair’s right-hand man, Alastair Campbell, of ‘sexing up’ a dossier about such weapons published in September 2002, but the committee said the claim that the weapons could be used within 45 minutes had been given undue prominence. It also said that Mr Blair had ‘inadvertently made a bad situation worse’ by misrepresenting the contents of the ‘dodgy dossier’ presented to Parliament in February 2003. The BBC, which reported the ‘sexing up’ allegation, turned down Mr Campbell’s demands for an apology. The government announced

Matthew Dancona

Diary – 12 July 2003

I am summoned to No. 10 for a one-on-one with the Prime Minister. These ‘landscape chats’, as his spin doctors call them, are, of course, strictly off the record. But I don’t think I am breaking a confidence in revealing that, as we sit on the terrace outside the Cabinet room, I witness a seriously tribal side to Mr Blair which has been obscured in previous encounters. Making small talk about football, I mention that my father played for Newcastle United in his youth. The effect of this revelation upon the First Lord of the Treasury – a lifelong Toon fan – is nothing short of electric. It is as

Jeremy Clarke

Running wild

I’m doing 170 kilometres an hour along the motorway from Barcelona to Pamplona. I pass a sign telling me I am now entering Navarre, and passing from Aragon to the Basque country. It’s a blue sign, about 20 foot square and riddled with holes. Where I live many of our road signs are peppered with shot, done for a laugh. But these are made by some sort of high-calibre rifle. The motorway is like a racetrack, black, cambered, empty, a continuous line of bougainvillaea bushes down the central reservation. I’m driving a Merc worth 20 grand. My own car back home is worth, for insurance purposes, 150 quid. I’m squirting

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 July 2003

Dear Mary… Q. On doctor’s orders, I’ve recently had to lay off some of my favourite foods – bread, shepherd’s pie, spaghetti carbonara, etc. Would it be polite to refuse a dinner invitation, when I know that the food served won’t agree with me, especially as it’s to a celebratory party for an old friend I used to run around with, who is shortly to come out of prison?Worried, address withheld A. Invitations to the party you mention are highly sought after, for a number of reasons. There is no need for you to refuse yours since, given that the new social equation is self-disciplined/neurotic equals A-list, you can guarantee

Stephen Glover

At least the government can still rely on the dumbed-down Times for support

When Robert Thomson was made editor of the Times some 18 months ago he let it be known that he intended to take his paper up-market. There was also good reason to believe that he would not let it be so slavish towards New Labour as it had sometimes been during the long tenure of his predecessor, my old friend Peter Stothard. How has he fared? The paper’s news pages did briefly become more elevated. A couple of new foreign correspondents were hired. No one could have pretended that the transformation was a great one, but something seemed to be going on. Yet in recent months Mr Thomson has gone

Taki

Good manners

A friend of mine who wishes to remain nameless told me a story too good to resist. Paul Johnson, Andrew Roberts, Robin Birley, Charlie Glass and myself were in Harry’s Bar following the Speccie party when my friend approached from a neighbouring table. ‘My 16-year-old daughter, working up at Oxford, was introduced to Bill Clinton as an intern, and a terribly embarrassing silence followed…’ Funnily enough, I had just attended Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s reception at the Orangery in Kensington for Hillary Clinton, a reception, incidentally, in which I behaved impeccably despite my feelings towards the Draft Dodger, who bombed Serbia to smithereens from 15,000 feet and not an inch

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Without belief, can we go on cursing our enemies – or blessing our friends?

Has the power to curse lost its meaning for modern man? Might we, in losing it, lose something precious: the power to bless? I was made to think about this last week, in Bristol, recording for later broadcast a couple of programmes in a series I present for BBC Radio Four. Off the Page is a modest little affair in which three writers discuss with each other and with me the short columns I have commissioned from them on a single, simple subject. Each week we take a different topic and I invite different writers (some famous, some new or unknown) to join me in talking and writing about it.

The Spectator

Should Scots rule England?

The interests of Englishmen are not threatened with impunity: and the danger of molesting them does not disclose itself till the threat has been uttered, and their enmity has been irrevocably incurred. They have a habit of sleeping up to the very moment of danger, which is equally embarrassing to their champions and their assailants. So wrote Lord Salisbury in 1873. He was echoed a century later by Enoch Powell, who observed that one of the ‘peculiar faults’ of the English was their ‘strange passivity in the face of danger or absurdity or provocation’. The question which ought now to be troubling Tony Blair, but almost certainly isn’t, is whether