Society

Saturday

Eric Anderson

Diary – 15 November 2003

In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever improving school exam results are the nearest thing yet to a panacea for universal happiness. Just notice how many people they please. Pupils, or students as everyone calls them these days, like getting A grades rather than Bs and Cs. Parents like that too. Headmasters and headmistresses can boast, year after year, of record results, and universities of rising entry standards. Governments like them most of all, because better results prove, of course, that standards are rising and that they made them rise. Only two groups grouse about them —

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 15 November 2003

A Kentish man, Mr Spencer Jones, sends me a photograph of a street named ‘The Forstal’. It is a cul-de-sac, or dead end, as we say in Oxfordshire. Why, asks Mr Jones, is this perfectly ordinary word not in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? The answer would be that it is dialect. There are lots of words not in the OED — slang, jargon, personal names, place-names and dialect words. Some of each category, though, do get in. Forstal is in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary. The earliest citation it gives (although Wright could not use as wide a catch as James Murray at the OED) is an interesting one from

Interconnect

Your problems solved | 15 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. While at a party at which I knew only the host, I made the mistake of trying to enter a group by laughing at a joke that I had not heard. Although rather silly, this would have been fine had the man standing next to me not asked what the joke was, as he had not heard. Dumbstruck with horror, I affected a coughing fit in order to escape. Please guard me against this terrifying situation with your advice as to what I should have done.C.W., Edinburgh A. You should have replied, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. I wasn’t actually laughing at whatever joke was being told

Stephen Glover

Strange as it may seem, the MoS believes the allegations about Charles are true

Earlier this week my dear friend the writer William Shawcross left a message on my answerphone. I am sure he will not mind if I repeat it. ‘Hi, Stephen, it’s William, your old friend. How are you? I have just heard some wonderful rumour today that you are going to use your entire column to denounce Associated Newspapers for its contemptible torture of both the Prince of Wales and George Smith. If this is true, I am so pleased. Congratulations, old bean.’ This message, it can be fairly said, is delivered in tones of jocular irony. Nor do I think that Boris Johnson, the editor of this magazine, will mind

Brian Masters

So nice and yet so Nazi

We are none of us, thank heaven, one-dimensional creatures easily and succinctly defined by a single characteristic. It is an obvious truth, yet was almost entirely ignored in the reporting of Diana Mosley’s death in Paris last summer, announced with the same clamour as had enveloped her for many of the last 70 years of her life. She was often vilified with a glee and enjoyment which carefully avoided any thought and latched on to the remorseless repetition of two simple facts, that she had been Hitler’s friend and Mosley’s wife. Ergo, she had to be detestable. To their great shame, even some serious historians were prepared to join in

Helen Osborne

A bland and baleful stoic

‘Woke up this morning feeling fine. Notices for Lorca’s comedy, Jack’s the Lad, terrific (even from that goof on the Times). Rehearsals for the new Arnold Wesker a real gas. Long lunch with Aimé Planchon (hot French bombshell); short siesta; drinks party at NT for all of us with CBEs … rest of evening a bit of a blur.’ April Fool. National Service, Richard Eyre’s diary of his ten years (1987-97) at the helm of the bunker on the South Bank, reads like Penal Servitude. What a chronicle of woes, crises and wariness, of ‘panic, insecurity and inadequacy’. The mystery is why Eyre, in his father’s phrase, chose to ‘nail

David Prycejones

The dangers of Fisking

In the www arena where the world speaks invisibly to itself, a new word has appeared: ‘fisking’, meaning the selection of evidence solely in order to bolster preconceptions and prejudices. Just as cardigans or mackintoshes are named after an inventive individual, so fisking derives from the work of Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of the Independent, stationed these many years in Beirut. The preconceptions and prejudices that are immortalising Fisk in the English language express an unqualified contempt for America. For him, most Americans are ignorant and arrogant, and their leaders mendacious and cynical power maniacs leading everyone to perdition. Everything wrong with the Middle East is particularly their

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Scotland is sick

Scotland spends more per capita on the NHS than England does, but by next year it will have Europe’s lowest life expectancy, says Fraser Nelson Imagine a British National Health Service flowing with French or German levels of funding. This dream, we are promised, will soon be delivered in return for higher taxes. But for the impatient, there is a solution: visit Scotland. For some time now, NHS Scotland has been living in Tony Blair’s promised land, enjoying European levels of health spending. Its NHS budget of £1,300 per head is a full 21 per cent higher than England’s. But instead of being an alluring example of what lies ahead,

Christopher Sandford

Sympathy for the vicar

Christopher Sandford says that Keith Richards — 60 next month — is a secret conservative: he eats shepherd’s pie, loves his mum and even goes to church He doesn’t exactly look like your average squire, Keith Richards, with his piratical swagger and a complexion that’s been compared to old cat litter. But Keith, who turns 60 next month, is emerging as one of the most shockingly normal, and English, of rock stars, as well as one of the most self-aware. ‘I can be the cat on stage any time I want,’ he said some years ago. ‘I like to stay in touch with him…. But I’m a very placid, nice

Angela Ellisjones

Victim culture began in 1880

Hardly a week goes by without the news that some criminal has pocketed an enormous sum from suing someone in an action which arises from the criminal’s wrongdoing. The government has sought to clamp down on this practice by inserting into the Criminal Justice Bill a clause that will prevent criminals from suing their victims for injuries they have incurred in the course of their crimes. This is a belated move in the right direction. But how did judges ever come to entertain such actions? How did all the traditional canons of the criminal law come to be inverted in favour of the wrongdoer? The pathological stage of a current

Paul Robinson

Identity crisis

Bossy-boots Blunkett’s plans must be resisted, says Paul Robinson, who has acquired five new cards in recent months, and it’s been a pain in the pocket for him I recently had my fingerprints taken for an identity card. If our autocratic Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gets his way, this will in the next decade or so become a universal rite of passage. Mr Blunkett has made it clear that he considers the issue of ID cards a ‘defining moment’ in Britain’s future. I agree, for his plans will define a new Britain which has turned its back on its traditional freedoms and adopted a new persona entirely out of keeping

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 15 November 2003

The Food Standards Agency has decided that the nation is too fat, and has suggested several policies aimed at persuading us to eat more healthily. The measures include stopping the likes of McDonald’s and Walkers crisps from sponsoring sports events and banning junk-food ads during children’s television programmes. One does not have to walk far down a high street to agree with the FSA’s assessment that a lot of children eat too much. But its suggested measures smack less of a fight against obesity than one against global capitalism. A ban on sponsorship by large food companies might possibly reduce the intake of McDonald’s revolting burgers, but it would do

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Blair is not guilty of mendacity but of weakness and poor judgment

Swimmers, scanning the sea for signs of danger, look beyond what breaks the surface. It is by the slight but unexpected troubling of the waters that hidden peril is often best located. Where something jagged lurks beneath or where two currents collide, a sudden agitated choppiness in a small patch of sea may tell us more than the great, regular rollers which we know how to breast. Most people seem to think that as regards the David Kelly affair, the Prime Minister himself is out of the roughest water; that Lord Hutton’s evidence-taking has somehow ‘cleared’ Downing Street — or at least that lesser figures are conveniently placed to take

Bruce Anderson

Like Churchill, Michael Howard understands that an opposition is a guerrilla force

Pompous, lobotomised-Lutyens details strive to rescue it from banality. They fail. Conservative Central Office looks like just another bog-standard 1950s office block. The appearance is deceptive. It is far worse than that. Whatever ‘bad karma’ means, Central Office has it. The atmosphere sets one’s teeth on edge, while encouraging the inhabitants to stab one another with hat-pins. The safeguarding of bureaucratic enclaves becomes the principal business of the day. There must be a dramatic explanation for all that malevolence. If the building were torn down, something unspeakable might be discovered in the foundations: a plague pit, or the bones of murdered children. In view of this, many sensible Tories have

Saturday

Tessa Keswick

Diary – 8 November 2003

This is the best time of the year to be in northern China. The monsoon is over and the summer temperatures are cooling down in Beijing and Shanghai. It’s the best time for food, too. ‘The peaches are in season in Beijing now,’ is the very first thing Fumei says as she greets us. ‘And in two weeks’ time we can eat fat hairy crabs in Shanghai.’ We find acres of grapes and melons being harvested in the Xinjiang oases, the raisin houses are bulging and baskets of juicy figs fill the markets. Trees lining the avenues are bowed down with pomegranates and persimmons. In Anhui province, the rice harvest

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 8 November 2003

‘This is a good one,’ said my husband, bubbling into his Famous Grouse. ‘Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome appointed to draw up the Pope’s briefs.’ ‘But that can’t possibly be a joke intended by James Murray or his collaborators working on the volume for “A” in the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century,’ I said. ‘Briefs isn’t recorded in that sense until the 1930s.’ ‘You can always spoil a joke,’ retorted my husband, returning to a less beetrooty hue. To be fair, Simon Winchester in his new book on Murray and the OED had explained the impossibility of an intended joke. In fact I don’t

Jeremy Clarke

Signing the Declaration

By day Clive drives a tractor. At night he tramps the fields with a pair of greyhound collie crosses called Knocker and Tip and a lamp. The lamp he is currently using is lighter in weight and much more powerful than his old one. To Clive, the almost incredible scientific and technical advances of the last 20 years have manifested themselves chiefly in the invention of the ferret locator and improvements in the hunting lamp. His new one is so powerful, he claims, that he can see into the next county. For someone like Clive, who hardly goes out of the parish, and has never been out of Devon in

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 8 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I have a pressing question. Although I am as addicted to my mobile as anyone else, I do try to keep conversations in public to a minimum. But I have noticed that on London buses there is a very plague of incessant chatterers. These people always seem to shriek as long and loudly as possible, and invariably in a tongue which sounds, to my terribly untutored ears, like duelling magpies. What can one do? The only thing I have been able to think of is to go up and say, ‘I am a doctor and can tell from the sound of your voice that you may have

The Spectator

Portrait of the week

Mr Michael Howard remained the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative party after a vote the week before of 90 to 75 against a motion of confidence in Mr Iain Duncan Smith, who later likened the event to a ‘near-death experience’. Talks between the Communication Workers Union and the Post Office ended unofficial strikes by postmen that had brought mail in London and elsewhere to a standstill. Firemen went on unofficial strike over pay rises. Mr James Murdoch was appointed chief executive of BSkyB; he is the 30-year-old son of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the company. The House of Bishops of the Church of England Synod

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 8 November 2003

What should men pray for? The Roman satirist Juvenal (writing c. ad 120) famously answered mens sana in corpore sano, ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. One wonders what he would have made of today’s men and women in search of the corpus sanum, lurching along the fume-filled roadsides in their huge fluorescent trainers, chatting earnestly into the bottles of water clenched to their ears. Good health, largely a matter of pot luck in the ancient world, was very highly valued. If you survived birth, childhood and disease and could enjoy a respectable diet, you could count yourself pretty fortunate. In such a world anything that could do you