Society

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Scapegoating Hoon was a bit like solving a crime by arresting the village idiot

For a long period in the late 1990s I worked for the Daily Express, a paper which vigorously supported the New Labour government. Once every six months or so Alastair Campbell, sometimes accompanied by Tony Blair, would turn up to give us our marching orders. At the end of one of these meetings I asked Campbell whether the rumours that he kept a diary were true. He moved his head away, did not look me in the eye. ‘No,’ he said. This is the trouble with Campbell. Though not without charm, or animal cunning or plausibility, he is untrustworthy. The extracts from his journal suddenly produced for the inspection of

The Spectator

Happy birthday to us

Readers may feel they have had almost enough of The Spectator’s 175th anniversary. Enormous and flattering articles have appeared in newspapers, including the Guardian. Spectator staff have been deployed on the airwaves, plugging merrily away. If the thought were not so appalling, one might even wonder whether there were some public-relations campaign, to ‘plant’ favourable items at strategic points in the media landscape. As the festivities come to their peak, routs and revels have been organised, sponsored by diamond companies and attended by Spectator-related celebrities such as Charles Moore and Nigella Lawson. Now, however, by way of a climax, a beautifully produced one-off anniversary edition is on the stands, an

Petroc Trelawny

An English composer in Ireland

In the basement of the Boole Library at University College Cork, I find myself face-to-face with a death mask. Slightly collapsed cheeks give it a look of the elderly Churchill. It is actually Sir Arnold Bax, the Romantic composer from Streatham, in south London, who briefly became one of the more unusual advocates for the end of British rule in Ireland. Alongside the mask, dust lies thick on the autograph scores of tone poems and chamber works, and personal effects including a pair of glasses and a cigar case from the Savoy Hotel. Across town at the university’s music department, his grand piano is propped sideways against a wall. Few

Mark Steyn

If Clark wins – I’ll quit!

New Hampshire It’s the poll that’s got ’em all hot: Wesley K. Clark: 49 per cent; George W. Bush: 46 per cent. CNN and USA Today conducted it, and on air this week, listening to her ‘senior political analyst’ declare that ‘President Bush is sinking’, Judy Woodruff looked as if she wanted to do her Meg Ryan When Harry Met Sally impression: ‘Yes, yes! Oh, God!! Yes!!! Aaaooooowwwwaaaooah!!!!’ I’d say it’s the poll that’s faking it. It’s comprised of 1,003 ‘national adults’, of whom 877 are registered voters. Whether the others have ever voted at all is unknown. But, as a general rule, polls of registered voters are less accurate

Paul Robinson

Code comfort

The influential American journalist Robert Kaplan recently commented that the real shapers of his country’s foreign policy are junior and middle-ranking military officers. When an engineer captain in Afghanistan mobilises his men to de-mine a road, or a major in Baghdad oversees the training of competent new policemen, the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) moves one step further towards a successful conclusion. But when their colleagues violently raid houses and carry off the wrong Afghans to detention, or gun down innocent civilians in Iraq, Osama bin Laden and his kind garner another handful of followers. Much depends on what individual American officers in the field consider to be acceptable behaviour.

Damien Mccrystal

First, weigh your nanny

This being the time of year when people are hiring new nannies and au pairs, I would like to offer some words of caution: do not hire a fatty. Although it is no doubt offensive and quite possibly illegal to say so, my considerable experience of the fat ones is that they are not very good. When my daughter was about a year old, we hired a great fat girl from Northumberland. I was sceptical about having something so space-consuming and undecorative in our moderately sized house, but held my tongue. I shouldn’t have, for within days of her starting work she revealed that she was a Jehovah’s Witness. Quite

Martin Walker

Never glad confident morning again

Washington The process is drearily familiar from the plots of countless tawdry novels. Opposites attract: two unlikely people begin a passionate affair. Friends all warn them that it cannot last. The friends are ignored as the lovers stand magnificently alone against an uncomprehending world. Then the first trace of an unfamiliar lipstick is found on a collar, and breezily explained away. Someone else’s earring is found in a suitcase after a business trip and laughed off as a colleague’s practical joke. But suspicions have been roused. Doubts creep in. Headaches are pleaded. What was once charming starts to irritate. Never glad confident morning again. The improbable partnership of George Bush

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 26 September 2003

So Gordon Brown’s Treasury has overspent its budget by 40 per cent – all on itself! No wonder the officials didn’t know where the money had gone. What fun if they had had to account for it in classical Athens …. One of the most extraordinary innovations of Athenian democracy was the appointment of executive officials. To simplify and omit some of the steps in the process, most of them were picked out of a hat from those who put themselves forward. Here was true ‘power to the people’ (the original meaning of d

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 20 September 2003

My husband, when asked to buy some French beans once, came home with a tin of broad beans produced in France. So I was delighted when he got me a reprint from the Ohio State Law Journal 1964, vol. 25 no. 1, as requested, from the medical school library. The question was the spelling of Daniel M’Naghten’s name. M’Naghten killed Edward Drummond in 1843 in mistake for Sir Robert Peel. He pleaded insanity and was acquitted, and the unsatisfactory rules on madness and responsibility drawn up after inquiries by the Lord Chancellor now bear his name. But what was his name? The OED lists McNaghten, MacNaughton, Macnaughton before adding an

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 20 September 2003

Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, gave evidence by a voice-link to the second round of hearings of the Hutton inquiry into the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi weapons. He said that the intelligence that weapons of mass destruction might be used within 45 minutes ‘came from an established and reliable source, quoting a senior Iraqi military officer who was certainly in a position to know’. On being asked if it had been given undue emphasis in the government’s dossier, he said: ‘Given the misinterpretation that was placed on the 45-minute intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight you can say that is

Rupert Hambro

Diary – 20 September 2003

I recently passed into a new decade. With this passing has come some rather surprising advantages, most of which are of a financial nature. My Senior Railcard, which costs £18 a year and gives me a discount on all trains, has already paid for itself handsomely. I would not have done anything about getting one had I not received a letter from the government telling me that I was entitled to it and also to a cash sum to help me with my heating bills during the winter. All this was very nice, but a message from a friend telling me that it is now more difficult to lose weight,

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 20 September 2003

Dear Mary… Q. While staying in Provence recently, as the guest of some friends from Suffolk, my host, albeit an Englishman to his core, appeared every evening in a different pair of monogrammed velvet slippers (stags rampant on coronets, HS entwined with stags rampant, etc., etc.). Knowing that his wife (who, incidentally, is a very close friend of mine and was away in New York at the time) does not allow him to wear his monogrammed velvet slipper collection outside Suffolk environs, and certainly not out of the shooting season, I found myself somewhat forced to comment on this fact. I subsequently told his wife, who was quite apoplectic with

The Spectator

Feedback | 20 September 2003

Comment on Diary by Nicholas Farrell (13/09/2003) Last week many people in Italy were both shocked and disgusted by Berlusconi’s statement about the fascist regime, according to which “That was a much more benign dictatorship – Mussolini did not murder anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them”. Giovanni Amendola (liberal deputy and former minister, d.1926); Pietro Gobetti (intellectual and founder of a liberal review, d.1926); Antonio Gramsci (founder of the Italian Communist Party, d.1937); Giacomo Matteotti (socialist deputy, d.1924); Carlo and Nello Rosselli (intellectuals and founders of an anti-fascist review, d.1937); Father Giovanni Minzoni (active supporter of the peasant’s rights, against the landowners backed by the fascists, d.1923).

Taki

In times of conflict

An email from Sir Roger Moore concerning two prominent Hollywood Hungarians whom I failed to mention last week. Did you know that Bernie Schwartz, aka Tony Curtis, was Hungarian? As was the wonderful director Michael Curtiz. The latter pronounced the words ‘Bring on the empty horses’ during the shooting of The Charge of the Light Brigade, or some cavalry epic like it. He meant the props, but David Niven used the Hungarianism as the title of the second volume of his memoirs. Roger also pointed out that Taki means waterfall in Japanese, something I knew but had kept awfully quiet about until now. And, speaking of the Land of the

Jeremy Clarke

Welsh hospitality

I spent last week in south Wales, staying in a cottage near the coast. On the second evening we walked to the local pub to see what it was like. We went across the fields to get there. Nailed to one of the stiles was a notice. ‘The bull in this field is a Semmantal bull. He is tame with people he knows, but visitors are advised to give him a wide berth. At the far end of the field you may also come across a donkey. Gunter is unpredictable and has been known to bite people. Visitors are advised to talk loudly as they approach so as to avoid

Petronella Wyatt

Shopaholic desert

At dinner the other night in Washington I was sitting next to Robert Redford. Actually, this is a slight fib. I was in a restaurant called Nora’s – which, incidentally, was the first organic restaurant in the capital – and he was at the next table. He is a man of stature; that is, he has heights attached to his shoes. He was also the polar opposite of butch, rather stringy with bad skin. My friend and I wondered what he was doing in Washington. Obviously not dining at the White House as Mr Redford’s political proclivities tend to the left-side. We guessed he might be lending support to Hillary

Bill Alexander

When revenge is sweet

The Elizabethans must have had a completely different attitude to physical violence. For a start, it was an inherent part of their system of justice. Even when we had the death penalty, killing someone in the name of justice was expected to be as quick and painless as possible. The hangman’s craft was to assess his subject’s body in a way that would ensure a clean quick twist of the neck, not slow and painful strangulation; that would be a bad hanging. But the Elizabethan hangman’s art was different. In the case of traitors, for instance, prolonging the pain, extending the humiliation, was a part of the punishment, part of

The Spectator

Unfair to the Third World

To appreciate the unique affection enjoyed by the British farmer, it is necessary to look no further than the bumf put out for British Food Fortnight, a series of harvest festivals, farmers’ markets and barbecues to be held across the country from 20 September to 4 October. ‘Farmers would gain if we could all eat more locally, regionally and UK-produced food,’ it reads, before suggesting some prayers for the brave men who plough the furrow in their Massey Fergussons. Let us hope there is room in those prayers for the soul of Lee Kyung-hae, a Korean cattle farmer who last week stabbed himself through the heart outside the World Trade

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The Iraq blunder will make Americans say, ‘Never again!’ And that’s a pity

A charge should be laid at the door of those who urged America onward into Iraq this year, and it should come not from pacifists, United Nations groupies or Uncle Sam-baiters, but from those on the Right who think that a great power does have special responsibilities, including – sometimes – a responsibility to intervene. We should charge the neoconservatives with fouling it up. We should charge them with spoiling the case. We should charge hotheads in the media with egging an administration into making a fool of itself when wiser friends urged restraint. The yee-hah tendency in the Pentagon and in the press has besmirched, by misapplication, a decent

Stephen Glover

Why all the hatred for Andrew Gilligan? His story was essentially correct

It strikes me, as I follow the Hutton inquiry, that almost any human activity can be made to appear questionable, even dodgy. I think of my – not untypical – hurried departure for London yesterday morning. Already late, I filled the dog’s water bowl directly from a jug, though I knew it needed washing out; threw a bank statement into the bin unopened; ate half a chocolate bar left by one of my sons on the kitchen table; and induced the taxi driver to break the speed limit as we raced to the railway station, where I just caught my train, and thereby accomplished my mission. If, though, something had