Society

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Nasty, brutish and on credit

Who says the leisure class is no more? On the contrary, as a recent weekday visit to the new spiritual heart of Britain revealed to me, it is very large indeed. Of course, the modern leisure class is not necessarily very high on the registrar-general’s scale of social classes from I to V, but that is another matter altogether. But where, you ask, is Britain’s new spiritual centre? The very idea of such a centre seems a bit odd – absurd even. It is certainly not Rome or Jerusalem, much less Canterbury. In good pagan fashion, Britain’s spiritual centre is close to its geographical centre. The answer is the Bull

Peter Hitchens

Reform the BBC, don’t kill it

Why do I now find that I, one of the BBC’s most persistent critics, feel the need to defend the organisation that I have attacked so many times in the past? Because for all its faults I would rather that Britain had a public-service broadcaster than that the airwaves were sold to the fattest cheque book. The time has come for sensible reactionaries to rally round their old enemies at the BBC, and for the BBC to seek support among those moral and cultural conservatives it has spent too long despising. Those who think that such an alliance would be as unprincipled and doomed as the Nazi

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 19 September 2003

Commentators are expressing shock at the Hutton inquiry’s ‘revelation’ that Tony Blair consults a private cabal of chums about policy. Excuse the Roman historian while he stifles a yawn. The Greeks had a word for ‘a monarch’s court’, and Roman writers adopted it (aula) to describe the imperial ‘court’ that emerged with the advent of emperors: politics having been a relatively open affair under the republican system (rule by Senate and elected executives), power was now in the hands of the emperor and his chosen associates, a closed circle with personal access to the emperor and the power to control access for others. Immediate family, including wives, bulked large in

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 13 September 2003

Many people think a runcible spoon is a sort of pickle-fork with a serrated edge. If that is what they call it, then that is the word for it, but it is not the same word that Edward Lear used when he wrote of a runcible spoon in 1871. He also wrote of a runcible hat and a runcible cat, neither much use for eating pickles. The new meaning of runcible can be traced no further back than 1926, when someone wrote to Notes and Queries with the suggestion. The correspondent gave its origin as a ‘jocose allusion to the battle of Roncevaux because it has a cutting edge.’ A

Taki

Vienna lost in time

Gstaad There seems to be a touch of autumn in the air, a damp, still greyness. How quickly summers drift away nowadays. Typically, my boat is just about ready to be launched, now that my thoughts are turning inward, towards Mittel Europa, Vienna and the Danube to be exact. Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, described Vienna as a city of spectacular opulence ‘mixed with a sense of something missing, even at its core’. It’s a good one, but I prefer a different one, the one about ‘a city that’s like a grand opera sung by the understudies’. One drives from Passau into the metropolis through thickly forested

Jeremy Clarke

Safety first

Sophia was such a very large lady, the seatbelt of my car, even when fully extended, wasn’t quite long enough to go round her. She insisted on wearing it though, so her lover Ulrika and I redoubled our efforts. After a titanic struggle we found that we could force it around her if we pulled on the strap with our combined might and clicked it into the catch on the driver’s side. The belt cut so deeply into Sophia’s stomach it was lost from view, but she insisted she was happy. She would rather be uncomfortable and safe, she said, rather than the other way round. I’d met Sophia and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 13 September 2003

Britain sent about 1,400 more troops to Iraq, the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry and the 1st Battalion Royal Green Jackets, to supplement its force of 10,000. Another 1,200 may be sent too. A man died during a clash between two factions of Iraqi asylum-seekers and two dozen men using baseball bats, sticks, bricks and knives in the St Ann’s district of Nottingham. Mr Paul Evans, the commissioner of Boston city police department, was appointed by Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, as head of the Police Standards Unit, which monitors local forces. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told the press he was going to say, at a TUC dinner,

Nicholas Farrell

Diary – 13 September 2003

Last week The Spectator interviewed Silvio Berlusconi, and there followed a political furore that dominated the Italian news for – well, at least a couple of days. The cause of the crisis was the opinion of Italy’s 57th Italian post-war prime minister on the subject of judges. This is a field in which he is expert, as a result of 500 raids in the past decade by the Guardie di Finanza on the various tendrils of his media empire. Il Cavaliere – as he is nicknamed – told us that Italian judges are ‘antropologicamente diversi’ from the rest of us for two reasons: (1) they are left-wing; and (2) they

The Spectator

Feedback | 13 September 2003

Comment on Forza Berlusconi! by Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell (06/09/2003) As a Swiss citizen interested in political history, and as an observer of recent political developments in Europe, I must question the approach of the media to the phenomenon Berlusconi and the effects it may produce in the long term. After 1989, a new class of politicians has appeared the members of which are not in the least interested in maintaining the conventional texture of the nation-state and it’s traditional principles, e.g. separation of powers, constitutional law, independence of the judiciary, but mainly in the pursuit of personal power play. If these politicians have started their career on the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 13 September 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Like an earlier correspondent this summer, my wife and I find ourselves in the invidious position of being asked, very much as an afterthought, to the wedding of friends to whom we considered ourselves close. Worse, on the grounds that they had ‘run out of’ the real thing, we have not even been sent a proper invitation, but a photocopy. How can we best express our dismay at having this B-list status so blatantly thrust upon us? H.R.-T., East Lothian A. Punish the couple by the following means. Arrange for a third party, posing as a Sloaney factotum service, to ring them to arrange a time for

Interconnect

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMini-breaks

Mmmm. Got lovely new mini-break brochure: Pride of Britain: Leading Country House Hotels of the British Isles. Marvellous. Going through all the pages one by one imagining Daniel and me being alternately sexual and romantic in all the bedrooms and dining-rooms.Bridget Jones’s Diary Last weekend my husband and I went on a mini-break to Majorca. Two weeks before this we spent a long weekend in Whitby, with friends. Earlier this summer I attended a two-day hen weekend in Manchester, and next week my husband is off on a three-day mid-week break to Valencia for the famous annual tomato-throwing (sounds like most dinner times with my two-year-old, but apparently this is

Justin Kerrsmiley

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMalta

To the romantic, Malta smells of thyme and fig; to the cynic, tar and goat – but, whatever a traveller’s disposition, he can’t deny that the country’s place in Mediterranean history is unique. Malta’s past is bold and bloody. In 1530 the emperor Charles V gave the Knights of St John their home after they had been forced out of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent. The knights used Malta to raid the Ottoman fleets, sending gold and silver back to their protector, and in 1565 Suleiman finally tired of this and set out to destroy the ‘Monks of War’; and so began the Great Siege. For months the attackers pitted

Michael Hanlon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALBest avoided

Another summer over and, once again, the question forms in my mind: where not to go on holiday next year? It seems a silly question – for the list, surely, is endless. There are all those places which have simply nothing worth seeing. The homes of light industry and flyovers, with no distinguishing architecture, scenery or climate. The Midwest, and its English equivalent, the East Midlands. The industrial towns of the German plains, the grim squalor that is the urban Third World. However, there is another – rather smaller – list of places that, although they are very much on the tourist circuit, have absolutely no appeal. This is not

Lucy Vickery

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALNew Zealand

If Australia, as a nation, is negotiating late adolescence, cocksure but fragile, striving to establish its identity, then New Zealand is a child: clear-eyed, blemish-free, with a steady, candid gaze. My introduction to this gigantic adult playground came by way of a promotional video, shown by Air New Zealand on the flight from London to Auckland and starring the country’s Prime Minister, gutsy, trouser-clad Helen Clark. The no-nonsense name suits Ms Clark, who has the aura of a strict but fair headmistress. In an impressively gung-ho fashion, she tackles a series of stomach-churning activities available to visitors – a 100-metre abseil into the Lost World caves at Waitomo on the

Michael Mcmahon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALThe great escape from other people

There is rust on the griddle of the barbecue, dust on the shoulder of the Pimm’s bottle and must in the air in the summerhouse, where the cushions and the picnic rugs are damp. Each day, dusk limps in earlier and earlier, and it can’t be long before the spirits start to go as flat as the paddling pool that has long been packed away. And yet now that the holiday season is over, the best time for a holiday has arrived – particularly if you have already had one, for stolen holidays, like stolen kisses, are sweet. Award yourself a bonus week or weekend away upon an impulse, and

Charles Moore Charles Moore

We might as well admit it: there are times when we are frightened of Islam

Since the editor is filling this page with its former occupants, I naturally responded to his invitation by looking back to the days 20 years ago when I filled this hole. In most respects, the subject matter was the same – why doesn’t the health service work, how to make peace in Northern Ireland, how the government is ignoring Parliament, why can’t children read and write, the problems of tax, crime, roads, housing, defence and, of course, Europe. In the last column that I wrote for this paper before becoming its editor (24 March 1984) I was in Brussels for a summit in which Mrs Thatcher was fighting for ‘our

The Spectator

Rape and justice

Justice should not only be done, but be seen to be done, and therefore secrecy in trial proceedings is to be countenanced only when circumstances genuinely demand it. However, justice also requires that people should not be punished for what they have not done, or for what it cannot be proved that they have done. Innocent people, or people not proved guilty, should be able to live their lives after their trial as if they had never been accused. The amendment to the Sexual Offences Bill passed by the House of Lords, granting anonymity to men accused of rape until they are found guilty, is therefore just and proper. This

Stephen Glover

The price war is over, and it is time to ask who won

Last Saturday the Times raised its cover price to 90 pence, which is what the Daily Telegraph sells for on that day. On Monday it went up to 50 pence, pricing the paper at only 5 pence less than the Guardian and Telegraph. Thus ends the price war between quality newspapers which began ten years ago almost to the day, on 6 September 1993. At that time Rupert Murdoch did something that most people thought was mad. He reduced the price of the Times from 45 pence to 30 pence. The general view was that buyers of quality papers did not care overmuch about the price they paid. Writing in

Harry Mount

The Young Fogey: an elegy

They’re playing rap music in the jewellery department at Christie’s South Kensington. In T.M. Lewin, the Jermyn Street shirtmakers, you can dip into a fridge by the cufflinks counter and have a frozen mini-Mars while you are leafing through the chocolate corduroy jackets. But who is left to mourn these things? In the old days, the Young Fogey, the character invented by Alan Watkins on these pages in 1984, would have been in the vanguard of the protesters, shrieking and whinnying away about the desecration of his haunts. He is silent …because he is no more. Twenty years after his creation, the Young Fogey has pedalled off into the sunset