Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 30 August 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I regularly enjoy Sunday lunch at a premier hotel here in Bangkok. The food is exceptional and the Thai service staff friendly and professional. Staff recognise and greet me on arrival with a warm, formal ‘Good morning, Mr Smith’. A couple of Sundays ago, chatting with an attractive waitress by way of a little innocent flirtation, I suggested she call me ‘Michael’. Since then I am greeted with ‘Hello, Michael’ on arrival by all and sundry at the hotel. Clearly she thought this was my preferred form of address and advised her boss accordingly. Being Thai, they were not aware of the subtlety. Mary, how can I

Noel Malcolm

Some things never change: the Euro-enthusiasts are still avoiding serious debate

If a week is a long time in politics, how long is 12 years? The last time I wrote this column was in September 1991. Tony Blair was just a front-bench spokesman on employment; Gordon Brown ditto on trade and industry. These I had at least seen and heard. But if anyone had said to me, ‘Geoff Hoon’, I would have had to answer, ‘Geoff Hoo?’ He was not even an MP, just a Derbyshire MEP with an improbably large moustache. The biggest recent political excitement was the fall of Mrs Thatcher in 1990. (If people ask,

The Spectator

A true conservative

Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday, needs no memorial beyond his own books and photographs. These will live for as long as mankind is interested in the traditional societies of which he left such a brilliant record. Nobody can ever again write that kind of book or take in such abundance that kind of photograph, for those societies no longer exist in the form in which Thesiger knew them. But it is worth asking why it should have been Thesiger, rather than anyone else, who acquired the knowledge needed to write about the members of the Rashid tribe with whom he spent five years travelling on camels in the

Mark Steyn

Leave it to America

New Hampshire Usually in Iraq, the Westerners getting blown up are American and British soldiers. So the world’s press, lacking any local angle and not being terribly interested in the poor bloody infantry at the best of times, cuts to the chase: the death of Private Wossname is yet more evidence of what a disaster Bush has made of Iraq …bogged down …quagmire …lessons of Vietnam, etc., etc. But the fellow who blew up the Canal Hotel left aid workers from many lands among the dead and injured, and so for once the media took time to mourn the loss of the individuals involved. Among the victims was the dapper

Anthony Daniels

The perils of Pauline Hanson

Sydney In his heart of hearts, everyone believes in long prison sentences; it is just that no one agrees about who should receive them. The three-year sentence handed out last week to Pauline Hanson, the former fish-and-chip shop owner who for a time was Australia’s answer to Jean-Marie Le Pen, has excited a lively, if not always entirely lucid, debate in Australia. Political liberals who usually cannot wait to forgive criminals for the harm they do to others now crow in vindictive triumph, while the hanging-not-punishment-enough brigade, of whom Hanson herself was once a prominent member, are outraged by the severity of the sentence. Pauline Hanson irrupted on to the

Adrian Hilton

Render unto the Pope…

This realm of England is an Empire …governed by one Supreme Head and King.’ So proclaimed Thomas Cromwell in his most critical piece of legislation, the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533. By calling England an empire, he designated it a sovereign state, with a king who owed no submission to any other human ruler and who was invested with plenary power to give his people justice in all causes. Interestingly, the Act’s critics in Parliament were not so much concerned by its doctrinal corollaries, as by the fear that the Pope might retaliate by organising a European trade embargo against England. The Pope, of course, laid claim to

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The hand of history is pointing to the door

The government brought the Hutton inquiry into being by its own shoddy actions. The lying and dissembling of No. 10 has so eroded public trust that, says Rod Liddle, the man responsible – Tony Blair – must go It seems as if we have another thing for which to thank the beleaguered BBC journalist, Mr Andrew Gilligan. According to Britain in Europe, that tautologically entitled pro-euro pressure group, there is no longer even the slenderest chance that the Prime Minister will attempt to drag us all into the single European currency before the next election. Ian Taylor, a Conservative MP and a board member of BiE, told the Daily Telegraph,

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 29 August 2003

Year by year at exam results time, every Candice in the world points to her sheaves of A-grade A-levels and from the depths of her Pot Noodles ululates her indignation at the manifest injustice of her rejection by Oxbridge. Greeks would have thought such youths deranged: did they not know what it meant to compete? The ancient Greek for ‘contest, competition’ is ag

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 23 August 2003

Dear Mary… This week, Mary is dealing exclusively with problems relating to table manners. Q. When eating, my 15-year-old daughter knocks her teeth with her fork or spoon. She is very amenable to being corrected, but we are about to join a large house-party where we will all be eating en famille, and I can’t nag her in public. I can’t stand the noise, so I imagine that none of the other adults will be able to stand it either. What do you suggest, Mary? C.H., London SW18 A. Choose an anodyne expression such as ‘Have you got enough salt?’ and collude with your daughter that when she hears this

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 23 August 2003

Documents presented to Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi weapons, showed that Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, overruled a recommendation from Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent undersecretary at the ministry, that Dr Kelly should not be required to appear before the Commons foreign affairs committee as well as its security and intelligence committee; ‘Presentationally, it would be difficult,’ wrote Mr Hoon’s private secretary, ‘to defend a position in which the government had objected to Dr Kelly appearing before a committee of the House which takes evidence in public.’ A document by Mr Jonathan Powell, the

Rachel Billington

Diary – 23 August 2003

Naked ambition is harder to disguise in the country. Take the duck race at a neighbouring village f’te. A hundred yellow plastic ducks went whizzing along a turbulent stream. My grandson Phineas’s duck was number 94, a prankster who liked to swim bottom up, head under water. We supporters cheered from the bank, lamenting as our duck tangled with a willow branch, rejoicing as he sped on a discovered current. A surprisingly gentle country pursuit, you might think, until I spotted number 94 had joined the leaders. ‘Go for it, 94! Squeeze them out, 94! Bash them with your beak! Scuttle the wimps!’ Now he was up to third, then

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 23 August 2003

‘Phwuh, this is a bit scatological,’ said my husband, looking up from last week’s column, his brow glistening with recycled Black Bush. From a man who is seldom ten yards from a sigmoidoscope, that was pretty rich. But in an interesting development on the great lasagne chase, Dr Peter Emery writes from hot Oman to say his Arabic dictionary gives lawzinaj as a loan-word from the Persian lawzina, ‘sweetmeats resembling qatayif combined with oil of almond’. Qatayif, Dr Emery explains helpfully, are small triangular doughnuts fried in melted butter and served with honey accompanied by qamar ad-deen (an apricot-based drink) during the evenings of Ramadan in Cairo and other cities

Taki

Perils of love

Gstaad The bad news is I had yet another birthday – 67 – along with my friend Claus von Bulow, who hit a double seven. Claus, incidentally, has turned into a fine theatre critic in his mature years, reviewing with grace and insight and quoting from the numerous wits and wise men and women he has known. And speaking of old age, I wish there was a bit more respect for ladies who die in their nineties – i.e., Diana Mosley. Is there so little imagination left among the hacks that every printed cliché about her had to be repeated ad nauseam? So Hitler came to her wedding. So what?

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