Society

Saturday

The Spectator

WHO, WHOM?

Looking at the wan, pathetic face of Pete Townshend, the rock musician arrested for possessing child pornography from the Internet, it is hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. He has not yet been convicted of any offence, and it may turn out that he has not committed one – but his reputation has been destroyed for ever. Over the next few weeks, we are going to see pictures of many more men peering sadly out of car windows as they are driven off for questioning by the police. More than 7,000 British men are on the list of individuals who have accessed child pornography sites on

Aidan Hartley

An end to a way of life?

In our bad old days there used to be the joke of the Nigerian and Kenyan ministers. The Kenyan visits Abuja, is impressed by the wealth of his counterpart and so asks how he does it. ‘Look out that window,’ says the Nigerian. The Kenyan sees a skyscraper rising out of the jungle. ‘Ten per cent,’ says the Nigerian. ‘Aha,’ smiles the Kenyan. The next month the Nigerian visits Nairobi and asks how his Kenyan friend is doing. ‘Look out that window,’ answers the Kenyan. The Nigerian sees nothing but an empty space full of rubbish. He looks quizzically at his African brother. ‘A hundred per cent,’ grins the Kenyan.

James Tooley

A lesson from the Third World

Schoolboy Worlanyo leaves his crowded home in the townships of Accra, Ghana, early in the morning, smartly dressed in brown shorts and a bright but frayed yellow shirt. He makes his way down filthy streets, but walks past the run-down exterior of the government school, where a few children forlornly wait for the doors to be unlocked. The government school teachers won’t be there for a few hours, some not at all today, or any day. Worlanyo walks on past, turns off down the next alleyway and enters by the brightly hand-painted signboard the crowded playground of ‘De Youngster’s International School’. The elderly Mr A.K. De Youngster looks on with

Simon Heffer

The dustbin party

Her Majesty’s Government is in a right mid-term mess. The public services don’t work, despite all the extra cash being thrown at them. The public has, according to a poll last weekend, completely lost confidence in the forces of law and order. Illegal immigration continues unchecked. The gap between revenue and expenditure is expanding. Mr Blair is losing the support of his party, and Mrs Blair is the public’s choice to be deported. Another opinion poll shows the gap between Labour and the Tories to be a mere 5 per cent. However, while the government’s support is collapsing, the Tories’ is hardly shifting upwards. Disillusioned voters are either swelling the

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 11 January 2003

Q. Friends of mine have parents who moved to this neck of the woods three years ago. The parents bought a property with a tiny garden and consequently very much wanted to find an allotment. An elderly lady living in a stately home nearby was dividing up her walled kitchen garden and gave them a plot within this. The allotment has been a great success but my friends’ parents are now faced with a dilemma. The elderly lady is moving to a dower house and would like the couple to leave their existing allotment and start another one in her new garden. Meanwhile, the son and daughter-in-law who have moved

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 11 January 2003

The aircraft-carrier Ark Royal set sail for the Gulf and 1,500 reservists were called up. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in a speech to a conference of more than 100 British ambassadors that Britain should remain the closest ally of the United States. ‘The price of British influence is not, as some would have it, that we have, obediently, to do what the US asks,’ he said. ‘But the price of influence is that we do not leave the US to face the tricky issues alone.’ He thought that the United States should listen to opinions on the Middle East, global poverty, global warming and the United Nations.

Simon Heffer

Diary – 11 January 2003

Sydney When I first came to Australia in the 1980s the national sense of humour was less developed than now. Scarcely had I settled in my taxi at Perth airport than my driver offered, unsolicited, the following joke: ‘Mate, what’s the difference between a roo lying dead at the side of the road and an abo lying dead at the side of the road?’ ‘Er, I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘There are skid marks in front of the roo.’ Now, the Indigenous Peoples are revered, respected, f

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 11 January 2003

‘These yours?’ asked my husband with his back to me, his head ostrichised in a cardboard box and a sheaf of envelopes in his upraised hand. They were, indeed, a bundle of letters from 1999 caught up in his circulars from cricket clubs and rubbish from pharmaceutical companies. He was tidying up four years late. One of the letters came from Mr James Fairbairn who wondered what had happened to -ize as a suffix. He found it was authorized on his American spellcheck, but anathematised on his UK English spellcheck. Looking through the Guardian, Radio Times, Strathearn Herald and Perthshire Advertiser for 1971 (a touch of my husband there, to

Petronella Wyatt

Please don’t blame Roy

Roy Jenkins was my father’s oldest friend. They first met when they were both at Oxford. When, afterwards, they both decided to go into politics, my father pipped him to the post. Much later, when I was growing up in Wiltshire, where we had a house, two of our neighbours were Roy and his pearl-pretty wife Jennifer. I don’t remember much about Roy in those days except that he was a highly competitive tennis and croquet partner. My father played tennis rather as a drunkard attempts sex. There was not much bounce to the ounce. He raised his arm to serve, rotated it several times, all the while emitting loud

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 11 January 2003

Mrs Samira Ahmed, an ex-university professor in Sudan, has launched a sex-strike in an attempt to end the 19 years of (un)civil war that have torn the country apart. The newspapers went into their usual routines about Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bc) – and, as usual, got it wrong. In Lysistrata, we are regularly told, the women of Greece are persuaded to refuse to sleep with their husbands in an attempt to end the Athens-Sparta war that had begun in 431 bc; as a result, the sex-starved men, sporting huge erections all day, give in and the war ends. This is true as far as it goes, but in fact the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Just who are They, and what are They up to?

They asked me how I knew/My true love was true…. Or so the song goes. But who were they, and why did they ask anyway? They don’t appear very sympathetic – they with their sneering inquiries about how I knew my love was true. Are they the same They as the They who don’t know It’s the end of the world (It ended when you said goodbye)? They pop up not only in song but all over the place in English discourse. They sound like a bossy and snooty crowd of know-it-alls. They are well placed. They are in touch. They are in the loop. They can make waves. They

Peter Oborne

Living in a state of terror

THERE has been a row during the last fortnight about whether the government should ban the English cricket team from travelling to Zimbabwe for next month’s World Cup. But the cricket has obscured the real issue. And that is whether Britain and the world community will intervene to stop Robert Mugabe from torturing, terrorising and starving to death the people of Zimbabwe. I spent two weeks in this beautiful country shortly before Christmas, making a film for Channel 4. We travelled illegally. Dr Mugabe does not want the world to know what he is up to, so he has banned foreign journalists. We posed as golfers, using secret cameras. We

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 4 January 2003

I lapped up Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas. In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as dictionaries. The first is ‘hoping to cure himself with the hair of the dog that bit him’, said of a man with a hangover going to the bottle again. This was in Dr Willis’s Oxford Casebook, she says. Is that Dr Thomas Willis (1621-75)? No doubt it was in use in his time, for John

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 January 2003

A third of families entitled to working family tax credits are not claiming them; 604,000 low-income families are missing out on £1.4 billion, an average of £42 a week each. The Tories are looking for ways to cut taxes, according to Mr Howard Flight, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury; ‘It could be up to 20 per cent,’ he said. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and his family returned to Sharm el Sheikh, in Egypt, for an end-of-year holiday; they are paying for the holiday instead of letting the Egyptian government do so, as it did last year. There was an argument about who should decide if the

Boris Johnson

Diary – 4 January 2003

Delhi If you are invited to one of these grand Indian weddings, you should jolly well make an effort. I inquired about the dress code, and was told that it would be all right for me to wear something called Kurta Pyjama. So I got the full bollocks. No mucking around. I went to the Delhi equivalent of Harrods, where the Suits-you-Sahib boys kitted me out, at some cost, in a green silk smock, an off-white silk waistcoat, and those funny drainpiped white pyjamas called churidars, not to speak of the agonising Jesus sandals called chaptals. And then there was the turban. Until you have had a turban wrapped around

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 4 January 2003

Dear Mary… Q. A couple of years ago you advised readers to minimise present-buying stress at Christmas by finding something that would be acceptable to people of all age ranges and simply buying up said item in bulk. This year I took your advice and feel I must share with readers the great success that I enjoyed with my bulk purchase of butler’s trays from IKEA. These trays are deep and come in painted-white-wood effect with fold-up stand. They were received with delight by both adults – who saw them as ideal bedroom accessories – and children who used them to provide surfaces to play on and to contain little

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 4 January 2003

‘Prepare for war, Blair tells army,’ announces a newspaper headline, stirring the ghost of the Roman military historian Vegetius in its grave. The civil servant Vegetius composed his Epitome of Military Science – the sole surviving Latin treatise on war – in the late 4th century ad. His only memorable utterance is qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum, ‘let him who desires peace prepare for war’, better known in its slicker form si vis pacem, para bellum. He reinforces it later on by saying that the Romans always keep their fleet at the ready ‘since no one dares to challenge or harm a people they know are fully armed and ready

Alberto Manguel

Alpha minus query

VOLUME I: THE MODERN MOVEMENT VOLUME TWO: THE TWO NATURESwith a foreword by William Boyd As a formula for failure, the first line of Cyril Connolly’s once famous ‘word cycle’, The Unquiet Grave, is unsurpassable: The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Engrave that over the lintel of any writer’s study and you’ll have put an end to the whole business, since what else is this craft of words but a fool’s attempt to trap a flickering intuition of the world between a capital letter and a

The Spectator

Scientific Underworld

Those who mistrust the new biotechnology have always argued that if it is technologically possible to do something, sooner or later it will be done. As far as the fundamentals of human existence are concerned, the Promethean bargain is a bad one. It is not necessary to deny the potential benefits to humanity of the new biotechnology to be deeply disturbed by the claim of Brigitte Boisselier to have successfully cloned a human being for the first time. This is not because she is associated with a bizarre sect called the Raelians, which believes that humans were created by extraterrestrial aliens. Scientific genius of the highest order is perfectly compatible

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why not kill Saddam and spare Iraq?

There’s something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins). This is what we’re about to do to Iraq, if I’m not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with the weapons inspectors. We are angry with one evil man and further irritated by his devoted but minuscule coterie. And so we plan to send in the expensive bombers and those weapons of fairly widespread destruction, the missiles; and perhaps thousand upon thousand of ground troops, too, in order to be rid of him and