Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like
Peter Oborne reveals that an operation has been launched within the White House to protect the President’s most important ally, and that the Tories are under pressure to give the Prime Minister an easy ride F or months Westminster has been alive with talk about the potential damage that defeat for George Bush in this
We didn’t have ‘pets’ when I was little. We had dogs — gundogs. Working dogs that lived in outdoor kennels and ate great slabs of rotting meat straight from the butcher. Occasionally we dunked them in a tub full of eye-watering flea-killer. I do remember them being brushed, but roughly and only to dislodge stubborn
The intended heading for this piece was to have been ‘Spa Wars’, since the demand for luxury pampering in country-house-hotel surroundings seems insatiable. Three country-house-hotel spas have opened within half an hour’s drive of here (on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire borders) in the last 18 months, and no expense spared. Even if you knew what thalassotherapy was,
A couple of weeks ago I attended a reception in the Banqueting House on Whitehall to mark the opening of an exhibition by the American painter Cy Twombly at the Serpentine Gallery. A vast and lavish buffet was laid on tables down the length of Inigo Jones’s grandest room. Wealthy collectors drank champagne with Turner
It’s time to lighten up about falling birthrates, says George Monbiot. The world will be a happier and better place with fewer people There is a group in North America — I am not joking — whose motto is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. Its followers would like human society to revert not just to a
For the 500 or so at the Thatcher jubilee dinner it was, if not the high point, certainly one of the more important. Having cheered themselves hoarse at the entry of the lady herself, and roared their joy at a gem of a speech by Norman Tebbit, the diners applauded Michael Howard. He said he
As the slaughter in the Holy Land continues, Emma Williams reports on the miseries caused by Israel’s security barrier, and wonders whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence Last week yet more children were slaughtered in the Holy Land. Four little Israeli girls and their pregnant mother were gunned down by
John Craxton (born 1922) is a painter who has spent much of his life in Greece. Growing up in an intensely musical family in Hampstead (his father was the first pianist to play Debussy in England, his sister was a celebrated oboist), he was aware from a very early age of the infinite and magical
Poetry and conflict are as old as each other. From war springs suffering and from suffering song. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the ancient association is as vibrant as ever. According to the Guardian, an anthology entitled 100 Poets Against the War has outstripped the opposition and become the nation’s most frequently borrowed
Baghdad As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as
Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women Anyone who wants to understand the peoples of Arabia and the surrounding regions ought to start with Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. He was writing about the late 1940s and, as he
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election triumph, Simon Heffer says the Iron Lady has a new spring in her step In her 79th year, widowed after a long and happy marriage, and having endured indifferent health, Lady Thatcher might seem to some to have become vulnerable, damaged and
Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand,
Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption Dame Shirley Porter is the unacceptable face of corruption, a rich woman taken in gerrymandering (had she started off poor, no one would have minded). But though the sum of
Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one,
This is the time of year when we stop complaining for a moment about the dreadful spring weather and start complaining about the neglect of England’s patron saint, St George. Our grumbles go something like this: we don’t know what to do to mark his feast day (23 April), we have no traditions like the
Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel
… now that April’s there The annual miracle of spring is thrilling everywhere. It is especially beautiful in the Chilterns, where the Prime Minister has a country house courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers. Our leader, however, scorns the beechwoods, the bluebells, the song of the blackbird and the call of the cuckoo. The
Bruce Anderson says the Tories’ revolutionary new education policy will devolve power to schools and parents In 1874, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.’ Over the subsequent decades, few senior Tories would have disagreed — yet hardly any of