Society

Saturday

Jeff Randall

Diary – 18 August 2007

It was the call that never came. For three hours last week, I sat with my hand hovering over the phone. I had been told that Bill Kenwright would be getting in touch between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Yes, the Bill Kenwright, theatreland big shot and chairman of Everton FC. This was exciting. Was I about to be hired for a cameo role in his West End production of Cabaret? Better still, perhaps, he fancied my prospects as a burly striker, playing at Goodison alongside Andy Johnson? Sadly not. The reason I had been put on red alert was that Kenwright and his inamorata, Jenny Seagrove, were panellists on

Taki

Plans for peace

Here, at last, is the Taki plan to save George W. Bush’s presidency from the disaster it has been turned into by his neocon advisers. Yes, the Iraq war is a failure, but pulling out now will turn it into a geopolitical catastrophe of incalculable consequences. What Dubya needs is a great big fat win which will overshadow Iraq, hog the headlines and catapult him in the polls. The operative word is Palestine. Let’s take it from the top: His latest call for an international conference, one that is supposed to give birth to a contiguous Palestinian state, is a good start. The trouble is that throughout the past 40

Jeremy Clarke

Great expectations | 18 August 2007

Three hours to go before the new season kicks off and I’m sitting in the beer garden in my new claret-and-blue Fred Perry polo shirt. Three hours to go before the new season kicks off and I’m sitting in the beer garden in my new claret-and-blue Fred Perry polo shirt. I’ve got a credit-card-style match ticket for the East Stand Lower in one pocket, 50 quid in the other, and I’m easing my way into my first ice-cold Fosters for exactly a month. About half a dozen lifelong friends will be along at any moment. Bliss. There’s a couple of hundred people in the beer garden already, the vast majority

Roy Hattersley

Explosive discussions

Remember, remember the 24th of August. According to the announcement on the noticeboard next to the bus stop, that is the date on which the next firework display will be held at the almost stately home just outside the southern boundary of the village. We shall call the gigantic Victorian pile Speculative Towers, for its original owner made his fortune from that sort of building. Since its glory days — Lady Elizabeth Cavendish can remember being taken there for tea — it has experienced several metamorphoses. At one time it was a teachers’ training college. Then, when all such institutions were absorbed into polytechnics, it became private property again. But

The Spectator

W. F. Deedes, 1 June 1913 – 17 August 2007. RIP.

Dear Bill. It is impossible to think of any other journalist — let alone a former editor of the Daily Telegraph — whose death would have made the lead on BBC news bulletins. Most journalists are not much liked. Bill — W. F. Deedes, Lord Deedes — was loved. The public trusted him. He wrote with compassion, common sense and a keen sense of the absurd, and was equipped with a vast knowledge of the world and its affairs. He knew or had met just about everyone who mattered in the 20th century. He drew on his own experiences but he did not bang on about himself. Here, from The Spectator of

Aidan Hartley

Home truths

Laikipia I ask my neighbours how one fixes a chimney. Laikipia I ask my neighbours how one fixes a chimney. ‘Throw a live, flapping turkey down it,’ says one. It appears chimney-sweeps are unknown in Kenya. ‘Or lower down a sack with two tomcats in it.’ Another suggests blasting a 12-bore up the flue. My problem, however, is not that we have a sooty chimney. It is that our fireplace smokes, gives no heat and threatens to ignite the thatched roof and burn down our brand-new African farmhouse. Apart from the chimney — and final coats of paint being slopped on — our home is finished. The farm is up

Joan Collins

Riviera notebook

The shiny new ‘Vodka Palaces’ lie scattered across the bay of St Tropez like the discarded toys of a spoiled child. The shiny new ‘Vodka Palaces’ lie scattered across the bay of St Tropez like the discarded toys of a spoiled child. Each year they seem to grow bigger, as do the gorgeous girls who cluster on deck and throng the boutiques and clubs — taller anyway. Many of the boats are owned by Russian billionaires — how did they become so rich so fast? — and it seems that three or four dazzlers hang on the arm of each stocky oligarch. What did the Russian government feed their pregnant

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Don’t knock paranoia. It may be terrifying — but it could save your life

This did not come entirely as a surprise. As a graduate student at Yale I experimented with LSD. Why anyone ever thought this drug would sweep the world and reduce the youth of the West to a state of gibbering addiction I cannot imagine because it was no fun at all, just weird. Among a number of temporary alterations to my perception there were two of a paranoid nature: walking the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, I kept hearing, in the indistinct conversations of strangers, my own name. Realising this was probably the result of eating two little pieces of blotting paper, I kept my nerve, told myself the perception

Frank Keating

Field marshals

Spend half an hour or so in front of a television on Saturday when Hampshire are in the field at Lord’s in the one-day county cup final. I guarantee some vivid and telling olde-tyme captaincy from the Australian Shane Warne. Spend half an hour or so in front of a television on Saturday when Hampshire are in the field at Lord’s in the one-day county cup final. I guarantee some vivid and telling olde-tyme captaincy from the Australian Shane Warne. No matter the tubby blond chevalier is probably the finest spin bowler the game has ever seen — now out to grass in England, it is his combative, cajoling and

Lucy Vickery

Seven seas

My selection of words was harsh in that there wasn’t much in the way of alternative meanings to play with. You rose to the challenge admirably, though, and submissions were impressively varied and convincing. As Jaspistos has observed before, this type of comp tends to produce a bumper crop of entries, and this week was no exception. It was tough, once again, to whittle it down to six. An ingenious few managed to coax a non-plant sense out of celery. Here’s Nicholas Poole-Wilson: ‘He was from Sydney, and I didn’t immediately recognise what he meant when he said he was on a six-figure celery.’ John Plowman strayed from the brief,

Allister Heath

Unintended market consequences

If only Alan Greenspan had read John Locke more attentively. The 17th-century philosopher, who doubled as a brilliant economist, was among the earliest exponents of the law of unintended consequences. It is one of the most powerful lessons economics has to teach, yet one the former US Federal Reserve chairman conspicuously failed to heed. To understand why hedge-fund whizz-kids have spent the past few weeks tearing their hair out, and why Greenspan is largely to blame, let us take a trip back to 1692. That year, Locke wrote with passion against a parliamentary bill that proposed to cut interest rates. Its supporters wanted to help the poor; but Locke realised

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 18 August 2007

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid? Today, for example, I read what a police spokeswoman said after a man on a motorbike had been shot dead on the M40 motorway. The police, she said, were not treating it as a case of road rage; they were treating it as a case of murder. So from now on killing someone who annoys you while you are driving — a pedestrian, shall we say, or an old lady puttering along who holds you up on your way to a supremely important meeting — is not really murder, but an understandable and therefore excusable response to

Patrick Jephson

The real Diana was our future Queen

‘Oh God, not more Diana.’ We’ve all heard it this summer and Di-fatigue is unlikely to be reversed by the official programme of remembrance. The Wembley concert was truly moving in parts, especially the video inserts which recalled Diana at her spontaneous, compassionate best. I’ll admit they reduced me to tears, and not just because here and there I caught glimpses in the background of a younger, slimmer, more idealistic me. Tears may also be shed in the relatively modest surroundings of the Guards Chapel when on Friday 31 August the Princess is remembered by a carefully vetted congregation. Another cocktail of sentiment, though probably of a brand more acceptable

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The curious case of the spy who fell to his death

When a man falls to his death from a balcony, some cynics wonder: was he pushed? When that man happens to be the most infamous spy in the history of the modern Middle East, it’s the first question on everyone’s lips. On 27 June the body of Ashraf Marwan was found on the pavement below his flat in Carlton House Terrace, one of London’s most expensive streets, which overlooks the Mall and St James’s Park. Marwan was an astonishingly well-connected Egyptian, the son-in-law of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president and hero of pan-Arabism, and the consigliere of Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. After Sadat’s assassination in 1981 he

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The last Tommy says: ‘It was a waste of time’

Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army Two years ago, when he was a mere spring chicken of 106, the last surviving Tommy, Harry Patch, was invited to inspect the Lewis guns at the museum of his old regiment, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, in Bodmin, Cornwall. To help jog his memory, a young major in his party fumblingly demonstrated how to change the magazine. ‘I said: “Major, you’d have to be quicker than that in action,”’ recalls Harry in his soft Somerset burr. ‘I said: “Here. Give me the Lewis gun and set your watch.” So I took the magazine off and put a new one

Raymond Carr

Warding off the barbarians

Counterpoints: 25 Years of ‘The New Criterion’ on Culture and the Arts edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer The 40 or so reviews and essays in this book celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the New Criterion. It saw itself as the heir of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. In 1922 Eliot wrote that his contributors sought to foster ‘a common concern for the highest standards of both thought and expression’. This was to echo Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and to protect it from the onslaught of philistine barbarians.

Douglas Davis

Bush’s exit strategy: cut and run – but not too far

More than four years after the American-led invasion of Iraq, there are signs that George W. Bush is preparing to call it quits. When the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003 and left the borders wide open they sowed the seeds of disaster. Neither the ‘coalition of the willing’ nor even the recent ‘surge’ could put Humpty together again. That, at least, is the conclusion I have reached after intensive interviews with senior Iraqi politicians and Western experts for a book that I am writing on the imbroglio. Whatever gloss General Petraeus applies to his report to Washington next month, he is unlikely to be the bearer of good news. Nor, in the run-up to the

Paul Johnson

Not so much the Mad Hatter, more the Mad Scientist now

In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’. In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’. I rather think Winston Churchill used it in this sense in his book The Malakand Field Force, but then practically everything the old boy said or wrote in moments of excitement or

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Beckham begins earning his salary (on the pitch)

If you thought David Beckham would be a one day story and then quickly ignored in the US you might want to consider that notice of his first goal for the Los Angeles Galaxy was considered the most important “Breaking News” for a full hour on ESPN last night. Then again, it was a trademark piece of Beckhamite brilliance:

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rick Santorum’s Wilderness Years

Ever wondered what happened to Rick Santorum after he lost his Senate race in Pennsylvania last year? Fret not, Michael Brendan Dougherty has done the yeoman work of listening to the appalling codswallop Mr Man on Dog is peddling these days. The whole thing is worth reading, but really Mr Santorum’s loony-tunes sing for themselves: For years, James Dobson, the Christian psychologist and popular radio talk-show host has been following Santorum’s efforts on behalf of socially conservative values. They both recently made Time’s list of the 25 most influential evangelicals, a true feat for a Catholic like Santorum. Like many evangelicals, Dobson’s interests now include foreign policy. In May, he