Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Foreign Gunners

Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page Any day now, soccer’s World Cup will obliteratingly dominate every back page (although this one, it goes without saying, shall be soberly discriminating). On Monday week (7 May) Sven, Sweden’s sexpot sphinx who coaches England, nominates his first batch of players, to be whittled down further before the tournament begins on 9 June. Might it be the last England side ever to consider it has a half decent chance of actually winning a World Cup? Foreign players totally dominate the Premiership, and the ongoing brouhaha generating most hot air is over Arsenal’s progress this season in the European

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Thatcherism saved Ryton but globalisation killed it — and striking won’t help

The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story in little more than 48 hours, mutating swiftly from ‘shock closure’ to more measured explanations of inevitability. Though Peugeot is accused of welshing on promises that the plant would keep working until 2010, its French bosses never suggested that it would make a new model after the Peugeot 206, and the fact that cars can now be built cheaper in Slovakia than in Coventry comes as no news at all. The logic of today’s globalised motor industry is that, in high-wage countries, only those

The Spectator

Joined-up misgovernment

The scandal of foreign national prisoners freed from jail without being considered for deportation might have been devised by some malign genius actively seeking to damage the social fabric of this country. So much has been undermined by this devastating disclosure: public confidence in the criminal justice system, the fight against racist bigots such as the BNP, and what little respect remains for politicians and their capacity to govern us competently. Charles Clarke has been right about one thing: there is much more at issue in this case than his own political fate. The fact that more than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals including killers, rapists and paedophiles have been let

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 28 April 2006

A Guardian journalist seems saddened that the departure of the previous editor could signal that ‘The Spectator’s similarities with the last days of the Roman empire are apparently over’. It is even more saddening to report that they never came close. Elagabalus, Roman emperor ad 218–222, showed what could be done if you put your mind to it. Of Syrian extraction, he became emperor at 15 and took the name Elagabalus (the ‘unconquered sun god’ of Syria), planning to make that deity supreme across the Roman world. That did not go down well with the authorities back in Rome, nor did his choice of officials: he put an actor in

Matthew Dancona

Diary – 28 April 2006

Beverly HillsThere is a global village, but the bad news for the environmentalists is that it is bound together by hatred of rising fuel prices. My cabby in London says exactly the same as the driver who takes me from LAX to my hotel: £1 a litre, or $3 a gallon, the outrage respects no borders. We are the world, as the song says — and we demand cheap gas. To the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Elton John and David Furnish are throwing a party for Dylan Jones, editor of GQ. It is a beautiful balmy night and the guests spill out into the hotel’s famous gardens, where the scent

Simon Hoggart

MARCH WINE CLUB

This month’s offer includes great classics, together with wines that may be unfamiliar but live up to Berry Brothers’ high standards I love to visit Berry Bros. & Rudd’s shop at the bottom of St James’s Street, London. In the window there might be a few choice bottles â” a Methuselah of Château d’Yquem sticks in the mind â” but indoors there is nothing so vulgar as merchandise. Instead there are sloping desks reminiscent of a Victorian accountant’s, and here you may discuss your oenophilic needs. Creaking stairs and corridors lead to small rooms containing a selection of the finest clarets and burgundies behind locked glass, like Ming vases or

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 22 April 2006

I thought my husband had fallen unconscious on the doormat, for I could not push the front door open. But I was mistaken. It was a huge drift of post complaining that I had used the word quick as an adverb. The problem was solved by a bit of jiggling backwards and forwards

Robin Oakley

Epic struggle

It was lunchtime at a Church school and there was a large dish of rosy apples. A nun placed a note on the fruit: ‘Take only one: God is watching.’ Further down the line was a dish of biscuits. ‘Take all you like,’ one child was heard telling another, ‘God is watching the apples.’ That child surely grew up to be a bookie, and at this stage of the Flat season they are cramming the cookies while we punters flounder, trying to discover which yards have got it together despite the cold spring and which three-year-olds have trained on through the winter. At Kempton on Saturday, the only time I

Simon Courtauld

Crashing boar

While we are all worrying about the threat to poultry from an alien virus which has now reached these shores, there seems to be little concern at the threat to our countryside and livestock from an alien animal now roaming free in England. I am referring to wild boar, hundreds of them, which are inhabiting forested areas of Kent, Sussex, Dorset and Gloucestershire, having escaped from farms and bred in the wild. If nothing is done about them, there could be many thousands of wild boar in 20 years’ time, marauding through woodland, threatening walkers, destroying crops and pasture, and spreading diseases — swine fever, bovine tuberculosis — to domestic

Taki

Flying high | 22 April 2006

Do any of you remember a film called The Blue Max? It is about a German flying squadron during the first world war. A working-class German soldier manages to escape trench warfare by joining up with lots of aristocratic Prussian flyers who see jousting in the sky as a form of sport, rather than combat. Eager for fame and glory — 20 confirmed kills earns one the ‘Blue Max’, the highest decoration the Fatherland can bestow — the prole shoots down a defenceless British pilot whose gunner is dead. His squadron leader is appalled. ‘This is not warfare,’ he tells the arriviste. ‘It’s murder.’ I know it’s only a film,

Frank Keating

Cups runneth over

Last two standing. For the muddied oafs of winter, this is the cruellest week. So near, yet…. Defeat in a semifinal, they say, is the hardest to bear. There are a lot of them about. Today soccer stages its two FA Cup semis. In the European Champions’ League, Arsenal played the first-leg semifinal this week, the second next; ditto Middlesbrough in the Uefa Cup. And at rugby union, the European club game’s defining Heineken Cup also stages two momentous semis this weekend. Death or glory, relief or jubilation — and cruelty. For neutral students of (in equal measure) both round ball and oval — they do exist, I can testify

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 22 April 2006

Q. I work in a City office, staffed mainly by young, trendy middle-class males, most of whom like to sport the silly fashion of trousers almost dropping off, exposing vast expanses of undergarments, in some cases almost bare buttocks! We girls don’t have a problem with this, but are disgusted by one young man who is obviously wearing the same underpants for several days, in fact almost two weeks — not a pretty sight. How do we politely approach him with a view to suggesting he become more hygienic with his personal grooming?S.J., London NW2 A. One of you should send a round-robin email. ‘Lost within the office, an unopened

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 April 2006

Yes, the BNP is unpleasant and hate-filled. But why does everyone feel the need to say it so much? Or rather, why don’t people say it about all the other hate-filled organisations in this country, as well as about the BNP? The Socialist Workers Party is hate-filled; so is Respect, so is Hizb ut-Tahrir, so is Sinn Fein, so are some in Greenpeace and some in Ukip, and so is John Prescott in relation to field sports and Ken Livingstone in relation to Israel, America and Britain’s imperial past. The BNP, like the now resurgent old Labour party, finds the basis of its support in resentment. Old Labour expresses that

Alan Watkins

Looking after Anthony

When this book first came out in 1966 it covered the entire period during which Charles Moran had been Winston Churchill’s physician from 1940 onwards. It caused a good deal of controversy, less because it was in any way hostile to Churchill than because it showed him as a fallible human being. The Churchill family were particularly exercised by its publication. Ran dolph Churchill said that all he asked of Moran was that he should have followed the standards of the ordinary GP, which he had failed to do. Randolph’s sister Mary Soames, denounced the work as disgraceful. It was so, even though her husband Christopher had emerged from it

Olivia Glazebrook

Dreamy moments

What a relief it must have been for Hugh Grant when he realised he could relax and play bastards. What torture it must have been to be made housewives’ choice after playing characters so totally unlike himself (Charles in Four Weddings, the nincompoop in Notting Hill, Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility). With what joy must he have delivered the role of Daniel Cleaver, Cleaver the handsome rotter for whom Bridget Jones sported those giant pants. Then Grant was on a roll. His haircut for About a Boy caused almost as much controversy as Jennifer Aniston did with hers in Friends. He played a bastard leopard-type who changes his spots

Peter Oborne

Harsh sunlight shines on a failing NHS, as fire consumes the Blairite vanities

There was a definite gaiety among MPs as they came back from Easter recess this week. The winter has been longer and colder than any in recent memory. Westminster, cheerless and crepuscular at the best of times, has a way of magnifying the gloom. Now spring has finally arrived with a series of fine sunny days. Best of all, we have the local elections. Ministers are out in force on the doorstep, and as a result carry an enviably tanned and weather-beaten appearance. This loosening of mood is palpable at the top of government. There are, for example, undeniable signs that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have been working together

Madsen Pirie

A short guide to winning arguments

When I taught logic at an American university, the chief problem was to entice students to take the course. The smorgasbord approach they used to build a degree meant that students wanted things which might be useful to them, or ones they might be good at. Logic, alas, was perceived as neither, and classes were largely made up of very bright students who were not afraid of it and who thought it might be fun. It would be difficult to show that it is a valuable life skill, given the remarkable number of successful people who happily get by without it. Many high-achieving executives, respected media commentators and prominent politicians

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

More than Madonna’s mother-in-law

I am wandering the gilded streets where it all began. A few hundred yards from here a handful of clever, public-school-educated young men met of an evening to discuss how best to transform the thing they loved, the Conservative party. They would meet for something called ‘supper’, apparently. Yes, I am in that little, extortionately expensive triangle of west London between Kensington and Notting Hill and I have the scent of history in my nostrils. Well, it’s either history or truffled polenta — hard to tell at this time of day. I’m here to meet a woman called Shireen Ritchie. Those youngish men who met for supper in Notting Hill

Michael Ashcroft

Conspicuous bravery celebrated

Michael Ashcroft, a devoted collector of the Victoria Cross, marks the 150th anniversary of the medal’s creation and salutes its simple beauty The concept of bravery intrigues me as much today as it did when I was a schoolboy. What is the crucial factor that makes some people more courageous than others? Is it in their genes, their upbringing or their training? Are they motivated by patriotism, religious conviction, respect for those who fight with them or simply an old-fashioned sense of duty? Is the bravery of most people premeditated or is it a spur-of-the-moment response to the heat of battle? These are the sorts of questions I started to

Boris Johnson

They love capitalism, but not elections

Boris Johnson goes to Beijing on a mission to sell democracy, but finds his hosts — as wedded to authority as they have been for the last 4,000 years — politely declining his offer It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer question. ‘So, Mr Boris Johnson,’ she said, ‘have you changed your mind about anything?’ And I was forced to reply that, yes, I had. Darned right I had. I had completely changed my mind about the chances of democracy in China. Before flying to Beijing I had naively presumed that the place was not just