Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 8 April 2006

Blair is no Thatcherite From Lord TebbitSir: I am not sure whether in his review of the programme Tory! Tory! Tory! (Arts, 25 March) Simon Hoggart is expressing his own view or that of Edwina Currie, that ‘by 1990, Thatcher had become the greatest obstacle to Thatcherism, which had to be rescued … by Tony Blair’. Whoever’s view it is, it is clearly a most outrageous, patently untrue statement. The obstacles to Thatcherism were Heseltine and Howe, not Thatcher. I know of no Blair achievement of any kind which could be described as ‘Thatcherite’. She did not throw money at public services without achieving a commensurate improvement in public services.

Frank Keating

Snakes and ladders

You will know by now whether Arsenal in Italy on Wednesday carried on from their racily appealing first-leg home victory over Juventus and are now in the semi-finals of the European Champions Cup. Whatever, last week’s emphatic, even euphoric, Highbury show remains one to bottle up and savour as a memento of north London’s old marble palace before the bulldozers crawl in. Arsenal begin next season at a swish new home down the road. It is 93 years since their first game at Highbury — Leicester Fosse defeated 2–1 in September 1913 — after they leased for 20 years the cricket fields of St John’s College of Divinity (promising not

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 8 April 2006

Q. We have friends who regularly invite us to dinner. Because I know that they have little appreciation of fine wine, we generally and generously like to bring a bottle of quality wine as a gift, to complement both the meal and the company. However, it is rarely opened and I and indeed others who may be invited find ourselves sitting through an otherwise enjoyable meal drinking an altogether unsuitable offering. I am sure that it would be rude to insist that our bottle be opened, but is there another way to coax our host into allowing us to enjoy the fruits of our labours?M.G.K., London A. To circumvent this

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 April 2006

I was in the gents at the Black Lion in Plaistow, east London, standing at one of the two urinals, when it hit me. I was thinking about my Mum. She hasn’t been well. First it was a chest infection, then the violence of the coughing fits put her back out, rendering her out of action for over a fortnight. They say nurses make the worst patients and they’re right. Mum is 75 now, but the state registered nursing training she underwent in the Fifties became so ingrained in her, she’s remained a nurse at heart ever since. And she’s a difficult patient, permanently in a state of frustration at

Pankaj Mishra

Spring forward, fall back

Republics, as much as monarchies, need founding myths in order to legitimise themselves in the eyes of their subjects. For a long time, the image of Chairman Mao leading his rag-tag troops over 10,000 kilometers, across 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers, offered abundant proof of communist bravery, endurance and selfless idealism to the Chinese. Com- pared to Mao’s exertions, Gandhi’s Salt March, the central legend of Indian nationalism, looks like a public relations gimmick. The Long March was first mythologised by the American journalist Edgar Snow, who visited Mao at his safe base in north-west China in 1936, and whose largely admiring account of Chinese communists in Red Star

Jasper Griffin

A toddle along the Gibbon trail

What is likely to be the future of Europe? Is some kind of unity really on the cards? Boris Johnson, in his formative period a student of the classical world, finds his mind turning back from the Treaty of Rome to the pukka Romans, the ancient chappies. What do they have to tell us about this EU caper? Being a politician, and consequently at least as subtle as your average serpent, Johnson does not start out in quite that direct way. He follows the approved manner of the poet Horace, not to mention the philosopher Aristotle, by beginning in the middle of events, with a bang. His opening gives the

Jaspistos

Kids’ stuff

In Competition No. 2437 you were invited to supply an incident from a children’s adventure story featuring a mythical beast and a magic device. Perhaps someone who doesn’t dig Robinson Crusoe, Swallows and Amazons or The Hobbit and feels no inclination to read a Harry Potter book isn’t the ideal judge for this competition, but I did my best and enjoyed it. Especially enjoyable was the amazing array of monsters you summoned from the vasty deep — the Plagerypuss, gruntilopes, the samaker, ‘a huge fish with whirling wings’, Diplorus the Dinodidacticus, Nobbin the Gobb, ‘a cross between a piglet and a sharpei dog’, and of course the Jasbeastos, ‘green-bearded, glasses

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Knock, knock! A toast to the City’s peerless chronicler and jokesmith

Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A Club No More, the last volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial history of the Square Mile. In the lighter field of daily and weekly journalism, Christopher has been peerless in his combination of wit, learning, firmness of judgment, appetite for gossip and enthusiasm for lunch — preferably at the Savoy Grill before its tragic refurbishment. As

The Spectator

How about asking us?

In his 1997 manifesto Tony Blair described New Labour as ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. Nine years on, it more closely resembles the ‘political arm’ of an Asbo family, at war with itself and indifferent to the feelings of others. Rarely has a government seemed so introspective, selfish and out of touch. ‘Social exclusion’ has come to mean the government’s exclusion of everyone else from its deliberations. Socialism has been replaced by antisocialism. Mr Blair used to make pledges about health and education; now the only pledge that consumes his colleagues is his promise to step down before the next election and

Roger Scruton

Hail Quinlan Terry

Since the early 20th century, Western society has been in the grip of a culture of repudiation — rejecting one by one the institutions, offices, traditions and achievements of the past, while having often little but sentimental emptiness with which to replace them. The most telling instance of this is modern architecture. For three millennia Western builders looked back to their predecessors, respecting the temple architecture of the ancients, refining its language, and adapting it to the European landscape in ways that are subtly varied, entirely memorable and above all humane. Then Le Corbusier burst on the scene. His plan was to demolish Paris north of the Seine and to

Allister Heath

Meet the real Sarkozy

Allister Heath has gained access to the inner circle of France’s interior minister. Here, he offers a unique portrait of the presidential hopeful Paris It was the ideal vantage point, a large room overlooking the magnificent Place de la République, the starting point of the rally. I sat watching all afternoon as hundreds of thousands of self-righteous students began their long march across Paris, waving red flags and chanting the idiotic slogans that are de rigueur on such occasions. But as I breathed in the heady atmosphere, both exhilarating and revolting, my mind kept returning to a series of fascinating conversations I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks with people close to

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The week the Queen was born

Mary Wakefield looks back at our issue of 24 April 1926, and finds The Spectator reflecting on Mussolini, the brewing General Strike — and the off-side rule It was press day at The Spectator when Queen Elizabeth II was born. The printers had set the lines of type for the edition of 24 April 1926, and were waiting for the extra paragraph about the new royal baby. Did their hearts swell with pride when it arrived? The Spectator gave them the benefit of the doubt: ‘Universal pleasure has been caused by the birth of a daughter, on Wednesday, to the Duke and Duchess of York,’ it said. ‘The new Princess

Sarah Bradford

She has succeeded by being herself

Sarah Bradford, the Queen’s acclaimed biographer, hails her 80th birthday, reflects on an astonishing life — and looks forward to Her Majesty’s ninth decade The Queen will be 80 on 21 April, an appropriate time to reflect on the changes which have taken place during her 54-year reign. She was born in the difficult aftermath of the first world war, 12 days before the General Strike of 1926, when the more nervous spirits predicted revolution, and memories of the fall of the Romanovs less than ten years before were still fresh. Her grandfather, George V, conscious of the importance of popular consent in the maintenance of his throne, had abandoned

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 7 April 2006

MONDAY Another day, another chance to demonstrate our values. We are launching our spring forum in Manchester with an initiative: ‘focusing on the transformational impact of trusting people’. DD was meant to be in charge but Dave stepped in at the last minute and said he would do it himself because D2 was bound to muck it up. Poppy in fearful snit after being put in charge of Wives’ Product Placement: Smythson’s handbags, novels written by spouses of members of the shadow Cabinet, etc. Says it’s beneath her. Well, excuse me! For once I seem to have come out on top. Am on a secret unit helping to secure celebrity

Diary – 7 April 2006

The most satisfying night of recent weeks had to be the poetry reading in the British Library organised by Josephine Hart, a woman born to fill us with her infectious love of poetry. It was standing room only, as Evelyn and Lynn Rothschild discovered, arriving late for the reading of Shelley by Dominic West, Byron by Edward Fox and Keats by Bob Geldof. Before the start it had been explained that Bob and Jeanne Marine (his traffic-stoppingly lovely girlfriend) had been in India, where they had been hit by celebratory henna bombs, leaving their hair a rich reddish brown. Back in London, Bob reached for the Daz to sort his

Saturday

Taki

Modern manners

In an age of corporate looting, insider trading, commercial gouging and crass commercialism, it is well to ask why we are picking on Didier Drogba for cheating. One tries to emulate one’s betters, and, as Matthew Norman wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, when a co-owner of Birmingham City has done time for pimping and makes his loot as a pornographer, why shouldn’t an overpaid African footballer try bending the rules? Elementary, my dear Roman. After all, if Abramovich can become Britain’s richest man by bending it like Beckham, cheating, diving and using one’s hand to set up a goal should be considered virtues, not vices. Sport follows society, and always

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 1 April 2006

Q. I look after 60 little girls at a boarding prep school. We have an ongoing struggle with headlice and nits. Combing these pestilential creatures out of long hair with nit combs and conditioner is almost a full-time job. (The parents do not want us to use organophosphates.) What can I do, Mary? Even if I do manage to get each girl’s head cleared, as soon as they go home one of them becomes reinfested through contact with a younger sibling and the whole thing starts all over again.Name and address withheld A. It is much less time-consuming to perform the treatment in a backwash sink. A company called LSE

Frank Keating

Oars-de-combat

‘Are you ready …’ The winds skim and frisk like a well-thrown flat pebble across the chop and chill of the mucky water. So do two slim, sleek boats carrying 16 broad and beefy men. Ships, towers, domes rip by …temples, wharves, jetties, tower blocks, bandstands, gullies; the Middlesex wall, the Surrey station, Harrods depository, Craven Cottage, the Riverside theatre; bikes on the towpath, daffs on the banks, pubs to the left of you, pubs to the right …and ‘hurrah! hurrah!’ from Hammersmith Bridge. Boat Race day tomorrow, so truly spring has sprung at last. Did I say 16 hulking he-man hearties, each in a boat for eight? Each man

Ian Ker

The everlasting bonfire

This splendid book of articles, essays and reviews, some published for the first time, begins with a long, masterly piece on the unfashionable doctrine of Hell, the best thing in the whole book. Having been taught about Hell by the monks of Ampleforth in the 1950s, Piers Paul Read asks, ‘Why was damnation dropped from Catholic preaching in the last decades of the 20th century when a monk from Ampleforth, Basil Hume, was Arch- bishop of Westminster?’ If there is a consistent theme in this book, it is the sense that what Read learned at Ampleforth and its prep school Gilling has been betrayed by the post-Vatican II English Church

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Tory Blair thinks is underrated

Liam Fox could have been designed by a committee of Tory modernisers. He was brought up in a council house, educated at a comprehensive and worked as a hospital doctor in the deprived east end of Glasgow. He has met Mother Teresa, still buys pop music and has long campaigned for the unfashionable cause of mental health provision. His wife is a lung-cancer specialist and charity worker. But he fails the soft-focus New Tory test on one crucial point: his politics are unashamedly, defiantly Thatcherite. His face is thick with make-up when he turns up late for lunch at a bar overlooking Tower Bridge. He apologises: the television studio detained