Society

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

What I learned about Condi

Character, not ideology, is the key to understanding this remarkable politician, says Anne Applebaum, who has seen the US Secretary of State’s cool charm up close A long time ago, before George W. Bush was elected, and before ‘Condi’ was an internationally recognised nickname, someone who knew Condoleezza Rice in one of her previous incarnations told me that the thing to remember about her is that she is definitely not a token, but that because people assume she is a token, they always underestimate her. A black woman Republican! From Alabama! Who speaks Russian! Of course she’s overrated, they say — until they wake up one morning and discover she’s

Jaspistos

Studied insults

In Competition No. 2436 you were invited to supply a very rude letter in which the writer terminates the services of an employee, tradesman or professional person. The most successfully rude letter ever written is surely Dr Johnson’s to Lord Chesterfield with its superb combination of sarcasm and sorrow: ‘Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?’ For the curious, Max Beerbohm’s samples of very rude letters can be found in the essay ‘How shall I word it?’ in And Even Now. ‘Even Jehovah’s witnesses avoid our door.’

Paul Johnson

Well, and what have you been giving up for Lent?

Who keeps Lent now? Lenctentid was the Anglo-Saxon name for March, meaning spring tide, and as the 40-day fast fell almost entirely in March, it was called Lent, though in other Christian countries it had quite different names. The odd thing about Lent is that though it is a period of gloom and sorrow, commemorating Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness when he prepared himself to sacrifice his life, the days are lengthening all the time as the grip of winter is relaxed, so we ought to feel a lightness of heart. But this Lent the icy east wind has been so persistent that we have not felt the warm breath

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 31 March 2006

MONDAYOrders from Dave. We must seize back the agenda, get everyone off sleaze. Problem is, DD wants to get stuck in and keeps ringing to set us on to some new loans-for-honours research project. Nigel says we must say, ‘Yes, right away, Mr Davis’ — and then get on with what we were doing. Dave says the Tories have changed. The days of bare-faced hypocrisy are over. Nowadays, if we are sitting in a bloody big glass house we don’t throw stones around — OK? It doesn’t seem fair. The Tories were the natural party of sleaze and now Labour has even taken that away from us. TUESDAYBig kerfuffle in

Emily Maitlis

Diary – 31 March 2006

Tuesday:Television Society Awards. Grosvenor, Park Lane. Wore little white dress, big black bow, quite low neckline. Tripped over own handbag on way into hotel. Awkward frock moment. Think I got away with it. Not sure anyone noticed. Wednesday:Calls for more rainbows and fewer shark attacks in Lambeth. The council has come up with a New Inishativ, nicknamed — by me — Operation Crayon. They have asked the under-fives — by way of a letter home from nursery — to ‘draw improvements they would like to see made to the borough’. Astonishingly, their drawings did not focus principally on the spiralling costs of council tax nor the pitiful collection of litter.

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Quail order

I wonder whether the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, will eat quail again after the shooting incident in south Texas last month, when he ignored the most basic safety rules in shooting at his intended target while unable to see that an elderly gentleman was in his line of fire. The birds that Mr Cheney was trying to shoot would have been either scaled or bobwhite quail, both species which take to the air only reluctantly, when put up by ‘bird dogs’. They never fly very far or very high, making Mr Cheney’s negligence — he was apparently firing into a low, late-afternoon sun — the more culpable. No quail are

Taki

Perfect peace

Gstaad The end of another perfect season where skiing is concerned. Wonderful powder snow, beautiful sunshine, plunging temperatures at night and empty slopes once the glitzy types went back to whatever holes they came from. On my son’s last day here, he and I skied recklessly fast together (I couldn’t keep up) and late in the afternoon we were the last two on the mountain. It was so perfect, so beautiful and still, I almost blubbed. I was sad that he was leaving and sad that the next time I see snow I will be 70. (Well, perhaps not. If I go to Japan next month for a farewell karate

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 25 March 2006

My husband lives almost entirely in the past, generally finding it a more agreeable place to make his habitation as, often, do we. To sustain him, the television has recently screened a number of dramatic reconstructions of the last days of Harold Wilson, and on some other channel a retrospective of the Thatcher years under the would-be witty title Tory, Tory, Tory. A snatch of film of Margaret Thatcher showed her, after her victory in the general election of 1979, standing in Downing Street saying, ‘Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ Some of those not well disposed to Mrs Thatcher

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 25 March 2006

Q. The most recent dog to arrive uninvited at our house, a little terrier, happened to behave impeccably, but in the past I have opened the doors to a variety of hounds from hell who have climbed on furniture, left messes and stolen food from the larder. You cannot very well turn people away when they arrive with uninvited dogs, but what would you suggest as a punishment fit for this crime?E.G., Fosbury, Wilts A. Welcome the dog, then pleasantly regale its owners with the cautionary tale of the guests who turned up at a nearby household with an uninvited naughty dog which wreaked havoc, desecrating carpets and beds. Moments

Frank Keating

Pick’n’mix

Anthem is as anthem does. What with the rugby internationals last weekend and the ongoing Commonwealth Games, a mad medley of various national anthems has been grating around the airwaves. Some find them uplifting. For me, the jingoistic jingles jar, particularly as extended overture to the rugby when the camera, with ingratiating reverence, pans along the line of cauliflower-eared shaven heads which resembles a Dickensian identity parade at Tilbury and a last call for Magwitches bound for the colonies. Some players weep, others prefer the trance-like glare. What, or which, is a national anthem these days? At Melbourne it’s been ‘Scotland the Brave’; at the rugby ‘Flower of Scotland’, a

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 25 March 2006

The neocons’ Iraqi ‘vision’ From Correlli BarnettSir: Surely Con Coughlin (‘A bittersweet birthday’, 18 March) is in error when he states that it was only after the fall of Saddam that Washington adopted the neocon vision whereby Iraq should be ‘a beacon of democracy that would shed its light throughout the tired autocracies of the Arab world’. Surely Bush and co. came into office in January 2001 having already bought the idea of ‘the American century’, and having already committed themselves to a mission to spread democracy round the world, starting with the Middle East, and with Iraq as the first target. This is attested by Christopher Meyer’s memoirs, Bob

Michael Cockerell

Diary – 25 March 2006

It’s been quite a week for mistaken identity. It began with my partner sounding very excited on the telephone. ‘At last a chance to make some money,’ she said. ‘The Independent has a story about dodgy dealings by companies in Iraq — one of them is run by Tim Bell. And they’ve printed a photo of you, captioned Lord Bell.’ I emailed Bell: ‘Have you seen the Indie piece which accuses you of making squillions trading with Iraq? They illustrated it with what purported to be a pic of you — but it was me. Should you sue or should I?’ Ping! came the reply. ‘As long as you don’t

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill nobody – 25 March 2006

MONDAYPanic and frenzy. Nigel is calling it Dave v. Goliath. Sebastian says if the first draft of Dave’s budget response is anything to go by it will be more like the ‘Ramble in the Jungle’. Focus group findings pinned to every wall — ‘If Dave was an alcopop, which flavour would he be?’ ‘Er, chocolate.’ The flatscreen playing a constant loop of Bush v. Clinton debates for inspiration. Every few minutes Nigel walks past whooping. He is wearing a Yankees cap. He asked me to get him a cup of coffee and shouted: ‘Go, go, go!’ This must be what Dave meant when he urged us to look within ourselves

Olivia Glazebrook

A quiet revolution in the studios

A book with the words ‘mavericks’ and ‘Hollywood’ in the subtitle should be a lot more exciting than this. After all, the movie business has been traditionally populated by monstrous egos with access to huge funds — a recipe for drama if ever there were one. Memoirs such as Bob Evans’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, or Julia Phillips’s You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again have described the film business we suspect is going on behind closed doors. The marvellous Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind confirmed that in the 1970s everyone in the movies had big sunglasses and a runaway coke habit — as well

David Rennie

Peter Mandelson: ‘my member states’

Brussels Almost the first thing you see, on entering Peter Mandelson’s office at the European Commission, is a bound set of photographs of Siberia resting on the coffee table. Are they a signal, a discreet protest from this most British of politicians at being sent into exile? Mr Mandelson would insist not. He had, by most accounts, an unhappy start in Brussels in November 2004, unable to hide his impatience with the collegiate, rather plodding ways of the 25-strong Commission. Recently Mr Mandelson has begun visibly to relish his new post, and his extraordinary powers to negotiate world trade on behalf of all 25 member states. Not that his taste

Frances Osborne

In unhistoric acts lies true history

Last week my four-year-old son gained a new classmate. She arrived in the middle of term as her mother has just walked out of Zimbabwe, leaving everything behind to start again from scratch here. I don’t just mean financial scratch — ‘we couldn’t bring a single penny’, she told me as she dashed off to an employment agency — but personal scratch too. When we exchanged mobile telephone numbers I asked her if she texted. She replied that she knew how ‘but I’ve nobody here to text me yet’. The decision of this well-connected graduate — who has worked for the Zimbabwean parliament, the Red Cross and the UN —

Matthew Dancona

The Da Vinci Code duo dinner

Matthew d’Ancona recalls a very odd meeting with the two men who have dared to take Dan Brown to court — and their spooky theory about the European Community Much the strangest journalistic encounter I have ever had took place more than a decade ago at the Westminster restaurant known in those days as L’Amico. It was the sort of bistro that old-fashioned Tory MPs found congenial, serving traditional Italian fare, with nooks and crannies in which to plot. The dinner in question took place in a private room, and the invitees were a motley right-of-centre bunch, gathered to give advice to two very unusual guests. And seeing the pair

Paul Johnson

Don’t put your daughter on the train, Mrs Worthington

This month I spent a weekend in Bruges, travelling most of the way by Eurostar, which for this kind of trip easily beats air travel for speed and is, of course, incomparably more comfortable. I love trains. All my early childhood in north Staffordshire, from four to 12, I travelled every day to school on a funny little LMS puffer on the so-called Loop Line, which went through the various Potteries towns and deposited me at Stoke, where it rejoined the main line. Historically, rail was the most efficient, cheap, safe and customer-charming form of travel devised for ordinary people. Like the 19th century which gave it birth, it promoted

Jaspistos

Holmes rides again

‘To the Royal Society of Needlework — and drive like the wind!’ Sherlock is speaking, Watson narrating. In Competition No. 2435 you were invited to continue from here. ‘Not …’ I gasped as we careered on to the Edgware Road.‘Exactly, Watson, our old adversary. Did you ever wonder in what subject the Professor gained his academic distinction? Crochet …’. I enjoyed this Moriarty moment in Derek Morgan’s entry. Mycroft Holmes, however, didn’t feature in any of your scenarios: perhaps it would have been too difficult to get him out of his armchair in the Diogenes Club and into a bumpy hansom. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the

Saturday

Taki

Lethal combination

If I told you I was skiing with a friend in the Swiss Alps last week, and my friend had been skiing in Iraq two days before that, you’d probably think I’d been smoking exotic cheroots, but you’d be wrong. Peter Galbraith is the son of Ken Galbraith, Harvard professor, writer, economist, ex-ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, and now, at 97 years of age, semi-retired from the political wars. His son Peter is also an ex-ambassador. He was Uncle Sam’s man in Croatia during the early Nineties, now lectures at the War College, and did stints with ABC in Iraq during the start of the great blunder. Peter