Society

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Sayonara, Pilks — we’re short of owners with their hearts in the business

A sprig of the Pilkington family was saying goodbye to his hosts. ‘I’ve an early start,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got to be at the bloody glassworks in the morning.’ When he arrived, he found that the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, was there before him and had left a note on his desk: ‘My boy, it seems to me that your heart is not in the business…’. Family businesses need enough sprigs to allow for such pruning, and this one was a model. Then some stray aunts and cousins wanted a price for their shares. Now Pilkington is just another public company, and in Sir Harry’s place sits Sir Nigel Rudd,

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters

Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others. No doubt I shall be accused of prejudice in favour of my own profession. To demonstrate that I am an unbiased critic, however, I shall cite the work of a doctor who wrote very badly, execrably in fact, the late Dr David Cooper. He was an associate for a time of R.D. Laing, the talented but wayward and

Peter Oborne

Jowell’s torment is a gift from the gods to Gordon Brown

There has been an iron rule at Westminster since New Labour won power nine years ago. When Brown is strong Blair is weak, and vice versa. Imagine a seesaw. This weekend Brown is up, feet dangling in the air, smirking. The Chancellor is the big winner from the Jowell debacle, so much so that it is hard to see how the Prime Minister can ever recover. Blair’s premiership — like John Major’s only much more so — has ended up mired in sleaze. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, naturally, is taking full advantage. In marked contrast to Tony Blair and his allies, Gordon Brown is impervious to the trappings of

Paul Johnson

A.J.P. Taylor: a saturnine star who had intellectuals rolling in the aisles

AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said ‘Enter!’ Then you got a full, crowded hour, and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before

Jaspistos

No prob.

In Competition No. 2433 you were asked for a poem in which each line’s rhymed ending is a truncated word. When I’ve a syllable de trop,I cut it off without apol:This verbal sacrifice, I know,May irritate the schol;But all must praise my devilish cunnWho realise that Time is Mon. This verse from ‘Poetical Economy’ suggests that its author, Harry Graham, writing in the 1930s, was the inventor of this game, one which you played with brio. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Alan Millard, whose splendid final rhyme tickled me pink. I’ve never had a pretty bodAnd so I visited the doc’sAnd asked

The Spectator

Whose schools are they anyway?

As so often, Norman Tebbit has a point. ‘Three of my grandchildren have gone to grammar schools, as I did,’ he told the Observer recently. ‘Now it looks as if we are going to cut off that route in the interest of something probably called social cohesion. But we’re not going to cut off the route to go through Eton. Come on, chaps. Fair’s fair!’ Lord Tebbit is the opposite of chippy, a Tory Titan who helped to make the politics of envy disreputable. His point is not that private schools are bad — far from it — but that pupils at state schools deserve much better than the often

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Don’t mock the Prince’s ‘black spider’: it could save the albatross

Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the front of a newspaper above a giggly caption, but hardly differed from the exasperated marginal scribbling we all produce but never expect to see in newspapers. I found my mind wandering to a different scene. I had described it in The Spectator at the time, six years ago. I was wintering in the sub-Antarctic on

Nigel Lawson

DEEP THOUGHT: Climate of superstition

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.Schopenhauer Next week marks the deadline that has been set for reactions to the less than satisfactory discussion paper that has emerged from the government’s belated review of the important issue of the economics of climate change. It is important for David Cameron, too. For, while rightly giving the environment a high priority, he is in danger, over this issue, of making commitments which, in government, he would find it extremely damaging to honour. Crucial though the economics of climate change is, the starting

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why I hate British films

It was Colin Welland who first uttered those terrible words ‘The British are coming!’ at an Oscar ceremony, back in 1982 — clutching his gold-plated statuette in his northern paw and grinning from beneath his deeply northern moustache. Colin had won an Oscar for having written the screenplay to Chariots of Fire, a film about some British people who could run quite fast, particularly Eric Liddell (or ‘speedy uncle Eric’ as we were wont to call him). Chariots of Fire possessed all of the qualities we have later come to associate with British films — resolutely well-meaning, somewhat stilted, implacably middlebrow and moderately sensitive, utterly devoid of sex, sin and

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 4 March 2006

Q. I deeply fancy someone in my office who sits near me. Our exchanges have always been businesslike and I doubt she has noticed my interest. The other women I work with appear to find me congenial and we socialise outside the office although none seems to perceive me as a ‘sex object’. Having said that, former partners have never complained. I don’t want to risk ongoing embarrassment by making a move and being rejected, so how can I find out first if I have any chance? Name and address withheld A. Choose one of your female colleague friends to act as unwitting emissary. Confide that your concentration is being

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 March 2006

Genghis was a leftie From Daniel Hannan, MEPSir: Paul Johnson demolishes the ludicrous expression ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’ and wonders what the Mongol leader’s true politics might have been (And another thing, 25 February). I’d have thought Genghis was a clear-cut leftie. His tactic, on conquering a tribe, was to liquidate the aristocracy and elevate the lower orders. He was a proto-Europhile, mingling his subject clans so as to prevent the development of a sense of national identity. Where modern socialists want to use the education system to cut high achievers down to size, the Khan was more literal, forcing his vassals to walk under a yoke and

Frank Keating

European Blues

Treats all round next week if the second-leg matches in football’s Champions League are as compelling as the first. Chelsea and Rangers, each playing in Spain, are at serious risk of elimination, but Liverpool and Arsenal should be in the hat for the quarterfinals. Liverpool, a goal down, may lack a front-line scorer but a coherent, fluent midfield and the importance of being earnest should ensure another heady night at Anfield and satisfactory progress in defence of the title they won so seismically last summer. Arsenal’s glistening win against pallid Real in Madrid might well have revived their entire winter. They simply can’t blow it now, surely. Chelsea and Rangers

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 March 2006

Last week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm. Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy side-effect was that the horse

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 March 2006

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 4 March 2006

Is it just me, or does everyone have a bit of a problem warming to Gary Rhodes? I know, I know, all celebrity chefs have their annoying shortcomings: Jamie’s wet lips; Nigella’s sloppy eating habits (sucking her fingers, juices dribbling down chin); Delia’s full-on, aproned bossiness; Rick’s silly dog, Chalky; Ainsley’s just about everything. And Gary? There is just something quite chilly and rather sinister about him. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that as time goes on he looks more and more like Freddy Kruger, possibly via a spring onion, what with the stupid hair. I don’t know what I’d put down first, Rick’s silly dog or Gary’s stupid hair.

Lucy Vickery

Hot Property | 4 March 2006

Perhaps it’s the association with The Goodies and with Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, but people are reluctant to admit that they live in Cricklewood. ‘Well, it’s sort of on the Hampstead border,’ they mutter sheepishly, when quizzed on their new home. But they’ll be hollering it from the top of Brent Cross shopping centre before long if Cricklewood Redevelopment Ltd has anything to do with it. ‘It was a place a man came in order to go to other places via the A41’ is how Zadie Smith describes the area in her novel White Teeth. But though roads dominate this unglamorous suburb — the A406 North Circular, the A5, the

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary – 4 March 2006

I was revolting from a very early age and more than once thought of taking over a radio station and starting a revolution. In those days the wireless exerted far more influence than the newspapers, at least in our house. I can still remember the opening sentence of my call to arms. Rise up, rise up, the moment is at hand. At this distance I can’t recall what particular cause provoked the necessity for an uprising, but I do know I’d been reading Red Eagle by Dennis Wheatley and that in my satchel I had a picture of Marshal Budenny, a man with a moustache straight out of a pantomime.

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The prince of start-ups is entitled to speak louder than any big-ego business knight

Every time Sir Alan Sugar fires a contestant on The Apprentice, the nation quivers in admiration; likewise whenever Sir Richard Branson launches another airborne publicity stunt. Serial entrepreneurs are accorded guru status, yet whenever Britain’s most prolific kick-starter of enterprise sticks his head above the parapet he is showered with abuse and told to get on with his real job, which is — as the comedian Marcus Brigstocke tastefully put it — ‘waiting for his mother to die’. The Prince of Wales, through the charity he set up when he left the navy in 1976, has helped more than 60,000 young people to start their own businesses. But he gets

Paul Johnson

Kindly write on only one side of the paper

A scare article in the Guardian says that handwriting will soon disappear. Not so. In fact, in the last two years I have reverted to doing all my writing by hand as they no longer make the machines I like, and my eyes object to staring at a screen. My assistant, the angelic Mary, puts my scribbles on computer or disk. Being left-handed, I have to hold my pen in a funny way, as writing from left to right is unnatural to sinistrals. I envy the Ancient Egyptians, who carved their hieroglyphs either way and wrote hieratic (the written version) from right to left. When I was writing my history

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Rural rides

Important stuff first: can the chap with the farm address in Shropshire who very kindly said he’d let me have his hunt coats and boots for a modest sum please get in touch again on Jamesdel@dircon.co.uk? My email has been playing up something rotten — apologies to all those of you who’ve not been getting replies — and my archive has been wiped. God, I hate technology. Right, now to TV. My theme this week is how I hate not just technology but also pretty much every aspect of the modern world. All I want to do is retire to the country — Wiltshire is current favourite because I’ve lots