Society

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 28 January 2006

‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of

Nicholas Kenyon

The composer and his phoenix

One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household. David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations

Robin Holloway

Heaven and earth

I don’t really like Radio Three’s recent venture into blockbuster one-man blow-outs. It’s a bit sophomoric and anorakish, and the completism can reduce even the greatest composers to wallpaper. Bach is unquestionably one of the greatest. But during ‘Bach Christmas’ it often seemed as though one were switching on into the same piece extended on an endless loop: might as well have been Telemann! This impression was compounded by a tendency to prefer jogtrot ‘sewing machine’ performances. Many minutes must have been shaved off the project by going for modern high-speed baroque. In fairness, I must add that of course I couldn’t hear everything, and did catch some diversity of

Christopher Fildes

A foxy Chancellor knows many things, but a hedgehog learns the hard way

Tutti possono sbagliare: we can all make mistakes, as the hedgehog observed, getting down from the hearth-brush. Whether our prickly Chancellor is a student of Italian proverbs, I cannot say, but he could learn from this one. In the five and half years since he auctioned half the nation’s gold reserves, the price of gold has doubled. He was bid rather less than $280 an ounce, the hammer fell, and he put the proceeds into dollars, yen and euros — but none of them has been as good as gold. Looking on as the price soared above $560, I could only reflect on the timing that caused him to sell

Paul Johnson

‘Should there be a retiring age for writers?’ Discuss

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’ I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of

Jaspistos

Surprise, surprise

In Competition No. 2427 you were invited to supply a poem or a piece of prose beginning ‘It began as a — but it turned out a —’, filling in the blanks as you pleased. It was that forgettable and forgotten poet Austin Dobson who wrote a triolet beginning, ‘It began as an ode/ But it turned out a sonnet.’ Your variations were legion: ‘It began as a hedge but it turned out a casus belli’ (Alanna Blake); ‘It began as a treat but it turned out an error’ (V.M. Perrin, referring to the apple in the garden of Eden) and ‘It began as a total disaster/ But it turned

The Spectator

Mother knows best

‘All new rights,’ said Gordon Brown in one of his more memorable utterances, ‘will be matched by new responsibilities.’ It would come across as a more honourable principle if the government were prepared to apply it in reverse. Yet as far as the parents of wayward children are concerned it seems that new responsibilities are to be accompanied by a diminution in rights. Last week, the Prime Minister unveiled his ‘Respect’ agenda, within which is the proposal to make parents more culpable for the misbehaviour of young children. In spite of our misgivings over Asbos, which it seems are now to be given to children as young as ten, we

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sven’s seven deadly sins

Here are a few reasons why the Football Association should have sacked the manager of England, Sven-Goran Eriksson. 1. Allowing England to lose to one of the worst teams in the world, Northern Ireland, in a crucial World Cup qualifying game. 2. Spending what seems to have been most of his free time attempting to find even more lucrative employment elsewhere. 3. Failing to get past the quarter finals of both the European championship and the World Cup despite possessing the most talented and competent English team for more than 40 years. 4. Preparing the ground to take over as manager of an English Premiership team, Aston Villa, and implicating

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Reefer madness

After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be declassified as a drug altogether — and reclassified as a banned foodstuff. Instead of being handled by a bunch of creepy do-gooders from the drugs’ charities, the battle to keep it off the streets would then be run by the zealots of the Food Standards Agency. You wouldn’t get dopeheads and smalltime dealers being let

William Cash

Instrument of terror

William Cash meets a Devon farmer who keeps the family’s gruesome family heirloom — Hitler’s red telephone — in his safe A week before Christmas the Grampian microphone that Sir Winston Churchill used to make his VE Day speech in Westminster Chapel went under the hammer at a specialist sale of historical documents at Ludlow Racecourse by the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock Madeley. The estimate was a fairly modest £700–£1,000. The microphone — whose wooden plinth is engraved with the words ‘The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance’ — has a curious history. In the 1950s it was the star attraction at a famous London restaurant, but it then crossed the

Mark Steyn

Osama doesn’t matter any more

Mark Steyn says that only Democrats and Europeans will be fooled by the offer of a truce from the ‘exiled Saudi dissident’ You know this fellow David Cameron? Well, obviously you do. But I’m thousands of miles away and I don’t, not really. I mean, I know who he is, and I read The Spectator, and I buy the London papers when I’m up in Montreal. But I’m not sure I’ve ever knowingly seen this Cameron guy on TV and I wouldn’t recognise the sound of his voice on the radio. And if I had to give a speech to, say, some Tory ladies in Banbury about the challenges facing

A.N. Wilson

The enemy of liberal cant

When the Twin Towers collapsed, I read nothing sane upon the subject in any newspaper until Michael Wharton, as Peter Simple, filed the following to the Telegraph: ‘Only a stony-hearted fanatic could have been unmoved by the massacre in America. Yet for us feudal landlords and clerical reactionaries, cranks, conspiracy theorists and Luddite peasants, the downfall of the Twin Towers that symbolised the worldwide empire of imaginary money is not in itself a cause of grief. Ever since the atrocity, dense clouds of hysterical rhetoric have been drifting about the world. America is at war, says President Bush. Britain is at war, says Tony Blair, dutifully echoing his master. The

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Misery of the Polish newcomers

Everybody loves the Poles. Everybody loves reliable plumbers and natural-born nannies. Only Andrzej Tutkaj, of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, is sceptical about the benefits of the march from East to West. I spoke to Mr Tutkaj on the telephone this week and asked him how all the new Poles were faring in London. There was silence, then a sigh. ‘I personally,’ said Mr Tutkaj, ‘don’t like to over-glorify the Polish people. They are far from ideal. ‘Since Poland joined the EU, it has been very hard work for the people in the firing line having to deal with desperate Poles with no money and nowhere to live.

Anthony Browne

Invasion of the New Europeans

Europe is one of the most divisive issues in British politics. But on one thing most Europhiles and Eurosceptics agree: that enlargement, letting those benighted former communist countries into the warm democracy-enhancing embrace of Brussels, was a good thing. Just about all respectable, right-thinking people feel that the UK should congratulate itself for opening its borders to Eastern European workers on 1 May 2004. And enlargement certainly has been a Good Thing for the affluent property-owning professionals, as Rod Liddle observed on these pages last week. Importing a servant class of nannies, plumbers and waiters means that people like me can enjoy the lifestyle of a Victorian gentleman that we

Saturday

Taki

Milestones and millstones

Rome They say that the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the Pantheon’s beauty that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick. It is, of course, the most perfectly symmetrical monument, along with the Parthenon, to have survived since antiquity, the former lucky enough not to have been blown up à la latter. The Pantheon is a perfect space, the diameter of its rotunda exactly the same as its height, 142 feet. It sits in the middle of the bend in the Tiber that cradles Rome’s historical centre, halfway between the Vatican and Capitoline Hill, its low dome rising only slightly above the rooftops. I am here admiring this

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 21 January 2006

Q. I have an aversion to shaking hands. How should I avoid this, without giving offence? My doctor informs me that more germs are passed by hand than by kissing. At my club no one shakes hands, unless they are being introduced to someone for the first time. However, even that I find trying. I just don’t like touching someone else’s hands. What should I do?I.S., London SE11 A. Why not make a point of cultivating the Social Hug? Extend your arms right out like a semaphore operator and close in on the friend or new acquaintance. Then rest your hands on their back. In this way you will not

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 21 January 2006

Miss Ruth Kelly resisted pressure to resign as the Secretary of State for Education after it was learnt that a minister had approved the employment in a school of a man who had been put on the sex offenders register after being cautioned by police for gaining access to child pornography on the internet. Other examples emerged, and it became clear that the categorisation of offenders and the clearing of them for work in schools was complicated and uneven. One man, aged 59, who was allowed to teach at a boys’ school by Miss Kelly, had been convicted for the indecent assault of a 15-year-old girl in 1980; he said,

Frank Keating

The ball’s the thing

Fifa has tossed back the sponsored ball which was expensively designed for June’s World Cup: it was too inclined to wobble in flight. Also last week, the on-going fuss over the size and aerodynamics of the golf ball came to an interim conclusion when both the Royal & Ancient and the US Golf Association admitted secret research into the manufacture of a larger, lighter ball which can be propelled less far. Modern clubs and a stronger generation have been pinging the thing such distances that many of the game’s fabled courses are becoming obsolete. The ball is kernel, core and be-all of so many games that such news items make

Olivia Glazebrook

Diary – 21 January 2006

I have a strange aversion to white goods and have never been able to bring myself to buy a washing machine. Once a week, therefore, I take my clothes off to the washeteria and sit in a sort of trance, watching them blur round. The other day I fell into conversation with the lady who runs the laundrette with her husband. She is small, round, and in her late fifties, I would guess. Her hair is set just so, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, and she wears a pair of spectacles on a chain around her neck. Her husband is a placid man who stares out of the window, as if to

Jeremy Swift

A desert as dangerous as ever

Exploration has come a long way since the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited India and central Asia in the seventh century AD, returning to warn about biting winds and fierce dragons in the Gobi. His advice for future visitors was don’t wear red garments or carry loud calabashes. ‘The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails certain misfortune.’ Red rags clearly annoyed dragons. Until the early 20th century, exploration was largely driven and funded by missionary zeal, scientific curiosity and the search for natural resources. Early explorers were employed to stake claims to the imagined fabulous cities of Africa or the gold of the Americas. European rulers sent explorer monks to