Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Cup tied

After the Lord Mayor’s show…. It is back to the humdrum for football today following last week’s all-embracing showstoppers in the FA Cup. Two or three years ago, we know-alls were writing off the world’s most antique annual tournament (est. 1872) as a geriatric diversion far past its sell-by date. Winning it offered no access to that licence to print money, the European Champions’ League, so once the strutters of Manchester United didn’t even bother entering. The supposed pre-eminence of the Premiership had moved things on, so the very idea of ‘dragon-slaying minnows’ was as preposterous in possibility as it was convoluted in metaphor. But Manchester United are desperate now

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 January 2006

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies: do not leave handbags on the seat while receiving Holy Communion.’ It is no simple matter to catch the thieves that make the warning necessary. At the same time, I have been told that pick-pockets like to hang around signs that warn, ‘Pick-pockets known to operate in this area,’ because when people see the signs

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 14 January 2006

Sky like the inside of a saucepan and a mean little drizzle stinging your face, garden sunk deep in midwinter gloom, except for the winter-flowering cherry trees with small, sugar-pink blossoms prinking from bare branches to lift the heart. I look for the first snowdrop, then the first aconite, then crocus, but forget about these cherries. The slender twigs last for weeks in a cool room. We have planted 1,000 snowdrop bulbs every autumn since coming to this North Cotswold farmhouse 15 years ago, and now there are great drifts of them. I always pick the first one I find and sniff. It smells very faintly of honey. Talking of

Iain Sinclair

The return of the colonel

This is a great Homeric return. With The Vengeance of Rome, Michael Moorcock releases his hobbled Odysseus, Colonel Pyat, from the maelstrom of history, the impossible burden of cultural memory. The original migrant — born in Kiev, assaulted and prostituted in Egypt, lionised in Hollywood — folds back into a case of greasy papers, technical drawings, sepia postcards, abandoned in Notting Hill and later deposited with Moorcock in Texas. Right from the start of the ‘Between the Wars’ quartet, a narrative trajectory was established. The conclusion of the sequence was as much predetermined as the fate of a family breakfasting in Stepney under the flight path of a V2 rocket.

Mark Steyn

Bleak portrait

‘You know I ain’t queer,’ Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist. ‘Me neither,’ says Jack. Then they get back to having sex with each other, high up in the hills of Wyoming. I would have liked to have seen Brokeback Mountain with a Wyoming crowd, or at any rate an audience of rugged laconic men in tight jeans, such as Jack and Ennis. Unfortunately, Brokeback doesn’t appear to be playing in any rural districts other than, er, the Hamptons and Provincetown. So I had to go and see it in Montreal, where its author, Annie Proulx, once attended Sir George Williams University. The joint was packed, and you could

Robert Cooper

Hellish motorway experience

Listening to Jim Norton reading The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on this outstanding recording is a first-class way of either revisiting James Joyce’s autobiographical novel or of dipping your toe in the water for the first time. I am a toe-dipper and whilst there were moments when Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ technique threatened to drag me out to sea, I found that a few jabs at the ‘Play Again’ button kept me both buoyant and enlightened with regard to the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. A memorable early scene sees young Dedalus home from boarding-school for Christmas. He is allowed to join the grown-ups for the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life

On the second day of the New Year, I rose, dressed, arranged myself on my crutches and hobbled down the road to the station. It was wonderful to be outside again. (Never give credence to ideas that occur to you indoors, said Nietzsche, which I think I’ll take as my New Year’s resolution.) At the station there was a handy ramp up to the ticket office that I’d barely noticed before, then a footbridge over the railway lines to platform two. At London Bridge station I toppled off the train and stumped through the ticket barrier, down an escalator and along a subway to the Underground station, where I took

Paul Johnson

What happened to all that ‘ivy never sere’?

People have mixed feelings about ivy (Hedera helix). It is believed to do unhurried damage to buildings while artfully concealing its depredations. ‘Creeping ivy …hides the ruin that it feeds upon,’ as Cowper says. Not long ago, Jerome, who looks after our London garden, had to cut back the ivy covering the high wall abutting the veranda of my library, thus exposing the brick. This grievously disturbed my post-breakfast period of contemplation, when I look out on the garden and work out what I will write during the day. However, with its characteristic tenacity and fecundity, the ivy has grown back again, the bricks have vanished and the incident is

Peter Oborne

It wasn’t the booze: Cameron did for Kennedy, and now Blair is the target

A myth is beginning to be constructed around the events of the last week at Westminster. It needs to be challenged at once before it gains ground and becomes acknowledged fact. It goes as follows: Charles Kennedy was sacked as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he was a heavy drinker. This is open to challenge — both the claim that Kennedy was a heavy drinker, and the associated proposition that he was driven from office on account of his drinking. Kennedy’s consumption of alcohol was at most moderate — and negligible compared with an earlier generation of politicians: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Ken Clarke. All of them

Jaspistos

Love lecture

In Competition No. 2425 you were invited to do as Ovid did: give poetic advice as to how to pick up, seduce and keep a lover of either sex. Here’s one of Ovid’s shrewd pieces of advice to girls (my translation, The Modern Library, New York, rush out and buy it): Steer clear of the young professorOf elegance, the too good-looking snappy dresserWho’s always arranging his hair — he’ll tell you a stale,Thousand-times-told tale,But his heart’s a gipsy, it camps, it moves.What can a woman do when the man she lovesIs smoother than she is and, for all she can tell,Has more men than she does as well? Not many

Taki

Pandora’s box

Gstaad On the evening that Charles Kennedy resigned, Barry and Lizzie Humphries came to dinner. My German cook Alexander made a special cake for Dame Edna, but Barry smelled a rat. He asked if the cake contained any alcohol. The answer was almost none at all. ‘Well,’ said the great man, who has not had a drink in 30 years, ‘if I ask for another ten helpings, we’ll know what’s in it.’ The idea that these Liberal creeps got rid of a man who had done a good job as leader of such a shitty party for having a drink too many is quite revolting. It’s almost as bad as

Roger Scruton

Dawkins is wrong about God

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own — the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell.

Douglas Davis

Lawless in Gaza

Douglas Davis says that Ariel Sharon’s wisest decision was his last one — to pull out of the anarchic terrorist hothouse of Gaza As the dominating presence of Ariel Sharon recedes from the public stage, his lasting legacy is likely to be not his military exploits but his final major political act: unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Israel had tried engagement, and when that did not work it opted for disengagement. If the Oslo accords promised a marriage between Palestinians and Israelis, Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal signalled a divorce. Reconciliation could be generations away. There were high hopes in Europe that Sharon’s evacuation would rekindle the peace process; that the Palestinian Authority

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 7 January 2006

The cost of domestic gas and electricity was expected to rise by 15 per cent in the spring, an increase of 50 per cent in three years. Among the New Year’s honours, knighthoods went to Tom Jones, the singer; John Dankworth, the jazz musician; Arnold Wesker, the playwright; and Lord Coe, the Olympics organiser; damehoods went to Vivienne Westwood, the fashion designer; Liz Forgan, of the Heritage Lottery Fund; Susie Leather, of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The whole of the England cricket squad involved in the Ashes series and the Beverley Sisters — Babs, Joy and Teddie — were appointed MBE. Mr David Cameron, the leader of the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 January 2006

In their New Year newspaper advertisement in the Sunday Telegraph, the Conservatives say, ‘The right test for our policies is how they help the least well-off in society, not the rich.’ That is a good approach, but will it be invariably applied? For example, the clearest way that the rich are privileged in modern Britain is not through the tax system, which even now penalises them more than the poor, but through the planning acts. Because it is extremely hard to build new houses anywhere, particularly in beautiful places, the price of existing houses rises all the time, particularly the price of large and beautiful houses. This gives a vast

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 7 January 2006

More women MPs, please From Amber RuddSir: Rod Liddle’s article on women candidates in the Conservative party contains an irritating and often repeated inaccuracy. (‘Let’s not forget the weirdos and halfwits’, 17/24 December). He refers to ‘the refusal of women to put themselves forward as potential candidates’. No such refusal has taken place. Women are putting themselves forward. As one of the women on this list, I know many of the others and know them to be just as talented and capable as their male colleagues. In fact the candidates’ list, from which the target seats will be selecting next year, is currently 25 per cent women. Please do not

Frank Keating

Opium of the people

I stoked up some good log fires over the holiday, and with a box or two of Thornton’s Continental Selection was snug at the hearth with two British histories on the go, thoroughly enjoying them both: The Victorians by A.N. Wilson and Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good (1956–1963). Scholarship and readability in flawless harmony, each relishingly, relishably bringing vividly alive their seminal eras to a semi-dunce who is at long last better versed on such as the Chartists, Irish Home Rule, Gladstone, Marie Lloyd, Gilbert and Sullivan, and CND, Supermac, Angry Young Men, Mods, Rockers and the life and works of Cliff Richard and good ol’ Gamal Abd

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 7 January 2006

Q. A friend in the fashion world telephoned me to say that she was sending round a handbag worth £400 for my Christmas present. She told me frankly that she would not normally spend £400 on me but she had been given this bag by a public relations person representing a certain designer and did not want it for herself. She added that, if by any chance I did not like it, she would prefer me not to sell the bag on eBay since the designer would inevitably get to hear of it and recognise the provenance of this ‘one off’. The bag duly arrived. It is a very beautiful

Michael Tanner

Near perfection

The Royal Opera’s new production of Rossini’s supreme Il Barbiere di Siviglia affords one of the few evenings of near perfection that I have ever experienced in an opera house. The only imperfection of any kind was at the beginning, and presumably is unlikely to happen again: a surprisingly, even alarmingly ragged account of the Overture, though even there there was a great deal of delightful pointing of phrases and revelling in Rossini’s strange ear for orchestral sonorities. After that, with the raising of the curtain — for once not too early — everything had the immaculate precision without which, as the conductor Mark Elder insists, Rossini comes to nothing.