Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Simply the Best

Before both codes of rugby muscled in briefly with a flurry of Test matches, a month or so ago who’d have imagined the two most compelling contests at the top of soccer’s Premiership this first Saturday of December would be Bolton Wanderers against Arsenal and Wigan Athletic’s neighbourly barney at Liverpool. Olde-tyme top-of-the-table ‘six pointers’. While Bolton’s reclaiming of the heights has been worthily achieved of late, their name has an antique resonance as founders of the League in 1888; Wigan’s dramatic rise would be even more spectacularly heady if they were to beat Liverpool today and then stop in their tracks the strutting leaders, Chelsea, next weekend at Stamford

Jaspistos

New coinage

In Competition No. 2420 you were invited to invent words describing something familiar which fill a need in the English language. The germ of this competition was a book called The Meaning of Tingo which assembles ‘extraordinary words from around the world’, from which I learnt that the Japanese have a single word to describe ‘a woman who appears pretty when seen from behind but not from the front’ and another very useful one which means ‘to try out a new sword on a passer-by’. I make way now for your own glorious neologisms. Each item wins its inventor £4, and Nicholas Hodgson gets the bonus fiver. Nompathy: concern felt

Paul Johnson

Things to pray for in this season of Advent

This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I

The Spectator

Letters to the editor

Birth of the internet Martin Vander Weyer’s excellent piece (‘The UN and the internet’, 26 November) should also have pointed out that the internet was a US defence project. In the 1960s military analysts saw the potential for a fault-tolerant command-and-control network in the event of all-out nuclear war. In collaboration with major universities (including UCL in London) the US Defense Department funded MILNET, which in the late 1970s became the internet. It is therefore jolly kind of them to let us use it in all its derived forms without any royalty, in spite of what it cost the US taxpayer. Likewise, it is kind of them to let us

Peter Oborne

How Cameron plans to profit from the war between Blair and Brown

Almost exactly two years have passed since Michael Howard was drafted in as emergency leader of the Conservative party. He has done the job he was asked to do. He took over at a moment of traumatic collapse. He administered first aid and gradually brought the victim back to life. In due course colour returned to its cheeks, and it was able to sit up in bed. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of Dr Howard, the patient is now taking tentative, unaided first steps. The recovery is by no means assured. But Howard’s own role is over. His final act was bravest of all. When he suddenly announced that he

The Spectator

No surrender | 3 December 2005

A fortnight ago this magazine praised the Prime Minister for a statesmanlike speech in which he made the case for abolishing agricultural subsidies and dismantling tariff barriers on food from the developing world. We repeat our assertion that if Mr Blair achieves this, it will be a legacy well worthy of honour. Unfortunately, however, he appears to be wimping out at the first hurdle. It is reported from within Whitehall that, in spite of having promised not to surrender the British rebate unless there is significant reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Prime Minister is preparing a fudge. The rebate will be split into two, part of which

Matt Price

Proud to be Thatcherite

Canberra John Howard is defying political gravity. After nearly ten years as Prime Minister of Australia he has no serious challengers. Tony Blair, by contrast, hobbles along performing an excellent impression of a fellow in the crippled poultry phase of his leadership. At 66, Howard is 14 years older than Blair. He has served a year longer in office, and he has won four elections to Blair’s three. You might think that Howard would be at least as burdened by scandal, disillusion, infighting, ennui and fatigue as the younger man. But you’d be wrong. Indeed, Howard is being encouraged by many in the Liberal party — Australia’s equivalent of the

Kevin Myers

Not all priests are paedophiles

The nightmare of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues. Last month a US law firm, Manly & Maguire, ann- ounced it was suing the Irish diocese that trained the busy paedophile priest Oliver O’Grady. This worthy is now at the centre of at least 17 multi-million-dollar child-abuse lawsuits in the Californian diocese of Stockton. Worse is to come. Another 18 Irish priests are facing multiple-abuse charges in California alone, with law firms hustling for their share of the action against the Irish dioceses from which they came. Lawyers in many states across the US where Irish priests sowed their paedophiliac oats, turning Catholic children into unwilling catamites, are now eagerly

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Public-sector scroungers

Ross Clark on the workers who milk the rest of us by retiring early as a result of ‘ill health’ The next few months may well see the political death of Tony Blair. But whether he will get buried is another matter. In an echo of the public-sector bolshieness 27 winters ago that eventually brought down the Callaghan government, public-sector unions have renewed their threat to stage a national strike over proposals to raise their normal retirement age from 60 to 65. A month ago Alan Johnson, the trade secretary, appeared to buy off a strike by agreeing with the unions to exempt all existing public-sector employees, even newly recruited

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Let Irving speak

I am surprised, incidentally, that our tradi-tional enemies do not object that only Aryan names are used for these disasters — why no Hurricane Isidores or Chaims?David Irving offers up his observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, September 2005. David Irving, the British histo-rian and alleged ‘Holocaust denier’ will be spending this Christmas and New Year in a Viennese prison cell while the Austrian authorities attempt to cobble together a charge against him relating to something he said 16 years ago. Back in 1989, while visiting Austria, he remarked, as he was wont to do, that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz — a view he has more

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 26 November 2005

Downing Street let it be known that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was sympathetic to plans to build new nuclear power stations; but then government ministers announced he had not made up his mind after all. The wholesale price of gas reached five times its cost at the beginning of November. Because of increased rail freight traffic (from 15.1 billion tonne-kilometres in 1996 to 20.7 billion in 2004), chiefly in imported coal, new goods-lines might be built in Britain, according to Mr Iain Coucher, the deputy chief executive of Network Rail. Two probationer policewomen were shot, one fatally, when they were called to a travel agency in Bradford that

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 26 November 2005

Poor countries need tariffs Contrary to your leading article (‘Full marks to Blair’, 19 November), ActionAid is absolutely correct to challenge Tony Blair’s commitment to forcing free trade in manufactured goods in the WTO ‘Doha round’ of global trade talks. Labour’s general election manifesto promised no forced liberalisation, and the ‘Doha round’ is about development, not just market access. Rather than lead to more jobs and less poverty, our research shows that the current proposals for deep tariff cuts in developing countries could bring massive job losses, bankruptcies and factory closures — a development disaster. Virtually all of today’s developed countries built up their economies using tariffs, subsidies and other

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 26 November 2005

It’s a Sunday and as our son doesn’t have any sporting engagements for the first time in 657 years my partner proposes a Family Day Out, a simple enough phrase always promoted in newspapers — The Best Family Days Out; Great Days Out For The Family — but one which always strikes terror in my heart. What amuses one family member often does not amuse another. The one who is not amused sulks. The one who would otherwise be amused sulks at the one who sulks. The one who was initially indifferent sulks because everyone else is sulking and in no time at all the Family Falls Out and the

Frank Keating

Lyricist of the links

A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In view of the prim pretensions of US sport when on its best starched-bib parade, the occasion was aeons away from the British Lions’ tours John and I covered in rugby’s relishable old amateur days. In his address, Hoppy quoted the antique aphorism that the quality of writing about games improves as the size of the

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 26 November 2005

Q. I was rather hurt yesterday when I delivered my 80-year-old mother to the Carlton Club at 3 p.m. to meet her friends and have tea and the porter would not allow me in. ‘Madam, are you wearing jeans!’ Too true — Armani jeans, Jermyn Street shirt, Burberry mac, flat ankle-length leather boots and small smart black leather shoulder bag. So out in the street — a five-hour round trip and not even a cup of tea. Thanks, Carlton Club. Advice please. J.M.A., address withheld A. Since you have a mother of 80 you must be at least 34 yourself. It is surprising that you could have arrived at that

Robin Oakley

Family fortunes

Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather, but you get a much better idea whether a horse will stay on winter ground working it on grass.’ Paul’s wife Fiona watched on old Flying Instructor, once the stable star and winner of races like the Red Rum Martell Chase at Aintree, now the nearly white hack leading the string. Astride one Thelwell-style pony

Taki

Menace and danger

New York A letter to the mother of my children from the greatest living French writer, Michel Déon, one of the 40 immortals of the French Academy, shows me to be a philistine. Michel kindly points out that Mozart’s Don Juan was inspired by a Molière play, not by a Beaumarchais one, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago while defending womanisers. I think I knew that, but I guess my mind was on Harold Pinter and the prize he got for writing unwatchable plays, and I scribbled the wrong name. Michel also writes that he doubts Marie-Laure de Noailles ever had a German lover because she was too

Jeremy Clarke

Ex-factor

I’ve gone round to Sharon’s and walked into a stand-up row between Sharon and her brother in their kitchen. They’re yelling at each other and the dog’s going barmy. She’s a slut and he’s a dick is the argument in a nutshell. The phone rings. I make myself useful and answer it. It’s Trevor, Sharon’s ex. He’s drunk, he’s down the pub and he wants Sharon to drive him and his van back to his house. He’s shouting as well. I relay the message to Sharon. She sags theatrically in despair, bursts into tears and aims a girly haymaker at her brother. I drive Sharon, who’s still weeping, to the

Joan Collins

Diary – 26 November 2005

An actor’s life is either feast or famine. For 90 per cent of us too often it’s famine, as our thespian business is vastly overpopulated and competition is fierce. In the past months I’ve had more than five jobs, including a two-week stint on Footballers’ Wives, which, after almost a year of famine, felt like drinking nectar. Talk about glitzy camp! It was a hoot as the girls (and boys) are fully made up, coiffed, manicured and exquisitely dressed to kill, or kick, in the height of chav fashion. Luckily, I played a magazine mogul with stunning wardrobe so I was able to stay away from Burberry ‘Andy caps’ and

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Commando courage

Patrick Hagen served as a wireless operator with 4 Commando Brigade signals troop. Here he describes the moment when, while guarding their exit route during a four-man hit-and-run raid on a radar site on the French coast, he and his friend Harry were discovered by two Germans. ‘There were only two types of commandos, the quick and the dead. This is what we’d been taught. So we both shot at once. Harry gave his man on his side two shots and I gave my man two shots. There was a small hole in his front — where the other shot had gone to, I don’t know — but a very