Society

Saturday

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

Jaspistos

Food for thought

In Competition No. 2419 you were invited to supply a poem in free verse beginning ‘I think continually of …’ ‘…those who were truly great’ completes the first line of a much anthologised poem by Stephen Spender. Free verse has a tendency to slip into something like very rough blank verse, and some of you fell into this trap. Of all the things continually thought about by you I was especially tickled by Paul Griffin’s ‘the Saturday Collectors,/ Mrs Broadworthy, Mr Brisk, and the sisters Payne,/ Always the same four’. The prizewinners, printed below, take £25, and I have no hesitation in awarding the bonus fiver to Noel Petty. I

Christopher Fildes

What goes up but won’t come raining down? The price of gold, and gold ingots

New York No helicopters are flying in the cold clear skies above Liberty Street, home of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from which I assume that monetary policy is in neutral. If money were running short, Ben Bernanke, successor-designate to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed, would be prepared to contemplate an air-supply of dollar bills, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. An air-drop of gold ingots would, by contrast, constitute a health hazard, which is one reason why Mr Bernanke has no plans for it. Another is that he cannot produce the ingots for the asking. For that purpose, nothing compares

Paul Johnson

Is the former ambassador a shit, a cad or a rat?

The bad behaviour of Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador in Washington, raises interesting questions of nomenclature. Should he be called a shit, a cad or a rat? I rather rule out rat as being tabloid-speak, and Meyer, though he has a lot to do with tabloids (as chairman of that humbugging body, the Press Complaints Commission), and actually flogged his memoirs to one, is not himself tabloid material, being dull and colourless. The Sun and the Mirror often refer to men who deceive their wives as ‘love-rats’. How do they refer to a red-haired tabloid editor who gets drunk, beats up her tough-guy actor husband and spends the night in

The Spectator

Produce the memo

A front-page exclusive in the Daily Mirror is normally something to be treated with great scepticism. Until, that is, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, offers his full stamp of approval by invoking the Official Secrets Act. Fantasies and hoaxes — unless they are fantasies and hoaxes propagated by HM government — by definition lie outside the scope of the Official Secrets Act. All of which convinces us that there must be some truth in the Mirror’s claim that in April last year President Bush, in the company of Tony Blair, discussed bombing the headquarters of the Arab television station al-Jazeera, in Doha, Qatar, and that the Prime Minister talked him

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The UN and the internet

The laptop on which I’m working tells me that it has sent 7,392 email messages to date, and if I knew how to reach its innermost parts it would probably provide a rather embarrassing list of every website it has ever visited on my behalf as well. Like most internet users, I have absolutely no idea how any of that traffic actually happened. I have a fantasy that it involves satellites in space and bunkers deep underground, full of scary professors and beautiful girls in lycra spacesuits dancing attendance on giant computers; and I sometimes wonder whether my cyber-correspondence is being monitored for key words (‘jihad’ perhaps, or ‘Galloway bank

Trevor Grove

Asbo-lutely mad

One way to imprison a suspected terrorist for 90 days or even longer, without any bother from Parliament, would be to give him an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. The Asbo could be drawn up to include a number of hard-to-follow rules such as never to associate with more than one other person in public or use the internet. Once a breach was proved in court, where it would be regarded as a serious criminal offence, the offender could be given a jail sentence of up to five years. Gotcha! Such is the concealed yet far-reaching power of the Asbo that this is a not entirely frivolous hypothesis. Asbos were introduced seven

Alasdair Palmer

The American way of torture

Alasdair Palmer on how the White House is trying to defeat Senator McCain’s anti-torture Bill America is starting to get anxious again about its use of ‘aggressive interrogation’. The more usual name for what the Americans have been doing to some of the people they think are terrorists is ‘torture’. When the pictures from Abu Ghraib first became public 18 months or so ago, they caused a flurry of agonised self-examination among senior officials in the country’s armed forces and intelligence services. That quickly passed when it was decided that what happened in Abu Ghraib wasn’t officially sanctioned. Now, however, something much more serious than Abu Ghraib worries the administration:

Mark Steyn

I back Black

Mark Steyn says that Conrad Black will beat the rap — provided he gets a fair trial In the Independent this week, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was teetering on the brink of his Glenda Slagg moment. You know Miss Slagg’s style: Monday: ‘She was the People’s Princess. Goodbye, England’s rose, our Queen of Hearts, God bless her.’ Thursday: ‘Diana, arncha just sick of her, shallow bulimic old fag hag?’ Ever since Conrad Black got bounced from Hollinger International two years ago, Sir Peregrine has been filing columns and giving interviews denouncing Black as a blundering colonial who at the behest of his sinister Zionist trophy clothes-horse turned the Telegraph from a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sometimes women share the blame

Rape is wrong, says Rod Liddle, but it is right to believe — as 30 per cent of British people do — that some victims are partly responsible There was a clever little opinion poll in your morning news-papers this week, courtesy of Amnesty International UK. The headline story from the poll was that about one third of British people thought that women were ‘partially or totally responsible’ for being raped if they didn’t say ‘No’ clearly enough, or were wearing revealing clothing, or were drunk, or had been behaving in a flirtatious manner. Usually opinion polls are, well, a matter of opinion: respondents tick a box expressing one view

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 19 November 2005

There was much speculation about the import of the government’s defeat, its first since it came to office in 1997, on a vote on the Terrorism Bill by 322 votes to 291, despite the jetting back from Israel of Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had only got as far in his visit as Tel Aviv airport. Some 49 Labour MPs voted against the provision to allow 90 days’ detention without trial; an amendment was then passed limiting detention to 28 days. Some commentators saw the defeat as a straw in the wind for the last days of Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister; others wondered how

Frank Keating

Red devils

From the 1870s, soccer’s insular ‘home’ unions had simply played among each other. Incredibly, England did not invite a foreign nation over here for a game for fully 50 years after they’d first played Scotland in 1871. Even after beating plucky little Belgium by 6–1 at Highbury in March 1923, the haughty English were not enamoured — over the next 22 years half-heartedly hosting only nine further games against various Continental neighbours while disdainfully totting up a total of 46 goals to 14. Of a sudden, the peace — and the bleak, monochrome, war-weary autumn of 1945’s bombed-out London — was lit up by the arrival at Croydon airport on

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 19 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. As an elderly art-lover, I was thrilled to be invited to the private views of exhibitions by both Julian Barrow and his brother Andrew. Alas, I see these take place on the very same night next week and, as I am now nearly 90 and practically bedridden, I really cannot risk the mid-evening trek from Julian’s landscapes at the Fine Art Society to Andrew’s alphabet collages at the Rebecca Hossack in Fitzrovia. As both brothers are hypersensitive, would it be tactful to chuck both parties rather than attend only one of them?E.E., London NW6 A. I have good news for you. I have consulted the galleries in

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 19 November 2005

In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers — that’s another old Borewich saying you’ll not have heard, I dare say. Come and meet my wife. A right Borewich lass. Garn thrixen. Better a troust ner a thoutch, eh?’ I was reminded of this inability to distinguish local peculiarity from the generally commonplace by the BBC wireless series Word 4 Word, which this

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 19 November 2005

Why children need us In attacking charities such as the NSPCC, the RSPCA and Cancer Research UK (‘Bullying for charity’, 12 November) Guy Adams also harms the beneficiaries. Both larger and smaller charities have a vital role to play in the voluntary sector. Each has its strengths and they complement one another. It is also wrong to assume that because the NSPCC is a national charity, it is not ‘local’. We have 177 projects across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands, all with strong links to the local community. Some of these projects work to help children rebuild their lives after abuse, and some work to prevent cruelty

Taki

Wild and crazy

New York I thought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than ever, I presume, her hubby having exposed those clowns passing themselves off as Her Majesty’s ministers. Jack Straw trembling in front of some hamburger-chewing American, and Prescott scratching his head about the Balklands. What a bunch of losers, oy veh! And speaking of losers, the bureaucrooks in Brussels want to introduce an emissions tax on

Jeremy Clarke

Match made in heaven

My friend and I arranged to meet outside the Boleyn pub, which is on the corner of Green Street and the Barking Road, 15 minutes before kick-off. I was about five minutes late and he wasn’t there. I had both our match-day tickets, so I couldn’t go in without him. I stood in the pub doorway and waited. If he didn’t turn up soon, we’d miss the start. I should have been gutted about this, because I’d flown across Europe that morning to get there, and he’d only had to come from Clapham, but the truth was I was just happy to be there. Being part of a West Ham

Simon Courtauld

Caviar crisis

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past 20 years. It would seem that the fishing in this sea was much better regulated in the days of communism in the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime in Iran. But the independent, not to say irresponsible, Russians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and Turkmen, and the fundamentalist Iranians, without any joint agreement to protect this hugely valuable

Alan Judd

Solid and dependable

Since its launch in 1989, Land-Rover’s popular Discovery has demonstrated that critical issues for motoring correspondents, such as handling and reliability, count for little when it comes to looks, comfort, usability and aspirations. Actually, that’s a little hard on the dear old Disco of that era. The V8 petrol version performed well and, although the early 200Tdi sounded and felt somewhat agricultural, it did the job after early problems were sorted out. The 2-litre petrol version is best ignored. The wallowing, on-road body roll of those early Discos — a consequence of their design for off-road excellence — never bothered owners as much as it did the motoring press. People