Society

Saturday

Miriam Gross

Diary – 19 November 2005

I’d never have guessed that there was a connection between Joan Collins and the novelist Anthony Powell, the centenary of whose birth is being commemorated with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. But there is, as I discovered quite by chance 20 years ago when I went to interview Powell to mark his 80th birthday. He and his wife Lady Violet had invited me for lunch before the interview; indeed he had himself prepared one of his famous curries and he greeted me at the door wearing a cook’s apron. At one point during lunch he asked me who had been my last interviewee. My heart sank. Would he feel

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spilling the beans on bankers, blondes, booze and boxers

A funny thing happened to me on the way to The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch. The early crowd in the foyer of Claridge’s ballroom was largely made up of City guests invited by our excellent sponsor, Threadneedle Investments, while less well-mannered parliamentary and media guests arrived late or not at all. I recognised several senior figures from my own banking days, among them a former colleague. Since this column is, this once, about journalistic good manners rather than corporate name-dropping, I will not hint at his identity. We exchanged pleasantries until a third party in the conversation moved away; then he brought his face closer to mine, with

Jaspistos

Bouts rimés | 19 November 2005

In Competition No. 2418 you were given certain rhyme-words in a certain order and invited to write a poem accordingly. The rhymes came from Masefield’s ‘Where They Took Train’ which has a rather unexpected first line, ‘Gomorrah paid so for its holiday’. I hope the old Poet Laureate would be happy rather than horrified at the use his poem is being put to here. The combination of ‘holiday’, ‘inn’ and ‘sin’ inevitably suggested to many of you the scenario of a dirty weekend, so that I found myself awarding brownie points to those competitors who showed originality, not suggestibility. Mae Scanlan, Brian Murdoch, W.J. Webster and G. McIlraith pleased, but

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2005

The Normal and Adventitious Danger Periods for Pulmonary Disease in Children (1913) by William Carlos Williams The great American modernist poet William Carlos Williams was also a full-time paediatrician. He received his MD in 1906 and practised continuously until 1951. The rare booklet above is among his small corpus of medical writings, appearing originally in The Archives of Pediatrics in August 1913. In it he explores the possibility of a ‘danger period’ for children just before puberty, when greater growth in height in relation to chest capacity makes them more vulnerable to pulmonary disease. As he puts it, ‘The height always increases, relatively, at the expense of the chest …

The Spectator

Full marks to Blair

Over the past fortnight it has been necessary for this magazine to side with those who would like to bury Tony Blair. This week it is our solemn duty to praise him. No amount of disquiet over his illiberal — and happily failed — scheme to subject terror suspects to 90 days’ detention without charge will stop us from recognising that the Prime Minister’s foreign- policy speech at Guildhall on Monday was an impressive piece of statesmanship. In a month’s time members of the World Trade Organisation will gather in Hong Kong to continue the so-called ‘Doha round’ of negotiations over the liberalisation of world trade. The leaders of developed

Frank Furedi

The age of unreason

To this day I am astonished when I hear that sensible, biologically mature adults allow themselves to be treated as if they were incompetent dimwits by a new army of professional surrogate parents. In days of old, traditional authority figures, like priests, instructed us how to behave in public and told us which rules to observe. Today’s experts are even freer with their advice. They do not simply tell us what to do and think, but also how to feel. A new army of life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides regularly lecture us about the most intimate details of our

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 12 November 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, insisted on pressing ahead with a Bill to allow police to hold anyone suspected of a terrorist offence for 90 days without charge. The government prepared legislation to allow terrorists who had fled Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement to return to the province without prosecution. Six men were arrested in connection with the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast last December, and two were released without charge. The High Court heard a case for compensation by more than 5,000 serving and former officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), which they said had failed those

Frank Keating

The Sultan of Multan

The one-off splendours of Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq offer a spicy tang to England’s first post-Ashes Test match which begins today in his hometown of Multan. The contrast with that soft-showered, gold-leaved autumn evening of hurrahs at the Oval seven weeks ago will be immense. Ancient Multan pitches its wicket on the very edge of the Punjab desert where sands storm, a battering heat pervades every pore, and spiritual mysticism permeates every sense. The Haqs have long been landowners of style and importance there; the batsman’s rich deeds make him the venerable city’s undisputed monarch, the nawab; Inzy is, if you like, Sultan of Multan. Ursine or pachyderm, take your pick

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 12 November 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have an old and dear friend who lives abroad. She divorced her husband some years ago and lives alone. We are both very fond of her and are usually delighted to see her whenever she is in England. My wife has a timeshare in the Lakes which we go to at the same time each year. We often invite guests who have included our friend but from time to time we do enjoy going by ourselves. This year we hoped to do this, but our friend invited herself, making it a very difficult week. Worse, she expressed the intention of joining us again

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 12 November 2005

The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a few minutes’ rooting around. Deeper spadework showed how wrong I was. The Greek sukophantes, literally ‘fig-revealer’, had a picturesque derivation thrust upon it, sceptically retailed by Plutarch in his life of Solon. The translation by Thomas North (1579), used by Shakespeare, says: ‘Wee may not altogether discredite those which say, they did forbid in the

Taki

Hot spot | 12 November 2005

New York When Jean-Marie Le Pen democratically won the right to challenge the incumbent Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, I wrote in this here space that happiness was to wake up and find Le Pen president of France. By the reaction I had, you’d think I had prayed for Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot — I list them in order of the numbers they killed — to have landed the top job in the land of cheese. Three years later, the chickens are coming home to roost, as they say in Clermont Ferrand. Paris is burning, or rather French cars are burning, and the people that Le

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Diary – 12 November 2005

There was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage that has overtaken the country in recent days. Cars seem to have had the worst of it. In the truest French bureaucratic traditions, somebody has even been keeping a countrywide tally of those destroyed: by Monday night the toll had reached 1,408 vehicles. On the same day a different news story caught my eye —

James Astill

A disaster waiting to happen

A few days after Baghdad fell to American soldiers, CNN aired footage of a harassed marine wrestling to contain an unruly mob, and yelling, ‘We’re here for your fucking freedom! Now back up!’ The occupation was already in trouble. Looters had grabbed their freedom with greedy hands, ransacking almost every state building left unbombed, stripping them of police records, Babylonian antiquities and porcelain urinals. And America had no plan, and no clue, of what to do with the broken and bitter country. In words often quoted, yet still amazing, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary nominally in charge of Iraq, saluted the madness: ‘Stuff happens and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy,

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A bad hair day for Tony Blair at the Chocolate Factory

Rivers of fudge are to be expected from corporate PR people, but the Cadbury factory at Bourneville has an unusually impressive one — an endless six-feet-wide flow of the soft, brown confection, about to be sliced into ribbons, then chopped into tiny rectangles, coated in chocolate and popped into Milk Tray boxes. Even more seductive is the assembly line for chocolate Creme Eggs — made in halves with the yolk in one half only, then neatly flipped together, sealed, wrapped and sent bobbing along the conveyors. But it was one of the robots in the packing section that earned a spontaneous round of applause from our tour party: simultaneously stacking

Jaspistos

Anti-hero

In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the first of a line of maladroit youths whose last mutation was Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. (I reread both books this year and found that the Huxley held up better.) The genre — what Mr Scogan in Crome Yellow calls ‘a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character’ — seems to have died

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The riots may be just what the French economy needs

Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too. Until the peoples of France and Germany are confronted by a palpable sense of national failure, they will never embrace the Anglo-Saxon model of market reform, and our continent’s economic logjam will never shift. For all its horror, and although no feeling person can welcome death and destruction, France’s convulsions this week could be for the French

Leo McKinstry

Young people are the business

Lazy, ignorant, shallow and irresponsible, more interested in taking drugs than in proper study, too apathetic to make it to the polling station but not to an ecstasy-fuelled rave: those are the images often associated with young people in modern Britain. Survey after survey shows widespread illiteracy and innumeracy among teenagers. At the ever-expanding universities, it is said that terror of placing too heavy an intellectual burden on students has resulted in remorseless grade inflation and undemanding degree courses like media studies and golf-course management. The anxiety about youth is graphically reflected in the current hysteria about binge drinking. A generation of young semi-alcoholics, whose entire lives are geared towards

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Profiles in courage

Have you ever escaped from captivity by removing from your boot the serrated surgical wire cunningly disguised as a shoelace and sawing through the windpipe of your hapless, squirming guard? Me neither, but I know someone who has. He’s a lovely old boy, gentle, thoughtful, slightly melancholy and, but for that unsettlingly sardonic smile and the gimlet glint in his eye, you’d never imagine for a moment that he could have killed anyone. But he did, quite a few times in fact, during his service in the second world war with the commandos. On this particular occasion, he had been captured with three of his comrades outside Dunkirk. One was

Patrick Sookhdeo

Will London burn too?

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has warned recently of ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Although he was not speaking principally about Muslims, they have become perhaps the most dominant group in British society. Divided along ethnic and sectarian lines, Muslims are nevertheless united by their creed, their law and the powerful concept of the umma, the totality of Muslims worldwide. The process of migrating and establishing a Muslim community in a non-Muslim context has an important place in Islamic theology. The word hijra is used to describe such a migration, in particular the migration of Mohammed and his followers in ad 622 from Mecca, where they

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The crescent of fear

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV. The fatwa was issued on day 11 of the rioting,