Society

Saturday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Death, drugs and red tape

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty their lofts to send surplus possessions to Cancer Research shops, and many more will be stuffing ‘pinkie rings’ on to their fingers and toes in order to support work on breast cancer. In all, Britons last year raised £302 million for cancer charities, far more than any other country in Europe. As a result of

Friday

Douglas Davis

Diary – 14 October 2005

If you’re thinking of moving to Sydney, forget it. That slice of unsolicited advice was offered when I made my third visit in little more than a year. The idea of actually settling in Sydney has never crossed my mind, but for those who are contemplating such a move the advice is sage stuff. Sydney is a city in crisis: house prices are sky high, on a par with those in London; the urban sprawl has reached its limits; the roads are clogged, and the reservoirs are running dry. I suggest to a city shopkeeper that the airport authorities should hang a ‘No Vacancies’ sign under the ‘Welcome to Sydney’

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 October 2005

Mr David Davis, Mr Kenneth Clarke, Mr David Cameron, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Malcolm Rifkind displayed what attractions they could muster as candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Boots the chemist, with 1,400 outlets in Britain, announced a merger with Allied UniChem, with 1,250 outlets in Britain and Europe, to produce a company with 100,000 employees and a value of £7 billion. A takeover of Telewest by its rival British cable operator NTL was expected to produce a communications company with revenues of £3.4 billion. BP warned that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might knock more than £400 million off its third-quarter

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 October 2005

Blackpool ‘With his designer wife, his two children (there is a third on the way) and his Notting Hill home, Mr Cameron does not look like a traditional Tory,’ I read in the papers. In what sense is this not a traditional Tory set of attributes? True, most Tories do not have designer wives — either in the sense of ‘designer t-shirt’ or in the sense meant here, that Mrs Cameron is a designer (of handbags) — but it is perfectly normal for them to have two children with a third on the way and, if they are rich, to have a house in Notting Hill. The thought behind sentences

Frank Keating

Sven’s last stand

A revitalised Scottish team will cause a heck of a bonny din at splintery auld Hampden this afternoon — olde tyme optimism. Ditto Northern Ireland at venerable Windsor Park. Neither are likely to qualify for next year’s World Cup finals, but England are, yet the preliminaries to their match at Old Trafford against Austria have been imbued with jaundiced, fatalistic vapours. Should England come a cropper today the fuss will be fulminating and the fallout grievous as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s team attempt to salvage something from the wreckage in their last-chance qualifier against Poland on Wednesday. If England fail to qualify for Germany 2006, their Swedish coach will be on that

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 October 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am the only child of parents in their seventies who are not super-rich but who do own a house in Dorset worth more than the £265,000 one is allowed to inherit before the 40 per cent inheritance tax comes into play. Ideally they would hand ownership of the house over to me now in the hope that they will live for another seven years (at least!), so I can avoid paying this tax, but I feel I cannot make this suggestion to them myself. Nevertheless it is impractical not to take what steps one legally can to prevent wasting money. What do you suggest, Mary? Name

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 8 October 2005

The case for Ken In last week’s issue you conducted a poll on how the public would view the Tory leadership candidates if they were better known, and concluded that ‘without the advantage of recognition, Ken Clarke would no longer be the front-runner’ (‘Clarke’s advantage fades away’). But surely what your poll actually shows is that Ken Clarke is, in fact, the only man for the job. It demonstrates both that Clarke is (leaving aside hypothetical situations) the only candidate people have heard of and how important this recognition factor is. How is it that Labour is in its third consecutive term? The fact is that the lies, broken promises

Taki

Spanish style

Madrid This is the sultriest city in Europe and, along with Paris and Rome, the most romantic capital of the old continent. When visiting Madrid there is only one place to stay, the Hotel Ritz, right in the heart of the city, opposite the Prado. There is a bucolic air about the Ritz, with the wide leafy streets that surround it and its beautiful garden-restaurants, which hint of romance and the forbidden pleasures of long ago. The past, of course, is what Spain is all about. Charles V had made it the most powerful country in Europe, imbuing his people with pride as well as melancholy, which his chronically depressed

Jeremy Clarke

Waiting for Mr Kurtz

The yellow plastic tables on the terrace outside the ferry-terminal bar faced directly into the afternoon sun. It was the last week of September and surprisingly hot. We’d been over to Roscoff for the day, from Plymouth, just for something to do, and we’d been uncomfortably hot all day, traipsing round in our sports anoraks and rucksacks. My boy said he was going for a wander, which I’m beginning to think is a euphemism for having a crafty fag. We’d seen all we wanted to see of Roscoff, a pretty little fishing town full of sprightly old French people, with an open-air food market, very expensive, with middle-class stall-holders. And

Graham Stewart

Business as usual

Reality television has demonstrated that it is no longer necessary to possess a distinguishing talent in order to enjoy celebrity status. Critics might argue that Simon Garfield has worked similar wonders for the diarist’s art. Where once we were treated to the inner demons of generals and statesmen, Garfield touts the daily musings of ordinary folk doing nothing much. For We Are at War, he has unearthed the diaries of five individuals who originally submitted their entries to the Mass Observation organisation in the first 14 months of the second world war. That clash of empires and ideologies has often been described as the ‘People’s War’. Yet, intriguingly, none of

Andrew Lambirth

Mixed company

The visitor to the depressing subterranean galleries of Tate Britain might be forgiven for feeling a trifle bewildered in the first room of an exhibition unashamedly titled Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. To the left is James Tissot and to the right a vast canvas of Paddington Station by the little-known Sidney Starr (1857–1925), who departed these shores for America in 1892, and perhaps made good. (Certainly, his dreary expanse of platform could profitably have been left undisturbed in Durban Art Gallery, rather than shipped over specially for this exhibition.) There’s even a large George Clausen in this first room, but where are the brand leaders? On the far wall a

Christopher Fildes

A soling and heeling for Boots, or just another round of hunt the thimble?

Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war …. Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the Western desert. The new plan is to merge with Alliance UniChem, thus giving Boots even more chemists’ shops. Until now, armchair strategists — the High Street is full of them — have assumed that Boots has quite enough shops. Its trouble has been to know what to do with them. What would people rather buy

Jaspistos

Competition | 8 October 2005

In Competition No. 2412 you were invited to supply a ‘jabberwocky’ poem beginning ‘’Twas brillig…’and containing new words of your own invention. By ‘jabberwocky’, which was deliberately lower case, I meant no more than surreal. I wasn’t inviting you to follow Carroll’s monster-slaying scenario, or his metrical scheme, only to match his inventiveness with neologisms in a wacky poem. Many of you over-egged the cake, throwing in so many invented words that I had only a faint idea of what was going on: in ‘Jabberwocky’ it is clear enough, even if you have to guess the meaning of ‘tulgey’ or ‘gimble’. It is almost impossible to write an amusing ‘nonsense

Paul Johnson

Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit physics interested him most. His friend Christopher Wren was a mathematician-scientist before he concentrated on architecture. Their colleagues in the Royal Society discussed all topics. When Diderot was compiling his Encyclopédie, he drew no frontiers between arts and sciences. As late as the year 1800, Humphry Davy, Coleridge and Wordsworth formed a trio of creators

Aidan Hartley

Terror in Mogadishu

On a recent drive in downtown Mogadishu with ten heavily armed bodyguards, I passed the site of the old US embassy, and observed a melancholy scene that Britain and the USA might ponder if they decide to bale out of Iraq early. The embassy has been totally demolished, either out of hatred or because Mogadishu’s benighted inhabitants need bricks with which to build their hovels. The site is now a forest of thorns browsed by camels. Washington has long regarded Somalia as nothing but a nasty backwater populated by ungrateful Africans, but the continuing violence there — much of it directed by Islamic extremists — suggests that the country may

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Guilty until proved innocent

Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max Clifford could not have timed better her arrival in Britain. As Mrs Menezes and other members of her family surveyed the spot where her son was summarily executed on suspicion of being a terrorist, the Prime Minister was on a stage in Brighton saying this: ‘We are trying to fight 21st-century crime — antisocial behaviour,

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 7 October 2005

A new exhibition of ancient Persian material at the British Museum has brought out the usual affirmations about how wonderfully humane and civilised Persians were, and how vicious the Greeks were in painting a picture of them as slavish, effeminate subjects of an oriental despotism that has helped pervert Western views of the East ever since. It is true that, since the Persians left no accounts of themselves except the usual boastful lists of royal achievements (Darius talks merrily about the number of enemies he impaled), we largely rely on Greeks for information about them, especially Herodotus (died c. 430 bc), who investigated why Greeks and Persians fought the Persian

Michael Heseltine

Diary – 7 October 2005

A decade ago, as president of the Board of Trade, I was responsible for competition policy. I could refer or not refer. I could accept advice or reject it. In the background — but not far away — were Parliament and public scrutiny. How times change. The Office of Fair Trading is now its own creature. Ministers have washed their proverbial hands; quangocrats rule. So what is going on in this citadel of devolved power? For months we in the press and publishing world have been worried about a forthcoming OFT opinion about our traditional method of distribution, whereby wholesalers are granted a monopoly of defined areas, provided they distribute

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 1 October 2005

Mr Tony Blair, in a speech at the Labour party conference, said, ‘The challenge we face is not in our values. It is how we put them into practice in a world fast-forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed.’ To combat antisocial behaviour he proposed ‘a radical extension of summary powers to police and local authorities to take on the wrongdoers’ and ‘more competitive sports in schools’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants soon to be prime minister, said in his speech, ‘I learnt from my parents not just to do my best and to work hard but to treat everyone equally, to respect others, to

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 1 October 2005

Prepare to leave Iraq As one who was against the invasion of Iraq from the start, I feel I must now urge a complete reappraisal of what our forces can realistically be expected to achieve there. Whatever views people may have had on the legitimacy of the various reasons presented to them for going to war, the operation — from the moment the military objectives were achieved — has degenerated into a disaster. Last week there were reports from usually reliable sources in the press that the militias have infiltrated at least half the police and internal security forces in the Shia and Sunni regions, and barely 10 per cent