Spectator articles from July 2004

Spectator archives from July 2004

Portrait of the week.
July 3, 2004... A fine old row broke out over an unpublished book, Off Whitehall, by Mr Derek Scott, a former economies adviser to Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. It detailed arguments between Mr Blair and Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. A...

The anti-Americans were wrong.
July 3, 2004... There was one thing surprisingly absent from last Monday's handover of Iraq's sovereignty by Paul Bremer, leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to Iyad Allawi, Iraq's new Prime Minister. It wasn't an extravagant ceremony involving a...

Diary.
July 3, 2004... After Wednesday's Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there's a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of...

Things may be looking up for Blair, but it is still not certain that he will fight the election.(Politics)
July 3, 2004... As any investment banker will tell you, share prices in ailing companies rarely go down in a straight line. The process of decline is typically punctuated by periods of stagnation, known by technical experts as a 'false bottom'. But these...

The Spectator's notes.
July 3, 2004... Summer storms can be worse than winter ones because the branches of trees in leaf--particularly ash and willow--are more likely to break. Last week half of our village, including our house, lost electricity for 27 hours when one of these breaks...

Fins ain't what they used to be: Charles Clover says that there's only one way to beat the celebrity chefs who are wiping out every endangered fish in the sea: take a trip to McDonald's.(Cover Story)
July 3, 2004... In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century...

The Blairs.
July 3, 2004... GIVE IT TO ME! IT'S MY TURN! YOU PROMISED YOU DID! YOU DID! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! YOU'RE SILLY! EVERYBODY LOVES ME! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Unilateral disarmament: Andrew Gilligan says that the new defence cuts will unman the British armed forces, and put soldiers' lives at risk.
July 3, 2004... Tony Blair's relationship with the Labour Left has always been sadly troubled. But now, finally, after Iraq, privatisation, the continued existence of foxhunting and the remaining litany of disappointments, comes something to bring a song to...

Get radical, Mr Howard: it's not good enough for the Tories to pinch Labour policies, says Simon Heffer. They must appeal to the people on the economy, education, drugs, immigration and Europe.
July 3, 2004... A shadow minister said to me last week, 'We might have a more credible leader now, but we have less credible policies.' We were talking after the Tories' announcement on health care--throw more money at the problem--had been followed by the...

Ancient & modern.(philosophy )
July 3, 2004... An American has done some "research' to demonstrate what he claims no one has yet acknowledged: that hoipolloi know better than the experts. Ancient Greeks knew that some 2,400 years ago. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato makes Socrates...

Mind your language.(Column)
July 3, 2004... As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying 'well', especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation. With conversation...

Forty per cent of nothing: if you want to know why voters are cynical, don't blame the press, says Rod Liddle--blame the mainstream parties for pushing almost identical policies.
July 3, 2004... The late novelist Douglas Adams was one of very few people who succeeded in pinning down, with admirable precision, the very meaning of life: it was, he argued, in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42. But there is now growing evidence...

Bring back railtrack: Tom Winsor, the Rail Regulator, tells Boris Johnson why he has hopes for a privatised future--in spite of unwarranted political intervention.
July 3, 2004... One of the reasons why some of us travel almost exclusively by bicycle is that under this government every other form of transport has been turned into a detailed psychological torment. As I write, the Tube is about to go on strike. Humps and...

Arab 'failure'.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From John Hatt Sir: In his otherwise excellent article about Israel, Max Hastings makes a surprising comment, claiming that the entire Arab world must be classed as a 'failed society' ('There is still hope in the Holy Land', 26 June)....

Europe uber alles.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Andrew Mitchell Sir: Daniel Hannah, writing about the European Constitution ('The way ahead for Europe', 26 June), states that he cannot remember anyone saying that EC law would have primacy when the UK gained EC membership in 1973...

Animal rights ignored.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Edward Collier Sir: Peter Oborne (Politics, 26 June) reckons that 'the Bill [banning hunting] raises massive human rights issues concerning compensation'. As my son might say, with rising inflection, 'Hello?' What infringement of...

Never plead guilty.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Cdr John Lewis RN Sir: In Life and Letters (26 June), Dr A.D. Harvey is quoted as referring to 'the possibility of prosecuting Noel Coward for a transatlantic tax dodge during the second world war'. Noel Coward was indeed prosecuted...

Drugs do harm.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Geoffrey Davies Sir: Charles Moore is right (The Spectator's Notes, 26 June). There are increasing numbers of young people (and their families) damaged by drugs. It's surely something the legalisers need to learn. Dr Susan...

Our hooligans are worst.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Michael Henderson Sir: If Rod Liddle ('English hooligans are pussycats', 26 June) genuinely believes that English football fans are no worse than those in other European countries, he need only visit any ground where they congregate....

Darcy and Devonshire.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From C.A. Latimer Sir: It seems unlikely that Chatsworth could have been Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberley (Life and Letters, 26 June). It would have been impossible for Mr Darcy to run such an establishment on a measly 10,000...

Hughes done good.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Peter Maddox Sir: While it has been good to see the return of Frank Keating (Sport, 26 June), one cannot let him get away with a false attribution. It was not the footballer-cum-racing man Mick Channon who gave the verb 'done good' to...

Going f--ing native.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Mary Breton Sir: Now that Iraq is safely sovereign, perhaps it is permissible to share this joke (from Texas) with your readers: two families moved from Pakistan to America. When they arrived the two fathers made a bet--in a year's...

Keeping Stalin in the dark.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 3, 2004... From Clarke Hayes Sir: It is true that the Russians were late in entering the war against the Japanese (Letters, 26 June) but the situation in the Pacific was not as simple as Professor Senn implies. Truman distrusted Stalin. He did...

In St Petersburg I glimpsed the hope and decency of Soviet communism.(Another Voice)
July 3, 2004... It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly. Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a 50-something Russian living in the former...

It is time to praise Mr Rusbridger--for not turning the Guardian into a tabloid.(Media Studies)
July 3, 2004... There lots of people who believe that Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, has messed up. Some journalists on his newspaper think that he has. So do many on the commercial side of the Guardian. The case against him is that over two years...

A welcome for the latest publication to illuminate the study of history.(And Another Thing)
July 3, 2004... History is by far the most important academic discipline. It encompasses all others, for every human institution or activity has a history, and so is a legitimate object of study. The historian is entitled to poke his or her nose into...

Getting up and making more of an effort? Our money is safer in bed.(City And Suburban)
July 3, 2004... I wonder what happened to all those plausible people who told us that we should be making our money work harder. Some of them must have been lynched, and some, I dare say, are promoting hedge funds and buy-to-let schemes. This was the sales...

Blunders and exhilarations.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS by Louis de Bernieres Secker, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 640, ISBN 0436205491 Louis de Bernieres' new novel, his first substantial work since Captain Corelli's Mandolin, ten years ago, proves, in many ways, a problem...

A very private dream.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... THE COMA by Alex Garland Faber, 9.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 160, ISBN 0571223079 Reading Alex Garland's third novel is a frustrating experience. He is a writer capable of brilliant storytelling, yet his book has virtually no plot; he can...

Fantasies under the river gums.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... WHITEFELLA JUMP UP: THE SHORTEST WAY TO NATIONHOOD by Germaine Greer Profile, 7.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 232, ISBN 1861977395 Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las...

Placeman without a place.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... ALASTAIR CAMPBELL by Peter Oborne and Simon Waiters Aurum, 8.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 378, ISBN 1845130014 One of the chief characteristics of New Labour, Blairism or the Project--they amount to the same phenomenon--is that many of the...

A man, a plan, a canal ...(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... NASSER: THE LAST ARAB by Said K. Aburish Duckworth, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 342, ISBN 031228683X Said Aburish, a Palestinian with excellent English who worked for years in Iraq, wrote a very good biography of Saddam four years ago. He...

A concern with appearances.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... CANARINO by Katherine Bucknell Fourth Estate, 12 [pounds sterling], pp. 340, ISBN 0007178654 I was bemused by this novel--a first from Katherine Bucknell, better known as an editor of Isherwood's diaries and of Auden studies. In its...

Le style, c'etait l'homme.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... ACCIDENTS OF FORTUNE by Andrew Devonshire Michael Russell, 13.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 127, ISBN 0859552861 We live in a demotic age. How is it therefore that by the beginning of the 21st century the Duke of Devonshire had become a...

The geographer of Bohemia.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... ANTHONY POWELL: A LIFE by Michael Barber Duckworth Overlook, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 338, ISBN 0715630490 To celebrate the centenary of Anthony Powell's birth next year an exhibition is being planned at the Wallace Collection in London,...

The boy done bad.(Book Review)
July 3, 2004... MY LIFE by Bill Clinton Hutchinson, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 1024, ISBN 0091795273 Speaking and writing represent two very different disciplines. The most spellbinding orator I ever heard 'was Aneurin Bevan. Yet when, in 1952, he...

The high kick of Regency fashion.(Critical Essay)
July 3, 2004... Few of the pleasures of adolescence endure through life, but one which has done so, in my experience, is the reading of the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. Devil's Cub was the solace of my O levels, The Corinthian attended my appendectomy,...

Time to wise up the BBC: Barry Millington writes an open letter to the new controller of BBC2.(Arts)
July 3, 2004... Dear Roly Keating Allow me to join the chorus of congratulations as you get your feet under your new desk at Broadcasting House. Knowing of your track record at BBC4, I was delighted to hear that you had got the job and I'm sure you won't...

Russian revelations.(Exhibitions 1)
July 3, 2004... Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy National Gallery, until 12 September, supported by BP 'Russia is vast', booms the introductory wall panel in the National Gallery's entrancing new exhibition. (Really? I thought it was a tiny island...

Breaking the waves.(Exhibitions 2)
July 3, 2004... Edouard Manet: Impressions of the Sea Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, until 26 September Modern art knew no more enigmatic or contradictory figure than the man commonly described as its founder, Edouard Manet. Among the strangest and most...

Un-British experience.(Music)
July 3, 2004... For those who have never heard of it, the annual Fez World Sacred Music Festival has established a cult following. In the ten years of its existence it has created such an individual formula for concert-giving, so fashioned around high ideals,...

Moral calamity.(Theatre)(Theater Review)
July 3, 2004... Guantanamo New Ambassadors Judith Bloom Southwark Playhouse The Pub Landlord Cambridge Theatre Tourists, not terrorists. That's the likeliest assessment of the Britons who have been released from Guantanamo Bay. Consider Jamal...

Impressive quartet.(Opera)(Opera Review)
July 3, 2004... Four Little Greats Opera North, Sadler's Wells Opera North concluded its season by bringing its 'Eight Little Greats' to Sadler's Wells, and I went to the final day, on which four of them were performed. This has been the most enterprising...

On best behaviour.(Television)
July 3, 2004... During one of the rain delays at Wimbledon this year they repeated a women's final from decades ago, Martina Navratilova versus Chris Evert, with commentary by Dan Maskell. It was as evocative of the past as--well, I was going to say a Cliff...

Animal magic.(Radio)
July 3, 2004... I was surprised to see that BBC reports should be based on 'accurate note-taking', a recommendation of the Neil report, set up after the Hutton inquiry to improve the corporation's news reporting. Making accurate notes has always been a vital...

Hungry for victory.(The turf)
July 3, 2004... When James and Pamela Mason were bringing up the precocious Portland, she was allowed pretty much what she liked, to encourage her to develop her own personality. She wore lipstick and couture dresses at four and was introduced to cigarettes at...

Greek greats.(High life)
July 3, 2004... As I write, the Greek football team is about to face the Czechs, by far the most talented team in Euro 2004. Win or lose, the heroic Hellenes have done the rest of us Greeks proud. It's politically incorrect to point this out, but when we beat...

Space invaders.(Low life)
July 3, 2004... There is a Japanese concept known as ma. A loose translation of ma might be 'the space between things'. In Kyoto, at the temple of Ryoan-ji, is a famous Zen garden. It is a dry garden of 15 rocks positioned on a surface of raked gravel,...

Over the hill.(Singular life)
July 3, 2004... The French have always enjoyed delivering snubs to les rosbifs. But now they have gone a step trop far. All red-blooded Englishmen, and loyal Englishwomen, should be inflamed this week by their shocking insult to our greatest rose anglaise,...

Wicked ways.(Bridge)
July 3, 2004... UNTIL recently, I was never quite sure what is meant by a Grosvenor Coup. I've often heard players exclaim to an opponent after going down in a contract, 'You Grosvenor'd me!', and I've always assumed it was an insult. I thought they meant that...

Spectator mini-bar offer.
July 3, 2004... I have bored on for ages about the excellence of South African wines. The end of apartheid made it easier for the country's winemakers to adapt to the latest techniques and to follow changing international tastes, while the fall in the value of...

Restaurants.
July 3, 2004... I go to the Cinnamon Club during the England v. Portugal match. I don't mind too much. I just don't have the constitution for these things. I watched England v. Croatia but got so nervous that every time the ball came near our goal I had to put...

Uranus.(Chess)
July 3, 2004... I recently purchased second-hand a charming little book from the 1930s called Chess for the fun of it by Brian Harley, chess editor of the Observer at the time. In his introduction Harley writes: 'Some misguided persons suffer from the delusion...

Olympics.(Competition)
July 3, 2004... In Competition No. 2347 you were invited to supply one stanza of an ode in praise of a real or imaginary winner of an Olympic event. 'I intended an ode/ But it turned to a sonnet.' The words of the poet Dobson applied to far too many of...

1671: absent friends.(Crossword)
July 3, 2004... The unclued lights (three of two words, the other six paired correctly) are of a kind. ACROSS 12 Pegasus member could be Danish frog (10, hyphened) 14 A dam or female bird (3) 15 Like Charlton, I get mixed with...

Midsummer madness.(Spectator Sport)
July 3, 2004... It is a precise half century since I was aware of Wimbledon. On the first Friday of July 1954 we were given a half day off games to cram into the common room to watch Ol' Drob flickering about on a fuzzy little monochrome screen. Jaroslav...

Dear Mary.(Your Problems Solved)
July 3, 2004... Q. I have been married for over 35 years and have four children and two grandchildren and parents still alive. My husband, of whom I am still fond, has been engaged in a long, weekday affair with a friend of mine, which is probably delightful...

Portrait of the week.
July 10, 2004... Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, asked by the Commons liaison committee if he would apologise for going to war with Iraq for the wrong reasons, said: 'It has got rid of Saddam Hussein and he was a tyrant. I do not believe there was not a...

Boycott the NSPCC.
July 10, 2004... Too much theory and not enough practice. Those were the words used this week by a lifelong shire Tory to describe what has become of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal Society for the Prevention of...

Diary.
July 10, 2004... The Reform Club in Pall Mall, which I have belonged to for nearly 50 years, is cheap and gemutlich--as Queen Victoria, who presides, would have said--and is where Laura and I stay on our visits to London. 'Bed-tea', as it is called in the East,...

Howard's Conservative party has made astonishing progress in a very short time.(Politics)
July 10, 2004... Just before the 1966 World Cup the England manager Sir Alf Ramsey remarked that his talented midfielder Martin Peters was 'ten years ahead of his time'. Peters himself was displeased by the observation, but Ramsey was in reality being...

The Spectator's notes.
July 10, 2004... 'Gazooks, what have we come to? Seven hundred and fifty unelected, unaccountable Lords and Ladyships discussing smacking children. A strange place to be debating so critical an issue to the family. What's wrong with the place to which we...

How to get into who's who: Michael Crick and Martin Rosenbaum reveal the lengths to which some people will go to record their names in Britain's foremost work of biographical reference.(Cover Story)
July 10, 2004... One of Britain's most secretive and mysterious intelligence-gathering operations is based inside a small, non-descript office block in St Anne's Court, a short passageway in Soho. The predominantly female staff who work at the heart of the...

The Blairs.
July 10, 2004... PETER? PETER?! IS THAT YOU? WHY ARE YOU GOING AROUND TOUTING GORDON FOR MY JOB?! PETER? ANSWER ME! THANK YOU FOR CALLING THE GEOFFREY ROBINSON HOME LOAN COMP...

Mind your language.
July 10, 2004... I had just looked up a phenomenon that a sharp-eared reader had heard on the wireless--the remarkable 'double is'--in Robert Burchfield's New Fowler's, when the telephone rang and I heard that he was dead. Dr Burchfield was a New Zealander,...

Invasion of the lawyers: Brendan O'Neill says that America's first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims.
July 10, 2004... Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq--the compensation culture. Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims, of individual...

Why the French lock up immigrants: Theodore Dalrymple says that the high proportion of Muslim prisoners in France reflects a deeply divided society.
July 10, 2004... Comparison is one of the ways by which we learn about the world; and yet how rarely do we make the kind of comparisons that would put our problems in a wider perspective. We prefer to live in a nationally solipsistic world, which is...

Let Slobbo speak for himself: John Laughland says that the case against Milosevic has all but collapsed for lack of evidence.
July 10, 2004... For a few hours on Monday, the world's human rights establishment was seized by terror. Slobodan Milosevic had been due to begin his defence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, but instead...

Ancient & modern.
July 10, 2004... As George Bush continues to battle with the problems of Iraq, he could do worse than read Virgil's Aeneid (19 Be), in which Virgil applauds Rome's worldwide dominion, but does not discount its human cost. Defeated by the Greeks, a band of now...

Peace comes dropping slow: no baton round has been fired since September 2002, says Thomas Harding, and Northern Ireland is enjoying its quietest period since 1968.
July 10, 2004... On holiday in Ireland recently, a few miles from the border with South Armagh, my girlfriend and I stopped for a pint in a small town called Ballyconnell. 'Which way to the pub?' we asked a local, and he directed us to Molly Maguire's on...

Mandelson says he's still important--and the horrible truth is he's right.(Thought For The Day)
July 10, 2004... Infestations of vermin, disease-bearing winged creatures and even malevolent spirits from the nether world are, in these civilised and technologically advanced times, summarily dealt with. We need not suffer their depredations for very long....

There'll always be an England when the rain pours down.(And Another Thing)
July 10, 2004... It was a quintessentially English occasion. About 16,000 people attended an open-air symphony and opera concert at Leeds Castle in Kent. They came equipped with all kinds of apparatus: small tents, folding tables and chairs, ice-buckets, stoves...

Ruling the waves.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Julius Wroblewski Sir: Charles Clover's piece on the world's declining fish stocks ('Fins ain't what they used to be', 3 July), good as it was, missed its chance to illuminate a greater picture. We are still exploiting the oceans...

Powerless people.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Joseph Askew Sir: I am at a total loss to explain Mark Steyn's recent article on Iraq ('Now it's up to the Iraqis', 3 July). In what possible sense is Iraq better off now than it was under the government that the British installed? It...

Cycles of danger.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Jules Lubbock Sir: Mary Wakefield (Diary, 3 July) raises the question of whether pedestrians are ever injured by cyclists. Here are two examples. A friend was hit by a cyclist on a pavement in Camden Town. Apprehended by a policeman,...

Not so moderate.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Steven Walker Sir: I read with interest your article by Stephen Glover (Media studies, 26 June). I was particularly interested in your comment that the Scotsman has been no more than moderately successful. It concerns me when industry...

Video games.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Frederick Forsyth Sir: Bitter controversy continues to rage over whether Swiss referee Urs Meier was right or wrong to disallow Sol Campbell's headed goal for England in Lisbon. In rugby union a referee can immediately refer any...

Hunting in earnest.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From John Wells Sir: Jessica Pownall misses the point (Letters, 3 July). First, foxes are not ripped apart alive. The leading hound kills it with one bite, as a terrier kills a rat. Secondly, foxes are a serious pest, killing not just...

Scientific heights.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 10, 2004... From Roy Rubenstein Sir: 'History is by far the most important academic discipline,' claims Paul Johnson (And another thing, 3 July). Not so. History is but action-replay to science, which continually seeks the ultimate limits of...

Excuse me, officer, could you direct me to the nearest public intellectual?(Shared Opinion)
July 10, 2004... Prospect magazine has cleverly won itself some publicity with a list in its July issue of 'the top 100 British public intellectuals'. It being alphabetical, Tariq Ali's name, I was pleased to see, was at its head. As a Tory, I am an...

The Sun's treatment of Wayne Rooney is barmy even by its own standards.(Media Studies)
July 10, 2004... Gentle readers of this column may not see the News of the World or the Sun very often, so they may be unaware that both Murdoch papers have gone bonkers in the grip of Rooney-mania. It started on Sunday with the News of the World devoting its...

Life may be hard in the High Street, but the chairman gets a soft landing.(City And Suburban)
July 10, 2004... Sir Peter Davis is an affable fellow with a mansion in the Cotswolds and a yacht on or off the Cote d'Azur, and now he will be able to spend more time with them. Until the other day he was chairman of J. Sainsbury, but he has shaken the...

How they saw themselves.(Book Review)
July 10, 2004... FACE TO FACE: BRITISH SELF-PORTRAITS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY edited by Philip Vann Sansom & Co, 81 Pembroke Road, Clifton, Bristol BS 8 3 EA, Tel: 0117 973 7207, 40 [pounds sterling], 29.95 [pounds sterling] (softback), pp. 312, ISBN...

Scotching some of the myths.(Book Review)
July 10, 2004... THE HUNT FOR ROB ROY by David Stevenson John Donald/Berlinn, West Newington House, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh EH 91 QS, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 339, ISBN 0859765903 Rob Roy (1671-1734) is one of the most famous of Scotsmen....