The Spectator back issues from March 2008:
Order, order
Mar 01, 2008 ...The Speakership of the House of Commons has been aptly described as 'the linchpin of the whole chariot'. This is why the lamentable conduct of Michael Martin, who has occupied the Speaker's Chair since 2000, is more than just another parliamentary 'sleaze' story. By his sheer stubbornness, Mr ...
DIARY
Mar 01, 2008; ...We woke up early on Oscar morning to see the hills of Hollywood wreathed in fog, clouds and spitting rain. I shivered in the unseasonable freezing weather. 'Should be fun on the red carpet this afternoon, ' I said to Percy. Turning on E! channel at 10 a. m. we watched presenters and starlets in ...
THE SPECTATOR'S NOTES
Mar 01, 2008 ...This is what Stubbs's Constitutional History of England says: 'That individual members should not be called to account for their behaviour in Parliament, or for words there spoken, by any authority external to the house in which the offence was given, seems to be the essential safeguard of ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Mar 01, 2008; ...MONDAY Thank goodness I keep a diary. I want to put on record here so that future generations of Lightwaters can see that it was my idea to have Our Leader encounter a great white 'shark' while surfing in South Africa! Moreover I picked out the blue, Malibu-cut Vilebrequins Dave was ...
Eye of newt and toe of frog aplenty
Mar 01, 2008; ...DRY STORE ROOM NO. 1 : THE SECRET LIFE OF THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM by Richard Fortey HarperPress, £20, pp. 352, ISBN 9780007209380 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This book is a metaphor: a book about a museum that is itself a museum, crammed with cabinets and curiosities; a ...
Made in Sweden: the new Tory education revolution
Mar 01, 2008; ...Stockholm This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be ...
The real tributaries of Enoch's 'rivers of blood'
Mar 01, 2008; ...What was in Enoch Powell's mind when he made his explosive 'rivers of blood' speech on immigration 40 years ago this spring? His repetition of wild allegations against immigrants made by his constituents and his apocalyptic warnings of bloody racial conflict ended his front-bench career ....
Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web
Mar 01, 2008; ...The man who brought you Bridget Jones is, you might think, an unlikely guide to the deeper philosophical and cultural meaning of the web. But, as he sips his tea in the kitchen of his Highbury mews home, Charles Leadbeater makes an extremely convincing magus of the online revolution and the new ...
Boris's most brilliant wheeze to date was the letter to the Guardian attacking him
Mar 01, 2008; ...The battle to become Mayor of London is getting dirty. Someone from Boris Johnson's campaign team -- or maybe Boris himself -- put a hilarious spoof letter in the Guardian this week. It purported to be from 100 'academics', luvvies, lesbians and professional agitators, all of them aghast at the ...
Rip up Blairism by the roots
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: Michael Gove (Politics, 23 February) gives a eulogy to Tony Blair, 'I admired Tony Blair. I knew Tony Blair'. I had hoped that David Cameron's claim to be 'the heir to Blair' was just a silly mistake springing from inexperience. It is more worrying to find that Blair worship is ...
Our own enemy
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: Douglas Murray's description ('A scholar who dares to look terror in the face', 23 February) of the terrorist mentality is spot-on: 'narcissism, widely misconceived altruism, youth, envy, mental and sexual dysfunctionalism, will to destruction and utopian absurdity'. ...
Cui bono?
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: Hugo Rifkind's conspiracy theory (Shared opinion, 23 February) about Diana's death has the merit of reasonableness, compared with the Al Fayed ...
Score one for Toscanini
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: Paul Johnson (And another thing, 16 February) might be amused at this delightful vignette about Toscanini's genius. An out-oftown visitor to Milan was enticed by a poster announcing that Toscanini would conduct that night's opera entirely from memory. Being a sceptic, he purchased a ticket ...
Substance abuse
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: I looked up Venetia Thompson on Google and was not surprised to see, given the lack of any evidence or other proof offered in support of her comments about white men and Obama ('Obama is a modern-day Othello', 23 February), that she does not appear to be a psychologist, anthropologist, ...
Celtic cringe
Mar 01, 2008 ...Sir: Molly Watson (Style & travel, 23 February) begins by saying 'Dylan Thomas used to say that a day away from Wales was a day wasted.' Was this the same Dylan Thomas who said 'Wales is the Land of my Fathers. And my fathers can have it'? Perhaps he meant that a day away from Wales is a ...
The truth about the Auschwitz 'gimmick' row is that Labour exploited Jewish sensitivities
Mar 01, 2008; ...David Cameron, said the Times last Saturday, 'was facing intense political criticism last night after including student "trips to Auschwitz" on a list of government gimmicks.' The Daily Mail was more shrill: 'Pressure was piling on David Cameron last night to apologise, ' said the paper ....
Whatever happened to Sir Richard Evans?
Mar 01, 2008; ...I had read -- admittedly in the Guardian -- that one needed to count one's fingers after shaking hands with Dick Evans. Anecdotes about the super-salesman who secured UK plc's biggest and most controversial contract, the $80 billion Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis that saved ...
Darling has offered an incentive for chicanery
Mar 01, 2008; ...Imagine the scene at around 10 p. m. last Thursday night in the private apartments at Buckingham Palace. It could well have been past normal bedtime for the Queen and Prince Philip, but they were sitting up -- perhaps aided by a scotch and water or some camomile tea -- waiting ...
Thom Gunn
Mar 01, 2008; ...We set out to explore the poison root, To etch the brain with new cartography, The harbour-glitter and the wine-dark sea. The only rule was endless latitude. Let the unready falter and retire -- We loved and feared your eager solitude, The city as a man-made ...
Small elephant at Dove Cottage
Mar 01, 2008; ...THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH by Frances Wilson Faber, £16.99, pp. 267, ISBN 97805771230471 £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a lively contribution to that mound of books -- now approximately the height of Skiddaw -- about Wordsworth and Coleridge and their ladies in ...
Plunging into the hurly-burly
Mar 01, 2008; ...THE REST IS NOISE: LISTENING TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Alex Ross Fourth Estate, £20, pp.624, ISBN 9781841154756 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 'Avoiding both the pigeon hole and the blackboard I have tried to trace a connecting line between the apparently diverse and ...
Power to the people
Mar 01, 2008; ...GOD'S FURY, ENGLAND'S FIRE by Michael Braddick Allen Lane, £30, pp. 758, ISBN 9780713996326 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In July, 1642, as the English House of Commons debated whether to raise an army against the king, a dismayed MP, Bulstrode Whitelocke, wondered how ...
The return of Kureishi-man
Mar 01, 2008; ...SOMETHING TO TELL YOU by Hanif Kureishi Faber, £15.99, pp. 344, ISBN 9760571209774 £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the ...
An appeal from beyond the grave
Mar 01, 2008; ...RECONCILIATION: ISLAM, DEMOCRACY AND THE WEST by Benazir Bhutto Simon & Schuster, £17.99, pp. 328, ISBN 9781847372734 In 1988 I arrived in Pakistan a few hours after the assassination of Zia ulHuq, the military dictator whose aircraft had been blown to pieces by a bomb. In most ...
A time for resolutions
Mar 01, 2008; ...In the forthcoming volume of his Smoking Diaries (not out till April, but I've been reading a proof copy) my old friend Simon Gray makes a brave admission. Well, he makes a number of these, but this particular one struck me. 'I haven't read him [Henry James] for years. I don't believe ...
Portrait of a director
Mar 01, 2008; ...David Piper, director of the National Portrait Gallery 1964-67, was a brilliant historian and museum director who, while writing a book called The English Face, found that there's no such thing. It vanished like the smile on Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat. Piper himself was disinclined ...
Art for the masses
Mar 01, 2008; ...Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography Hayward Gallery, until 27 April There's a whole separate exhibition in the downstairs galleries of the Hayward. It's called Laughing in a Foreign Language and is supposed to explore the role of laughter and humour in contemporary ...
Aural danger
Mar 01, 2008; ...The Guardian had an interesting -- and, frankly, terrifying -- piece the other day by Nick Coleman, the Independent's long-serving and shamelessly cerebral rock critic. I used to know Nick slightly: we talked drivel on the same radio show for a while a dozen years ago, and he wrote a piece ...
Family at war
Mar 01, 2008; ...Margot at the Wedding Nationwide, 15 Margot at the Wedding is one of those unsettling and bothersome films which will bother and unsettle you during, afterwards and possibly for much of the next day, like a flea in the ear. If this is your sort of film, then you will like it ...
Compare and contrast
Mar 01, 2008; ...Flight London Coliseum Ballet galas might be the dream of every spectacle-craving balletomane, but they can easily become a nightmarishly boring series of 'party pieces' if they are not properly organised. Luckily, this is not the case when a company such as Ensemble ...
Seeking redemption
Mar 01, 2008; ...The Lady's Not For Spurning (BBC4, Monday) was ostensibly about Margaret Thatcher and the baleful influence she had on the Conservative party after 1990. It was actually about Michael Portillo's long quest for redemption. This has been going on since May 1997, when he lost his seat. As he ...
Dead end
Mar 01, 2008; ...Salome Royal Opera House What is a producer, or, as they more often like to be called these days, director, to do if he is asked to produce/direct a work about which he has no interesting ideas and none comes along during the production process, and the invitation comes from a ...
Wild life
Mar 01, 2008; ...Only this column would persuade me to get up at 6.30 on a Sunday morning. Six-thirty! In my other life I pore over the collected works of the 18th-century writer Dr Johnson, who constantly struggled to persuade himself out of bed before noon. He liked the idea of early rising, ...
Good guys, bad guys
Mar 01, 2008; ...An interesting week, to say the least. A Carlton Club speech on multiculturalism which didn't quite come off, a kidnapping in Gstaad, a party in London to celebrate David Tang's knighthood, the mugging of John McCain by the man who committed adultery with Emma Gilbey, a great Pug's club lunch ...
Open for business
Mar 01, 2008; ...I can go for fortnight without a drink -- three weeks at a push. After that I begin to feel disconnected. I try to ignore the feeling, hoping it's a symptom of Seasonal Affective Disorder, or the onset of a cold, or overdoing it at the gym. But it persists and, after several days, changes into ...
Cheating at food
Mar 01, 2008; ...'Ecraser l'infâme!' Voltaire proclaimed in his war on corrupt priests and crooked government officials. Delia's Smith's new book How to Cheat at Cooking opens up a whole new field of infamy: the culinary crime. As in 18th-century politics, so in 21st-century cuisine, it's the public who gets ...
Cut-price torture
Mar 01, 2008; ...My favourite television advertisement at the moment is for EDF energy, which promises us that it can make our bills lower. All we have to do is use less gas and electricity. Please, do not snort. I snorted initially. Then a few days later I received my gas bill from EDF. It ...
One man and his winery
Mar 01, 2008; ...When his father died, Rob O'Callaghan, the maker of Rockford wines in South Australia's Barossa Valley, was mildly surprised to find that several hundred mourners turned out for the funeral. His father had not been a particularly high achiever and Rob had not realised the old man had so many ...
Pleasure boats
Mar 01, 2008; ...If ever you want to murder your husband by hitting him over the head with a bottle, always choose champagne. The glass is over twice as thick as normal wine bottles, and so it's unlikely to smash. It is therefore very unfair to criticise the Duchess of Cornwall for the fact that the Veuve ...
Ancient & modern
Mar 01, 2008; ...Macavity-like, Brown was never there when he was Chancellor, and rarely seems to be there now he is Prime Minister. When he is, he is always blaming someone else or avoiding the question. This is highly reminiscent of the second Roman emperor Tiberius who, like Brown, was following someone, ...
Money talks in Mumbai
Mar 01, 2008; ...With Shilpa Shetty, Lachlan Murdoch, Aussie feist-meister Andrew Symonds and more Indian billionaires than you can shake a stump at, the eye-watering player-auction for the new Twenty20 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Mumbai last week was never going to be something tailored for the Long Room at ...
Their Lordships' duty
Mar 08, 2008 ...One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of the House of Lords is what political scientists, borrowing the language of biologists, call 'redundancy'. We have two eyes and two kidneys in case one malfunctions. In the case of the repackaged EU Constitution -- now called the Lisbon ...
DIARY
Mar 08, 2008; ...Mumbai A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the ...
The Tories should fear the dynamic new team of professionals that Brown is assembling
Mar 08, 2008; ...It is a story that could have been scripted to boost morale in Conservative headquarters. At five o'clock one morning, security guards at 10 Downing Street were called in to intercept an intruder only to find the Prime Minister trying to enter his own office. Apart from the delicious image this ...
DIARY OF A NOTTING HILL NOBODY
Mar 08, 2008; ...MONDAY Oh dear. We lost the war of Obama buzzwords at the weekend. Now there's an inquest to find out how Gordon managed to get compared to Barack before Dave. I just don't understand it. All that briefing. All those meticulously written speeches with the mandatory 25 mentions of the ...
THE SPECTAOR'S NOTES
Mar 08, 2008; ...The battle over the evaded referendum on the Lisbon treaty seems to be following the pattern of all European arguments in this country. The pro-integrationists have used the favourite tactic of claiming that it is all a fuss about nothing. The treaty, they say, is technical, too boring to be ...
Keeping the bear at bay
Mar 08, 2008; ...WARSAW 1920: LENIN'S FAILED CONQUEST OF EUROPE by Adam Zamoyski HarperPress, £14.99, pp. 160, ISBN 9780007225521 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Who would think that a battle as decisive as Marathon or Waterloo took place at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? Such is the ...
No sleep till Denver: Hillary, the unlikely underdog, takes it to the wire
Mar 08, 2008; ...San Antonio, Texas It was meant to be the night that Barack Obama sealed the deal. The presidency seemed almost within his reach. Then, against the odds, like the villain in a horror movie, Hillary came back from the near-dead. And by the end of Tuesday night -- with a thumping win in ...
Velvet revolutionaries
Mar 08, 2008; ...Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group Tate Britain, until 5 May The Millbank branch of the Tate empire is currently blessed with two major loan exhibitions of painting, and if you find the Peter Doig retrospective a bit too thin for your taste, the thick dry crusty surfaces ...
Lines of beauty
Mar 08, 2008; ...Perhaps we need the occasional humiliation to remind us that we are human, though for some of us daily life provides more than sufficient evidence. Turning right off the high street into a narrow yard, I stalled the unfamiliar car, blocking the road. Other motorists tolerated my first ...
Tales from the riverbank
Mar 08, 2008; ...There can be few more gentle prospects in all Scotland than looking across the waters of the Tweed at Kelso to the low, shimmering crenellations of Floors Castle beyond. In the 19th century C.J. Apperley in Nimrod's Hunting Tours called the river the 'Rex fluviorum', and H.V ....
Water, Prozac, management consultants: all completely useless
Mar 08, 2008; ...According to one serious frontpage newspaper report, all those bones found on the site of that former children's home in Jersey were actually left-over props from an edition of Bergerac. The whole place is taped off, they've had the floppyeared sniffer dogs in and the supposedly grisly, ...
GLOBAL WARNING
Mar 08, 2008; ...It has been shown conclusively that people who listen to the news or read a newspaper at breakfast are more miserable than those who wisely maintain themselves in ignorance. Unfortunately, help for the former is not at hand: one of the main stories in the newspapers recently was that ...
It is not US Marines who should be on trial
Mar 08, 2008; ...After 9/11, the United States had the sympathy of the world on its side. Yet as we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this sympathy and trust has been entirely eroded, and during the making of my film, Battle for Haditha, I saw exactly how and why this change of heart and ...
If God proved he existed, I still wouldn't believe in him
Mar 08, 2008; ...The syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn't stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark's Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing ...
Beware the politician posing as a scientist
Mar 08, 2008; ...One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue, however remote it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir ...
Education revolution
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: Fraser Nelson ('Made in Sweden', 1 March) is right to highlight the importance of Sweden's independent state schools for the debate on school choice and diversity. The successful Swedish experience strongly influenced New Labour reformers as we sought to introduce independent state-funded ...
Powell unhinged
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: Robert Shepherd's analysis of the reasons behind Enoch Powell's notorious immigration speech ('The real tributaries of Enoch's "rivers of blood" ', 1 March) is fascinating. But there are other more concise explanations. My aunt, Dame Enid Russell-Smith, worked closely with Powell ...
Moor to the point
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: I am relieved to know that my concerns about the possibility of a President Obama are due not to any substantive matters but solely to my 'primeval racist fears of the black super-male'. Before reading Venetia Thompson's article ('Obama is an Othello for our times', 23 February) I ...
Disproportionate claims
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: According to its website, the British- Israel Communications and Research Centre, of which Lorna Fitzsimons is CEO ('Israel is getting ready to invade Gaza', 23 February), is an organisation 'devoted to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in the UK'. These aims might ...
London calling
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: Rod Liddle is not only nasty and sexist and silly, he's wrong ('Boris's most brilliant wheeze', 1 March). I'm not in Newcastle upon Tyne and I haven't worked there for years. He could have ...
Magic lines
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: I find myself going along with most of Paul Johnson's choices (And another thing, 1 March). But there is surely one grievous omission, one total blind spot. Mr Johnson claims Keats is his favourite poet but says that all of his poems are 'too long'. Surely he has forgotten -- rather than ...
Briefs encounter
Mar 08, 2008 ...Sir: Tamzin Lightwater writes (1 March) about David Cameron's Vilebrequin swimwear. As any keen follower of political fashion knows, whereas Tony Blair wears Vilebrequins costing £80 a pair, Dave wears lookalikes ...
If it's good that Harry was fighting the Taleban, why are we queasy when Israel fights Hamas?
Mar 08, 2008; ...Do you reckon they told all the royals? Seriously? All of them? Even the flaky minor ones, like Fergie? Or has she been gossiping with the Countess of Wessex and the bafflingly female Princess Michael of Kent, these past three months, wondering where Harry was, and whether this time he'd done ...
New oil giants rise in Gandhi's native land
Mar 08, 2008; ...Gazing out over India's Gulf of Kutch from the small jetty owned by Essar Oil, you would hardly think you were witnessing the birth of one of the world's new industrial heartlands. Placid turquoise waters stretch out to the low landmass opposite; behind you lie mile upon mile of shimmering salt ...