Any other business

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for Eddie’s sake

Bill McDonough once preached to Wall Street from the pulpit of Trinity Church, taking his text from St Matthew and reminding his astonished hearers of their duty to their neighbours. Lord George (Eddie, still, in the City) prefers to take his text from J. Fred Coots and Henry Gillespie, authors of the 1930s classic ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’. To an astonished banquet of bankers in Guildhall on Monday, he warbled his message: ‘You better be good, for goodness sake.’ A warning came with it: ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good.’ This was Santa, an example to central bankers everywhere.

Paul Johnson

When copulating, beware falling into Deep Structures

I don’t give a damn for grammar, or syntax either. Having learned to ‘parse’ as a small boy, and done ten years of Latin and eight of Greek, I take it all for granted. But I love semantic and grammatical niggles and rejoice in the way some people get red in the face with rage at the lapses of others. Thus Earl Granville, when foreign secretary, telegraphed to Sir Stafford Northcote in Washington that the substance of the treaty between Britain and America (eventually signed 8 May 1871) was all right but that ‘in the wording of the Treaty Her Majesty’s Government would under no circumstances endure the insertion of an adverb between the preposition “to” and the verb’. The Earl was something of a stylist.

Stephen Glover

Why is the Times so down on the Tories? And is it to do with Katharine Raymond?

Political parties should not sue newspapers: that would certainly be my general view. But one can understand why the Tories should have issued a writ against the Times. It follows two articles in the newspaper last month alleging that its Aussie campaign director, Lynton Crosby, had told Michael Howard that he was bound to lose the general election. The Times declined to publish a denial issued by the Conservatives, who also claim that they were not approached before publication. The action bespeaks a wider disenchantment on the part of the Tories. If these two articles had been out of the ordinary, there would be no writ. Michael Howard’s people evidently believe that the Times is often gunning for them, and they are largely right.

Saturday

Stephen Glover

Is Murdoch about to cut the cover price of the dumbed-down Times?

To read the mind of Rupert Murdoch is difficult and not necessarily pleasant — difficult because he is cleverer than almost any other publisher who has ever lived, and not necessarily pleasant because he is nearly always planning to do someone down. But students of the man generally agree that the only thing that drives him is circulation. It is all that matters. There is no point in having a low-circulation quality newspaper if it can be turned into a higher-circulation title of less quality. That is why he slashed the cover price of the Times in 1993, which more than doubled the sales of the paper and accelerated its dumbing-down. And it is why the Times adopted the tabloid format more than a year ago, a change which has also increased circulation, if much less spectacularly.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

A cure for melancholy: Parmigianino, Dickens, Schubert

My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.’ It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. I sit in my library, while the rain beats down on the windowpanes at either side, and the garden is so vaporous I can scarcely see the winter-flowering prunus bravely setting out her pink blossoms, and I fill my mind with the better things of long ago.

Stephen Glover

Our modest war heroes may be forgotten by the state — but not by the Telegraph

Every morning, when I am faced by my pile of newspapers, almost the first thing I do is to turn to the obituary page of the Daily Telegraph. Obits in all the serious papers are good — generally much better than they were 20 years ago — but the Telegraph has a particular specialisation which its rivals hardly try to emulate. Three or four times a week it carries pieces about former servicemen who fought in the second world war. To be included it seems that you need to have won a military medal, or else gone on to achieve high rank after the war. These obituaries record the acts of sacrifice and bravery of young men over 60 years ago. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the British press.

Ross Clark

Everyone benefits | 29 January 2005

Douglas Alexander tells UK music industry: Government pledges continuing help to reach US and China.This year 20 music events are being organised (up six on last year) and UK Trade & Investment will allocate nearly half a million pounds to promote the industry overseas in key markets like the US and China.... Douglas Alexander, minister for Trade, Investment and Foreign Affairs, will attend Midem, the largest international music trade fair event in the world, in Cannes on 24 January, and will begin his visit with a lunch reception hosted by representatives of the Music Business Forum. This will be followed by a visit to see the new ‘British at Midem’ music village where he will meet many of the 300 delegates from a wide range of music genres and businesses.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Why not stop abusing Prince Harry and start thinking?

‘We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.’ Macaulay’s famous castigation of humbug, apropos of Moore’s Life of Lord Byron, applies perfectly to the sententious huffing and phoney indignation heaped upon the silly head of Prince Harry for wearing Nazi uniform at a fancy-dress party. Ye gods! Are we never going to be allowed to consign Hitler and the Nazis to history, where they belong? In April it will be 60 years since Hitler’s final defeat and death. How long do we have to wait before those dreadful times can be seen in a cool perspective unclouded by emotions, especially false ones whipped up by newspapers like the Sun, a media pachyderm with the brains of a shrivelled pea?

Christopher Fildes

All Lombard Street to a china orange as the last bank moves out

Last exit from Lombard Street. This week Barclays begins to pack up and move out. The bank’s founder set up shop there as a goldsmith 315 years ago, and Barclays has been established on its corner site under the sign of the black eagle since 1728, periodically building and rebuilding. The post-war head office, a massive stone money box, was knocked down to make way for a lumpy effort in the Moorish taste, known to its City neighbours as the Islamic Cultural Centre. The directors never liked it — they had to go downstairs to tomb-like lunch-rooms in the basement — and four years ago put down an order for a tower in Canary Wharf. In May, when the move is complete, Barclays will have 5,000 of its staff all toiling away under the same lofty roof. Such is banking fashion.

Stephen Glover

Can the Guardian be a newspaper both of the Left and of the establishment?

John Lloyd has become a much lauded guru of serious journalism. A former member of a fascinating group called the British Irish Communist party, he is now a loyal Blairite, and edits the on the whole very good Financial Times Saturday magazine. He is also the author of an interesting recent book on the British media which for some reason escaped the notice of this column. One day we may put that right. Mr Lloyd recently used the pages of his magazine to make an ex-cathedra pronouncement. This was that the Guardian is poised to become the new paper of the British establishment. His suggestion, which is certainly correct, is that the Times has voluntarily given up its position as the establishment newspaper.

Ross Clark

Everyone benefits

From this week, we will be picking out some gems from the Panglossian world of government press releases, a world in which our hard-working ministers and civil servants make valiant efforts to better the lives of a grateful public. The title of this column, Everyone Benefits, is a frequent phrase which crops up in New Labour press releases to describe how nobody, least of all you the taxpayer, ever loses out from its initiatives. Lakeside Darts Action Promotes Adult Numeracy The Minister for Skills and Vocational Education, Ivan Lewis, today visited the World Professional Darts Championships at Lakeside to promote adult numeracy learning with the British Darts Organisation.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Why the giant waves were acts of a benevolent God

Things are stirring on the God front. A leading atheist recants his disbelief, provoking cries of anguish from the Darwinian fundamentalists crowded on to their isolated bandwagon, now stuck in the mud of events. On the other hand, the giant waves in the Indian Ocean shocked the Archbishop of Canterbury — not one whom Jane Austen would have called ‘a sensible man’ even at the best of times — into doubting the existence of a deity, or at least a benevolent one. The question of whether the notion of God is compatible with the existence of evil or calamitous events in the world is a very ancient one, and was pondered by Plato and the Stoics, and most of the early Christian philosophers — such as Origen — and later by Thomas Aquinas.

Christopher Fildes

Keeping them busy at North Colonnade — it’s time for a Trouser Authority

Oh, look. In response to widespread lack of public request, the people at North Colonnade have found something new to regulate. A sequence of count-down advertisements — only so many days to go — have been preparing us for the joys of general insurance regulation, which comes into force on Friday. If you are in the business and your application form has not gone in by then, you are (as the ads remind you) committing a criminal offence, so there. What business? Well, insuring things: selling insurance, advising on it, arranging it, being an agent for it or helping with the paperwork. Even if it is only a marginal part of your business, or something you do in your spare time, you’re caught.

Theodore Dalrymple

Second Opinion | 15 January 2005

Is there, or could there be, anything more sacred than human life? How precious is our brief flowering or interlude between two eternities of oblivion. That is why the wisdom of ages has accorded to motherhood such deep and abiding respect. Until now, that is. Last week I was examining a patient who was accused of having assaulted his girlfriend. His solicitor thought he might have some kind of illness that caused him to hit women. He, the solicitor, didn’t want to be sued later for having left any stone unturned in the defence of the indefensible. I asked the defendant about his previous girlfriends. At the age of 14 he had had two: a girl of 15 and a woman of 37.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

The decline and fall of the femme fatale

My old friend Peregrine Worsthorne was deploring the other day the decline in the quality of courtesans. And it is true that those who get themselves into the headlines today, either by the voracity of their sexual appetite or their status as mistresses of prominent men, do not strike one as notably interesting or desirable. But were they ever? And what is a courtesan anyway? A lady of easy virtue with court connections? A royal whore? Nell Gwyn did not hesitate to use the word, calling herself ‘the Protestant whore’ to an angry mob hunting for well-connected papists. There is in the Correr Museum in Venice a suggestive panel painting, done by Carpaccio in 1495, and known to Ruskin and Proust, who loved it, as ‘The Courtesans’.

Christopher Fildes

Instant ethics — just open the package and give your conscience a break

How convenient it would be if we could find something out of a package — a computer programme, presumably — to do our conscience’s work for us. Then we could switch off and stop worrying. Happily, in the world of investment, this need has been met, with the invention of ethical funds, armed with ethical codebooks. These are the investors’ equivalent of buying bubble baths from the Body Shop — a tepid glow of self-satisfaction comes with them. The Financial Times even has an ethical investment index, smugly entitled FTSE4Good. Along the way, ethics have been codified and redefined to fit the package. Now investors in Framlington’s Health Fund find themselves called to a meeting and asked to approve a change in their fund’s objective and purpose.

Ross Clark

Globophobia | 8 January 2005

The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says it has sent 30,000 animals at £25 a time, many of them to East Africa. ‘How many times have you bought your uncle a tie, a plant or a book that he doesn’t need?’ reads the bumf on the Oxfam website. ‘The Oxfam catalogue can solve your problems by allowing you to buy him a really useful present this year — a goat.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

The angry Megalosaurus coming fast up Holborn Hill

When the new year is young I always have the impulse to do something sensationally novel in writing. But what? Is there anything which has not been done before? I answer: yes — coin a new metaphor. We take metaphors for granted and use them without thinking, mix them too, and abuse them constantly — whenever we say ‘literally’ we almost always mean metaphorically (e.g., ‘Chirac and the Chinese President literally fell upon each other’s necks’, the New York Times). In fact it was a genius who invented the metaphor, long before Homer (about 2000 bc in Egypt, which raised problems for those who carved the hieroglyphs, its syntax making no provision for metaphors; the priest-carvers took refuge in abbreviations, cf.

Frank Johnson

Religion is never easy, and sometimes it’s hard to be a truly faithful Wagnerite

Two weeks ago, quite a few of us in London were at a religious occasion. On the face of it, this was unsurprising since it was just before Christmas. But few competing religious occasions would have had this one’s air of reverence. It was the first night of the first part of what will become a new production of Wagner’s Ring at Covent Garden. Many of us arrived early just so that we could stand around and experience the mass expectation. Over the throng in the bars there was a sense that we were about to be admitted to something sacred. The seats had sold out within hours of going on sale months before. The sense of occasion was all around us. What would the production be like? What would be its ‘concept’?

Stephen Glover

However bad things may seem, the news for newspapers is good

As another year looms, I cannot remember such despondency in what used to be called Fleet Street. It is not just that several newspaper groups are losing money: it was ever thus. There is talk of a general decline in newspapers. Some even suggest that the written word — as it appears in a bundle of newsprint delivered to your door or picked up at a newsagent — will not last more than ten or 20 years. We are told that the Internet will tempt more and more readers, and that the young do not have the same interest in newspapers as their parents and grandparents did. The sharpest decline in readership has been in London, where almost every title has suffered, and it is adduced as a warning of what will happen in the rest of the country.