Any other business

Relax. You are under no obligation to read the small print. There is a clause in Europe’s constitution about bringing our economic policies — money and tax — into line with our neighbours’, but it must have got past the Prime Minister, because he has flown to Rome and signed us up for it. In any case, we shall be able to vote on it. In eighteen months or so from now, if he is still with us, he will stage his promised referendum. One other promise of this kind remains outstanding. Before the pound can be submerged in Europe’s single currency, we shall have to vote in favour — but he has never called this referendum, because he has never yet felt confident of winning it.

If there is one material I particularly relish, it is alabaster. It is slightly soluble in water and therefore defenceless against a rainy climate. So it can’t be used for outdoor work on cathedrals and churches. For internal decoration, however, it is superb, being soft and easy to cut; it takes a high polish and can be painted with almost any kind of pigment including watercolour. In the Middle Ages, workable deposits were discovered in Staffordshire and near Nottingham, and by the mid-14th century English alabaster was famous, and religious figures and altarpieces carved from it were exported all over Europe.

The news that Tony O’Reilly may be willing to sell 30 per cent of the Independent newspaper seems utterly astounding. It has enjoyed a considerable succès d’estime by going tabloid. From being a catch-up sort of newspaper which did not excel in any particular area, it has become a trendsetter. First the Times followed suit and produced its own tabloid version. Then the Guardian announced that once it has acquired new presses it will transform itself into a so-called Berliner — i.e., the same shape as Le Monde. The rejigged management at the Daily Telegraph will have to make up its mind whether or not to produce a tabloid edition. Nor is this tabloid craze confined to Britain.

Don’t you just love those socio-economic league tables which put Britain a miserable 25th, virtually down among the developing nations, while Scandinavian nations emerge on top? The first time I went to Denmark I wasn’t quite prepared for the frumpiness, so often had I seen its social democratic model depicted by left-leaning academics as a paradise on Earth. The Left has another such table over which to bleat about the misery of modern Britain: a Geneva-based organisation called the International Labour Office (ILO) has compiled an ‘economic security index’ which it claims measures health and happiness around the globe. Sweden emerges top, followed by Finland, Norway and Denmark. France is seventh, Germany ninth and Britain a lowly 15th.

The Prime Minister has enjoined us to be ‘in complete solidarity with Russia and the Russian people’, and invites us to draw a parallel between the terrorist threat from al-Qa’eda and the threat posed by Chechen lunatics. I am not so sure about that. Is it not possible that if Osama bin Laden had never been born and there had been no attack on the World Trade Center, Russia would still be besieged by appallingly cruel home-grown terrorists? It is easy to feel a sense of solidarity with the people of Beslan, even of Russia, but impossible to identify with President Putin and his government. We do not share the same values. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Putin’s almost totalitarian treatment of the media.

Ever since he became editor of The Spectator, which must be about five years ago, Boris Johnson has been urging me to write a column about the Financial Times. It is a subject which seems to drive him towards apoplexy. As Boris sees it, the FT is run by leftist énarques whose hearts are very far from the businessman struggling with cashflow problems in Nuneaton or, as it might be, Henley. It is a newspaper for sharp-suited Eurocrats and fat cats on the early morning shuttle to Brussels or Milan, not the hardworking capitalist stuck in his dingy office with the VAT man menacing outside the door. I am sure he is right. And yet until now I have turned a deaf ear to his diatribes.

Unlike British newspapers, the New York Times enjoys beating its breast. It recently published a lengthy ‘editor’s note’ which acknowledged that its coverage in the months before the invasion of Iraq ‘was not as rigorous as it should have been’. The paper conceded that ‘articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display’ while other articles that called the original ones into question were ‘sometimes buried’. Many people may regard this apology as pompous and rather absurd. But if a newspaper gives the impression that weapons of mass destruction existed in profusion, and posed a deadly threat to the West, should it not apologise when it becomes clear that they did not?