Features

Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower Boing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wrote ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’. In peace and war, trouble and strife, mourning and celebration, here and now, Big Ben reminds us of ourselves.

Like all red-blooded members of the human race, there is nothing I like more than looking at pictures of Liz Hurley. So this month’s Tatler was a particular treat. There she was in wellies, accessorised by tulle and mousseline gowns in dusty baby-pink. The pictures ticked all the right boxes. Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, in ballgown and Wellingtons in the hen house at Chatsworth? Check! Muddy-hem-and-heaving-bodice costume dramas set in National Trust locations? Check! (The shoot was at Sezincote, Glos, a jewel of a mini stately modelled on a Rajasthan palace.

Rod Liddle says that the insane therapeutic methods used by Haringey Social Services typify the ideological determination of these ‘experts’ to accentuate the ‘positive’ and ignore social reality The Baby P case is still howling around us all, another gale of reproof hammering at the shutters of our liberal indulgence and at our fathomless respect for experts and institutions. We might all have harboured the suspicion that social workers were, in the main, absolutely useless, driven by an outdated and discredited discipline and ideology (that’s sociology and multiculturalism), and not especially bright. But it took Sharon Shoesmith, who was the boss of Haringey Social Services when Baby P was murdered, to drive home the point.

In the hall at Aberglasney — a fine, classical country house, built in 1720, 20 miles north-west of Swansea — high up by the cornice, an elaborate chunk of plasterwork is missing. To give the full catalogue entry, it is a rococo console, carved with twirling honeysuckles, a motif dear to the ancient Greeks. I know, to my deep and lasting shame, where to find it. In fact I can see it now, on a mahogany stand next to my desk. Its protuberant plaster leaves provide a nice perch for my keys where I don’t forget them. For all its usefulness as a key perch, the console would look better glued back to the cornice in Aberglasney’s drawing room. And so I am returning it.

As we circle out into Table Bay and back towards the mountain, the pilot welcomes us to Cape Town – and warns us about the burgeoning violence. For the first time, locals are talking about it too. ‘We all know people who have been raped and murdered,’ says one friend who delivers me to my guesthouse after a meal and watches until I am safely inside. She rings her security company and arranges for a guard to meet her at her door if she is coming home late. So do my other female friends. I’m staying at Kalk Bay, a seaside village a little way outside the town centre, where you can buy freshly caught fish on the quayside and which has the shabby chic of parts of Notting Hill.

In an exclusive interview, Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, talks to Matthew d’Ancona about the licence fee, the Ross-Brand affair — and hints at flexibility over funding If there is a stereotype of the BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons does not match it. Marmaduke Hussey, for instance, was the archetypal establishment patrician, while Gavyn Davies was one of the original New Labour cronies (felled by the Hutton Inquiry). Sir Michael, in contrast, has a beaming, technocratic countenance, the look of a brand manager at Sunshine Desserts who has good news for C.J. about tapioca sales. Which is probably a good thing, given the scale and the nature of the task that faces him, and the range of adversaries he confronts.