Features

With its move into 22 Old Queen Street, The Spectator will occupy a house full of friendly ghosts and memories of grand occasions in the world of the arts in the first quarter of the 20th century. For this elegant mansion in Westminster was for over 30 years the London home of Leo Frank Schuster, known to all his circle as Frankie, a patron of the arts and friend of the composers Edward Elgar and Gabriel Fauré and of the conductor Adrian Boult and the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He was homosexual and very rich. Born in 1852, as a youth he had worked for a spell in his father’s bank in the City but decided that his share of the family inheritance was all he needed and he could not waste his life making any more money.

Scandals have anniversaries, too, and another has just passed. In January 2006, it emerged that the Education Department (DfES) had authorised Paul Reeve — a man who had a police caution for viewing child pornography and was on the Sex Offenders Register — to be employed as a PE teacher in a school in Norwich. In May 2005, civil servants advised Kim Howells, an education minister at the time, that the man should be given only a warning, was not a risk to children, had not been convicted of an offence and that no child had been harmed. Reeve had not been put on what is still called ‘List 99’, the department’s blacklist, even though he was on the Sex Offenders Register. More cases were quickly uncovered.

Diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend. You may have heard that it’s ‘girls’ who share a special relationship with the little sparklers, but don’t be fooled; females have simply had a rather more sophisticated advertising campaign working for them over the years. Drug-addled soldiers, morally lobotomised mercenaries and bloodthirsty terrorists are more appreciative of the potential contained in those chalky-white carbon stones than any dewy-eyed fiancée could ever hope to be. Since the late 1990s, thanks to relentless lobbying by organisations such as Global Witness and Amnesty International, Western fiancées have become more conscious that these expensive symbols of eternal love may not have had the most loving of journeys to their left hand.

Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’. What a difference a year makes. The man I meet in the Treasury office has been transformed into a towering figure in the global warming debate. His report, The Economics of Climate Change, has had a huge impact in Britain and around the world. It is billed as hard proof of the compelling economic case to tackle global warming. It is hard to imagine a less likely evangelist than the quiet, bespectacled man who apologises for being late.

Andrew Geddes recounts the long affair between his  mother Margie and the great poet, and the passion of  his letters to her over many decades My mother first met John Betjeman in the summer of 1929. She was 20 and he was a master at Heddon Court prep school in Potters Bar where her brothers Dick and John Addis were pupils. Together with her parents, she had driven over from Primrose Hill in an open landau (my grandparents did not seem to be aware of the invention of the motor car) to attend the school sports day. It was a hot summer’s day and they sat in deck chairs on the edge of the games field watching the sports. A slim young master with large brown eyes and sticky-out teeth caught my mother’s attention.

Rod Liddle says that it is not only entertaining to put your money into companies that  behave naughtily. It is also economically lucrative: so buy more stocks today Are you worried about the size of the footprint you are leaving on this earth? More specifically, are you worried that it might not be big enough? I may have the solution. The Spectator Unethical Investment Fund (SUIF) is a chance for all those decent, God-fearing, rather right-of-centre citizens to put their money where their mouths are, for once. Sick of politicians whining about corporate responsibility?