Santa Klaus
John Laughland talks to the Czech President, V.
Features
Saturday
Bagged by the USA
Owen Matthews goes on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s ‘Indian Country’ and sees them capture and interrogate suspects It was one of those wonderfully luminous Afghan days, the spring sky a vibrant baby-blue, the heat of the day cut by a breeze which blew though fields of poppies and winter barley. We were on the edge of the Khost highlands, where the fertile Khost plain starts to rise into the mountains of the Pakistani border — also known, not so affectionately, by the soldiers of Task Force One of the US army’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment as ‘Indian Country’. Band-i-Khel, the small village we had surrounded with our armoured cars and Humvees seemed deserted.
Bum rap pinned on parents
Acts of brutality are carried out in the name of ‘reasonable chastisement’ but, says Rachel Johnson, banning smacking will only encourage children to believe that they have a right to behave as they please Well, this promises to be a fair old punch-up. In the anti corner, we have some 350 parenting and counselling organisations, 180 MPs and peers, the Methodist and Catholic Churches, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Lib Dems, 71 per cent of the general public (according to our old friend Mori Z. Poll), Penelope Leach, a roster of the great and the good from David Aaronovitch to Benjamin Zephaniah, and the late Dr Spock.
Saturday
Fine Arts Special
Over in Notting Hill, at England & Co., 216 Westbourne Grove, W11 (until 12 June), is a fascinating retrospective of that underrated painter Albert Herbert (born 1925). Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art with the Kitchen Sink painters, Bratby, Middleditch et al., but was less drawn to gritty social realism than to an art altogether more symbolic and concerned with states of mind. (‘Art is not about meanings but feelings,’ he has said.) An early dose of Surrealism was compounded by the influence of Francis Bacon, briefly a tutor at the RCA, and Herbert began to explore his own intensely personal narratives through shared stories, many of them taken from the Bible.
Fine Arts Special: The rights and wrongs of conquest
France gave back artefacts looted by Napoleon. So what’s different today? asks Martin Gayford ‘Give us back our marbles’ is the cry. Passionate demands are made for the return of famous works of ancient sculpture. In response, there is equally heated resistance. Sending them back would be an offence against civilisation, it would break up a great collection. Only in a mighty museum in a sophisticated metropolis can such works truly make sense. Their surrender would be an aesthetic tragedy and — worse — national humiliation. Of course, it all sounds extremely, indeed wearyingly, familiar.
Finding your marbles
A perfect market is a utopian ideal of economists. In such a market, accurate information is instantly available to all, there are no barriers to trade, participants may be buyers or sellers, and there are no middlemen. But it is generally accepted that such perfection cannot exist in practice — the concept is merely a useful theoretical construct. However, I believe that the game of marbles as played at the Dragon School in Oxford in the 1950s came very close to being just such a perfect market. The game was played by eight- to 12-year-old boys. Boys could choose to be either sellers or buyers and could instantly change from one to the other.
Cursed are the peaceniks
James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether maybe it’s not time that you too did the cowardly thing and went over to the other side....
‘The West is like the Great Satan’
Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like a smallish, zoo-kept hawk. ‘Well, his middle name is Cervantes, does that help?’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Sorry!’ I mouth at Sir Crispin. Cup of tea, Sir Crispin? Coffee? Neither.
Bush to Howard: hands off Tony
Peter Oborne reveals that an operation has been launched within the White House to protect the President’s most important ally, and that the Tories are under pressure to give the Prime Minister an easy ride F or months Westminster has been alive with talk about the potential damage that defeat for George Bush in this November’s Presidential contest would inflict on Tony Blair’s standing in the Labour party. This just goes to show how parochial Westminster political discourse has become. The much larger and more interesting issue — what would it mean for President Bush if, as now looks possible, Tony Blair will be driven out of office over the summer? — has been neglected. The President himself is scared stiff. It is easy to understand his alarm.
Saturday
Luxury Goods: Pet parlours
We didn’t have ‘pets’ when I was little. We had dogs — gundogs. Working dogs that lived in outdoor kennels and ate great slabs of rotting meat straight from the butcher. Occasionally we dunked them in a tub full of eye-watering flea-killer. I do remember them being brushed, but roughly and only to dislodge stubborn thistles. Now that I have my own dog — a Parson Jack Russell called Cato — I am somewhere in between the dog and pet worlds. She lives inside (mainly on the furniture). When she lets me, I brush her. I clip her toenails and wash her if she’s rolled in something foul. I can’t clean her teeth any more because she tears toothbrushes apart.
Luxury Goods: Spas
The intended heading for this piece was to have been ‘Spa Wars’, since the demand for luxury pampering in country-house-hotel surroundings seems insatiable. Three country-house-hotel spas have opened within half an hour’s drive of here (on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire borders) in the last 18 months, and no expense spared. Even if you knew what thalassotherapy was, would you pay a pound a minute to get it? Or the same amount to reap the benefits of the Hammam bed? Apparently this last, being a sort of solid massage table, is butch enough to get men to agree to a pampering massage without feeling even a little bit gay. But who are these customers? Who pays for a weekend in an incredibly luxurious hotel and never leaves the premises?
Luxury Goods: Absolutely priceless
A couple of weeks ago I attended a reception in the Banqueting House on Whitehall to mark the opening of an exhibition by the American painter Cy Twombly at the Serpentine Gallery. A vast and lavish buffet was laid on tables down the length of Inigo Jones’s grandest room. Wealthy collectors drank champagne with Turner Prize-winning artists beneath Rubens’s only surviving ceiling. Lord Palumbo gave an exquisitely embarrassing speech in which — as has been widely reported — he repeatedly muddled the name of the principal guest, Cy Twombly, with that of the owner of Condé Nast, Si Newhouse (who was not there). Altogether, it was a highly satisfactory evening, and a neat demonstration of the power and prestige of art.
Less is more
It’s time to lighten up about falling birthrates, says George Monbiot. The world will be a happier and better place with fewer people There is a group in North America — I am not joking — whose motto is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. Its followers would like human society to revert not just to a pre-industrial past, but to a pre-agricultural one. Humans would subsist on the untended fruits of nature, hunting the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, gathering roots and berries from the derelict cityscapes reclaimed by the wild. It all sounds rather splendid, if you are young, fit, perfectly sighted, and don’t mind dying before you reach 40.
Sack them
For the 500 or so at the Thatcher jubilee dinner it was, if not the high point, certainly one of the more important. Having cheered themselves hoarse at the entry of the lady herself, and roared their joy at a gem of a speech by Norman Tebbit, the diners applauded Michael Howard. He said he was a Thatcherite, and that the party would follow a Thatcherite direction. They loved it, for they believed it was necessary. They could be right. Certainly, when Tony Blair had the previous day accused Mr Howard of being a Thatcherite, many Tories felt the Prime Minister had given them a huge boost. Now Lady Thatcher is flavour of the month again, there is no longer guilt by association. The old doctrines of reducing the state and empowering the individual are acceptable once more.
Trapped behind the wall
As the slaughter in the Holy Land continues, Emma Williams reports on the miseries caused by Israel’s security barrier, and wonders whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence Last week yet more children were slaughtered in the Holy Land. Four little Israeli girls and their pregnant mother were gunned down by Palestinian terrorists on a settlement road in Gaza. Eleven Palestinian children were killed by the IDF, also in Gaza. ‘Nothing changes,’ said my Israeli host in Jerusalem as we left his home on our way to a restaurant. ‘We need something — God, do we need something — to pull us out of this madness.’ Some Palestinian children ran off into the bushes, scared.
Saturday
A sign from the gods
John Craxton (born 1922) is a painter who has spent much of his life in Greece. Growing up in an intensely musical family in Hampstead (his father was the first pianist to play Debussy in England, his sister was a celebrated oboist), he was aware from a very early age of the infinite and magical connections between sound and the visual image. His subsequent work as a painter has all the structure one expects of a great composer: his are paintings which sing of their substance. Craxton first went to Greece in 1946, staying on Poros, an island renowned for its ravishing charm (Lawrence Durrell called it ‘the happiest place I have ever known’). In 1951, Craxton shared digs with Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The peace movement’s fight has gone
Poetry and conflict are as old as each other. From war springs suffering and from suffering song. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the ancient association is as vibrant as ever. According to the Guardian, an anthology entitled 100 Poets Against the War has outstripped the opposition and become the nation’s most frequently borrowed book of poetry. Even now I hold the volume in my hand. And I read with tremulous fascination about its torrid and telling birth-throes. Last year, on the eve of conflict, Laura Bush was favoured with a visitation from Apollo. The god of verse implanted in the First Lady’s mind the bright idea of staging a poetry recital at the White House. She consulted her husband and he duly gave his assent.
Worse than Vietnam
Baghdad As Iraq burns, Paul Bremer’s men remain inventive. Faced with the problem of getting their positive message out from behind the blast walls and barbed wire which surround the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad, they have resorted to technology. A television studio has been built inside Saddam Hussein’s former palace, and broadcasting companies such as ours are expected to link its outpourings to London so that reassuring messages from American officials and their Iraqi allies can be pumped directly on to British television screens. It could be called ‘Good news from the bunker’. In truth, after the most disastrous month since the invasion, good news is hard to come by.
‘Female soldier’ is an oxymoron
Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women Anyone who wants to understand the peoples of Arabia and the surrounding regions ought to start with Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. He was writing about the late 1940s and, as he knew, the world which he described was about to vanish. This provides the modern reader with a necessary perspective. It should make him aware that in the whole of human history, no major region has undergone such profound changes in such a short period. Today, the Maktoums of Dubai fly the world in their private 747s to inspect racehorses. Then, they still rode out on camels to battles and blood feuds against their neighbours.
Saturday
Thatcher bounces back
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election triumph, Simon Heffer says the Iron Lady has a new spring in her step In her 79th year, widowed after a long and happy marriage, and having endured indifferent health, Lady Thatcher might seem to some to have become vulnerable, damaged and a target for pity. Certainly, a spiteful profile of her in a Sunday newspaper a few weeks ago gave the impression that the Iron Lady was now like a cross between Miss Havisham and Lady Circumference, a mixture of the tragic and the absurd.