Features

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The end of the Etonians

Forty years ago today, The Spectator published perhaps the most important and influential article ever to appear in its pages. That is a high standard. R.W. Seton-Watson’s reports before 1914 condemning ethnic oppression may well have led indirectly to the postwar dismemberment of Hungary, for better or worse. And in a leader, headed ‘On the side of liberty’, to mark this magazine’s hemiocentenary in 1978, the Times was flattering enough to say that The Spectator was then in the vanguard of a new libertarian spirit, which would (in the event) help Margaret Thatcher to her victory the following year.

Andrew Gimson

The joys of inequality

It is time we gave the party some electric-shock treatment. The words are worthy of Stalin or Mao, but were spoken by nice, considerate Tony Blair soon after becoming Labour leader in 1994, when he was plotting with his creepy sidekick Philip Gould to ditch Clause 4. In recent months Mr Blair has used the university funding crisis to put several million more volts through his comrades. Like some sadistic psychiatrist, he has fastened his electrodes once again to the emaciated body of the Labour party, which is horribly contorted and enfeebled after eight and a half years of his treatment, but is still capable of feeling pain. Labour MPs emit blood-curdling shrieks of anguish as the Prime Minister tries to force his plan for university top-up fees on them, but that is their function.

Ross Clark

V is for victory — and for vagina

Ross Clark wonders whether Iraqis would prefer clean water and electricity or Britain’s taxpayer-funded ‘gender advisers’ Following the successful liberation of their country from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, ordinary Iraqis are once more beginning to experience some of those things which we in the West take for granted: electricity, telephones, fresh running water and the likes of Deirdre Spart from the Haringey Women’s Collective. If there is still a lot of work to be done in establishing security in the country, one thing which isn’t being ignored is the agenda of Western feminists.

Saturday

Interconnect

The hubbub of the marketplace

In the 1960s a cosmopolitan collector friend of my father who had fallen on hard times took salaried employment with a Bond Street gallery. When asked how he was adapting to his new life, he replied serenely: ‘In the art world, there are the crooks and the supercrooks. I’m with the supercrooks.’ Today, he might not have found the transition so smooth. In the past ten years the art business has changed almost beyond recognition, especially in the field of contemporary art. The model of the contemporary art dealer is now closer to a market trader than a supercrook thanks to the boom in art fairs, which has shifted the action from the hush of the private gallery to the hubbub of the marketplace.

James Frayne

Cut taxes to show you really care

If you are lucky enough to be in Iowa next week, don’t miss a new TV ad campaign against the Democrat presidential candidate front-runner, Howard Dean, ahead of election primaries in the state. The ads, run by a right-wing pressure group, suggest that ‘Dr Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.’ Crude negative election campaigning of this kind makes Tory tax bombshells here in Britain seem pretty tame. The ads are not part of Bush’s $120 million campaign, which has not even begun.

Peter Oborne

The truth is he lied

Last Monday it emerged that the Saville inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings would carry on for at least another year. By the time it ends, supposing it ever does, Saville’s shambles will have taken nearly a decade, cost more than £200 million, and some of those most intimately involved will surely have died. Over Christmas and the New Year, Lord Hutton is said to have been at his home in Northern Ireland, not that far from Saville’s Londonderry base, drafting the final passages of his investigation into the death of the brave, public-spirited government scientist Dr David Kelly CMG. It will have taken six months, start to finish. Maybe Lord Hutton wanted to be as far away as possible from the fetid world of Westminster and Fleet Street, to write his conclusions.

Saturday

Interconnect

Visual treats of 2004

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to this year’s exhibitions — from El Greco to Ken Kiff The chief thrill of this year’s gallery-going has to be the El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery (11 February to 23 May). It will be the first major showing of his work in this country, and for many the first chance to study his visionary paintings in any depth. Domenikos Theotocopulos (1541–1614), who settled in the Spanish city of Toledo in 1577, was known as ‘the Greek’ because he hailed from Crete, whence he introduced a modern version of the Byzantine style to a shocked and admiring audience. Trained as an icon painter before studying Mannerism in Venice and Rome, he forged his own highly individual and luminous style from these components.

Leo McKinstry

In defence of Wacko Jacko

In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie described the bed that the ‘rampageous’ boys made for themselves in their magical primitive home in Neverland: ‘It filled nearly half the room and all the boys slept in it, lying like sardines in a tin.’ Today, the sleeping arrangements at a modern version of this fantastic place have led to one of the most explosive prosecutions in recent criminal history. The singer Michael Jackson, who so loves the Peter Pan story that he named his own Californian ranch ‘Neverland’, is awaiting trial on charges of molesting a 12-year-old boy, Gavin Arvizo, who has cancer, and of using an ‘intoxicating agent’ to facilitate sexual contact. The case is due to come to court this month, and the outlook is bleak for Jackson.

Theodore Dalrymple

Escape from barbarity

This year is the centenary year of the Entente Cordiale, and I intend to celebrate it by buying a house in France (the acte authentique, the final signing, takes place later this month) and, in the not very distant future, by living there. Whether this will improve Anglo–French relations remains to be seen. France is no terrestrial paradise, but I know from experience of living abroad that other country’s blemishes do not affect you in the same way as your own country’s blemishes, which weigh heavily on your soul. You can observe the failings of foreign politicians with amusement and the intractability of foreign social problems with detachment.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Strolling round Siena

We were fortunate with the weather in Siena. At first it was warm enough to sit outside having a drink, a treat in early December, but then the temperature fell rapidly and freezing northerly winds buffeted the ancient edifices in this most compact and beautiful of Tuscan hill towns. The cold did not affect the passeggiata, the ritual evening perambulation, in which everyone takes part in order to see and be seen. In fact, there now seems to be no particular hour sacred to it - it takes place all day long and into the night, or did when we were in Siena, with different generations gossiping and strolling at different times of day. The only concession to the weather was the appearance of warm wraps (plenty of fur to be seen) and flannel overcoats for the pet dogs.

Andrew Gimson

Honour bound

The inanity of minuting these conversations! The madness of putting on paper derogatory remarks about such very distinguished people! These were among the chief exclamations made at the Christmas party held by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, where much of the conversation concerned the leak of a paper in which the merits and demerits of 38 candidates for honours were ruled upon with extraordinary frankness by a committee of top civil servants, including the great Sir Hayden Phillips (profiled in this magazine on 16 August).

Saturday

Martin Gayford

The Good News of Isenheim

In the Christkindlesmarkt — the Christmas market — in Nuremberg at about this time of year you will see an astonishingly large array of Christmas decorations. The market stalls are full of them — carved ones, tinselly ones, glittery ones, some woven out of straw — those stalls, that is, which are not selling sausages, spiced biscuits and specially rich varieties of seasonal cake. English Christmas, as everyone knows, was imported by Prince Albert. When you visit, say, Nuremberg or Bamberg at this time of year, you feel you’ve traced it to its source. It’s a festival with roots deep in the art of the North. The spirit of Christmas, even the spirit of the Christmas decoration, seems to fill much of the art and architecture of central Europe.

Mary Wakefield

Recipe for success

Mary Wakefield meets Nigella Lawson and finds that she is friendly, confident, beautiful — but nervous with it In a window-seat at the far end of the bar in the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower Hotel, Nigella Lawson, dressed in black, sits waiting for me. The lighting is mellow, the seats leather and her eyes modestly downcast. If she were auditioning for the part of Anna Karenina, there would be no contest. It seems a great waste that instead of Vronsky, she gets me, struggling to free myself from my anorak. We shake hands over the salted cashew nuts and get off to a rocky start. ‘I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this interview,’ she says. If I wasn’t already so fascinated I might be a little hurt, but Nigella, close-up, is riveting.

Digby Anderson

Go to work on Christmas Day…

Good generals know when it is time to give up an impossible defence and seek a more secure position to hold. It is time to give up Christmas. It is now utterly overrun by the combined forces of sentimentality, irreligion, bad manners and worse taste. I do not say that on ‘the day’, as it is now called, we shouldn’t mount the odd raid to attend church — though the same hostile forces have long been within its gates too, infantilising its liturgy, replacing its sacred music with ditties and recorders, and plastering its walls with the scrawlings and daubings of children. They are especially noticeable at Christmas. Be very careful which church you go to and at what time.

Rachel Polonsky

Stop flattering Putin

Moscow Russia’s Duma election was not an irrelevant farce. It marked an important stage in the continuing struggle between President Putin and the enlightened few who are striving, with talent, energy and courage, to create democracy and a civil society in this country. Though the political events in the preceding weeks sometimes looked like impenetrably intricate clan wars within ‘the elite’, they exposed this struggle in all its simplicity. Beguiling imagery covers the surface of the city. This month’s big prize at the Shangri-La Casino on Pushkin Square is a ‘prezidentsky kortezh’, a familiar sight for Muscovites.

Correlli Barnett

Why al-Qa’eda is winning

Last month, the sixth since President Bush proclaimed ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq, proved the worst so far in terms of American and ‘coalition’ body bags: 81 in all. November was also marked by the bombing of a residential quarter in Riyadh, and by the four Istanbul car-bombs. In ironic contrast, this was the month dignified with President Bush’s state visit to Britain, complete with his and Blair’s defiant rhetoric about defeating ‘global terror’. All in all, now is surely a good time coolly to re-assess the state of play in this so-called ‘war on terrorism’. First of all, we have to clear our minds of moralising political cant and media clichés.

Tom Stacey

Window of opportunity

Tom Stacey on how, as an act of penance, his great-great-uncle donated the great west window to King’s College Chapel As the choristers of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, fill our ears on radio and our eyes on television with their double Christmas bill of carols for the birth of Jesus, the light that plays upon the Chapel’s sublime fan vaulting is, as ever, exquisite. Yet behind that light I have a tale to unfold, mysterious and dark. The Chapel’s great west window was the largest single scene in stained glass in Europe when consecrated in 1879. For all I know, it is so still. It depicts the Last Judgment — what mediaeval iconography called a ‘Doom’.

Craig Brown

The temple of whom (singularly possessive)?

Craig Brown has to mind his Ps and Qs when he goes carol-singing with The Pedants’ Association It’s always pleasant to go carol-singing, or carols-singing, with The Pedants’ Association, formerly The Pedants Association, originally The Pedant’s Association. I first joined ten years ago with the long-term aim of attracting the requisite number of votes in order to change its title to The Association of Pedants, thus rendering the apostrophe redundant, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. In fact, far from it: Rome was built over a period of a good many centuries. Indeed, the last time I paid it a visit, I noticed a great deal of building work still in progress.

Theodore Dalrymple

Reasons to be cheerful

Theodore Dalrymple on the joy of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary — in gooseberries, for example, even in human beings In my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one’s skull for thoughts that just aren’t there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life’s unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most people are not nearly as miserable as they ought to be, or would be if they saw their own lives in a clear light.

Cormac Murphyoconnor

We need to be saved

Hell exists, says Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, but so does hope. Choices have consequences, and by making the right choices we move towards God Before very long, I would imagine, together with my fellow-Cardinals, I will be going to the Vatican for the election of the successor to Pope John Paul II. The election takes place in the most precious jewel of the Vatican Museum, the 15th-century domestic chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, known as the Sistine Chapel. Here, twice a day, the Cardinals assemble and one by one place their vote in a silver urn for the one whom they truly believe is the best person to assume the mantle of Peter. The event itself is dramatic, but made more so by the surroundings.