Features

Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky, a roll of subcutaneous blubber the colour and consistency of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake around the midriff, or at the top of the legs. Quite often, though, they’re quiveringly leviathan and — rather like our universe — in a state of perpetual, hectic expansion; the folds of enveloping flesh growing almost before your eyes.

Something extraordinary and rare is happening in London: we have an incomparable El Greco exhibition in our midst. It doesn’t really matter that it’s being staged in the rebarbative dungeon-like rooms of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing basement, for even those inconsiderate walls are alive with the strange music of El Greco’s vision. For a few months the dungeon becomes a sacred crypt, filled with the fluttering spirits of El Greco’s agonies, ecstasies and visitations, with a wild chant that cannot be stilled. Against such strong magic we are powerless: along with El Greco’s saints and sinners our gaze drifts inevitably heavenwards.

Lady Trumpington is on the warpath. At the age of 81, the author of the tremendous dictum ‘I’d rather be common than middle-class’ will deploy her formidable rhetorical powers to condemn a wretched piece of legislation. The ‘Bill to prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place’, as its long title runs, is now making its way through the House of Lords, and Lady Trumpington is one of the select band of peers who oppose it. For nearly 70 years she was herself a heavy smoker: ‘I started at the age of 11 and smoked 40 a day until two years ago. No doctor has ever gone at me, really, but I think a lot of them smoke anyway. I used to be a junior health minister [from 1985-87].

Nothing is more important to a journalist than his integrity. The founders of the Independent were men of such unyielding principle that they would not allow their journalists to go on freebies. On other papers most journalists handled the integrity/freebie issue in the time-honoured fashion: by abusing any hospitality they were given — trashing a hotel room, getting weeping drunk, pawing the mayor’s wife — and then writing a mocking piece about those who had squandered fine food, wine and linen on them. That way, the hacks reasoned, nobody could say that they had been bought. Their honour was intact. These days I don’t have the energy for integrity. It’s a young man’s caper. So here comes the plug.

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.

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.