Features

Saturday

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.

Rian Malan

Africa isn’t dying of Aids

Cape Town It was the eve of Aids Day here. Rock stars like Bono and Bob Geldof were jetting in for a fundraising concert with Nelson Mandela, and the airwaves were full of dark talk about megadeath and the armies of feral orphans who would surely ransack South Africa’s cities in 2017 unless funds were made available to take care of them. My neighbour came up the garden path with a press cutting. ‘Read this,’ said Capt. David Price, ex-Royal Air Force flyboy. ‘Bloody awful.’ It was an article from The Spectator describing the bizarre sex practices that contribute to HIV’s rampage across the continent. ‘One in five of us here in Zambia is HIV positive,’ said the report.

Saturday

Dean Godson

Meeting of the extremes

That's another fine mess you've gotten me into,' quipped David Trimble with black humour as he bounded in to meet with Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Lady Grey Room at Hillsborough Castle last Saturday. As well he might: for the first time, Ian Paisley's anti-Agreement Democratic Unionists had won more seats than the moderate Ulster Unionists in a Stormont election. The drift away from the parties of the centre ground in last Wednesday's poll was even more dramatic on the nationalist side, where Gerry Adams's Sinn Fein inflicted a 'Redmond moment' upon the Social Democratic and Labour party led by Mark Durkan.

Rachel Royce

Health and safety spell danger

Have you noticed that whenever there is an armed siege these days the police quickly seal off the area, surround the site with at least 20 marksmen, send for the trained negotiators and, um ...wait until the victim is good and dead before they venture in to have a peek at what's going on? I expect that's probably a gross oversimplification ' and one which will have police commanders up and down the country in an apoplexy of rage. But it has the ring of truth about it, doesn't it? I have been haunted by the case of Lorraine Whiting. She was the woman who bled to death while on the phone to an emergency operator. Her estranged husband had shot her in the legs. He had always promised to maim her if she left him. After shooting her, he shot himself.

Saturday

Rose Prince

FOOD AND DRINKPheasant pilav

Thanks to a hot summer, the countryside heaves with pheasant, dead and alive, and it must be eaten, or shooting, too, will enter the sights of the anti-enjoyment lobby. If this means just cutting the breasts from the carcass — and to hell with the rest of the bird — so be it. Life may well be too short to pluck pheasants. Pilav is a sympathetic recipe for cooks that cannot bear the tedium of another roasted game bird. It is also a dish that takes the now so-English pheasant back to the Islamic countries of its roots — regions very much in mind — where vine fruits and nuts often share a dish with meat.

Damien Mccrystal

FOOD AND DRINKCheesy feat

This is the most important time of year in the calendar for that part of me which loves cheese. I yearn for it all year. I talk about it for months — perhaps not as animatedly as I bang on about the coincidental start of the shooting season, but euphorically none the less. For this is the time of year when you can buy vacherin, the finest, most extravagant pressed-curd product ever devised by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel. Oddly enough, the first time I ever tasted it I was in a Chelsea restaurant called Monkeys, which delights in snorting with contempt at the myriad health guidelines laid down by Brussels.

Anthony Lloyd

Constitutional vandalism

Anthony Lloyd says that the government’s plan to replace the law lords is an attack on tradition, and pointless too On 12 June the Prime Minister issued a press release announcing that the ‘post of Lord Chancellor’ would be abolished. The announcement came as a complete surprise to everybody, not least the law lords. For in the same press release the Prime Minister also announced the government’s intention to create a new supreme court to replace the law lords. One would have thought that the law lords would have been consulted in advance, or at least informed. But they were not. The proposed changes were presented as a package to modernise the relationship between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

Daniel Hannan

Our son of a bitch

President Karimov is a ruthless tyrant, says Daniel Hannan, but he supports the war on terror and is backed by the West. He shouldn’t be A strange little row has been bubbling away over the past two months concerning our ambassador to Tashkent. You may have seen the odd headline about it in the inside pages of the broadsheets but, unless you have a particular interest in diplomatic affairs, I suspect your eye will quickly have skipped on to the next story. Why, after all, should we be especially interested in Uzbekistan? A tremendously important region for Britain during the Great Game, of course, but hardly of vital strategic interest today.