Features

Saturday

Interconnect

Paying the penance for Culture

Impossible to estimate how much the Scots have enriched the Life of Man. They gave us the Telephone (sorry, wrong number), Penicillin (much better today, thank you, doctor), the Television (but there's nothing good on any more), and the Wandering Dipso (K'you spear us fufty peents, pal?). To this we must add their latest innovation: the weather-proof, bomb-proof, completion-proof building. The new Scottish Parliament is emerging, with Darwinian slowness, at the base of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh. A pair of Y-shaped cranes stand over the scattered rubble, their huge limbs ladylike and prim, like fantastical herons dipping and pecking at the concrete. The award-winning architect, Enric Miralles, is as Scottish as they come, by the way, as long as they come from Spain.

Damien Mccrystal

Sorry, traditional fare’s off

Nobody I know goes to the Savoy Grill any more. It used to be a place to be seen – probably the most important such restaurant in the business community. The staff were dressed formally, delivering a discreet and respectful service. Customers were addressed by their titles, where such existed. The food was reminiscent of country-house cooking – or, sometimes, school dinners – and seldom surprised the palate. The wine list was deeply traditional, with, of course, a heavy emphasis on claret. No one snapped their fingers at waiters, because a politely raised eyebrow would do the job. No one turned up in T-shirts and shorts, and no one brought young children.

Tom Stacey

The all-purpose bogeyman

One has to be careful of saying anything nice about people like Idi Amin, even when they are dead and gone. It is easy to get a reputation for being deliberately provocative, or for seeking compassion kudos like the late Lord Longford, who befriended convicts for the sheer magnitude of their infamy. For many years, Idi Amin was the civilised world's stock example of 'pure evil'. Nearly a quarter of a century after the end of his outrageous tyranny, everybody still knows about him. Not so long ago, after spending a long weekend in Idi's company in seaside Jeddah, I was collecting a roll of developed film from Happy Snaps in Notting Hill Gate. When the man behind the counter awoke to the subject of my happy snaps, he was agog with a tremulous awe.

Mike Dewar

Can we liberate Zimbabwe?

As Mr Mugabe continues to flout international opinion, suppress democratic opposition to his regime, and reduce this once rich nation to abject poverty, some commentators are asking if it might not be desirable to remove this despot by means of military intervention. I leave it to others better qualified than I am to debate the legality in international law of such an action. And, of course, whether or not the United Nations would sanction military intervention is a big question. But leaving aside these enormous issues, is it militarily practicable to mount such an operation? Zimbabwe is bordered by Zambia in the north, Botswana in the west, Mozambique in the east and South Africa in the south.

Michael Hanlon

Bark, don’t bite

Modern life is full of terror. We quake at global warming, Arab terrorists, gene-tinkered foods and rogue vaccines. New plagues from the East, our mobile phones and our railways all have the ability to induce panic. These are all new fears of new things. And all, to a greater or lesser extent, are irrational. But there is another, and I would argue even greater and more insidious, fear that has crept up on us in the past 20 years or so. The object of this fear is not new; but the fear itself is. And it is making life for a significant number of us quite miserable. What is it that we are frightened of? Children – especially other people's.

Theodore Dalrymple

Sick, thick and dangerous

As a conservative, I am against all unnecessary change, of course, but I welcome innovation that improves the quality of life. Thus I rejoice to learn that certain doctors in my neck of the woods are now conducting clinics for difficult and challenging (i.e., violent and dangerous) patients in local police stations. This will improve the quality of clinical care no end. Naturally, the principal beneficiaries of this innovation will be the doctors themselves. They will no longer sit in fear and trembling behind their desks as their young male patients, decked out in the uniform of modern British savagery, make their unreasonable demands, compliance with which they are prepared to enforce by using their full and extensive repertoire of vileness.

Deal W-Hudson

The Gospel according to Braveheart

Washington, DC We were an odd sight to the young crowd in the pool hall late on a Sunday night. A couple of middle-aged family guys don't exactly blend in, at least not in Adams Morgan, a hip young neighbourhood in Washington, DC – especially when one of them is Mel Gibson. It was the night before the screening of Gibson's controversial film about the Passion of Christ. The man better known as Mad Max, or William Wallace, was relaxing in the pool hall after his long flight from Los Angeles. There was little relaxing elsewhere in the room, however. Women hoping for an autograph, a game of darts or simply to catch the star's eye began a slow migration towards us.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bristol’s animal magic

It's the height of the silly season, and the capital glows in the unexpectedly seasonal heat. For anyone who has not forsaken London for the seaside or elsewhere, I recommend the witty diversions of Video Quartet by Christian Marclay, at White Cube in Hoxton Square until 30 August. Four screens project a profusion of film fragments choreographed seamlessly with accompanying soundtrack – clips from Hollywood movies, of singers and musicians (from Hendrix to Sinatra and Callas), concentrating on keyboards, horns and violins. The result is an immaculately structured 14-minute drama which is very funny and utterly compelling. Marclay (born 1955) is acclaimed internationally as visual artist, experimental musician and composer.

Christopher Howse

A reasonable assumption

Anglicans in the United States believe it is a good idea for bishops to express their homosexual preferences genitally with long-stay companions. Some people will believe anything. Others find it hard to believe in the event commemorated each 15 August, the Assumption into Heaven of the Virgin Mary. I can't myself see it is any harder to believe than the substantial presence of Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist. But I think I know the reason people find the Assumption a credal crux. It is because they suppose the dogma was invented on 1 November 1950, when Good Pope Pius XII declared that 'the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory'.

Mary Kenny

Sex and the City means family values

The sexually explicit scenes in Sex and the City – now into its last series on Channel 4 – make me feel like Maurice Chevalier: I'm so glad that I'm not young any more. It is not that I feel, as my husband Richard West does, that it is all quite 'filthy' and 'disgusting' (he recalls with fondness the Old Aussie saying 'There's nothing worse than toilet talk from sheilas'): goodness me, I'm no prude. It is just that some of the sexual gymnastics, particularly as demonstrated by Samantha and the young men she picks up, seem somehow both humiliating and competitive. I mean, you look at Olympic swimming and marvel at what the human body can accomplish, but you do not imagine that you are supposed to do likewise in the municipal pool the next day.

Ross Clark

Country slickers

Ross Clark on how the new CAP rules make it profitable for city folk to buy farms and use them as homes – with big gardens If the words 'Get orff my land' are delivered in future less in yokel tones than in the mid-Atlantic accent of the trading floor, don't be surprised. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reveals that two thirds of all farms sold between April and June this year were bought by non-farmers, many of them by City bankers who like the idea of living in a country house surrounded by 300 acres of their own land. The land agents Strutt & Parker confirm that wealthy buyers are seeking to buy farms rather than landless houses in order that they might 'control the living space and environment around them'.

Andrew Gimson

Charming wit or oily Welshman?

This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the saloon bar. But mention Sir Hayden Phillips to men of affairs, men of a certain consequence in our public life, men who are members of his club, Brooks's, and you will find that they laugh, or smile at least, and say what an amusing fellow he is, besides being a brilliant operator. There is something about the mere thought of Sir Hayden that cheers people up. But should you ask, with a journalist's impertinence, for some example of Sir Hayden's wit, or some fuller idea of the man's charm, your distinguished informant will first reassure himself that he is speaking 'off the record', then repeat what he has already said – 'amusing', 'brilliant', etc.

Philip Hensher

Give me a break

It started with some junk mail. I threw it out: I gave no consideration to the fact that it was addressed to a Miss Phyllis Henshaw. I put it down to some glitch in the address-sharing industry. But then the telephone calls started. The first one was from a business I'd always been rather unhealthily intrigued by: the photographic makeover studio. 'Could I speak to Miss Phyllis Henshaw, please?' the voice said. 'I think you've made a mistake,' I said. 'This is Philip Hensher. There isn't a Phyllis Henshaw.' 'Ah,' she said, before starting on her scripted spiel. 'I don't think you understand,' I said, in the manner of the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima refusing to dance with George Brown. 'In the first place, I'm not a woman.

David Lovibond

Weep for Wales

I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather, who had walked from Somerset to Amlwch for a job on the new railway. The austerity of the grey, disapproving little town must have suited; he married a Welsh monoglot, 'went chapel', and put down a taproot. It wasn't until my father escaped into schoolmastering and England that a chink of light was let in.

Nigel West

How Labour has subverted British Intelligence

It is not just the reputation of ministers and their bagmen that is taking a bashing at the Hutton inquiry. So is the reputation of Britain's intelligence services. British Intelligence has been subverted. The nation's front line of defence has been catastrophically damaged by New Labour's spin machine. The tawdry ethics of Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror newsroom have infiltrated the secure Cabinet Office rooms occupied by the Joint Intelligence Committee. The merest suspicion that an intelligence agency has succumbed to spin undermines its credibility and authority. But there is more than mere suspicion here. Recent events highlight a process of politicisation that has been going on since Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street in 1997.

Saturday

Martin Gayford

In love with economic disaster

We spent part of the last two weeks – as has become a family custom – mooching round Siena. And although, like Venice, the place can absorb a huge number of visitors before becoming unpleasantly crowded, we were by no means the only ones. That's because, of course, Siena is just about perfect – an intact mediaeval town, with hardly a building later than the 16th century, but a living community, not a mummified museum. It is also a prime example of what most of us love to look at when we go travelling. Namely, economic failure. Siena looks the way it does because of a series of disasters. At the beginning of the 14th century it was one of the most go-ahead places on earth, a prototype of the way we all live today.

Theodore Dalrymple

Bum rap for Jamaicans

Whenever I have a patient who belongs to the first generation of Jamaican immigrants, I cannot help but ask myself what England has done to the Jamaicans. How has such a charming and humorous community been turned into the sullen, resentful people that so many of their children (or grandchildren) seem to be today – particularly the males, possessed as they are of an arrogant sense of radical entitlement that renders them almost extraterritorial both to the laws of the land and the laws of good manners? What has England done to them that they should turn out thus? Of course, there is still a strong strand of church-going respectability among the Jamaicans.

Mary Keen

Gardener’s question time

Is the taxpayer about to stump up another £16 million for the Duchess of Northumberland's pet project, Alnwick Garden? Mary Keen investigates To him that hath shall be given, and to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland hath been given quite a lot. We are talking public funding here. The £11.5m Lottery sum awarded to secure the Duke's Raphael for the nation is a record for a work of art. This could be chicken- feed, however, compared with the funding the Duchess hopes to bag for her pet project, the Alnwick Garden, which by the time it is completed will have cost an estimated £42m. When I interviewed Jane Northum-berland in March for the Daily Telegraph, she said something that I agreed not to mention in that article.

Tom Fort

The rising tide of clichés

In more tranquil times, before the Gilligan storm broke over his head, the BBC's admirable and honourable director of news, Richard Sambrook, contributed a foreword to one of the corporation's periodic attempts to remind its journalists of their responsibilities towards the English language. 'Clear storytelling and language,' Sambrook wrote, 'is at the heart of good journalism.' These are words which, given subsequent events, have acquired an ironic resonance. What is at issue here is not Sambrook's unexceptionable sentiment, but his grammar. Richard, Richard, I can hear myself saying in the pedant's weary tones (for many years ago, when he was an eager and fresh-faced newsroom subeditor, I used to check his stories), plural subject requires plural verb.

Aidan Hartley

How to kill a burglar

Nairobi One evening in the Kenyan capital late last year, my friend Sean Culligan endured an experience that, in several instructive ways, can be compared and contrasted with that of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. Sean is a mild-mannered man who, after retiring from the British military, settled in East Africa. He works for a medical charity that is held in high esteem. For a pastime he likes target shooting. He has a licensed pistol. 'My military training tells me that if you have a gun, you should carry it,' Sean tells me. 'If you carry it, you should be prepared to use it.' The incident occurred on a Friday evening in Nairobi's suburbs, where Sean had arranged to pick up a doctor and colleague named Suzanne from her house. They were going on to a meeting downtown.