Features

Saturday

Bruce Anderson

Tinker, tailor, soldier, stooge

THE conventions of secrecy were maintained. Only Richard Dearlove's disembodied voice appeared in front of the Hutton inquiry. But, irrespective of the effect on individuals' reputations, there are fears that recent events have compromised the Secret Intelligence Service. Its operating procedures have been subjected to too much daylight, and it has been used for purposes that were never intended. One former intelligence officer has described this as the Icarus syndrome; SIS has flown too close to the sun. In this case, the sun is Tony Blair. There is a piquancy in Mr Blair's developing such a close and indeed affectionate relationship with SIS. About a year before he became Prime Minister, he was invited to lunch at the service's Vauxhall Cross HQ.

Roger Scruton

The truth about meaning

There is a certain tradition in American philosophy that combines logical rigour and systematic thinking in a style so concise and self-contained as to offer little or no purchase to the critic. The tradition began with C.S. Peirce, found triumphant expression in Quine and Goodman, and lived again – just at the moment when everybody was beginning to think that it belonged to a vanished phase of American culture, alongside William Carlos Williams and Aaron Copland – in the philosophy of Quine's most brilliant student, Donald Davidson. When I began research in Cambridge in 1967, Davidson's name was never mentioned in the philosophy department.

Rachel Johnson

Boys and girls go out to work

So how many did you get this summer?' I ask. 'Six hundred and fifty,' answers Lucy Townsend at Cazenove, the stockbroker. 'More than 400,' says Caroline Dawnay, a literary agent at PFD. 'About two dozen a week,' moans Ann Sindall at The Spectator. And one of them, who was only 14, should have been at home, in Ann's frank opinion, reading Jackie magazine. Even I got four requests to supply work experience to students or sixth-formers – a whole generation drawn, like moths to light, to offices over the summer. There they flutter until the darkness of autumn falls and they can go back to school or campus armed with a trophy reference and another impressive line on their CV. 'Here's what I really hate,' one senior fiction editor confided.

Anne Sebba

Go straight to Heaven

Tourists in downtown Calcutta (or Kolkata, as we all must now learn to say) cannot fail to be struck by a 50-foot mosaic of the city's most famous immigrant, Mother Teresa. The Skopje-born nun is smiling benignly on the snarled-up traffic chaos that belches and honks beneath her. To one side of this giant piece of wall-art is an advertisement proclaiming, 'Reserved for Calcutta's Best Brands'. Mother Teresa is Calcutta's best brand. Later this month, when, in record time, the Pope bestows on her the Vatican super seal of approval and declares her blessed, she will be well on her way to becoming a saint. Hers will probably become the fastest sainthood since the Roman Catholic Church set rules controlling saint-making in the 13th century. Why the haste?

Theodore Dalrymple

Nasty, brutish and on credit

Who says the leisure class is no more? On the contrary, as a recent weekday visit to the new spiritual heart of Britain revealed to me, it is very large indeed. Of course, the modern leisure class is not necessarily very high on the registrar-general's scale of social classes from I to V, but that is another matter altogether. But where, you ask, is Britain's new spiritual centre? The very idea of such a centre seems a bit odd – absurd even. It is certainly not Rome or Jerusalem, much less Canterbury. In good pagan fashion, Britain's spiritual centre is close to its geographical centre. The answer is the Bull Ring, Birmingham, or rather – as it is now called – Bullring.

Peter Hitchens

Reform the BBC, don’t kill it

Why do I now find that I, one of the BBC's most persistent critics, feel the need to defend the organisation that I have attacked so many times in the past? Because for all its faults I would rather that Britain had a public-service broadcaster than that the airwaves were sold to the fattest cheque book. The time has come for sensible reactionaries to rally round their old enemies at the BBC, and for the BBC to seek support among those moral and cultural conservatives it has spent too long despising.

Wednesday

Mark Riley

‘We just want to ask people a few questions,’

'We just want to ask people a few questions,’ we said, innocently clutching our pollster’s clipboards. The GI didn’t know whether to laugh or give us a slap. ‘You’re out of your heads. Don’t even think of leaving the Palestine Hotel. I’ve been in every kind of war situation you can imagine, and this is the most dangerous — because there are no rules. It’s completely unpredictable. Now they’ve taken to CQAs (close-quarter assassinations). It’s open season on Westerners.’ A month earlier, the editor of The Spectator had asked YouGov to conduct a poll in Iraq. Our reaction had been the same as the GI’s: he must be crazy.

Saturday

Interconnect

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMini-breaks

Mmmm. Got lovely new mini-break brochure: Pride of Britain: Leading Country House Hotels of the British Isles. Marvellous. Going through all the pages one by one imagining Daniel and me being alternately sexual and romantic in all the bedrooms and dining-rooms.Bridget Jones's Diary Last weekend my husband and I went on a mini-break to Majorca. Two weeks before this we spent a long weekend in Whitby, with friends. Earlier this summer I attended a two-day hen weekend in Manchester, and next week my husband is off on a three-day mid-week break to Valencia for the famous annual tomato-throwing (sounds like most dinner times with my two-year-old, but apparently this is special). I'm hoping to fit in a visit to Sitges before the end of September.

Justin Kerrsmiley

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALMalta

To the romantic, Malta smells of thyme and fig; to the cynic, tar and goat – but, whatever a traveller's disposition, he can't deny that the country's place in Mediterranean history is unique. Malta's past is bold and bloody. In 1530 the emperor Charles V gave the Knights of St John their home after they had been forced out of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent. The knights used Malta to raid the Ottoman fleets, sending gold and silver back to their protector, and in 1565 Suleiman finally tired of this and set out to destroy the 'Monks of War'; and so began the Great Siege. For months the attackers pitted themselves against the walls of modern-day Valletta. They succeeded in storming Fort St Elmo, where the mostly French knights fought with extraordinary heroism.

Michael Hanlon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALBest avoided

Another summer over and, once again, the question forms in my mind: where not to go on holiday next year? It seems a silly question – for the list, surely, is endless. There are all those places which have simply nothing worth seeing. The homes of light industry and flyovers, with no distinguishing architecture, scenery or climate. The Midwest, and its English equivalent, the East Midlands. The industrial towns of the German plains, the grim squalor that is the urban Third World. However, there is another – rather smaller – list of places that, although they are very much on the tourist circuit, have absolutely no appeal. This is not just because they are likely to be overcrowded or overpriced.

Lucy Vickery

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALNew Zealand

If Australia, as a nation, is negotiating late adolescence, cocksure but fragile, striving to establish its identity, then New Zealand is a child: clear-eyed, blemish-free, with a steady, candid gaze. My introduction to this gigantic adult playground came by way of a promotional video, shown by Air New Zealand on the flight from London to Auckland and starring the country's Prime Minister, gutsy, trouser-clad Helen Clark. The no-nonsense name suits Ms Clark, who has the aura of a strict but fair headmistress.

Michael Mcmahon

WINTER TRAVEL SPECIALThe great escape from other people

There is rust on the griddle of the barbecue, dust on the shoulder of the Pimm's bottle and must in the air in the summerhouse, where the cushions and the picnic rugs are damp. Each day, dusk limps in earlier and earlier, and it can't be long before the spirits start to go as flat as the paddling pool that has long been packed away. And yet now that the holiday season is over, the best time for a holiday has arrived – particularly if you have already had one, for stolen holidays, like stolen kisses, are sweet. Award yourself a bonus week or weekend away upon an impulse, and you will probably have far more fun than you had in the August fortnight you looked forward to for so long. With no time to build unrealistic expectations, you'll certainly be far more relaxed.

Martin Gayford

Swimming pool or work of art?

One of the most amusing broadcast moments of the early 1990s was a radio debate between the painter Patrick Heron and various citizens of St Ives. The subject was the proposal to build a new art gallery in the town. Several angry Cornish voices were to be heard going on about a swimming pool – the alternative project. On the other side, plaintively upholding the cause of Modernist art, were the reedy, patrician tones of the artist (a public-school voice that Heron, a staunch socialist, was very sorry he had).

Brendan O’Neill

How we trained al-Qa’eda

For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked – the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today.

Harry Mount

The Young Fogey: an elegy

They’re playing rap music in the jewellery department at Christie’s South Kensington. In T.M. Lewin, the Jermyn Street shirtmakers, you can dip into a fridge by the cufflinks counter and have a frozen mini-Mars while you are leafing through the chocolate corduroy jackets. But who is left to mourn these things? In the old days, the Young Fogey, the character invented by Alan Watkins on these pages in 1984, would have been in the vanguard of the protesters, shrieking and whinnying away about the desecration of his haunts. He is silent ...because he is no more.

Leo McKinstry

I prefer the tub of lard

Just after David Hill’s appointment as the new Downing Street press chief, I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Mail. In this article, I revealed that Hill was a superb amateur rock vocalist, who had not only sung in several major venues across London, but had also appeared in the musical Hair. But, even in the face of such revelations, by far the most startling fact about Hill remains his 20 years of service as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour party. Even murderers rarely have to endure sentences of more than 15 years, yet Hill was shackled to this charmless figure of epic mediocrity from 1971 to 1991. As one former Labour press officer, who worked with Hill in the early Nineties, said to me last week, ‘David has a great sense of humour.

Rod Liddle

I was 12, she was 13

According to a survey reported last weekend in the Independent on Sunday, almost all homosexuals are barking mad. I am using the politically correct term ‘barking mad’ so as not to incur the wrath of the mental-health pressure groups, all of which become psychotically incensed and even violent when they read of mad people being described as ‘nutters’ or ‘doolally’ or – an old favourite of mine purloined from the US demotic – ‘crazier than a shithouse rat’. So I’ll stick to ‘barking mad’ and thus forestall angry letters from Mind, et al.

Tom Utley

Madonna of the Pseuds

Leonardo’s ‘Madonna of the Yarnwinder’, stolen the other day from the Duke of Buccleuch, is the painting that changed my view of civilisation. I know it quite well, because one of my sisters-in-law used to live just up the road from Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, where it hung until it was pinched. Whenever I stayed with her and wanted to escape from the children, I would slope off to the castle to take the guided tour. There was no danger that my sons or nephews would want to come with me, because at that age they would almost rather have had an extra maths lesson than traipse around a stately home, looking at pictures. My life-changing moment came on about my third visit to the castle, when I was standing in a little group of tourists in the Staircase Hall.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Chirac and the son of Nippon

Paris Within the next few months, Jacques Chirac’s illegitimate son will turn 18 and the French press will face a dilemma. Do they celebrate his majority on the front page of Paris Match? Or do they keep it as hush-hush as they have in the past out of courtesy, respect for a statesman’s private life and fear? I talk of Chirac’s illegitimate son as if he were a fact, but all I have to go on is ever more brazen Parisian gossip which says that we are in 1994 all over again, counting down to when Paris Match put Mazarine Pingeot on its front cover and the world found out that Fran’ois Mitterrand had a 19-year-old daughter who lived with his long-standing mistress in a government flat on the Left Bank.