The Spectator

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42 days Sir: Thank goodness for Matthew d’Ancona’s clarity of mind on 42-day detention (‘Jacqui Smith’s vote of confidence’, 7 June). People who want to be provoked will always find an excuse. If they are subtle, they will manufacture a grievance based on an issue about which their sworn enemies disagree — and then exploit the difference. Critics who claim that increasing pre-charge detention will be a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for terrorism have fallen into this terrorist trap. Such critics acquired their views in the age of Trotskyism, when the Trots were trying to provoke the establishment into violence in the belief that it would speed up the revolution by exposing the ‘mailed fist behind the velvet glove’ of capitalism.

Over at Trading Floor, Michael Millar reports on the chief executive of Gazprom's prediction that oil prices will keep rising until they hit $250 per barrel.

Poppy appeal Sir: Fraser Nelson’s article accurately outlines the urgent need to implement an alternative counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan (‘The precarious peace in Helmand’, 28 May). Helmand province now cultivates half of Afghanistan’s opium in a country which accounts for 93 per cent of the global illegal opium market. A significant element of the current approach to countering burgeoning opium production levels — forced poppy crop eradication — has proven disastrous. Instead of providing economic stability, heavy-handed policies analogous to the US-sponsored ‘War on Drugs’ approach in Colombia have undermined reconstruction efforts and failed to re-engage with local communities.

Seek the reason why Sir: I greatly enjoyed Peter Jones’s excellent article on Ancient Roman globalisation (‘For real globalisation, look at Ancient Rome’, 24 May). I respectfully disagree with one paragraph, however, in which he describes Greek philosophers as having ‘proceeded from hypotheses, which they never tested’. It is true, of course, that the Greeks were incapable of testing certain things, such as the nature of the elemental constituents of matter. Nevertheless, in what was within their power to observe, they often proceeded, not from hypotheses, but from the empirical study of natures. The pre-eminent example of this approach is the extant work of Aristotle.

Thatcher’s champion Sir: The Spectator may have been Margaret Thatcher’s first press champion as Fraser Nelson notes (‘Labour’s best hope’, 17 May), but its support was not unwavering. At the end of 1974 it was unduly impressed by the efforts of Heath’s allies to brand her a food-hoarder when she sensibly encouraged pensioners to stock up with tinned food at a time of rising inflation. On 7 December 1974 it opined: ‘for the milk-snatcher to become the food-hoarder shows precisely the same political ineptitude as Sir Keith Joseph and it is likely to have the same political consequence’. Her defiance of the Tory critics swiftly silenced the editor’s doubts.