The Spectator

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 9 April 2005

The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles was suddenly postponed for a day because it clashed with the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II on 8 April. The Prince of Wales was to represent the Queen at the funeral, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to perform a service of dedication for the couple, also wanted to go to the funeral, as indeed did Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. Mr Blair said that he was postponing an audience with the Queen for a day as a ‘mark of respect’ for the Pope; after the delayed audience he announced that Parliament was to be dissolved and a general election held on 5 May, as everyone had expected. The Grand National was postponed from 3.45 to 4.10 because of the rescheduling of the wedding.

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Shades of Zimbabwe

When Richard Mawrey QC, who presided over the inquiry into electoral fraud in Birmingham, said the tactics used in the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’ he was, if anything, understating his case. It was shocking enough that six men, all of whom were subsequently elected councillors, were found to have committed electoral offences so grave that they have been disqualified and barred from standing for election. It was shocking enough that three of them should have set up a ‘vote-rigging factory’ where they doctored hundreds, and possibly thousands, of postal votes (the men were caught red-handed, yet preposterously protested after their punishment that what had happened to them constituted ‘a dark day for democracy’).

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 2 April 2005

Mr Howard Flight who, many were surprised to learn, was deputy chairman of the Conservative party, had the whip withdrawn and was told by Mr Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, that he could not stand for Parliament as a Conservative candidate after he addressed a dinner of the Conservative Way Forward association. When discussing savings in public expenditure identified by the James report, Mr Flight told the meeting, ‘The real issue is, having won power, do you then go for it?’ This was presented by Labour as an admission of secretly planned cuts.

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Unfair but right

To the minds of many reasonable people the punishment meted out to Howard Flight, MP for Arundel and the South Downs, has been of unwarranted severity. No one — not even the genial Mr Flight — denies that his words were ill chosen. But his supporters would say that at heart they reflected nothing more than his general instinct for small government, and his general desire to stop waste and economise on spending — ambitions which all Tories should applaud. He was speaking at a private meeting, and did not expect to be reported. He was stitched up. Many reasonable people, not a few of them among his fellow MPs and his constituency association, will feel that it would have been enough to sack him as Tory deputy chairman.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 26 March 2005

Private Johnson Beharry, 25, was awarded the Victoria Cross for valour on 1 May 2004 during an incident in Iraq. The government admitted that Camilla Parker Bowles would become Queen if she was married to the Prince of Wales when he became King. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said he would give parliamentary time if he were prime minister to a Bill to reduce the upper limit for abortion from 24 to 20 weeks. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, said, ‘The policy supported by Mr Howard is one that we would also commend, on the way to a full abandonment of abortion.’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said it should not be an election issue.

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Red alert on Brown

It is an iron rule of politics that the more ecstatic the immediate reviews of a Budget, the more disastrous it is likely to prove for the country over the long term. Last week’s effort by Gordon Brown may yet prove to be in the grand tradition of Denis Healey’s 1975 performance — which was instantly popular, but ended with Britain begging for alms from the IMF. If you want evidence of the Budget’s ephemeral magic, it is there in the opinion polls. After weeks of closing the gap, the Tories appear to have sunk back to an eight-point deficit, according to a Guardian/ICM poll.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 19 March 2005

In a widely leaked tinkering Budget, Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, raised the threshold for stamp duty to be payable on houses from £60,000 to £120,000 and the threshold on inheritance tax from £260,000 to £275,000; slightly increased pensions; deferred petrol duty rises until September; increased excise on cigarettes by 7p a packet ‘for health reasons’; and announced plans for stem-cell experiments and a memorial to the Queen Mother in the Mall. A Downing Street official said that Mr Brown’s part in the election campaign would be equal to that of Mr Alan Milburn’s, if not more important.

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Feedback | 19 March 2005

A Liddle simplistic I read Rod Liddle’s article (‘A question of breeding’, 12 March) with dismay. It appears that my son has autism because I found my husband’s company congenial and we married and had a child. As an explanation for a complex neurological disorder this seems slightly simplistic. In fact it seems only just better than the blame-the-mother argument that was popular in the 1950s. Those people who married and had children with disorders such as Hunter’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis or haemophilia undoubtedly found their partner’s company appealing as well, but all these disabilities have identified genetic causes.

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Fit for debate

When Michael Howard was asked about abortion by Cosmopolitan magazine he gave an entirely reasonable answer: that he himself supported the case for abortion, and was reconciled to the practice — a broad statement of principle that one might expect from the leader of a progressive party with hopes of forming a government. It was a right won for women in the 1960s about which there is now, rightly or wrongly, an overwhelming national consensus. But he went on to say what many have long believed, that the legal time limit for abortion should be reduced. It seems incredible that it is still legal to terminate a foetus at 24 weeks — six months — when medical advances mean that 39 per cent of babies born at that age survive.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 12 March 2005

The government was defeated in the House of Lords by 249 to 119 when a Liberal Democrat amendment to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill was passed — to apply the prior sanction of a judge rather than the say-so of a home secretary to all proposed control orders, not merely those that stipulated house arrest. The next day five votes in the Lords went against the government; 24 Labour peers voted against their party when a ‘sunset clause’ was added to the Bill. Among those who voted against the government were Lord Irvine, the former Labour Lord Chancellor, and Lord Condon, a former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

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Feedback | 12 March 2005

ADHD is an illness I am the mother of a daughter who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For the past 23 years I have protected her and defended myself against the sort of opinionated, didactic comments made on this disorder by people such as your writer Leo McKinstry (‘Not ill — just naughty’, 26 February) and I am sick of being told that this condition is nothing more than an excuse for bad behaviour brought about exclusively by bad parenting. While Mr McKinstry fully acknowledges that this is a medically accepted condition that can be quite clearly seen on an MRI brain scan, he condemns the professionals by decrying the symptoms as nothing more than typically uncontrolled loutish behaviour.

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The Leader | 12 March 2005

The latest crime-fighting proposal from the IRA is so boneheaded, so stunning in its stupidity, so stereotypically moronic, that if it had not come from a bunch of thugs and killers we might be tempted to say that it is almost sweet. The sisters of Robert McCartney, who was murdered in a Belfast bar, are about to visit America, the IRA’s most profitable fundraising territory, in a campaign to bring his killers to justice. They want the many witnesses to his murder to be able to testify free from the death threats already issued by the IRA. To judge by the slogans appearing on the walls of some Republican housing estates, so do a good number of the IRA’s traditional supporters. And what is the IRA’s response?

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 5 March 2005

The government did a good deal of nodding and winking to the opposition over its rushed legislation to provide for house arrest without trial and other controls on anyone suspected of connections with terrorism. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, conceded that judges should decide if suspects were to be put under house arrest, but police should have powers to hold them in the meantime. The government majority was reduced to 14 in a Commons vote. Sajid Badat, 25, from Gloucester, was convicted, after pleading guilty, of conspiring with Richard Reid, the attempted ‘shoe-bomber’ jailed in America, to destroy aircraft in December 2001; Badat dismantled his own shoe-bomb and was arrested in November 2003.

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Feedback | 5 March 2005

Lay off the Tory tabloids Douglas Hurd advises us to ignore the campaigns of the popular press — and, by implication, the people whose concerns they ably articulate (‘Time to fight back’, 26 February). Hurd has spent his professional patrician lifetime disdaining the opinions of ordinary people. That is why the party he and his fellow grandees — Heseltine, Howe and Patten — drove into the ground by 1997 is in such a parlous condition today. It is the press that has provided the only opposition to Hurd’s neo-Blairite agenda, and has vigorously rejected the policies so dear to him: coddling criminals, bending the knee to Brussels and grovelling to foreign despots everywhere.

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A despotic act

It is unfortunate, though perhaps inevitable, that people who have lived only in conditions of liberty and democracy should have limited interest in the legal provisions that keep societies free. That much is clear from the public’s response to the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. The past week saw one of the gravest parliamentary debates of modern times, on a measure which would undermine an 800-year-old principle of English law: that no man should face imprisonment without trial. And yet to judge by the opinion polls, most citizens seem to care little about the issues involved.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 26 February 2005

Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, attempted to rush through Parliament legislation to put people suspected of terrorism under house arrest without trial. Mr Michael McDowell, the Irish justice minister, said that leaders of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland were also members of the Irish Republican Army’s seven-man Army Council: ‘We’re talking about Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams, Martin Ferris and others,’ he said. All three men denied the accusation. Mr Adams had earlier nuanced his opinion that the IRA was not involved in December’s £26.5 million raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast, saying, ‘The IRA has said it was not and I believe them, but maybe I’m wrong.

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Feedback | 26 February 2005

Miller’s genius Attention must be paid’ to Arthur Miller (Mark Steyn, ‘Death of a salesman’, 19 February) quite simply because he was the greatest dramatist of our lifetime. Briefly to answer Steyn, it was hardly Miller’s fault that his biographer failed to locate Norwich accurately; and having survived the McCarthy witch-hunt, it seems a little unfair to condemn Miller simply because he declined to join the far Right, where sadly Steyn now seems to belong. The fact that Castro and Gorbachev recognised Miller’s genius doesn’t necessarily mean that he recognised theirs. Nor was he even remotely unpatriotic — he just didn’t always care for the way his beloved country was being run.

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What did Blair advise?

If you want an answer to the tricky question of whether it is right for the Queen to boycott her son’s wedding, turn to that leading constitutional expert, Max Clifford: ‘Of course she should go. She’s his mum.’ Once the legality of the wedding is established, the love of a mother for her son is all that matters. Constitutional experts can say all they want about how unseemly it is that the Queen should have to visit a register office, even if she has been photographed beaming from the arcade of that same register office in Christopher Wren’s fine Guildhall at Windsor, presiding over a procession of flower-pot men in 2002. Historians can say that monarchs have boycotted weddings before.

Saturday

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Portrait of the Week – 19 February 2005

The Labour party made six so-called pledges: ‘Your family better off. Your child achieving more. Your children with the best start. Your family treated better and faster. Your community safer. Your country’s borders protected.’ Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, made a speech at a party conference at Gateshead in which he said his relationship with the electorate was like that of a man going through a bad patch in his marriage during which crockery is thrown at him; ‘I’m back and it feels good,’ he added. The Prince of Wales is to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles on 8 April in a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle, to be followed by a service of prayer and dedication, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Stand up to America

The war on terror will be concluded, George W. Bush has suggested, when citizens of the free world no longer live in fear. Everyone, that is, except Britons accused of crimes in America. Last week, three former investment bankers with the NatWest, David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby, took the extraordinary step, via a judicial review in the High Court, of asking the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to investigate them. They did this because an investigation by the SFO presents the only means by which they can defend themselves before being extradited to the United States on charges of defrauding their former employer of $7 million.