The Spectator

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 March 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said after the bombings in Iraq that there was ‘a struggle between good and evil’ going on there. Before the bombings, Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said it was withdrawing support from the Butler inquiry into intelligence on purported weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because the inquiry was to be conducted in an ‘unacceptably restrictive fashion’; Mr Michael Mates, the Conservative MP on the Butler committee, said it was his duty to continue. Miss Clare Short was asked on Today on Radio 4 about spying on the United Nations and said: ‘These things are done. ...

The Spectator

Competition – terms and conditions

1. This prize draw is open to residents of the UK, 18 years or over, except employees of The Spectator 1828 Limited their associated, affiliated or subsidiary companies, and their families, agents or anyone else professionally associated with the draw. 2. Details regarding how to enter as published form part of the terms and conditions. It is a condition of entry that all rules are accepted as final and that the competitor agrees to abide by these rules. The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into. 3. Only one entry per person. Late, illegible, incomplete, defaced or corrupt entries will not be accepted. No responsibility can be accepted for lost entries and proof of transmission will not be accepted as proof of receipt.

The Spectator

Gordon’s great con

Aspiring actors are, by tradition, advised by their mentors never to work with children or animals. Budding politicians, on the other hand, should be advised at all costs to avoid pensioners. They make lousy photo opportunities and they have a tendency to fuss over irritatingly small amounts of money. On the other hand, it doesn’t look good when old folk get sent to jail as a result of government policy. This is exactly the embarrassment now facing Tony Blair’s administration. Up and down the land, leathery ladies in silly hats are vowing that they would sooner do time in Holloway than fork out for another hefty rise in council tax. The government has been lucky to get this far without provoking a popular revolt against council tax.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 February 2004

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, proposed internment without trial for those suspected of terrorist offences, and other measures such as wider telephone-tapping. The government said that migrants from countries joining the European Union on 1 May will not be able to claim some benefits until they have worked in Britain for a year. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: ‘If they can’t support themselves, they will be put out of the country.’ But the criteria sounded unclear and open to legal challenge, as the European Commission lost no time in pointing out.

The Spectator

Closed minds

If staff at the Lancet ever go on bonding weekends, they should avoid rock-climbing, canoeing or any other activity in which they would rely on the trust and loyalty of their colleagues. Last weekend the magazine spectacularly turned against the author of one of the most controversial papers it has ever published. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 raised suspicions that the MMR vaccine was responsible for causing autism, was told by the magazine that his study should never have been printed. Editor Richard Horton said that Dr Wakefield’s research was ‘fatally flawed’ because its author had failed to declare a conflict of interest: that he was also conducting work on behalf of lawyers representing families of autistic children.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 February 2004

Mr Oliver Letwin, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the Tories wanted to freeze government spending, except that on health, education and pensions, and would fund increases there from economic growth. On the day he made his remarks, a report by the government’s efficiency review, headed by Sir Peter Gershon, said that perhaps £15 billion could be saved by transforming the way public-sector bodies worked; his prescription envisaged centralisation, economies of scale and regulation by penalties. Vodafone was beaten in its attempt to take over AT&T Wireless by the American group Cingular. Mr Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of schools, recommended that GCSEs and A-levels should turn into components of a new four-tier diploma.

The Spectator

Oliver asks for less

Oliver Letwin has laid the foundation for a Conservative victory at the next general election. We do not mean the Conservatives will necessarily win that election: that will require the recovery of great tracts of the political landscape from the Labour party. But the Conservatives are now in a position to campaign on the basis of a robust and pragmatic financial programme which is in harmony with the instincts of the British people. When politicians are asked what they intend to do with our money, the question is generally posed in the following form: are you going to raise public spending or cut taxes? To this conundrum, the shadow Chancellor answers ‘both’.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 February 2004

Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced plans to set up a Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was likened to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, to replace the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, and to take over the functions of the Home Office and Customs and Excise in investigating the smuggling of people, tobacco and illegal drugs. Mr Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, asked on television: ‘What would be wrong with making heroin available on the state for people who want to abuse their bodies?’ Nineteen Chinese workers, two of them women, were drowned as they picked cockles in Morecambe Bay. One telephoned his home in China as the water rose about him.

The Spectator

Make them legal

There could be no clearer example of human exploitation and its tragic consequences than the recent events in Morecambe Bay. Nineteen Chinese workers, who had paid a small fortune to agents in order to come to Britain for a better life, were drowned while gathering cockles in dangerous tidal waters of which they lacked local knowledge. Nothing can absolve those who exploited them — in this ferocious and conscienceless manner — of their moral responsibility, but this should not prevent us from considering what part our current way of treating illegal immigrants played in the tragedy.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 February 2004

The government announced a committee of inquiry into the accuracy of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war last year; it will be chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, the former Cabinet Secretary; the other members will be Mrs Ann Taylor, a Labour MP and chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee (ISC); Mr Michael Mates, a Conservative MP and member of the ISC; Sir John Chilcot, the staff counsellor for the security and intelligence services; and Field Marshal Lord Inge, the former Chief of the Defence Staff. There will be no Liberal Democrat, since Mr Charles Kennedy, the party leader, decided not to support the inquiry.

The Spectator

Right war. Wrong reason

Every so often there is an event which confuses the usual prejudices of political folk. One such event was the rise of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who combined gay liberation with a dislike of immigrants, thereby scattering in all directions those on the Left whose belief systems are dependent on the assumption that all minorities have common cause against white conservatives. The publication of the Hutton report and the appointment of Lord Butler to conduct a further inquiry into the intelligence which took Britain and America to war with Iraq is another such event.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 31 January 2004

The government narrowly carried the second reading of the Higher Education Bill, which makes provision for universities to charge British students an extra £3,000 a year. The vote was 316–311, with 72 Labour MPs voting against the government and 18 abstaining; Mr David Taylor, the Labour member for North West Leicestershire voted both for and against the Bill. Mr Jack Cunningham, a former Labour Cabinet minister, broadcast to the nation his view that the Labour rebels resembled the Militant Tendency. The next day Lord Hutton published a long report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the government expert on weapons.

The Spectator

Bring back Gilligan

On Tuesday, 24 September 2002 Tony Blair stood up in the House of Commons and waved a dossier. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ he said. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ These words were vital, at the time, since many MPs believed this country had no business waging war in Mesopotamia. It was in Mr Blair’s interests to point up the threat from Iraq. ‘The document discloses that Saddam’s military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them,’ he wrote in the foreword. As Mr Blair’s officials had foreseen, these words had a big impact.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 24 January 2004

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, ordered a review of 258 convictions of parents for killing their children after the Court of Appeal ruled improper convictions based solely on expert opinions where two or more babies had died. Mr Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, met Samantha Roberts, the widow of a sergeant shot dead during the war against Iraq after having been ordered to hand over his body armour for use by another soldier. Lord Hutton announced that the report of his inquiry into the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly would be published on 28 January. This is the day after the Commons vote on government proposals on university fees, which Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, has been energetically trying to persuade backbench rebels to support.

The Spectator

Parents make the best parents

Two developments this week demonstrate the absurdity, not to mention the inhumanity, of the government’s policy towards child-rearing. Firstly, sperm donors were informed that children conceived with the aid of their donations will be given the right to trace them. Secondly, the minister for children Margaret Hodge announced that it would be impossible to reunite thousands of children with parents from whom they were removed as a result of child-abuse prosecutions, even in cases where those prosecutions are ruled to be unsafe. In the first case, the government is intent on thrusting some of the responsibilities of parenthood upon men who simply wished to help others and who believed the law protected their anonymity.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 17 January 2004

The government proposed adding a surcharge to fixed-penalty fines for offences such as speeding and being drunk in public; it would be hypothecated to the compensation of victims of crime, but employers would also have to pay compensation for those injured at work by criminals. Asked in Parliament by Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, about denying having authorised the naming of Dr David Kelly, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said, ‘I suggest you look at the totality of what I said. But I stand exactly by what I said then.’ Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk was suspended from his programme by the BBC after writing in the Sunday Express about Arab countries: ‘What do they think we feel about them?...

The Spectator

No need for an inquiry

At 6.20 a.m. on Tuesday, the serial killer Harold Shipman hanged himself in Wakefield prison. He tied a noose in a bedsheet, placed it round his neck, tied the other end to the bars of his windows and jumped off a radiator pipe. It is difficult to see what else there is to say about the matter, but no doubt Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, will already have some ideas. He has just been appointed to carry out an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the former GP’s death. Mr Shaw will do his job with professionalism. He will establish what Harold Shipman had for supper the night before his demise, what exactly was said in Shipman’s last telephone conversation with his wife, Primrose.

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 10 January 2004

Mr Michael Burgess, the Coroner of the Queen’s Household, opened the inquest on Diana, Princess of Wales, the conclusion of which, he said, would not come for more than a year; he had asked Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to investigate her death, which was on 31 August 1997; as Coroner for Surrey, Mr Burgess also opened an inquest on Dodi Fayed. The Daily Mirror published a sentence from a letter written by Diana in October 1996 saying, ‘My husband is planning “an accident’’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury, in order to make the path clear for him to marry.

The Spectator

The uses of adversity

On Sunday, Tony Blair told the troops in Basra that they were ‘new pioneers of 21st-century soldiering’. The praise was fully deserved and sincerely delivered. Over his years in office, the Prime Minister has become a great admirer of the armed forces. Even so, there was a slight problem about the way he chose to phrase his compliment. The emphasis on new century, new army could obscure a crucial point: that the British Army is so good because so many of its traditions and so much of its ethos do not change with the calendar. Tried and tested, they endure. This also applies to training methods, which have come under attack in recent years because of fears about bullying.

Saturday

The Spectator

No guns on planes

When, at the insistence of the US Department of Homeland Security, the first armed ‘sky marshals’ take to British transatlantic flights, it is to be hoped that the in-flight movie won’t be Goldfinger. For anyone who has managed to avoid seeing any of the 40 years’ worth of repeat screenings, the Bond film concludes with the sight of Goldfinger’s portly frame being sucked through a plane window shattered in a gunfight with 007. It doesn’t take any great knowledge of aircraft pressurisation systems to realise that guns and planes do not mix. The pilots’ union, Balpa, has come to the same conclusion. Even former BOAC pilot Norman Tebbit, who supports the case for sky marshals elsewhere in these pages, does so with grave reservations.