Commentariat

Times

My first assignment as a journalist in Bombay was in 2003, when I visited the home of a man accused of planting a bomb that had killed several people a few days earlier at the Gateway of India, the city's most famous landmark. The suspected terrorist lived in a typical Bombay slum, congested, with packed houses that shared walls and windows, and I spent the day quizzing the neighbours, who said they had heard and seen nothing suspicious, even though the police were sure that the man had assembled the bomb at home.

On the whole, and in the main, and everything considered, you do not in a
democracy go around arresting the Opposition. For some time now, web
humorists have been spelling new Labour “Nu-Labour”. As reports of Damian
Green’s arrest swirled yesterday, the prefix ZA attached itself to the
bloggers’ joke: ZANU-Labour. If by lunch I had heard the comparison with
Zimbabwe once, I had heard it a dozen times.

In this time of national adversity the country needs leadership by example. Instead of fan-mailing X Factor finalists, Gordon Brown should be down in the Westfield shopping mecca rewarding Sarah for swinging that Scottish by-election with a Christmas splurge in Jimmy Choo. Why are Tessa Jowell and Jacqui Smith not tripping into Cabinet, ministerial wrists buckling under Accessorize bags? We need to see Lord Mandelson test-driving sporty runabouts, Alistair Darling running amok in PC World.

The death of Woolworths has dealt a serious blow to those of us who had been quietly celebrating the onset of recession as a counterbalance to the recent years of greed and slickness, and had hoped that it would herald the arrival of a new austerity.

After wartime service in the Royal Artillery, David Summerhayes embarked in
1948 on a diplomatic career, towards the end of which, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, he played an important role as ambassador and leader of the UK
delegation to the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.

Neville Brown played a crucial role in the development of comparative law as
an important scholarly subject. His work on French law and the differences
between the common law and civilian legal systems brought him worldwide
recognition and honours in the UK and abroad. He served as Professor of
Comparative Law at the University of Birmingham from 1966 to 1990.

Brenda Wilks writes: In the early 1960s a young grammar schoolboy full
of vitality and blond good looks raced upstairs on the bus surrounded by
pretty schoolgirls every school day. While still a student he mesmerised an
audience at a local secondary school when he directed a performance of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This was Richard
Hickox. I wonder how many of the young people who performed with him
then have followed his career, as I have? The vicar’s son who has given so
much to so many and who never lost that vitality is a tremendous loss to the
musical world.

With his boisterous rhyming, highly developed braggadocio and salacious,
profanity-laced routines, Rudy Ray Moore was a stand-up comedian and film
actor who was credited with having helped to shape modern hip-hop culture.

Grace Hartigan was a gestural painter whose work bridged two postwar art
movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1958 Life magazine
called her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters”. Much
as she appreciated the attention, she did not like the conditional ranking —
she wanted to hold her own among men, specifically the rock stars of
Abstract Expressionism, and for a time, she succeeded.

Enid Blyton is back, and all is forgiven. This summer she was voted the
nation’s favourite author. And yesterday the author Anne Fine, the former
Children’s Laureate, winner of every possible prize for her books, came out
powerfully on the side of the Faraway Tree and the Five Find-Outers and Dog
series, with a Radio 4 programme called A Fine Defence of Enid Blyton.

W e now know that 2009 is going to be very, very tough, particularly the first
half of it. A number of our clients are battening down the hatches and there
is considerable gloom about.

Images of that great Bombay monument, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, engulfed in flames and thick billowing smoke cannot help but recall the collapsing twin towers of 9/11. The attack seems to bear all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation.

Forget VAT. Forget the Pre-Budget Report and the gaping hole in the public finances. Why has no one noticed that the financial system is clinically dead? Without bank loans, credit lines and overdrafts, good businesses will go bust and repossessions soar. The PBR was miserably irrelevant.

The festive season has come early this year - well for the robbers it has. For the rest of us there isn't a great deal to celebrate.

Is it just me, or does it seem odd to you, too, that while folk all over the country are being laid off from their jobs, we're being told that the only way out of this mess is to spend like there's no tomorrow? Hurrah, another 20 per cent off at Marks & Spencer! That will make us forget our woes, and give our ailing economy a boost as well! What's not to like?

The woes of Woolies have inspired a wave of nostalgia for a Pick'n'Mix of cosy experiences that range from filching confectionery or broken biscuits, searching for 7in singles by Technotronic and Yazoo to buying Miners mascara and scratchy school uniforms. However, as the retailer's administrators assess possible offers for Woolworths' 800 stores, maybe we should all be concentrating not so much on the past of this business, but on what its passing means for the future of high streets, including yours.

The last surviving veteran of the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in
1940, “Alfie” Sutton was the observer (navigator) of the Swordfish torpedo
bomber flown by Lieutenant F. M. A. Torrens-Spence, in the second wave of
assaulting aircraft, which was led by Lieutenant-Commander J. W. Hale. The
raid, carried out by pitifully slow biplane aircraft whose technology owed
more to the First World War than the Second, against a modern navy bristling
with anti-aircraft guns in a well-defended southern Italian harbour,
achieved devastating results out of all proportion to the size of the force
involved.

Called up as a newly qualified doctor for National Service in 1953, Freddie
Hurrell opted to take a four-year short service commission in the Royal Air
Force. In the event he was to serve in the medical branch of the RAF for 36
years. In that time he was to gain invaluable service in many hands-on posts
at RAF stations at home and abroad, gaining frontline insight into the
problems of aircrew by getting airborne himself as often as he could.

Jan Krugier was one of the world’s foremost art dealers and the creator of a
superb collection of drawings and other art works by artists ranging from
Raphael and Ingres to Picasso and Bacon. His achievements were the more
remarkable for the harrowing circumstances of his childhood — as a boy he
survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

Trudy Bliss was the keeper of the flame for her husband, the composer Sir
Arthur Bliss, for 33 years after his death in 1975, and a writer and
broadcaster who enjoyed success at the end of the war and in the postwar
period. In 1987 she founded the Bliss Charitable Trust to promote
performance and recording of her husband’s music and to encourage young
composers.

Peter Lehmann was a gas industry executive who helped to change British Gas
from a state monopoly to a competitive energy company. At the same time, he
retained a deep concern for the industry’s social responsibilities, and
after retiring from the board of Centrica he became chairman of the Energy
Saving Trust and, latterly, the Fuel Poverty Action Group.

The leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales has called for the National
Gallery to surrender a Renaissance masterpiece – because it is a “work of
faith” rather than art.

The keen wind of recession whistled down Hope Street last week. In Liverpool, the question on everybody's lips was simple: would it blow away the city's dreams of turning its year as Europe's Capital of Culture into a decade of regeneration? What price those millions sunk into great theatre, street carnival, cutting-edge art and Simon Rattle concerts? Were they simply to be swept out by economic forces that no one had predicted?

The number of flights at Heathrow will increase far sooner than the Government
has previously admitted under plans to squeeze in more take-offs and
landings on the existing runways.