Already a subscriber? Log in
Sir Stephen Wall
By email
Turkey in the middle
Sir: When Stephen Pollard blames Europe (and its refusal to admit Turkey into the EU) for pushing the AKP-led Turkey into the arms of the Middle East, he is undermining the role of Islam in Turkish politics (‘The end of Israel?’ 5 June).
Turkey, ever since its inception in 1923, has suffered from an identity crisis, the result of an internal battle between a secular elite and the Islamic masses. The succeeding generations failed to spread the Turkish republic’s secular ideals to the masses, leaving them open to Islamic narratives. This ideological gap, coupled with the EU-dictated democratic reforms, helped Islamists consolidate their power base.
The EU has unwittingly eased the Islamists’ entry into Ankara, enabling them to advance the process of Turkey’s Islamification. Whether the current Turkish government, whatever it says, really wants to be a part of the EU is not clear, although it makes no sense whatsoever for it to be a midget in the EU when it has the option of becoming the tallest person in the Middle East.
Randhir Singh Bains
Essex
Sir: Stephen Pollard misses an important point about the criticism of Israel. Israeli methods always had an element of thuggishness about them. These days it looks increasingly like incompetent thuggishness.
Robert Davies
London
Moral Laws
Sir: Charles Moore’s otherwise excellent moral compass appears to be off, perhaps due to the lodestone of 13 years of Labour misrule. David Laws should not return to the government after a decent interval, as he suggests (The Spectator’s Notes, 5 June).
No amount of talent can remove the fact that the taxpayer was made to pay David Laws £40,000 unnecessarily, the reason for this being to conceal his sexuality from friends, family, colleagues and, for a time, journalists. Laws could have found a way to do this that was less expensive to us. Then he would not have lost his job. British politics is becoming like ice hockey, where misbehaviour results in a spell in the sin bin and then you return to the fray. It should be like soccer, where a red card means you are off the pitch for the rest of the game with additional repercussions.
Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett’s hokey-cokeys with Labour Cabinet positions on the occasions when they were caught doing something naughty are not precedents. Rather, they are additional examples of how New Labour debased politics and other institutions in Britain.
Paul T. Horgan
Crowthorne
Sir: What does the editor of the Daily Telegraph think he has achieved by exposing Mr Laws? What dastardly wrong has he righted? What national interest has he promoted? A kick in the solar plexus of the new government to remind it who is boss?
The entire parliamentary expenses thing has given us the unedifying spectacle of the press crowing on a dunghill of sanctimonious hypocrisy, and listening to its echo from an obedient public. No echo from this quarter. ‘Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages,’ said Stanley Baldwin, a man after my old conservative heart.
Antony Graham
East Lothian
A tale too tall
Sir: There is no storyteller more delightful than Claus von Bülow, but I must correct his version of the one quoted by Taki (High Life, 29 May). Claus may have been at the launch of Leni Riefenstahl’s memoirs, but I definitely was and Ronald Fuhrer was not, for being at the apogee of his shortlived fame as a London host, Ronald was giving a swagger dinner party that evening. I asked Riefenstahl to inscribe a copy as a present for him. ‘So… Herr Ronald?’ She said, pen poised. ‘Fuhrer,’ I answered. Her gnarled hand trembled as she wrote the word.
Nicky Haslam
London
Mystical Victorians
Sir: A.N. Wilson, in his review of John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave (Books, 5 June) doesn’t mention the fact that Newman was a mystic. Does Cornwell do so? An extraordinary number of Victorians were mystics — Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, etc — and without taking this into account how can we understand them? Ruskin, for example, was one of the brains behind today’s welfare state. Wilson also says he found Newman’s defence of theism (in ‘An Essay in Aid of the Grammar of Assent’) persuasive. That’s more than Newman did — he ends his Essay by saying if you can’t see God mystically for yourself, you’d better stay agnostic.
Dick Sullivan
London
Also in Society
Also by The Spectator
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in