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Sir: Denis MacShane is too generous. In his Diary (11 October) he surmised that I might be the author of John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ slogan. But I am afraid I can take no credit for a campaign conceived by others before I came to Number 10. Still, ‘back to basics’ is a useful little phrase, which I confess to deploying at the Intelligence Squared debate against the motion proposing Georgian and Ukrainian membership of Nato. It may even have played a modest part in Team Skidelsky’s crushing defeat of Team MacShane. As your correspondent put it, ‘rarely has the room been so dramatically swayed by the arguments on the night’.
Christopher Meyer
London SW3
Sir: I enjoyed Denis MacShane’s Diary — except for the totally unjustified criticism of how ‘British Tory MPs’ voted at the end of the Council of Europe debate on the war between Russia and Georgia. The key vote as far as criticism of Russia was concerned was on Amendment 45. The Russians hated it and with the help of the leader of Denis’s Socialist Group it was defeated. Every British Tory vote was in favour (much to the annoyance of the Russians).
Denis also forgot to mention that just three of the ten Labour MPs entitled to vote did so (two with us and one with the Russians). Although Denis is a substitute member, the rules allowed him to vote in the place of one of seven missing Labour MPs. Can it be that the choucroute and Alsace wine he writes about took priority over joining me and my Conservative colleagues in voting against the ‘Kremlin line’?
David Wilshire MP (Spelthorne)
Leader, UK Conservative Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Taki ticked off
Sir: Taki is quite incorrect at various points in his sweeping revision of the history of modern guerrilla movements, on which he bases his opinion that ‘insurgencies have a tendency to wear out their enemy and eventually prevail’ (High life, 11 October).
First, the Communist Hukbalahap movement in the Philippines was defeated in the 1950s and the claims of upstart groups to have continued its depredations in later decades are absurd. Second, the FLN, which was victorious over the French, fought in Algeria, not Tunisia as stated by Taki. Third, the ‘Vietnam-style Tet offensive’ which Taki predicts may happen in Kabul is now widely understood to have been a failure for the Vietnamese communists, notwithstanding the mendacious American media which, not unlike its abominable generation of successors, insisted on reporting to the detriment of Western forces on the ground.
It is somewhat amazing that Taki seems to have forgotten that the Greek communist guerrilla movement of 1946–49 ended in a thorough defeat of the subversives.
Stephen Schwartz
Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Washington, DC
Irritated by Nats
Sir: The SNP does seem to get between Charles Moore and his peace of mind (The Spectator’s Notes, 18 October). But would he not agree that the oil revenues would have been of inestimably better use to everyone in Britain in a Scottish Oil Fund than being spent to further the vanities and ambitions of an increasingly rascally and third-rate political class?
Gordon McNeill
Largs, Ayrshire
General confusion
Sir: I fear that Nigel Milliner (Letters, 18 October) himself falls into error when correcting Dot Wordsworth’s confusion of Gordon and Kitchener. The Nile expedition, which neither relieved Gordon nor Khartoum but retreated, two days after Gordon died as the city fell to the Mahdi, was led by Garnet Wolseley. Kitchener retook Khartoum from the Mahdi’s successor a decade later, again up the Nile.
Allied to the Mahdi, the fuzzy-wuzzies — the Haddendowa — were not adjacent to Khartoum; they inspired Kipling by blocking relief attempts from the Red Sea ports.
P.G. Urben
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
A Correction
In last week’s Indian travel issue, the headline on Juliet Nicolson’s piece was: ‘A Maharini’s Secret Garden’. It should, of course, be ‘Maharani’.
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