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Lister Wilson
Cambridge
Number crunching
Sir: The figures for national insurance that you published in your leading article (22 November) are incorrect. Unfortunately, employees have not paid a rate of 4.85 per cent on their annual earnings for many years. The current figure is 11 per cent. Also, the figures you quote for the lower and upper bands relate to 2007/08. The earnings figures for 2008/09 are £5,460 and £40,040 upwards respectively. Having written this, however, the points you make are very true. You have, if anything, understated the burden.
Martin Haslam FCA
Via email
Best of the Beeb
Sir: As one of the apologists for the BBC cited by Robert Solomon (Letters, 15 November), I must confess that I did indeed fail to pick up on Mrs Finching’s crude speculations about Chinese women in Little Dorrit, but despite this I beg leave not to retract my previous comments to the effect that the licence fee is good value. In fact I would add that the presence of a lewd reference in a period drama hardly undermines arguments concerning the ‘high quality of its production’.
Mr Solomon does not make it explicit (excuse the pun), but the inference is that he disapproves of such lewdness. May I suggest that, in addition to turning off his television and radio, he should also avoid attending productions of any plays by William Shakespeare. For that matter, he might wish to handle with care practically the entire canon of English literature, from Chaucer to the novels of Jane Austen, for in Northanger Abbey we are informed of Catherine Morland that ‘At 15… she began to curl her hair and long for balls.’
Jon Stubbings
London N3
In praise of Low Life
Sir: Jeremy Clarke describes himself (Low Life, 22 November) as the worst hack in the history of British journalism. Can I assure you that in our opinion he is the finest journalist currently gracing the pages of the British press?
Martin Spencer-Hogbin
Victoria, Australia
Not the same book
Sir: I do not seem to have read the same book as Philip Zeigler (Books, 15 November) although both title and author — My Three Fathers by Bill Patten — are identical. I read a moving, fascinating and brave account of how someone, in middle age, discovered and struggled to come to terms with the fact that his real father, Duff Cooper, and his putative father and stepfather, Joe Alsop, not to mention his own mother, had all, in their different ways, created a conspiracy of deception about both his identity and their true natures. Even his loving stepfather was a closet homosexual.
To be told suddenly and vindictively by your mother that your real father was one of her several lovers, and that she had betrayed the deceased father you loved, when you are over 40 is quite a blow, and a compelling tale by any standards. Your reviewer, however, seems to have taken from the book a litany of minor errors about aristocratic titles and a splenetic dislike of both the author and his style. This reader at least prefers to read Patten’s gripping, if subjective, memoir than the latest edition of Debrett’s.
John Ranelagh
Grantchester, Cambridge
The Grand Old Party
Sir: Theodore Dalrymple (Global Warning, 15 November) is not alone in being annoyed by incomprehensible acronyms. A perfect example appears on the page facing his article. There James Forsyth, in an article about American politics, refers to the ‘GOP’, without giving any clue as to what this strange acronym means. Could you please enlighten me?
T. Roberts
Sidcup, Kent
His eyes deceive him
Sir: Although Charles Moore’s supposed spotting of Oleg Deripaska in the Wolseley last week (The Spectator’s Notes, 22 November) provides a fascinating insight into Mr Moore’s anti-Russian prejudices, we regret to inform you that it also provides an insight into his eyesight. Mr Deripaska was not in London.
Evgeny Fokin
Office of Oleg Deripaska,
Basic Element Company,
Moscow, Russia
Prussian paradox
Sir: Taki from time to time likes to dwell on the brilliance of the Prussian officer corps (High Life, 22 November); a fair enough point, and one which it is difficult for Germans to make. But might he touch one week on the moral cowardice of the German generals who failed to get rid of Hitler in 1938?
Andrew Gimson
London NW5
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