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Greedy Gordon
From Clive Cowen
Sir: Your leading article of 13 May (‘Sorry, you’re no Mrs Thatcher’) hit the spot when you wrote, ‘He [Mr Brown] and Mr Blair have tussled as if the office of prime minister belonged to them.’ Rather than those sullen looks in the background, rather than the innuendo of barely coded statements, rather than all the appearance of leaks from Mr Brown’s camp, it would have been so much more reassuring if Mr Brown had been a loyal and supportive colleague.
How can we trust a man to work for the nation’s best interests when he cannot be seen to be 100 per cent loyal to the Prime Minister, who appointed him? How can we trust a man who is so desperate to be prime minister? Surely this is an awesome responsibility that no sane man would so avidly seek? Could it be that the sort of person who is so overtly desperate for the job is really the last man we need?
Clive Cowen
Ramsden, Oxfordshire
Cashing in
From Frank Robinson
Sir: David Meikle (Letters, 13 May) is naive in thinking that European countries are clamouring to join the EU because they share its values. It is because they know that they will receive more money from the EU than they will have to pay
in — some of it ours, following Mr Blair’s rebate capitulation at the end of his
presidency.
Frank Robinson
Wetherby, Yorkshire
Kissing men
From Oliver Mason
Sir: In ‘The Spectator’s Notes’ (20 May) Charles Moore writes, ‘Merely 30 years ago, films of men kissing would have been banned in most European countries….’ This is not quite right. The film Sunday, Bloody Sunday, directed by John Schlesinger, in which Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch) and Bob Elkin (Murray Head) kissed each other passionately, appeared in 1971. Admittedly, it was described as ‘groundbreaking’, but it wasn’t banned — at any rate not in stuffy old Britain.
Oliver Mason
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
Theatrical canard
From Michael Grosvenor Myer
Sir: Michael Vestey (Arts, 20 May) retails yet again the canard that ‘Look Back in Anger, attacked by most reviewers, was saved by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson’. This bids fair to be the strongest and most persistent ‘minds made up, don’t confuse us with the facts’ theatrical folk-tale of our time. A couple of weeks ago, on the 50th anniversary of the play’s first night, the Guardian reprinted on its editorial pages Philip Hope-Wallace’s notice: a ‘has its faults but an obvious talent to watch’ piece absolutely typical of what appeared the next day — I remember reading almost identical remarks in that day’s London Evening Standard on my way home from work. But this truth doesn’t make nearly such a good story, does it?
Michael Grosvenor Myer
Cambridge
Roman contraception
From Suzan Smith
Sir: Sir Cliff Richard (‘It seemed to me that Tony was suffering’, 13 May) states that Jesus ‘obviously never got into contraception, because it did not then happen’. In fact, both contraception and abortion ‘happened’ at that time. Pliny in his Natural History (29.27.85) writes of one supposed method of contraception.
Soranus, who wrote a treatise on gynaecology in the 2nd century AD, describes both contraception and abortion (1.60.4, 1.61.1–3 and 1.64.1–2, 1.65.1–7), and Ovid in his Amores (2.14.5–10ff) speaks of his feelings about the abortion which his lover, it seems, is about to procure.
Suzan Smith
Harrogate, Yorkshire
Mad, bad and hard to say
From John Kiely
Sir: Actually, the Iranian President originally had a quite uncomplicated name: Inejad (Shared opinion, 13 May). But after he had been in public life for a few months, every time someone mentioned his name, the response would be, ‘Ah, mad Inejad’. People began to think they were being corrected.
John Kiely
Melbourne, Australia
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