Spectator's Journal: Mad Cows and Englishmen
Richler, Mordecai
"Spectator's Journal: Mad Cows and Englishmen" by Mordecai Richler Mad Cows and Englishmen The Spanish Armada couldn't manage it. Neither could Napoleon, or Hitler. But where they failed to bring Great Britain to its...
...snapped Cook, his smile menacing...
...The government has reluctantly ruled that Dr...
...Compassion is the rule of the day and the cows should be allowed to lead natural lives...
...MORDECAI RICHLER is the author of Oh Canada...
...Two weeks before Passover, in Montreal, an alert Quebecois tongue-trooper, an official of our province's Office de la Langue Francais, ordered a food distributor to remove kosher products from store shelves and demanded that future shipments be labeled in French...
...But where they failed to bring Great Britain to its knees, a cabal of McDonald's, Burger King, and Wimpy's has reduced Little Englanders—this once happy few, this previously legendary band of brothers—to a bunch of mendicants...
...During the debate on the Scott Report, and the alleged Tory cover-up of illegal arms sales to Iraq, a government minister was foolish enough to argue that the sales of machine tools to Saddam had been good business and had guaranteed thousands of jobs...
...Mad salmon...
...Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams, a City wholesale broker, has come up with a policy dubbed Human Mad Cow Insurance Protection...
...Massari's application for asylum, and strongly recommended that Mr...
...The pity is that the optimum solution is readily available, courtesy of the former jewel in Queen Victoria's crown...
...If only they would accept Fergie, a.k.a...
...Most recently the ridiculous 37-year-old duchess twice changed her flight plans in horny pursuit of Thomas Muster, an Austrian tennis star nine years her junior, whom she has followed from Melbourne to Florida...
...After lunch, I sat in on question period...
...0 n April 2 I was invited to lunch at the House of Commons, and the food was just what you might expect in a British public school...
...Feeling lonely...
...Roy protested, "belittled and demeaned my female status...
...I am now known to everyone as Mr...
...Loonybins Dover sole...
...Speaking in London recently, appropriately enough in a wax museum—Madame Tussaud's, to be precise —Virginia Bottomley, the National Heritage Secretary, proclaimed, "Tourism now earns more for the UK than North Sea oil or financial services...
...Once having finished my shopping in Harvey Nichols fifth floor food hall, I can repair with my parcels to the adjoining bar for a tipple, a convenience yet to be made available even in the most opulent American food emporium...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Mordecai Richler Mad Cows and Englishmen The Spanish Armada couldn't manage it...
...After all, what is to be said about an off-shore island that advertises itself abroad as a source of cheap labor...
...Experience the thrills and (Continued on page 73) For all of us who want government off our backs Why Small Business Is Leading the Revolution Against Big Government 1 IL °n MAIN STREET RICHARD LESHER PHI...
...What I watch out for, even more carefully, are sheets of unilingual matzohs...
...Having inadvertently admitted Dr...
...We may soon witness the largest backyard barbecue known to mankind...
...Elbowing my way into Harrod's cigar shop, past shifty-eyed American smugglers, snatching commie Havanas with both hands, I cannot only buy a good Cuban cigar over the counter, as it were, but may also light up in a restaurant without the health fascists at the next table flying into a frenzy...
...For an annual premium of a mere £10 it offers £25,000 worth of coverage against Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), and the maximum protection available is £250,000, payable once the disease is diagnosed...
...packing suitcases in Quebec, back in November, for our annual five-month sojourn in London, I scrupulously went through all my jacket and trouser pockets to make sure I wasn't carrying any cocaine, heroin, gold bars, A-Bomb triggering devices, or stacks of counterfeit U.S...
...Enjoy a dogfight in a Spitfire...
...Shoot the breeze with Dr...
...Married, with two children, the doctor was contemplating a sex-change operation...
...Guided by the shining principle that the customer is always right, Home Secretary Michael Howard was more than willing to oblige the Saudis, but was temporarily stymied by the Chief Immigration Adjudicator, who found that the Home Office had no right to refuse to consider Dr...
...If any of you were CEOs of a privately-owned company you would have been sacked ages ago...
...MacKenzie, head of the cable television station Live TV, the man who has brought viewers Topless Darts, has placed an ad in the tabloid Sun: "Newsreader wanted...
...Sail into gunfire with Admiral Nelson on the Trafalgar Pool...
...Stopped by a stranger on the street, I don't brace myself against a possible mugging, but understand that it is merely somebody in need of a street direction...
...It is the industry of the future...
...44 June 1996 • The American Spectator In the brave new world of trash publishing, the scheming Fergie, lumbered with a £3 million bank overdraft, is also reported to have signed a £6 million deal for a yet-tobe-scribbled memoir about her four-anda-half-year bonking interlude with Bryan and the breakdown of her marriage to the pathetic Prince Andrew...
...Chamber of Commerce offers a stinging indictment of absurd government regulations that cripple America's small businesses...
...Even so, it does seem that the once fierce British lion has lost its teeth...
...Requiem for a Divided Country, This Year in Jerusalem, and many novels, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now, and Solomon Gursky Was Here...
...Rubbing it in, I fear, the council's parent group, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, has pronounced the BSE crisis a manifestation of "divine displeasure" at the slaughter of cows for beef...
...This, Ms...
...Recently, William Muirhead-Allwood, 49, an orthopedic surgeon who had participated in the Queen Mother's hip-replacement operation, gave a press interview wearing mascara and eye-liner, with light face makeup over his visible stubble...
...Desperate Tory politicians, running a consistent 30 points behind nearly-new Labour in the polls, have been shuttling to and fro between London and Brussels, denouncing the intrusive EU bureaucracy at home, while pleading with it on the road for baksheesh of many billions of pounds...
...But, preparing for our return trip home, as we are now, I don't worry about such piffling contraband...
...Samuel Johnson in Ye Olde England Pub...
...The Duchess of Yuk, as part of the deal...
...Furthermore, clicking glasses, we resolved to continue kissinggirls who used the indigenous foundation cream, never mind that it possibly contained deadly beef extract...
...Meanwhile, Bryan has been accused of a £900,000 fraud in Germany...
...This, he explained, would further distinguish Live TV's news bulletins from the "dull and regimented" format of Britain's mainstream current affairs programs...
...Hasmuth Shah, spokesman for the British branch of the council, which has the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India's main opposition, has promised to provide loving care for twelve million cattle...
...Massari may remain in Britain for the next four years, where he has been placed under no obligation to muffle his criticism of the Saudi government...
...Jack Kemp A Selection of the Conseryative Book Ckubj At bookstores no, or Lail 1 8011-253-6.1Th to order...
...The mind boggles...
...And this country that invented gunboat diplomacy now trembles at the hint of displeasure from an Arabian absolute monarch...
...I shouldn't complain too much, because I like it here...
...Senator Richard Shelby "An insightful look at how small business engaged itself in finding real solutions to America's public policy challenges...
...Looking for a giggle...
...Mohammed al Massari, a prominent Saudi Arabian dissident, who has had the bad taste to call for democracy in his homeland, they were eager to dump him on little Dominica, lest they lose some valuable defense contracts...
...Buses stop for me at pedestrian crossings...
...A big-time beefeater reports from London...
...to which nobody will come...
...This, I should point out, is a convivial system whereby if, say, a Tory MP cannot be in the House for a vote, pleading that he must visit his sickly, beloved old mum in the hospital, but, more likely, has arranged for a nooner with his pert research assistant, his Labour pair agrees not to vote as well...
...Where the surrounding seas have been just about fished out by a second armada of Spanish marauders, and where a good deal of the automobile industry is now owned by either the Japanese or the Germans...
...Good business...
...This year we have had to do without spring and, even as I write, early in April, the unseasonal chill, as well as endless bad news, is still with us...
...Good business...
...Or, God forbid, a jar of gefilte fish with a label that is in English only...
...The last time Great Britain stood alone, during the darkest days of the Second World War, my aunts knitted ferociously for Bundles for Britain, and to this day I shudder at the thought of all those khaki sweaters unraveling in the foxholes...
...In this continuing crisis, bewildered Tories tend to float increasingly dotty solutions, my favorite the suggestion that the cattle should be ground up and their minced remains dumped at sea, eventually infecting the fish stocks as well, no doubt...
...In yet another knee-slapper, pretty 14year-old Caroline Roy, a mobile phone company manager, has been awarded £113,000 by an industrial tribunal, becauseher boss insisted on her greeting him in the office with the accolade, "Hello big boy, you were fabulous again last night...
...Those machine tool sales were guaranteed by your government and paid for by British taxpayers," he added, reducing the Tory front bench to stony silence...
...Massari, but this, he says, is not blackmail: "Blackmail is when you do something illegal...
...DUTTON Spectator's Journal (Continued rom page 40 spills of the Blitz in our Docklands Park, air raids begin promptly at six...
...On balance, it is still safer to be a Jew in Quebec than a threeyear-old cow in the United Kingdom, and you can quote me on that...
...Taxi drivers speak English...
...The sales to Iraq totaled £700 million and Saddam has yet to send a check...
...But the late Peter Cook, of Beyond the Fringe and other inspired comedy enterprises, was right when he ventured years ago that this island was doomed to eventually sink giggling into the sea...
...During the last bovine scare, at least, the traditional British sense of humor prevailed...
...Not so long ago tabloid readers feasted on unflattering topless photographs of Fergie having her toes sucked by her financial adviser, which is rather more, come to think of it, than my bank manager has ever done for me...
...Ispend five months of the year in London, my refuge from the loopy tribal politics that prevail in my native Quebec...
...Conspiring in tandem, a triad of hamburger chains (not to mention the vengeful wogs across the Channel) has banned U.K beef, the pride of this off-shore island's cuisine, and called for the burning of twelve million cattle...
...What with the Easter hols about to begin, the silly boys and girls of Westminster were in a whoopee end-of-term mood, waving order papers, jeering, and wisecracking...
...The banner headline read, "Britons Among 930 Adrift on Crippled Cunard Liner...
...I don't want to make too much of this...
...We are a sovereign country...
...That attentive adviser, one John Bryan, is now suing her for a third of her purported multi-million dollar contract for a projected series of Budgie the Helicopter books for kids, an idea which some cynics insist was pilfered from the earlier Hector the Helicopter juvenile, which was written by a mere commoner...
...The last time I had been to lunch in the House, with then–Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, I had asked him if MPs had ever refused to pair...
...I can count on two mail deliveries a day...
...London is a city where, for the most part, the small civilities are still observed...
...The American Spectator • June 1996 73...
...Lock up your wife in the Tower of London...
...Should the national lottery ticket I bought this week prove to be the winner, I will not have to pay tax on my millions, or wait for the bonanza to be paid out piecemeal over the next two hundred years...
...Kelvin MacKenzie, for instance, is an advocate of the disadvantaged...
...It has been estimated that the slaying of the entire herd would cost a total of £.20 billion, but the benevolent Hindus would take them off the United Kingdom's hands for £i billion transportation costs...
...Major, who continues to endure truly vicious attacks in the Tory press, seems to me the most likable and decent of men, while Tony Blair strikes me as more of amarketing chap than a principled leader...
...I .111 \ NMI It DUI 1101\11 Itt \\ \ \\ I: 11 NEWT GINGRICH The president of the U.S...
...And, looking into my crystal ball, I can foresee the day when Disney buys up the island, lock, stock, and barrel, dresses the natives in Sense and Sensibility or Middlemarch costumes, and runs it all as an amusement park...
...But possibly what really ails the Duchess, no longer Her Royal Highness since her divorce, is her speed-like diet of fenfluramine and phentermine pills that she has been prescribed by a New York doctor...
...You must [also] obtain confirmation from your suppliers that the packaging will be francized so that this violation is not repeated in future years...
...We can buy wherever else we want...
...Howard do so within a month...
...I want to be fair...
...Yes," said Wyatt...
...But then Canadians always did have the right stuff...
...Must have stammer...
...A recent Daily Mail headline asked, reasonably enough, "Fergie: Has She Got Mad Cow...
...Saudi Arabia's ambassador to London has warned that the British would jeopardize hundreds of millions of pounds in contracts unless they deport Dr...
...Leaders of the World Council of Hindus have approached Health Secretary Stephen Durrell, offering sanctuary in India for all those cows due to be "executed...
...William Muirhead-Allwood," he said, "but for years I have called myself Sarah, and that is how many of my friends know me...
...This is not only a matter of removing these products," he wrote...
...This is not to suggest that all British bosses are boors...
...It is immoral to slaughter these cows," he said...
...Richard Lesher is sitting at the pinnacle of a growing movement to put government back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people...
...U.S...
...Call the Fanny Hill Escort Service...
...The 37,845-ton Royal Viking Sun, second only to the company's flagship QE2, had struck a reef in the Gulf of Aqaba, and Cunard has since been fined £15 million by the environmentally responsible Egyptians...
...Once, when there was some talk of diminishing the size of the Member's Bar, an insufferable notion endorsed by some devout Welsh Labour MPs, we absolutely refused to pair...
...In a daredevil mood, and eager to prove undying loyalty to Queen and country, although a mere colonial myself, the next day I went to lunch with a toilet-trained native, and we both ordered Angus sirloin steaks...
...There was the High Street butcher who posted a sign in his window that read "The Only Mad Cow Here Is My Wife...
...Yes, indeed...
...Oh Quebec...
...Certainly she is the most vulgar and avaricious of a generation of incredibly dim royals...
...A spokesman for the British Stammering Association has said that his organization is "extremely interested...
...And now the Home Office has had to beat a retreat.44 Leaders of the World Council of Hindus have approached Health Secretary Stephen Durrell, offering sanctuary in India for all those cows due to be "executed...
...The most effective, and justifiably feared, debater in the House is easily Robin Cook, the Labour spokesman on foreign affairs, who always does his homework and can speak at length without notes...
...One of my companions, a Tory peer, conceded the coming election, but doubted that his party would be diminished to two in number, as were the Conservatives in Canada in 1994...
...But now it is the spirit of free-market enterprise that is most evident in post-Thatcher Britain...
...Slop bills, lest I make a bad impression on Her Majesty's customs inspectors in Heathrow...
...Take, for instance, the front page of the April 5th Daily Telegraph...
...John Major, in fine form, made a quick meal of a subdued Tony Blair...
Vol. 29 • June 1996 • No. 6
