22 Nov 2003

22 November 2003

In this issue

Featured articles

Until well into the 1980s, the death penalty was a problem for aspiring Tory candidates. Local associations were almost always in favour, strongly. This led to much wrestling with conscience. Conscience often lost. Matters were easier for card-carrying intellectuals. Any constituency prepared to consider one of them had already braced itself for bizarre opinions. But it would have been unwise for a beef-faced squire to declare his opposition to hanging.

The threat to rugby

Rachel Johnson wonders whether Earth has anything to show more fair than 15 beefy rugby players, especially when it’s raining. But lawyers take a more calculating view of the gameThe Rugby Football Union lot stuck down in Twickenham (Dee, Dave, you’ve been a great help, cheers) have, I know, been looking forward to receiving their copies of this week’s Spectator with more than their usual anticipation. I told them that I wanted to write a piece, to be published just before the World Cup final, that would put rugby into some kind of perspective; in other words, I intimated, The Spectator would be saying that the rugby was the most wonderful thing that has happened to England for as long as anyone could remember, if not the most important thing ever to have happened in the history of the world.

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