UR TV CAST

“There are also guys like [Youri] Djorkaeff who also scored a great goal on Sunday.”We’re only at the third round of the season so the game can’t be called a championship decider. The press learned of his adroit transaction in advancing pounds 140,000 to his elderly neighbour to buy the house next door from Westminster Council (at a discount of pounds 50,000) on the understanding that the property would revert to him It is now worth at least pounds 300,000. His reward was promotion to the lowest rung of power, as parliamentary private secretary to then health minister, Brian Mawhinney.Duncan’s spell in government lasted 17 days. He remains the Conservatives’ Peter Mandelson – and that is a hard act to live up to.For now, he is a casualty of the war at Smith Square between Hague’s generation and old farts like Lord Parkinson who regard Duncan as a bumptious upstart whose undue influence on the leader needs downsizing. The fact that she has survived and even prospered in the face of such calumny indicts all of us – the press, the people and a political party once held in high esteem by the world.That is the bad news.

The good news came last week in the form of Katiza’s Journey, a BBC documentary on Katiza Cebekhulu, the state witness who was spirited out of the country on the eve of Mrs Mandela’s 1991 trial and imprisoned in Zambia at the ANC’s behest. In the South African context, Katiza’s Journey was political dynamite, a damning account of a plot in high places to defeat the ends of justice and cover up murder. Ten years ago its makers would have been arrested and deported. In 1997 the state- owned SABC gritted its teeth and broadcast the documentary in prime time. Certain passages were neutered to protect Nelson Mandela but, otherwise, this was a decision that packed flesh on to the ANC’s rhetoric of democracy and open government.Like the SABC, the Truth Commission is essentially an ANC institution, loaded with party faithful and fellow travellers who must have found it painful to take steps that threaten to destroy the reputation of one of their own icons. And yet they, too, have done their duty, summoning Winnie to take the stand in next week’s preliminary hearings and account for her role in 18 “gross human rights violations”, including eight murders “Truth kills,” said the poet Ted Hughes. It might finally have caught up with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.Additional reporting by Nomavenda Mathiane..

We live in dangerous times. Motorists driving under the influence of illicit drugs are a “growing menace” says the Daily Mail “Holiday cancer threat” says an Independent headline Threats and menaces make daily morning reading But there’s a difference between them. Threats are about something that hasn’t happened yet, like the impending rain that threatens play, or the cancer that may come from too much sunbathing, whereas menaces are already upon us: drugged-up motorists are even now at the wheel. It’s not clear how this distinction came about, because for most of their careers the two words have been practically interchangeable. Menace comes from minari, which my Latin dictionary defines as “to threaten”, while the Oxford English Dictionary defines to threaten as “to try to influence (a person) by menaces” We seem to be going round in circles. The OED has a quote from Reginald Scot, the Elizabethan cham-pion of women accused of witchcraft, about people who “stand in more awe of the menaces of a witch than of all the threatenings pronounced by God”, plainly an early case of what Fowler called Elegant Variation.
No one decided that a menace should refer to the agent of danger while a threat was the danger itself – that a menacing cloud, say, should bring the threat of rain – it just happened. Nor is it obvious why there should be something far more disturbing about a menace than there is about a threat: one never hears talk of idle menaces.

Perhaps it’s just another example of the Latin-derived synonym carrying more weight than the Germanic one (terror, for example, is more alarming than fear), which has always made me suspicious of those Guides to Good Writing that tell you to choose the Anglo-Saxon word in preference to the Latin one. Buchan traces the public history of money dutifully and skilfully, if sometimes a little stodgily, and takes more entertaining excursions into Shakespeare, for instance, and gender relations This chapter sees Buchan living dangerously. “Money is now quite beyond human control” Rowe tells us early on, and ends her preface with “Understanding money is a matter of understanding ourselves”. The cooler- headed Buchan seems to echo some of this in his “Money, which we hope to see and hold every day, is diabolically hard to comprehend with words.” Diabolically? This is hardly rational language.Still, once these early signs of panic are over with, both writers settle down. We know all the obvious reasons, which are devastatingly simple; these authors want to work out, it seems, why it isn’t in fact simple at all.Although Dorothy Rowe’s style is quite different, a certain breathlessness in the face of the subject also unites the writers. Buchan’s title, “Frozen Desire”, is only one of many such phrases he coins (sorry) in his book: he also has “incarnate desire” (his own), “coined liberty” (Dostoevsky’s), to quote just two Both books are attempts to discover why money matters. It gives us a clue straight away as to what these Big Questions actually are: that we are not, here, talking about real value – water in the desert, for instance, or an absolute moral sense – or about currency and exchange value either in its broader sense (labour or sex, knowledge or skill) or even in its crazier local manifestations (tobacco in prisons, or the tulip in 17th-century Holland), even though all these things, and many more, are covered by Buchan and often mentioned by Rowe.No, we are firmly in the world of money as a mental and emotional category.