Foraging natives

Sir: Simon Collins is right about England supporters’ world class barracking [Spectator. Oct 24th]. Having wasted my youth in the 70’s on the football terraces of Portman Road, I still enjoy watching football, much to the amusement of my Australian husband. He was mystified once by the English fans singing ‘Rule Britannia’ during an international game (I think he thought it was rather high brow for football hooligans) ‘England are playing Argentina’, I explained. He was none the wiser until I added the word ‘Falklands’. He was very amused……

I would like to correct Simon on a point regarding ibises. I concur absolutely with his description of them as dirty and sinister; however they are actually a native species. There are three types of ibis indigenous to Australia, and the ones Simon saw in Mosman are probably the ironically named Australian Sacred Ibis. They seem to have forgotten their ‘sacred’ status in the city, and are now a sort of winged grey squirrel, rummaging through rubbish bins and infesting parks. One once tried to steal my daughter’s ice cream while she was still holding it. They are often to be seen prowling the sports fields of the school where I teach, and if I point them out to the boys as we study Ancient Egypt they invariably suggest catching one and mummifying it. I suppose we could call it experimental archaeology.
Allyson Schofield
Denistone, NSW

Vulgar touch

Sir: Can’t help it; Mathematics teacher. Neil Brown (Brown Study 17 October), “common and vulgar”: tautology. Willing to bet that he heard of vulgar fractions as a child.
Tim Harrison
Canberra, ACT

Not a Cnut

Sir: Tony Abbott was capable of great decency and service, perhaps more so than any Prime Minister for decades. But he was equally capable of self-serving ruthlessness.

No politician since 1975 has stretched parliamentary conventions to their limits, adding to a collapse in public trust in parliament. Abbott readily admitted that it was not as grave a crime to mislead the ABC as it was to mislead the parliament, he readily admitted that what he said was not always the gospel truth. His prime ministership was undone, in large part, because he insisted that he had never made promises that he had in fact made. This was all the more remarkable because he destroyed Julia Gillard’s credibility on the grounds of trust.

His political instinct was to sacrifice institutions if it served his needs and to shut down discussions and debates in order to make it easier to negatively frame his opponent. Yet, despite his great promise and a clear capacity for complex thinking and advocacy for unpopular ideas amongst his own support base, as Prime Minister, his vision for the future was to lock us in aspic. He took option after option ‘off the table’ and in doing so, impoverished us all.

Abbott was both complex and deeply flawed. That was part of his appeal, or rather, his fascination. But he was not a great Prime Minister.

Conservatives should know their task is to manage change in a manner that preserves traditions and institutions. That is, in fact, the point of the King Cnut story (quoted wrongly in your magazine). Cnut waded into the water to demonstrate that he could not in fact stop the tide. Successful conservatives know this too
M Taflaga
NSW, Australia

An expert in diplomacy

Sir: In his letter of 24 October, the
94-year-old Sir Archie Lamb modestly does not mention that he ably describes the evolution of the Diplomatic Service from pure diplomacy to the promotion of ‘trade’ in his latest memoir, The World Moves On. This is history from the inside as he rises from pre-war filing clerk (with a break as a Hurricane and Typhoon pilot) to ambassador and the Diplomatic Service Inspectorate.
Dr Ian Olson
Aberdeen

Not a red brick among them

Sir: Harry Mount gives unwarranted status to the academic institutions attended by Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet by implying they were red-brick universities (‘Red-brick revolutionaries’, 24 October). Red-brick universities do not feature among the higher education centres mentioned in his article.

The term ‘red-brick university’ was given in 1943 to six universities with high academic status, particularly in science, technology and medicine. These universities were strongly allied to their host cities and accordingly designated civic universities. In recent time the original six — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and Bristol — have been joined by other universities to form the Russell Group. All these universities are research-intensive and are held in high regard, particularly by those of us who were fortunate enough to attend and work in them.
Prof. Sir Miles Irving (Liverpool, 1953-1959)
Woodstock, Oxfordshire

Canada rocks

Sir: For reasons unknown, Canada receives scant attention in the pages of your great publication; even New Zealand gets more mention. So it was with delight that I read Rod Liddle’s catalogue of ‘right-wingish’ rock bands including Rush, BTO, and sometimes (not now) Neil Young — all Canadian (26 September). This is consistent with the rebellious nature of the rock genre. For most of our history, Canada has been ruled by the ‘left-wingish’ Liberal party.
Kevin Sheedy
Toronto, Ontario