Sir: Your epic apologia for your magazine seems to suggest
that any polemical article, however fatuous or bilious, is a good thing (`Taboo or not taboo, that is the question', 19 November). You don't distinguish between responding to provocation and being pointlessly offensive. I wrote as sharply as I did in The Spectator (`No pon- tification is this realm of England', 29 Jan- uary) in order to defend the Church of England against denigration by certain Catholic journalists who had worked them- selves into a triumphalist frenzy at the prospect of women priests. Other, more thoughtful Catholic writers such as Clifford Longley and Michael Walsh warned against making too much of the issue (so did Angli- cans such as Edward Norman), but their voices were drowned by the clamour that this was the end of the Church of England. Now, less than a year later, what has hap- pened? Two or three hundred Anglican priests have become Catholics, more than a thousand women have become priests, most people have forgotten what all the fuss was about, and relations between the two churches have, as I had hoped, begun to return to their previous courteous and friendly state.
By contrast, the typical Spectator attack on this or that foreign country seems to have little purpose except to stir up and give our xenophobic juices a work-out. As for William Cash's article, I am still not quite sure what the point of it was, but I don't think I like the sound of it.
Ferdinand Mount
Editor, The Times Literary Supplement, Admiral House, 66-68 Smithfield, London El
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