Columns

Thursday

James Forsyth

Gove, gone

‘There’s no shame in a cabinet to win the next election,’ declared an exasperated senior No. 10 figure on Tuesday night. This week’s reshuffle was not one for the purists: it was designed with campaigning, not governing, in mind. With less than ten months to go to polling day, politics trumps policy. This is why Michael Gove is moving from the Department for Education to become Chief Whip. The test of this shake-up will be whether the Tories win the next election or not. This reshuffle demonstrated that Tory modernisation is not about measures anymore but men — and women.

Rod Liddle

The NHS ‘wellbeing’ monkey deserves to die

My young daughter has a furry beaver — lifelike in all but its eyes, which to me seem cold and dead. I bought it for her in the United States and I think it has pride of place within her impressive menagerie of anthropomorphised cuddly toy animals. There are also countless wolves which we have to hide when her grandmother comes to stay, in case she puts them in a sack and burns them, or just throws them in the garage. Grandma is an evangelical Christian of a somewhat uncompromising brand and believes that wolves, living or inanimate, are agents of Beelzebub. As, of course, are bats.

James Delingpole

Fear and libertarianism in Las Vegas

Great God, Vegas is an awful place. I realised this the moment I arrived. My cab driver — who’d been perfectly agreeable en route from the airport — mistook my post-flight sluggishness for reluctance to give him a tip, and drove off angrily cursing me as I fumbled in my pockets. The line just for the check-in desk was about a mile long. Everyone was fat and drunk and dressed for the beach. Outside it was too hot: 105°F at 5 p.m. Inside, it was too cold from the relentless air-conditioning. Everywhere had the style and charm and tastefulness of Redditch. By day three I’d had enough. ‘Don’t stay in Vegas more than three days,’ people had warned me. And people were right. It’s more than enough. Four days would definitely drive you mad.

Mary Wakefield

The ambulance service is in a state of emergency

Tom leant back against the bathroom wall, his face streaked with blood from the nosebleed, eyes half shut like an owl. ‘I’m passing out,’ he said. Then his legs gave way and he slumped to the floor. ‘Tom? Tom?’ I shook him but — nothing, no response. His hands began an awful looping tremor. Five minutes before, I hadn’t been much worried, a little bossy even, enjoying playing nursemaid to a friend. It’s only a nosebleed T. Now. Don’t tip your head back, you’ll choke. Lean forward over the sink, pinch your nose. Like this. Here. As Tom lost consciousness, so my reality changed. This was a different world — one in which T might be having a fit, or dying. My thoughts moved at different speeds.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Could Michael Howard be the next EU Commissioner?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the EU Commissioner role" startat=732] Listen [/audioplayer]In recent weeks British government visitors to Berlin have been confronted with a persistent question: when will David Cameron make up his mind about who he’ll send to Brussels? Picking a European commissioner is a big decision: Tony Blair sent Peter Mandelson, who went on to become the EU trade commissioner. Gordon Brown nominated Cathy Ashton, who picked up the foreign affairs post. There is a tradition of Brits landing relatively big jobs — and, ergo, power and influence. But prime ministers need to send someone with enough heft and zest.

Matthew Parris

What kind of idiot tries to stand in the way of a national child abuse panic? I do

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Dr Liz Davies discuss the child abuse enquiry" startat=48] Listen [/audioplayer]As essay titles go, ‘On losing an argument with Tim Loughton MP’ may fail to catch the imagination; but there we are: I don’t need to be re-elected. You know before you start when you’re on a losing wicket, and I had fully expected to lose this argument, which was on live television with Adam Boulton. But I thought the attempt might be interesting. I’d been inspired by a thoroughly sensible contribution to the subject on the Today programme, by Peter Bottomley MP.

Hugo Rifkind

Israel is drifting away from the West – but condemnation won’t help

Glaring, the ennui over Israel. The way we drag our eyes to the page, and sigh, and want to read something else. Sympathy is hard. Even anger is hard. It’s just… bleurgh. Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s?

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

The voice of Big Mother does more for women than any Twitter feminist

Feminism in modern Britain is not for the faint-hearted. Only the smartest, mouthiest girls on the social media scene dare join the fray — in print, in blogs, on Twitter — where they yell silently at each other in front of a mute but poisonous audience. It often seems not so much a fight for ladies’ rights as for territory: Caitlin Moran, Lily Allen, Laurie Penny, all jostling to own each particular piece of feminist turf. So it pleases me, secretly, that quite unnoticed by the Twitter girls, another woman’s voice, one that speaks aloud to millions every day, has done more (I suspect) to advance equality than the whole shouty lot of them. I noticed her first when I answered a phone call from an anonymous number not so long ago.

James Delingpole

Imperialism is back – and this time it’s politically correct

‘Why did you leave us?’ said the old Sudanese man in Omdurman market. ‘Things were so much better when you were here.’ He was talking about the British empire, of course, and apologies if I’ve told the story before, as I know I have. It’s just that it’s such a fantastically satisfying way of winding up all those guilt-ridden post-colonial types who find it a source of shame and embarrassment that the world’s atlas was once half-covered pink. I don’t though. Not at all. What shames me far more are the mistakes we’re now making as a response to that guilt. We’re still treating the Africans like children; and we’re still ripping them off.

Rod Liddle

I like the look of this exciting new Islamic State. But why don’t they want Belgium?

There is something attractive about almost the whole of southern Europe being part of an immense and somewhat rigorous caliphate, as promised by the exciting Sunni Islamic movement formerly known as Isis. This new entity, stretching from Santander in what we currently know as Spain, to Cox’s Bazar on the Bangladesh and Burmese border, would handily encapsulate 98 per cent of the worst countries in the world, as defined by me out of rank prejudice, but also by various more scientific UN criteria.

Thursday

James Forsyth

George Osborne’s been playing politics since he was 12. Now, finally, he’s winning

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_26_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss Osborne's rising fortunes" startat=934] Listen [/audioplayer]George Osborne’s first taste of political leadership came aged 12. At his prep school, Colet Court, he took charge of a party for school election in 1983. The Chancellor’s chosen party (as the forthcoming schools guide will discuss) was not the Conservatives, but his own Independent Conservatives. Sadly, history does not record what caused this schism — but it does seem to be the first evidence of Osborne’s modernising tendencies. He has always exhibited a very distinct form of Conservatism, and one that has recently moved in an intriguing new direction.

Rod Liddle

Rebekah Brooks takes her place in a perfect picture of modern Britain

What image comes to mind when we think of Britain today? I was moved to contemplate this question after reading the Prime Minister’s inspiring treatise on British values, which seemed to involve ‘being quite nice’ and not referring to other people as kaffir and then trying to blow them up. Fair enough. I suppose — as an image of Britain, Sonny and Cher jihadis bringing their arcane and vicious sandblown squabble to the streets of London is perhaps a more modernist take on John Major’s vision of an old maid cycling to morning communion through the early morning mist.

Hugo Rifkind

I may not know much about khat, but I know banning it is crazy

Khat is a leafy stimulant chewed mainly, I gather, by Somalis. This week the government banned its possession and sale. And, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why. Not being a Somali (or, indeed, a Russian murderer, whatever the sketch above might suggest) I can’t pretend that my life will now have a khat-shaped hole in it. Dimly, if I’m honest, I can remember a Swiss German hippy once giving me some leaves to chew on an Indian beach once, but they tasted horrid and I spat them out. So if I have taken khat, ever, it was then. Generally, I prefer to buy my leafy stimulants in packets of ten or 20 at the corner shop, set fire to them, and lie to my wife. Or, failing that, to stew them up with some hot water, and add some milk. The usual sort of thing.

Matthew Parris

Ed Miliband’s problem isn’t his image. It’s us

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_26_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss whether Labour should let Miliband be Miliband" startat=934] Listen [/audioplayer]That bacon bap earlier this month was not the cause of Ed Miliband’s unpopularity. Ed Miliband’s unpopularity was the cause of the bacon bap. Scant comfort this will give the Labour leader and his fabled ‘advisers’, but they can stop worrying about food-related photographic gaffes because once the world is out to get you, the world will get you, and if they don’t get you one way they’ll get you another. Sooner or later Mr Miliband will have to eat, and sooner or later a shutter will click as he opens his mouth.

Thursday

James Forsyth

How the Westminster hawk became an endangered species

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the death of Westminster hawks" startat=726] Listen [/audioplayer]There is a slight whiff of the summer of 1914 to Westminster at the moment. The garden party season is in full swing and the chatter is all about who is up and who is down. In the Commons chamber itself, domestic political argument dominates. You would not know that a vicious sectarian war is raging in the Middle East. At the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the fall of Mosul to the terrorist group ISIS, no one asked David Cameron to explain the government’s policy on Iraq. The situation in Iraq is dire on both a humanitarian and a strategic level.

Rod Liddle

A Labour elitist meets a fête worse than death

It is surely only a matter of time before someone with a mischievous glint in their eye invites the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, Helen Goodman, to open a fête in a place with which she is entirely unfamiliar, e.g. Bishop Auckland. Helen recently turned up as guest of honour at a fête in a village in the constituency she has represented for nine years. She delivered a moving eulogy to Ingleton, praising its beautiful waterfalls and deep, labyrinthine caves. The villagers listened with a dawning hilarity. Mrs Goodman had confused the village she represents with one of the same name some 70 miles away in the Yorkshire Dales. There are no caves or waterfalls in Ingleton, Co Durham.

James Delingpole

The big fat lie about cholesterol

Though I’m not generally big on banning stuff, there’s one substance I would prohibit without a moment’s hesitation — probably on pain of death if that’s what it took because clearly, where vanquishing monstrous evil is concerned, no sanction is too extreme. I’m talking, of course, about the devil’s semen: semi-skimmed milk. And about its unholier cousin — aka the devil’s urine — skimmed milk. Seriously, almost nothing can conspire to ruin my day more effectively than when I order up a flat white and the barista doesn’t know that only weird faddists with no taste take their coffee made with anything but full fat. Apart from maybe when someone tries to add some skimmed or semi-skimmed to my tea.

Mary Wakefield

Please, Cameron – no moral grandstanding over Iraq

If there’s a bright spot in the murky mess of Iraq, it’s that finally we have a war that it is impossible to paint in simple terms, as a battle of good against evil. This time, even our PM, the self-appointed heir to Blair, can’t grandstand about defeating ‘terror’ or protecting ‘innocent civilians’ because there’s terror and innocence on every side. He can’t pose as world policeman; stand side by side with Obama and say ‘we must not let this evil happen’, because clearly we already have. Take ISIS, the Islamist group once affiliated to al-Qa’eda who’ve become the world’s new public enemy number one. ISIS have captured parts of northeast Syria and Iraq, and have begun to eye up Baghdad.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Once Scotland votes, it’s England’s turn for a constitutional crisis

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_June_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the English question and the next election" startat=1129] Listen [/audioplayer]Before David Cameron heads off for his summer holiday, he’ll be presented with a first draft of the Tory manifesto by Jo Johnson, Boris’s younger brother and a cautious, well-organised thinker. He dislikes publicity almost as much as the Mayor of London relishes it. Radical ministers lament that Johnson doesn’t like pushing their recalcitrant colleagues too far, but despite this, the early hints are that the manifesto will be a surprisingly bold document. There will, though, be one thing missing from this draft: what to do about the English question.

Hugo Rifkind

Don’t blame the Guardian if criminals are getting better at hiding online. Blame iTunes and Netflix

I wouldn’t wish to deny that all drug dealers and crime lords read the Guardian. Indeed, check the circulation figures, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that only drug dealers and crime lords read the Guardian. So, when I read last week about the trouble that GCHQ is now having tracking online criminality, and the way that GCHQ considers recent revelations about state surveillance via the Guardian to be the cause, I did not for a moment think that GCHQ was entirely wrong. I genuinely wonder, though, if the rogue National Security Agency IT boffin Edward Snowden, whom we hear so much about, has damaged national security as much as Apple has. Or Netflix or BT or TalkTalk, or the entirety of the global industries of music, television and film. No, I’m wholly serious.