Columns

Thursday

Matthew Parris

A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in Africa. Actually it probably wasn’t a slave pit and we probably didn’t discover it, but ‘Arab’ ‘slave pits’ were what Southern Rhodesian schools offered as an explanation for the circular, room-sized, stone-lined pits sunk about five feet below ground but open to the sky. And if Roger’s and mine were not the first modern eyes to behold this antiquity, then we were able at least to persuade ourselves of the claim, as there was no path trodden into the small patch of dark, dense primary forest in whose midst we found the pit; and nobody else seemed to know about it. This felt like a discovery.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Neknominations – this is what the internet is for

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that name. I don’t know where it comes from, Torz. A shortening of Victoria, I would guess, although it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was actually christened Torz, much as people these days are christened Jayden. Anyway, that’s not the point.

James Forsyth

Only Angela Merkel can save David Cameron now

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_20_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Cameron's relationship with Merkel" startat=1204] Listen [/audioplayer]British politicians still prize a visit from the President of the United States above all others. Yet no American President has been as important to a British Prime Minister, in domestic political terms, as the German Chancellor is to David Cameron. Angela Merkel is the person who can both help him keep his party together as it approaches the next election and then, with luck, deliver his promised renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership. For Cameron, Merkel — far more than Barack Obama — is the indispensable ally.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The martyrdom of Mark Steyn

When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued. Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory. What made me doubly jealous was that this was a case Steyn was guaranteed to win.

Mary Wakefield

Why did Theresa May deport my homeless friend?

I’ve heard some excellent things about our Home Secretary, Theresa May. People who work in her department say she’s bright and hard-working, and that she runs around on her hamster wheel of ministerial duties as nimbly as any political hamster could be expected to. If she has a fault, it’s said, it’s that she doesn’t have a grand plan — the Home Office wheel spins round, but to no particular end. Well, that’s all to the good, say my sensible friends — who wants a reforming secretary of state? No good can come of a politician with ideas. It’s the one approving thing also said about Cameron: at least he doesn’t have an agenda. Well, I’m not so sure that isn’t a stupid thing to say.

Rod Liddle

We buy dogs to reflect ourselves. So who’s buying all these killer pitbulls?

I’ve called the doggie hospital three times now to find out how Jessie’s getting on. She’s just come round, at the time of writing. I think it’s partly guilt which makes me keep ringing up: we’re paying to have her ovaries ripped out with a small hook-like device, which seems to me a betrayal of the trust shown in us by the dog. She thought she was just going for a quick ride in the car and clearly didn’t understand why everyone was being so nice to her, so solicitous. Seven months old and, before her first season, she is being deprived of the undoubted pleasures of being on heat. It is surely the right of every bitch to behave, once a year, like Sally Bercow.

James Forsyth

If David Cameron can’t get the floods right, all his hopes will wash away

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on how the floods will define the PM's legacy" startat=1218] Listen [/audioplayer]It is all hands to the pump in Downing Street. The entire No. 10 operation from the Prime Minister down to the Policy Unit is focused on the floods. ‘We are all on a war footing,’ declares one official. David Cameron is spending his time poring over maps of the affected areas. ‘It is quite remarkable,’ says one minister who attends the Cobra meetings on the floods, ‘to hear the Prime Minister asking Gold Command about individual farms.’ Cameron knows that the floods will be a defining moment for his government.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

If Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t happy, what hope is there for us?

Celebrity deaths have no decorum. From Elvis on his toilet to Whitney face down in her bathtub, their last moments sit alongside their songs, or films, or their drunken stumbles out of nightclubs. Kurt Cobain, my teenage idol, had been dead from a shotgun blast to the mouth for — what? Days? Hours, even? — before the newspapers started running photographs of his Converse-clad feet visible through the doorway of the shed in which he died. Fans would pass them around. Weird, really. If a favourite uncle dies in his bed, you don’t go asking your cousin for a Polaroid, do you?

Matthew Parris

How Alex Salmond could lose his referendum and still wreck the United Kingdom

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3' title='Matthew Parris and Alex Massie discuss how Alex Salmond could wreck the Union even if he loses' startat=55] Listen [/audioplayer]From a kind of torpor about this year’s Scottish referendum, Lord Lang of Monkton has roused me. You may remember Lord Lang as Ian Lang, a Scot who as MP for Galloway served Margaret Thatcher and John Major as a minister, under the latter both as Scottish Secretary and then President of the Board of Trade. A pleasant, steady and notably capable man, it was possible to imagine him as a potential Tory leader, but he stuck with John Major throughout.

Rod Liddle

I’ve invented a new game. It’s called ‘Six Degrees of Shami Chakrabarti’

Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the tragic story of Sally Morgan being given the boot from Ofsted? In all other manners the coverage was adequately respectful and the reporters, rightly, allowed their anguish to bleed through the fraying bandage of impartiality. Not enough, mind – I could have done with some real weeping and tearing at the hair: how could this brilliant and exciting woman be so traduced? The Tories are trying to take over everything! You’d have thought they’d won an election, or something. How dare they. I wonder which public institution will be the next grateful harbour for Baroness Morgan?

James Forsyth

Ed’s finally reforming Labour. So why are the unions happy?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_6_February_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Marcus Roberts discuss Labour's election strategy" startat=702] Listen [/audioplayer]Ed Miliband has his legacy. Or, at least, what he hopes will be the first part of it. He has succeeded in scrapping the system by which he was elected Labour leader. Gone is the electoral college split three ways between MPs, trade unions and ordinary party members. It has been replaced by a one-member, one-vote system. This will be simpler and more democratic. It will mean that unions can’t send out ballot papers with leaflets telling people who to vote for, and nobody will have the advantage of wielding multiple votes.

Thursday

James Delingpole

How the MPs’ expenses scandal proved the wisdom of Alain de Botton

Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain de Botton. Alain is a genuinely delightful fellow — charming, considerate, wise, modest — but this has made no difference to the degree with which, in some quarters, he remains intensely loathed. This saddens me. There are certainly occasions when I find his utopianism naive, twee, mockable. And, yes, I suppose it’s easy to be jealous of a handsome man with a beautiful wife and a comfortable life which seems to involve nothing harder than pondering philosophically, writing bestsellers and being on TV a lot.

Mary Wakefield

Hearts – the next stage of the 3D printing revolution

I have seen the future — your future if you’re rich enough or brave enough to embrace it — and I have to tell you, it’s weird. Imagine this: it’s 2025 and you’re getting on, feeling your knees a bit. You’re bending over one day to pick up junk mail when you feel a terrible pain in your chest. You call 999 and within the hour (in this ideal world) you’re in hospital under the knife. But this isn’t heart surgery you’re having, it’s bottom surgery: the doctor’s taking a chunk of fat from your bum. Have they made a terrible mistake? No they have not.

Rod Liddle

Why I’m on board for the homophobic bus

London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people who, like me, work in the media, as they call it. I was born in London but only feel truly at home in the north-east of England, an area of the country within which the constituents of that list I quoted above are almost nonexistent. But I am thinking now of moving back to the city — it’s possible that I could afford a flat in somewhere such as Brockley, or perhaps Catford — to take advantage of a radical new development in our capital. Because rumbling along the streets of London quite soon will be homophobic buses.

James Forsyth

The coalition is now an open marriage

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the state of the coalition' startat=1275] Listen [/audioplayer]Without any fanfare or formal announcement, the government has moved into a new phase. ‘We’re not in a coalition now. We’re just cohabiting,’ says one Liberal Democrat. ‘We’re a sexless couple. We live in the same house but sleep in separate bedrooms.’ The two parties are governing together but pursuing increasingly separate agendas. As this Lib Dem source puts it, ‘They’re doing what they want and we’re doing what we want.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Being assaulted nearly put me on trial

Way back in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time in court. What happened, see, was that in the wee small hours of a drunken Edinburgh morning, my friend Jonny and I took a shortcut home through the disused railway tunnel that runs under Holyrood Park. I’d been through it many times, being enraptured with the magic of abandoned urban spaces and, perhaps more to the point, stupid, but never before had it contained a gang of pissed-up youths on a rampage. This time it did, and they put us in hospital. Various arrests followed pretty swiftly.

Matthew Parris

Is a new art form being born on Woman’s Hour?

In a comic-strip cartoon, beads of water apparently radiating outward from the head of one of the characters indicate embarrassment. Lines flying horizontally from a character, all in one direction and tailing off with distance, indicate rapid movement in the opposing direction. Every western child knows this; but were you to show the cartoon to a Tuareg nomad in the Sahara, these ciphers — which are really more a form of hieroglyph than a depiction of any recognisable object — would be meaningless. Likewise in a film, cutting between scenes  would totally confuse our Tuareg, who would wonder why we had apparently left one place and gone suddenly to another.

Rod Liddle

Why didn’t Bridget Harris just slap Lord Rennard?

When I was promoted to being editor of a programme at the BBC, back in the late 1990s, my line manager came and talked to me in a deeply mysterious manner for a number of troubling minutes. He was wary and elliptical and I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. There were things you could do as a deputy editor, he told me, that you couldn’t do as an editor. But he didn’t tell me what those things were, those things which I now couldn’t do. I just sat and nodded wisely. Only later did I realise that this was his ‘Don’t shag the staff’ speech. That was the thing you couldn’t do — the staff. I hadn’t been aware that as a deputy editor I could do the staff. I wish I had known.

James Forsyth

What the NHS owes the Tories

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='James Forsyth discuss the NHS with Charlotte Leslie MP' startat=1430] Listen [/audioplayer]Pinned to the wall of Jeremy Hunt’s office in the Department of Health is an A1 piece of paper detailing that week’s ‘Never Events’. It catalogues the mistakes that have been made in NHS hospitals that should never have happened: people having the wrong leg amputated, swabs being left inside patients after surgery and the like. This grim list is a rebuke to the glib, Danny Boyle-style rhetoric which dominates all political debate about the NHS and treats any attempt to examine the failings of British health care as heresy.

Thursday

James Delingpole

When trolling pressure groups cause real harm

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as if I’d invited them to snog a bird-eating spider.