Columns

Thursday

Matthew Parris

You can’t demand democracy in Syria but ignore it at home

After David Cameron’s decision to seek parliamentary approval for air strikes against Syria, two lobbies came charging in, banners aloft. Now their attention has moved to Barack Obama’s decision to seek approval from the US Congress. Though on opposite sides of the argument, these two groups have something in common, and it depresses me. Both see democracy as capable of securing a right decision. Neither sees democracy as capable of making a decision right. Let me explain. The anti-interventionists are of course delighted (as was I) that our Prime Minister sought a Commons mandate for military action. They’re even more delighted now that Parliament has said no.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

By all means wring your hands over Syria. Just don’t ask me to trust you

They’re getting the rebuttals in early, have you noticed that? You might call them a pre-emptive strikes. Here’s William Hague, speaking to BBC Radio 4 about those chemical attacks in Syria... ‘To believe that anybody else had done it, you would have to believe that the opposition in Syria would use, on a large scale, weapons that we have no evidence that they have, delivered by artillery or air power that they do not possess, killing hundreds of people in areas already under their control.’ Pretty good, that. He must have practised it beforehand. ‘Have’ and ‘possess’ mean the same thing, after all, so you need a bit of preparation there. Better, certainly, than John Kerry, who gave a press conference at the White House and said...

James Delingpole

The tao of Ayn Rand

I’m now half way through Atlas Shrugged and I’m loving almost every moment. But Ayn Rand isn’t someone you read for pleasure, I’m beginning to realise. She’s someone you read so you can underline sentences and scrawl in the margins ‘Yes’, ‘God that is so TRUE!’ and ‘YES!!!’ For example, at the heart of the novel are three romances between heroine Dagny Taggart and a trio of driven, dauntless free marketeers. But you don’t pay them any serious attention — not even during the sex scenes, which you skip quickly past in order to get to the much more exciting bits about industrial relations. Partly, it’s because Rand isn’t much of a prose stylist, least of all when she tries to do lyrical.

Alex Massie

Why must we worry about London’s success?

For a long time my view of the Imperial Capital — as, like other Scots, I am still prone to considering London — was borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s description of its riverside: ‘It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life.’ London was mysterious, huge and confusing. I disliked it intensely. Times change. London seems a place transformed these days. It fizzes.

Isabel Hardman

The PM is preparing for another coalition. His colleagues have other plans

Conservatives have been returning to their Westminster offices this week to find the wind behind them. Something suddenly seems to be going right: there’s good news on the economy, jobs and immigration and Labour seems to be in gentle meltdown. The idea of an outright majority in a 2015 election suddenly seems a lot more plausible. Which is why ministers and advisers are so dismayed at reports last week that David Cameron was planning for a second coalition after 2015. Just when a Tory election victory seemed possible, the Prime Minister has been mulling over a change in party rules so that MPs could vote on a new coalition agreement.

Hugo Rifkind

After the threat to storm Ecuador’s embassy, heads should roll. But whose?

How can it be that we’re two weeks on, and there’s still been no media witch hunt to identify the (I choose my words carefully) cretinous meathead who decided to threaten Ecuador with the storming of their London embassy if it didn’t expel Julian Assange? Has there been a more shaming diplomatic fiasco for Britain in the past decade? Post-farce, this country stands revealed as in thrall to an undemocratic cabal, which quietly dominates every aspect of public life. I refer, of course, not to the agents of American military industrial hegemony, but to bastards even worse. That’s right. Lawyers. On paper, the Foreign Office maintains both that William Hague sanctioned the threat, and that it wasn’t actually a threat at all.

Rod Liddle

Could political correctness finally get Galloway?

Do you share the very real pain of the disability lobby groups about George Galloway MP referring to someone with whom he was arguing as a window-licker? Maybe you do. I have never heard the term used except as a mild admonition to someone who had just done or said something stupid. For others, it seems to have a darker charge, for gorgeous George was inundated with complaints. Some chap from the mental health charity Mencap said that he was ‘appalled’ and that ‘hate crime and bullying are a daily reality for many disabled people’. Are they? Every day? Or is Mr Mencap overstating the case a tad? Even if they are I am not sure what this has got to do with Galloway’s lazily flung insult.

Tim Stanley

Why is Romney courting the Tea Party? Because it’s more likeable than he is

It wasn’t hard to tell the Republican establishment from the Tea Party activists at this year’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. The different uniforms illustrated the unresolved tensions that run through American conservatism. In the convention hall, the regular Republicans often looked dressed for dinner at eight — smart jackets and pearls. A boy from West Virginia sported an orange bow tie beneath his coal miner’s hat. But at a separate Tea Party Unity Rally held in a local church, the audience of some 2,000 came dressed for a barbecue — T-shirts, jeans and the occasional crazy with a tricorn hat and musket. The atmosphere was folksy and amateurish; there was even a raffle.

Thursday

Tom Switzer

Conservative landslide in Australia: Tony Abbott will crush Kevin Rudd

Sometimes only a cliché will do, especially when the subject is the Australian Labor party. Labor is holed beneath the water line and is sinking fast. No one, not even its newly reinstated skipper, Kevin Rudd, is capable of keeping the boat afloat as the nation heads for a general election on 7 September. In a couple of weeks, barring an act of God or a military coup, the conservative Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal-National coalition, will replace the left-liberal Rudd as prime minister of Australia. It was not meant to be like this.

Matthew Parris

I don’t think it’s over in the Balkans

I returned last week from a short break in the Balkans; travelling by train in Serbia, walking from village to village over the mountains of northern Albania, an evening in a big Albanian town, a couple of journeys in Montenegro and a very short time in Croatia… so only a taste; nothing that makes me a Balkan expert; just a sniff of how things are. On that flimsy evidence, here’s a guess. I don’t think it’s over in the Balkans. Things don’t feel settled, don’t feel real. There’s an amazing railway from the Serbian capital of Belgrade to Podgorica, formerly Titograd and now the capital of Montenegro. In nearly 12 hours you pass through wildly beautiful country: lush farmland, little towns, high hills and forests, and finally magnificent mountains.

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Why we should fear the new housing bubble

It’s senseless to ask how things are going to end, because things as a general rule don’t. They rumble on, they morph, and yesterday’s drama becomes tomorrow’s eyebrow-raising justification for thinking that people used to be inexplicable idiots. Nonetheless, I read these stories of house prices rising again and I cannot help but wonder. How is it going to end? How is it even supposed to end? What is Mark Carney’s golden future? Interest rates stay low, repayments stay low, house prices keep going up and then... what? How do all these people who have overextended themselves eventually underextend themselves so as not to be utterly buggered when rates finally go back up again? What is the correct verb for underextending yourself? Is there one?

James Delingpole

Ukip are playing it safe – so they’ve rejected me

So farewell then £80,000 salary, £150,000 expense account, secretary, team of assistants, constituency office, first-class travel, immunity from prosecution, Brussels blowouts, ludicrous pension and all the other perks I’d been so looking forward to enjoying from May next year onwards. Ukip has decided that it doesn’t, after all, want to have me as one of its MEPs. The rejection came as a bit of a surprise, I must say. When the party chairman, Steve Crowther, rang to break the news, I felt rather as Brad Pitt might on being turned down for a mercy shag he’d proffered Ann Widdecombe. No offence intended to Ukip — I think they’re great people and a very necessary prick to the Westminster bubble.

Rod Liddle

The sad story of Oprah, the handbag and the shop assistant

Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you reading it. I hate the idea that you might be left behind the curve, but I just don’t know how to get around that. An outrage occurs and of course we try faithfully to report it, so that you can be outraged vicariously, but time moves on; the outrage spreads out, like a fast-moving conflagration, and begins to affects us all and we all of us feel unclean and traduced. Already, with the outrage I’m about to describe, the Guardian has decided it was not one outrage but two conjoined outrages, Siamese-twin outrages if you like. By the time you read this we could be in United Nations territory. We could.

James Forsyth

Ed Miliband may be stumbling – but don’t forget his huge headstart

Coming back to the office after a holiday is never a pleasant experience. There’s the clogged inbox, the reminders that you have left undone those things which you ought to have done, and the realisation that you won’t get another break for months. But even by these standards, Ed Miliband has had a difficult return to work. He’s been met by a cacophony of demands, many of them contradictory. Miliband does have problems. He lacks the sort of policies that would show the voters what he’s about, his shadow cabinet are underperforming, and the Tories seem to have moved into disciplined election-fighting mode. But he can take comfort from a problem he doesn’t have: there is no left-wing alternative to Labour, no party cannibalising his vote.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Gay civil partners should resist pressure to ‘upgrade’ to marriage

Apparently I’ve proposed to my civil partner. He claims that on BBC Radio 2, on the Jeremy Vine show (he thinks it was the JV show) I expressed myself in terms which presumed his prior acceptance. I can’t remember a thing about it — on live radio one does tend to throw these thoughts out heedlessly — but my partner swears I said, ‘Oh yes, well I suppose we’ll have to get an upgrade.’ He found this a graceless way of popping the question, and has forbidden me from using the term ‘upgrade’ again. Ah well. But in that case, if not ‘upgrade’, what shall we call it?

Rod Liddle

It’s not hate that Caitlin Moran can’t stand. It’s being disagreed with

Hell, it’s been tough, but I think I’ve pulled through. I went out this morning to buy some cigarettes and there were plenty of people about, doing stuff — so the world has not changed beyond recognition these last couple of days. Everyone else seems to have made it. I hope you made it OK, too, without the need for counselling. Here we all are, huddled together, clutching at each other for warmth in the post-apocalyptic gloom. But we’re still standing. We managed to survive Caitlin Moran’s 24-hour boycott of Twitter. Moran is a journalist who decided to boycott Twitter because, incredible though it might seem, people keep saying nasty things on this conduit for the vapid, histrionic and self-obsessed.

James Forsyth

Is the EU stopping Britain’s shale revolution?

A few months after the last election, Oliver Letwin warned Cabinet colleagues that a chunk of Britain’s income would be gone for good after the economic crisis. Letwin, who has always been the Cameron project’s in-house intellectual, told them that some of the complex high finance in which Britain had specialised was never coming back. We would have to develop a new form of economic activity to make up for the loss. The good news is that this new form is looming into view. Fracking the Bowland Shale alone will, on a relatively cautious estimate, produce the equivalent of 90 years of North Sea gas production.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Do women really watch as much porn as men?

You may be aware that David Cameron — as part of a secret, Lynton Crosby-inspired operation codenamed Suck Up Shamelessly To The Embittered Authoritarian Killjoy Harpies At Mumsnet — has decreed that as from next year the default option when you sign a contract with your new internet provider will be ‘No porn in this household, thank you. I think it’s a disgrace.’ Superficially (and does this coalition ever think any other way?) I can see this makes a lot of sense.

Rod Liddle

This cant about protecting children from porn is really about protecting the coalition

I have tried very hard to become an afficianado of pornography, seeing as it is by far the most popular pastime in the world. Also, it annoys a lot of people that I don’t like, so I feel I should put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. But the trouble is, the scenarios never quite rattle my cage. I find myself despising the men involved, and disliking the women, before even the cap has been removed from the lubricant. This is an impediment to full enjoyment, feeling averse to the grunting, smug male half-wits and the unnaturally supplicant — and usually tattooed — ladies. I sometimes wonder if I would be better off with something involving animals, as at least I’d feel simpatico to one half of the coupling.

Hugo Rifkind

Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever

This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know, but this is not to be another one. I promise. Time was, though, it was actually quite hard to find out what people thought, if they weren’t you. I mean, you could go out and ask them, but the process always ended with you being in a supermarket car park, and them being mental and not knowing what the Working Time Directive even was anyway. Twitter is a pipe of views coming straight to your screen. So explicitly not writing about it can feel like going out into the world with a bucket on your head, simply because you’re a bit bored of people writing about what they’ve seen with their eyes.