Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Lord Rennard doesn’t need an inquiry. He needs a swift kick to the shin

I was seated at a rather stiff and formal BBC dinner a dozen or so years back, one of those ghastly occasions upon which the boss class attempt, painfully, to commune with the corporation untermenschen over noisette of chicken, or something similar. There were perhaps 15 of us, drawn from various levels of the BBC strata, with the then head of news — and now director-general — Tony Hall seated somewhere democratically in the middle. Along from me was a lowly but attractive female production assistant whose dining was interrupted by an unwelcome hand snaking along her inner thigh. The errant hand belonged to the well-lubricated reporter on her immediate left.

James Forsyth

Lord Rennard, Mark Oaten and the Lib Dems’ embarrassing adolescence

Imagine if seven Tory Cabinet ministers had resigned since David Cameron became Prime Minister. Then think about another seven being accused of having covered up alleged sexual misconduct by a senior party official. It would put ‘Back to Basics’ in the shade. It would be the biggest scandal the Tory party had faced. But this, proportionately, is where the Liberal Democrats find themselves today. Of the five Liberal Democrat Cabinet ministers appointed in May 2010, two have resigned — David Laws and Chris Huhne. Another two, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, are facing questions over the role they played in a cover-up of Lord Rennard’s alleged misdeeds.

Hugo Rifkind

Stop shouting at Hilary Mantel – there are real outrages to address

It started the other week, when David Cameron was in India. Although it started like a bout of malaria starts, so I suppose the more precise term would be ‘recurred’. There he is in Amritsar, touring the site of a massacre, possibly in that hat. And all Britain wants to know is what he thinks about what Hilary Mantel thinks about the Duchess of Cambridge. What, I thought to myself, the hell is wrong with us? It’s a pretty expansive ‘us’, this, and it includes Cameron himself.

James Delingpole

Spending isn’t the answer. But how do we explain that?

One of the things I love about being a classical liberal is that I’m always on the right side of every argument. I’m pro: freedom, jobs, self-determination, cheap energy, higher living standards, academic excellence, property rights, an even better future, Michael Gove MP, wine, women, song. (So long as the song is not by Maroon 5 or Bruno Mars.) And I’m anti: arbitrary authority, nanny-statism, money-printing, tyranny, despair, almost all war, poverty, prohibition, disease, squalor, uncleaned-up dog poo, meddling busybodies, crap capital projects based on massive lies (that means you HS2!), corrupt officials, civil war, totalitarianism, hyperinflation, injustice, Tim Yeo MP.

Thursday

Steerpike

Steerpike | 21 February 2013

Dave’s a listener. He listens to women in particular. That’s the sub-text of his recent disclosure that Sam keeps urging him to promote more women to the Cabinet. Yet Dave’s top table boasts just four leading ladies. And at his last reshuffle he replaced ousted females with men. ‘He’s listening all right,’ says a junior minister, ‘with both fingers stuffed in his ear-holes while humming and doing the complete opposite.’ A senior Tory puts it more succinctly. ‘Like the Prime Minister, I favour Cabinet equality,’ he says, ‘but we’re still about half a dozen birds short of a lap-dancing club.’   Vicars of Christ!

Rod Liddle

Forget Eastleigh, Tatchell vs. Hughes was a real by-election

I got a text message the other day, inviting me to a party. This is a nice thing to happen, and not an everyday event. I have become used to all modern forms of communication bringing nothing but trouble; the more modern they are, the more unpleasant will be the message. If it arrives via Twitter, it will usually be a condensed ball of noisome vomit, perhaps containing within it the vestige of a threat. In a sense, we are all Mary Beard these days. The nastiness rains down upon all of our heads, the nastiness from other people. Never mind.

Matthew Parris

What’s in a brand name? From Beechams to Brasso

Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to myself out loud. ‘Vosene’. What an odd title for a shampoo. It sounded cold, clinical, antiseptic, perhaps a little harsh: a nod more in the direction of hygiene than of the soft, caring, nurturing image that more recently branded hair products aim to convey. I bet (I thought, remembering my 1950s bedroom wall poster of nuclear power stations) that Vosene is a mid-20th-century brand name.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The horsemeat scandal shows the true extent of Europe’s power in Britain

There’s something gripping about a food scandal. The idea we could be inadvertently eating something taboo exercises a fascination on the public mind. But where has all the horsemeat in supermarket bolognese and burgers come from? At the moment, attention inside government is focused on Romania and Mexico. Romania is in the frame because of a 2007 law banning animal-driven carts. This led to huge numbers of horses and donkeys being slaughtered. All this meat couldn’t be sold in country. The fear is that it has ended up crossing the European Union, with the label changing from horse to beef on the way.

Rod Liddle

The poor have been sold horse dressed as beef – and they should be compensated

Well at least — so far — no middle-class food has been found to contain large chunks of horsey. It’s all been in the junk they feed the chavs. It’s true that Waitrose withdrew some beefburgers for sale a week or two back, but this was only a ‘precautionary measure’ and later the burgers were found to contain ‘100 per cent beef’, from privately educated cows, according to the supermarket. Thank the lord, etc. Instead, it’s all in the Findus beef lasagne and some unspeakable frozen product from Tesco which masquerades as spaghetti bolognese. Or spaghetti bologneigghhhhhhhhhs, as I daresay the red tops will call it henceforth.

James Delingpole

How Twitter almost destroyed me

Last year, my old sparring partner George Monbiot got himself into a spot of bother. ‘Why not stick the knife in on your blog?’ various people suggested. But I didn’t because George’s travails had nothing whatsoever to do with his wrongheaded political views (which I’m more than happy to attack at every turn). They had to do with a libel he’d repeated about someone on Twitter. About this, I refused to gloat. This is not because I’m an incredibly decent, warm and caring person. Well, not just. It’s because, as a fellow Twitter user, I recognised a case of ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Of course I felt terribly sorry for the poor fellow he’d libelled.

Hugo Rifkind

Another good idea goes the way of all wheezes

Coercing the long-term unemployed into work placements is not a stupid idea. Nobody thinks it is. And by ‘nobody’ in this context, I mean Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, and Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, and they’re pretty much the only people worth listening to. Doubtless, quite a few of the actual long-term unemployed have differing views. But they would, wouldn’t they? I’ll tell you what is a stupid idea, though. Telling a woman who already has a work placement in a museum that she has to quit it and go and do one in Poundland is a stupid idea. And telling a trained mechanic that he has to spend six months polishing furniture is another stupid idea.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The battle of Eastleigh will be bloody

This week’s Cabinet meeting was a deceptively straightforward affair. Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers met as usual, and discussed economic competitiveness and their priorities for the next Queen’s speech. It was a convivial gathering of coalition allies. But no one mentioned the elephant in the room: the Eastleigh by-election, a contest that will pit minister against minister. As one Cabinet member puts it: ‘This will be very difficult to handle, as both sides really have to win.

Steerpike

Steerpike

Stanley Johnson, replete with energy and charming as ever, is touring the country looking for a safe Tory berth to ease himself into at the next election.No takers so far, I’m told, but the wily old bird has devised a brilliant ruse to boost his chances. He’s been dropping hints that his occupancy would last only until May 2016, when Boris’s second mayoral term ends. Johnson Snr would then fall gracefully on his sword, leaving the seat vacant for the blond bombshell to launch his bid for the Tory leadership and Downing Street. The so-called ‘baby lotion strategy’ (Johnson & Johnson) is proving hard for constituency chairmen to resist.

Matthew Parris

A snapshot moment in Old Havana

The Parque Mátires ’71 is pleasant, nothing special, hardly distinguishable from dozens of other little parks in Old Havana. Fairly safe, reasonably clean, shabby, some tatty greenery and a few trees, a bird-limed bronze statue to a forgotten hero, and rickety park benches around a stone-paved terrace. I was perched on the more stable slats of one of these in the late afternoon sunshine, and reading Romola. This was not as incongruous as it sounds, for the massive novel is George Eliot’s attempt to recreate a world far from her native English Midlands: the smells and colours, the jostle and noise of the street in 16th-century Florence. Old Havana is closer to Renaissance Florence than to Nuneaton, Warks.

Rod Liddle

What makes me feel sorry for Chris Huhne

If Chris Huhne hadn’t copped off with that woman who looks remarkably like the late comedian Jack Douglas, I suppose we would have been deprived of all the tumultuous glee which has attended both his utter collapse, as a man, and his likely incarceration. We would never have known about that small crime, committed years before he had become an MP. It was not the act of asking his wife to take those speeding penalty points which did for him, it was swanning off with his assistant, Carina -Trimingham. Wives sacrifice themselves for their husbands in all manner of ways; it is part of the deal of marriage, I suppose. The compact breaks down irretrievably when the husband transgresses — as, it seems inevitably these days, he does.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cameron will have to fund his Mali adventure

‘This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans,’ Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, declared in 1991. Yugoslavia, he said, was a problem in Europe’s neighbourhood and Europeans would solve it. In the end, a decade of genocidal ethnic conflict was only ended thanks to substantial US involvement. The hour of Europe has arrived again with the conflict in Mali. This time, though, it is the Americans telling the Europeans that it is up to them to solve the problem. The Obama administration has wasted no time in making clear that it thinks France’s aims in Mali are overly ambitious. It is also dragging its feet in terms of offering assistance, complaining about the cost and publicly wondering what the exit strategy is.

Hugo Rifkind

Gerald Scarfe isn’t anti-Semitic – but David Ward is

I’m turning into a Holobore. I can feel it happening, and it’s sapping at my soul. What a week. It started with David Ward, the Lib Dem MP and anti-Semite. No, shut up. Yes he is. If you say ‘the Jews’ should have ‘learned the lessons of the Holocaust’ and that they clearly haven’t because of their ‘inflicting atrocities on Palestinians’ then you’re ticking every box. And he did say these things. So he is. It’s ‘the Jews’ that rankles first, obviously. I’m a Jew. Am I inflicting atrocities on Palestinians? Me and Lenny Kravitz and Woody Allen? Oh, you cretin.

Rod Liddle

The law doesn’t change just because you’re on horseback

I’ve just sent off a cheque to the RSPCA in the hope that they will put it towards the costs of bringing another prosecution against those arrogant pink-jacketed psychopaths who continue to hunt foxes with hounds despite the fact that it is against the law to do so. It’s a small contribution towards the upholding of law and order in our increasingly fractious society. I’ve always been in favour of law and order; tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime and so on. If society passes a law saying we shouldn’t do something, then we shouldn’t do it. We can protest our right to do it, we can petition MPs, we can rail from the pages of expensive magazines. But we should abide by the law of the land, no matter how absurd we consider it to be.

James Delingpole

At last: your chance to make me a kept man

Sometimes my wife accuses me of being sexist but I really don’t see how this can possibly be because a) I’ve acknowledged for some time that I consider women the superior species in every way and b) because I’m totally up for the idea of being a kept man. I’m sure if I were a male chauvinist pig type I wouldn’t think that way at all. I’d be all: ‘Get behind that sink, woman, and make sure you’re wearing that kinky French maid’s uniform when I get back from the pub after a hard day’s bringing home the bacon or you’ll feel the rough side of my hand.’ The idea of being bankrolled by a mere woman would, I am sure, be anathema to me.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Will the real radicals please stand up?

At the next election, all parties will agree that Britain is in a mess. They will disagree about is who is to blame. Both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats will say that Labour left behind an even bigger set of problems than people realise; their government has started to fix things, they’ll argue, but they need more time. Labour will claim that the ‘austerity coalition’ has choked off growth. But what’s odd — given that we’re heading for a second election where the voters will say ‘no’ when asked whether they’re better off now than five years ago — is the lack of radicalism in British politics. The ideas doing the rounds in Westminster do not meet the test of the moment.