Columns

Thursday

Steerpike

Downing Street’s departures, and Martin Ivens’ redemption

More turmoil at No. 10, I hear. ‘Cameron’s power network is disintegrating,’ gloated an insider as news broke that two aides close to the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, are to leave. The pair worked together at the highest level. Paul Kirby (head of policy) would devise new administrative schemes and Kris Murrin (head of implementation) would make sure they didn’t work. In Macmillan’s day it would have been called laissez-faire government. No doubt the modern term is something like ‘hands-on multidimensionality’. In other words, paralysis. While losses mount at the Guardian, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, has fallen in love. He keeps ordering the sub-editors to find space for articles about his new Fazioli piano.

Rod Liddle

It’s not misogyny, Professor Beard. It’s you

Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.’ — Gaius Valerius Catullus ‘I do not know whom Mary Beard is but wyth a name lyke that she surely has a third teat and a hairy clopper.’ — Internet posting following Professor Mary Beard’s appearance on Question Time So Catullus, mate — things have not got much better over the last two thousand years. People, it seems, are still ill-bred and tasteless, as that second quote up there would suggest. It was not the most tasteless comment on the internet over the last week or so, or even the most tasteless to be directed at Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Matthew Parris

How Graham Greene spoilt my tropical rapture

On the patio of my hotel in Havana... No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana. Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B: a result of the partial liberalisation of the island’s economy, allowing ordinary Cuban families with a spare room to take a paying tourist or two into their homes.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cameron’s European moment has come – a year late

David Cameron should have given his big Europe speech a year ago. Having just threatened to veto a new EU treaty, he had proved that he was prepared to aggressively defend Britain’s interests, and he had reassured those in his party who worried he wasn’t really serious about Euroscepticism. An address delivered at that point, which was clear about his vision for Britain’s role in Europe but vague about how he intended to achieve it, would have received a fair wind. But there was no follow-up. The veto was left to stand on its own, unconnected to a broader European policy. There were several reasons for this. The first is that Cameron has always been slow to take advantage of his successes; he has failed to grasp that no currency depreciates faster than political capital.

Hugo Rifkind

I don’t care whether torture works. It still isn’t worth it

Torture is wrong. You can tell it’s wrong easily, not by the way it makes you feel, or by the extent to which it does or doesn’t conform to ancient moral codes made up in deserts, but by the way that, when it happens, it screws stuff up. When Barack Obama assumed office four years ago, shutting Guantánamo Bay was one of the first things he was going to do. A whole term later, there it is, utterly not closed, full of people who can’t have a fair trial because of past torture and can’t be sent home because of the risk of future torture. In Britain, meanwhile, torture stops us from deporting Abu Qatada and assorted nasties, makes us liable to pay millions to the likes of Binyam Mohammed, and makes governments want to introduce secret trials.

James Delingpole

Three decades of blood and horror – just the sort of history I like

In the church just a few fields from where I live stands the handsome, painted alabaster tomb to Sir Richard Knightley and his wife Jane. Round the sides of the tomb are reliefs of their 12 children — four girls and eight boys — variously the ancestors of George Washington, the Queen and David Cameron. But at least as impressive as Sir Richard’s dynastic achievements, in my book, are his dates — 1455 to 1534. Every time I go to see him, lying there with his SS collar (symbol of the victorious Lancastrians) round his neck and the dog (or is it a lion?) at his feet, I think, ‘You jammy bastard!’ and I fervently pray that some of that luck will rub off on me. To have lived to nearly 80 is remarkable enough in almost any distant age.

Rod Liddle

How Moore, Burchill and Featherstone all had a lovely bitch fight

 ‘Women ... are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ — Suzanne Moore   One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves. That quote above comes from the very talented feminist writer Suzanne Moore.

Thursday

Steerpike

Nick Clegg’s pallor, Murdoch’s revenge, and Lord Strathclyde’s champagne

Has Nick Clegg seen a ghost? The pallor of the Lib Dem leader continues to excite comment in Westminster. At Monday’s half-time presentation by the coalition, he was looking as anaemic as a jellyfish. ‘Either he’s lost four pints of blood or he’s been given his latest polling figures,’ said one hack. A friendly spin doctor explained the mystery. The Prime Minister, standing beside Clegg, had meticulously plastered his face with a thick coating of bronzed grease before coming out on to the podium. And his sun-lounger look made Clegg’s au naturel complexion appear even more washed out than usual. James Harding, the ousted Times editor, left with a £1.3 million payoff in his pocket and the praise of Fleet Street ringing in his ears.

Rod Liddle

How did Mary Seacole come to be revered as a black icon?

Isn’t it time, just out of perversity, that we all signed the petition on the Operation Black Vote website to restore the part-time nurse Mary Seacole to the national curriculum? I am beginning to think that our children should learn all about this entertaining woman; she’s given me a good laugh for the last dozen or so years, ever since she was dredged up as an icon by the deluded and hysterical liberal-left. After all, if Mary is not restored to the curriculum, kids will be pestering us to know why so many buildings in this country are named after her. The University of Salford, the University of Birmingham and Brunel all have outposts bearing the name of this mysterious woman, along with a bunch of nursing centres and, inexplicably, part of the Home Office.

Matthew Parris

The ineffable sadness of Franco’s ruins

The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in -Catalonia. You will spot the long, winding, inundated gorge on any map of north-east Spain. Seeing the teeming Costa Brava into which this valley spills through the Ter’s last gorge, you may wonder at how empty is the country behind the portals of that gorge. The map shows no roads or settlements. At night, flying above on your descent towards Barcelona, you will see hardly a light. All is black.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Cameron election

One of the first things that the coalition did on taking office was to announce the date of the next election. This was meant to prevent destablising speculation about when the two parties might split apart and go to the country. It has largely succeeded in doing that. But there has been an unintended side-effect. Knowing the date of the next election has made all the parties far more obsessed with election planning than they normally would be. When two or three Conservatives are gathered together, attention invariably turns to 2015. David Cameron’s New Year message read, deliberately, like the first part of an election address. In conversation with members of the Cabinet you would think that polling day is six months away, not 29.

Hugo Rifkind

Get the church out of the state, and the state will stay out of the church

So let us return, you and I, warily and wearily, to the topic of gay marriage. Gingerly, in fact, as though with a hangover after an ill-tempered, bickering party. And, in the cold and Nurofenned light of day, let us find our common ground, and think about where it leads. I’m still for it and I’m still of the view that churches shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to. I’m for both of these things for the same reason, which is a belief that one person’s conviction, however firmly held, shouldn’t mess with another’s liberty and happiness unless it absolutely has to. In all honesty, though, I don’t consider them equal concerns. The right of gay people to marry, I reckon, is pretty fundamental and human.

Rod Liddle

If the mice have to face my wife, they’ll have only themselves to blame

I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice, probably the 15th we’ve had on this subject since we moved in back in August. We could both hear the mice downstairs, whooping it up, holding some sort of shindig of their own; the relentless skittering across the stone floor tiles or the parquet wood blocks in the living room. I was tempted, at one point, just to shout downstairs: ‘Keep it down a bit will you, we’re trying to get some sleep up here.

Friday

James Delingpole

I’m proud to come out as an Eton parent

I was just traipsing across the fields towards Common Lane, there to collect Boy en route to his St Andrews’ Day F-Blockers’ exhibition match of the Wall Game, when I was accosted by a splendid, Spectator-reading type who’d parked his car next to mine. ‘Are you James Delingpole?’ he asked. I admitted that I was. We got talking. There was only one possible reason for my being there, as he and I both knew. ‘Do you think I should finally out myself?’ I said. ‘I mean I’ve been living the lie for what seems like an age. And it’s so unlike me to keep secrets from my readers. Let’s face it, fearless and frank autobiography rather is my schtick.’ My new friend agreed that perhaps the time had come. So here goes.

Matthew Parris

Gay marriage the easy way

‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was giving the Foreign Office an account of her efforts to collect a horse from Moscow’s station. The horse was a present to the Prime Minister, John Major, from the President of Turkmenistan, who had despatched the fierce Akhal-Teke warhorse by train accompanied by a wagon-load of melons to pay the Russian Railways.

Rod Liddle

2013: good news for werewolves, bad news for Belgium

So the wassailing and drinking and pigging out has been done. The relatives have mercifully left. You have taken many, many medications to restore to yourself a certain cloudy consciousness and are beginning to wonder what the year ahead holds in store. Keep taking those medications, then — because here is 2013 in full. I’d stay in the shed if I were you. January Several countries which took part in the exciting ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 announce new laws to prevent women from smiling, buying shoes and hogging the TV remote. Worried about the possibility of defeat in next year’s referendum on independence, Sir Alex Salmond further lowers the voting age to five for human beings and just two for ‘all antlered animals’.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The net is closing in on Father Christmas, the old perv

Does Santa Claus really exist? I have to say I have become very sceptical in recent years. There is something about this character which simply does not ring true, not to mention his rather sinister retinue of airborne reindeer. I am not saying that he definitely does not exist, simply that we should not be too credulous, too ready to believe what the authorities tell us. A junior school teacher in Dorset is in trouble for having allowed into the minds of his eight- and nine-year-old charges a similar element of doubt.

James Forsyth

Our person in Brussels

One of David Cameron’s great skills is his ability to separate the cares of office from the rest of his life. Samantha Cameron is never likely to say, to misquote Clarissa Eden, that ‘in the past few weeks, I have really felt that the terms of the European renegotiation were flowing through my drawing room’. This Christmas, however, the Prime Minister’s working hours are likely to be dominated by Europe. For in the new year he is expected to give a speech setting out how he wants to change the terms of Britain’s EU membership. Several new European treaties will be needed in the next few years as eurozone governments seek ever closer integration.

James Delingpole

We must act now to save our country from the scourge of wind turbines

The place I love more than anywhere on earth is the Edw Valley in mid-Wales. We’ve been going there every summer for more than a decade now and the kids think of it as their second home. When I die — as I nearly did once, you’ll remember, when I was carried off down the River Edw in full spate only to be rescued by an overhanging branch — you’ll find engraved in my heart the name of the hamlet where we stay. Cregrina. It’s our garden of Eden. In the evenings, long after the valley has descended into shadow, the moors on the humpbacked hills are still bathed in golden light and every time I look at them I think of the Churchillian sunlit uplands whose prospect gave us hope in our darkest hour.

Matthew Parris

A Christmas Carol for the Chancellor

‘“You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three Spirits, without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread…”’ ‘“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” said the Apparition. “Come with me,” and Scrooge followed.’ The scene was as familiar to Ebenezer Scrooge as to any Spectator reader. Returning to the past, the now-reformed former miser saw himself as Charles Dickens had described him in the last chapter of his famous short story… ‘“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy.