Columns

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

A lost illusion at the Last Night of the Proms

It was the last night of the Proms and the first I’ve ever attended. I’ve watched it on TV, of course, and even been to a Last Night of the Proms party, where we all watched the television, swigging sparkling wine and singing along to Rule Britannia. But to be there, actually among the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, would be something special, I thought. And it was. Ever since receiving an invitation to join a friend whose party were occupying a whole box I’d felt excited about it, and I was not disappointed. There’s something about real events — a thrill that has perhaps sharpened in an era when, thanks to information technology, ‘virtual’ attendance gets cheaper all the time.

Rod Liddle

It’s hardly surprising that most politicians are mentally ill

I suppose it is largely our fault that most politicians are mentally ill. We eviscerate them daily and one assumes that some of the poison eventually seeps through and begins to affect their central nervous systems. Being held up to ridicule for their incompetences, being dependent for their livelihoods upon the whims of idiots, and being forced to speak in a language from which all real meaning has been excised obviously takes its toll. I have been reading the diaries of that strange former minister Edwina Currie — a woman with whom I share virtually no political conviction but who I have nonetheless always rather liked as a person. She is definitely mad.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The Green Party is outdoing itself with its own tolerance

My father once told me that tolerance was a great and precious British virtue, and that we shouldn’t waste it on homosexuals. Even at the time this struck me as a somewhat illiberal and unkind point of view to which I privately objected. It was easier though, back then, to hold such ‘homophobic’ beliefs because there were only eight or nine homosexuals in the entire country, so far as we were aware, and they all seemed slightly ashamed of their predilection, except for maybe Quentin Crisp and Joe Orton.

Hugo Rifkind

But why didn’t Grant Shapps mention that he’s a keen karaoke rapper?

What’s wrong with editing your own Wikipedia entry, anyway? I’ve never touched mine, but only because I’m scared people would find out, which would be bad, although for reasons which elude me. I don’t even know why I’ve got a Wikipedia entry, actually. It was built in 2005, at 1.12a.m., by somebody who appears to have been at Birmingham University. Since then, it has been a lurking presence in my online life, like some chick you’ve never met who goes around telling people she’s your girlfriend. This past week, Grant Shapps, the new co-chairman of the Conservative party, has been ridiculed in numerous papers for editing his. There wasn’t anything ¬≠particularly bad in there beforehand.

James Forsyth

The people are making their choice on Cameron. So are Tory MPs

There’s an intensity to politics this autumn. The government is churning out as many announcements in a week as it used to in a month. Ed Miliband’s staff are striding around the Palace of Westminster as if they have somewhere to be in hurry. The reason for this burst of activity is that all sides know that the next few months might well determine who wins the next election. Between now and Christmas, we’ll find out if the British economy has been contracting for a year, or is in recovery. If it is the latter, Downing Street hopes that this will give momentum to its push for growth.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Enough bluster. It’s time I faced the voters

They’re building a wind farm, six turbines the height of Salisbury cathedral spire, on the hilltop half a mile from your home. Would you say, on balance, that this will increase or decrease the value of your property? Hmm. Tough one. Let’s try and work it out by carefully weighing up the pros and cons. Cons • The lovely view which was one of the reasons you bought the house has been destroyed. • From now on your days will be plagued by ‘shadow flicker’ and your nights by irregular whumping and low-frequency noise which may cause you insomnia, raised cortisol levels, stress, anxiety, disorientation, panic attacks, depression.

Matthew Parris

Meditation on a Spanish church clock

The despoilation of the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to the French border in north-eastern Spain is well known. To meet the demand for package holiday resorts in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Catalan tourist and construction industries deployed untold quantities of reinforced concrete to dispiriting effect. Vast swaths of the Costa Brava and Costa Barcelona Maresme should be wiped from the discerning traveller’s map. Wherever there is a long, open, sandy beach which is good for swimming (and there are miles upon miles of these), a line of brutal resort hotels, apartments, bars, clubs and restaurants marches in parallel, usually behind a congested promenade.

Rod Liddle

Why can’t I go to parties like Naomi Wolf’s book launch? | 6 September 2012

I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in light years than inches). I have nothing which constitutes a ‘life’, as such, so I go to one or two of these bashes every year — largely out of gratitude that anyone would ever invite me to anything.

James Forsyth

Cameron didn’t enjoy this reshuffle. But he needed it | 6 September 2012

David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers burst into tears in front of him when he was delivering the bad news. Lady Warsi was so cross about being stripped of the party chairmanship that she went home to Yorkshire and carried on negotiations from there. Some ministers even succeeded in staying put when the Prime Minister would have liked them to move. On Monday afternoon, he asked Iain Duncan Smith to consider switching jobs.

Rod Liddle

Why can’t I go to parties like Naomi Wolf’s book launch?

I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in light years than inches). I have nothing which constitutes a ‘life’, as such, so I go to one or two of these bashes every year — largely out of gratitude that anyone would ever invite me to anything.

James Forsyth

Cameron didn’t enjoy this reshuffle. But he needed it

David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers burst into tears in front of him when he was delivering the bad news. Lady Warsi was so cross about being stripped of the party chairmanship that she went home to Yorkshire and carried on negotiations from there. Some ministers even succeeded in staying put when the Prime Minister would have liked them to move. On Monday afternoon, he asked Iain Duncan Smith to consider switching jobs.

James Forsyth

Cameron didn’t enjoy this reshuffle. But he needed it

David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers burst into tears in front of him when he was delivering the bad news. Lady Warsi was so cross about being stripped of the party chairmanship that she went home to Yorkshire and carried on negotiations from there. Some ministers even succeeded in staying put when the Prime Minister would have liked them to move. On Monday afternoon, he asked Iain Duncan Smith to consider switching jobs.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’ve left London. How will I ever work again

They say that moving house is the third most traumatic thing after death and divorce and they’re right about that, I reckon. For the past few weeks and months I’ve been treating our London house not like the beloved home where I’ve spent 12 happy years but more like an anonymous shell where I just happen to eat, sleep and work. I used to enjoy having new friends round and hearing them wax lyrical about the niceness of the wallpaper or the size of the bedrooms or the delightfulness of the view over the park, but not this year. I used to spend hours in the garden, but I’ve scarcely been out at all — not to weed, not to grow tomatoes, not even to smell the scent of my favourite Souvenir du Docteur Jamain.

Rod Liddle

Why do all the fattest people live on islands

Here’s a mystery which has been keeping me awake at night recently. Why do people who live on islands, and even more so very small islands, tend to be grotesquely overweight? I stumbled across this strange apparent correlation the other evening, while sporcling. This is what I do in my spare moments these days, in lieu of a life. Sporcle is a website which offers hundreds and hundreds of quizzes, and has some particularly good quizzes on geography. This is how I know which country in the world has the most renewable water resources per capita (Iceland), which country has the most camels (Somalia), who produces the most apricots (Turkey) and plantain (Uganda), which US cities have seen their populations drop by the largest number (St Louis).

Matthew Parris

How a nice little rabbit can win the political rat race

‘Nice people, with nice habits/ they keep rabbits/ but got no money at all,’ sang the popular duo Flanagan and Allen in my father’s day. I can still remember Dad playing it on our gramophone in the early 1950s. My family liked these sentiments; secretly we rather hoped they applied to us. But I write now not as a nice person, but on behalf of nice people. I think that song is self-oppressive. The early appearance of rabbits in the lyric gives the game away: fluffy and harmless creatures whom we may love but are unlikely to admire. Rats are more successful. A recent study in Scientific American, however, has challenged the supposed link between being nice and being a loser.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Politicians can’t dance, probably because they’re aliens

Let us talk about politicians dancing. Specifically, let us talk about Boris Johnson and David Cameron dancing to the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony. Graceful, elegant, debonair, all of these things it was not. Cameron clapped, strangled by his tie, like a man whose sober country church has been taken over for a week by some bastard with a guitar. Boris was more relaxed, swinging his belly to the beat as a bountiful chick might swing her boobs. Digging it, like Daddy Pig might dig the DJ at Peppa’s wedding. Did you see? The cameraman held them both for 20 seconds and then moved abruptly on. ‘This isn’t funny,’ a producer might have told him. ‘This is like watching them on the loo.’ And my response came in stages.

W James-Antle-Iii

Can Paul Ryan save Mitt Romney

Washington, DC If you read only the British press, you might get the impression that Mitt Romney couldn’t have found a more extreme running mate than Paul Ryan. The new vice presidential nominee is a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House budget committee, in which capacity he has pushed for gradual but significant cuts in social welfare. Yet it seems that Ryan’s criticism of the National Health Service, so celebrated at the London Olympics, has rankled most. ‘Romney’s new No. 2 savages the NHS,’ declared the Times. The Guardian asked, ‘Is Paul Ryan’s attack on the NHS healthy criticism?’ (Three guesses as to what the answer is.) Even the Daily Mail dubbed Ryan a ‘conservative hardliner’.

Rod Liddle

Let us enjoy peace on Mars while we still can

There are some things to be said in favour of the planet Mars. Its atmosphere contains almost no oxygen, the temperature in winter reaches minus 143˚C, it is exceptionally arid and dusty, and any human travelling to the place would receive sufficient solar radiation to be lit up like a Russian dissident. My problem with the place, though, is that it is only 33 million miles distant. It is altogether too close for comfort, virtually a stone’s throw away. Mercury, I think, or better still Pluto, would be far more fun. On Mercury, incineration would be instantaneous. However it is Pluto that really fits the bill. It is three billion miles away, roughly — and bracingly chilly, a little like Hull in January. And also airless and bleak and devoid of light. Perfect.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Quit Afghanistan, yes – but don’t declare victory

Military commanders, announced last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, ‘have warned the Prime Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’. What the newspaper calls ‘senior sources’ have been singing and I don’t doubt the burden of their song is as reported. The same briefing process is under way in the United States, where the Pentagon is letting it be known that President Obama’s promised troop withdrawal after the American ‘surge’ is premature; that the Taleban are by no means beaten; and that the Afghan security forces whom Nato-Isaf are training are not yet ready to take the insurgency on unaided.

Rod Liddle

I had to run from the Olympics. I care about it too much

The London 2012 Olympics, seen from a distance of more than a thousand miles, is a peculiar, shimmering thing. Our capital city dominates the news every night but, for reasons which I cannot explain, the Croatians are not exultant about the fact that we have won lots of gold medals at rowing and stuff. It always brings one up short, being abroad and finding that these swarthy foreigners do not think that we are as important as we think we are. Here in Dalmatia the Olympics coverage concentrates almost exclusively on those sports played with great enthusiasm by fractured bits of the southern part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the cabal of squabbling countries who were commies but not Warsaw Pact. So every day, all day, it’s water polo and — even more so — handball.