Columns

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Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’.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.

James Delingpole

Sorry, Boy, but you were right. You really did have to be there

‘But Dad, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We can’t miss out. We can’t… .’ ‘No, Son, it will be a complete ruddy waste of time and money. We’re too poor. Even if we tried to get tickets we’d only get really crap ones like Albania versus Belarus in the women’s football. Anyway it’ll be crowded and tacky and boring and horrible. Oh and we’d probably get blown up by a terrorist bomb. So really, we’re well out of it.’ As I write these words Boy is with Girl on summer camp in Hampshire.

James Forsyth

Inside the Tory party, boundaries are shifting

You know things really are difficult in the coalition when neither side is badmouthing the other. These days, when those around David Cameron and Nick Clegg bite their tongues, it tends to be because one jibe might bring down the coalition. Since 24 July, everyone has been on best behaviour. Over dinner that evening, Cameron and George Osborne told Clegg and Danny Alexander that Lords reform was off: they could not persuade enough Tory backbenchers to support it. The Liberal Democrat duo replied that, if this was so, their MPs would not vote for the boundary changes the Conservatives so dearly want. But the icy civility of recent days can’t disguise the fact that the coalition — indeed, the idea of coalition government — is in big trouble.

Saturday

James Forsyth

For Boris, the Games could be just a warm-up

It is an odd summer in Westminster. The political big beasts have stayed around because of the Olympics. Government ministers have international schmoozing to do; and in any case, like their senior shadows, they would not want to risk being seen scrambling back from abroad in the event of a national emergency. They are not, however, expecting to be able to score many political points while the Games are in progress. Only one office-holder is making full use of them: Boris Johnson. The Mayor of London has been doing what he does best — directing the emotional energy of a crowd. His performance has reminded me of a conversation I had several years ago with one of his former colleagues who had known him in several guises.

Rod Liddle

Once, Boris, you would have hated this show

In the end, after sniping and carping and moaning for months about how ghastly the Olympics was going to be, I thought the opening ceremony rather wonderful and therefore felt ashamed of myself for having been so aloof. I had not expected such a breadth of vision, nor such beauty, nor indeed the copious room allowed for a certain self-deprecating humour. I wish I’d been there, with the kids. As it was we allowed our six-year-old daughter to stay up to watch the athletes parade around the stadium with their flags and it may well have been the most instructive two hours she has enjoyed in her life. Huw Edwards would announce the national origin of a tranche of athletes and my daughter would ask, wide-eyed: ‘What’s this country like, daddy?

Hugo Rifkind

Back in 2005, Blair thought these would be his Olympics

Back in 2006, I broke a great story in the Times about Tony Blair’s tie. Yep, that’s me, always the heavyweight. But it was good stuff. What we’d noticed — me and Simon from the picture desk — was that whenever Blair felt particularly under pressure, he’d pop out the next day in his special Olympic tie. It was a stripy affair, worn by the whole crew when we won the bid in 2005. Obviously, it gave him a lift. To be honest, it was rather like shooting fish in a barrel. This was 2006, remember, so Blair was under pressure all the time. I barely even remember why. ‘Tony Blair wore his Olympic tie yesterday to give his press conference on the Middle East with rumours of Cabinet splits over his policy towards Lebanon,’ I wrote.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Cameron can’t risk becoming the status quo candidate

The next few weeks should be a good time to be Prime Minister. Unusually for this decade, anti-politics will not be the mood of the moment. Instead, the nation will indulge in an Olympic holiday from austerity. Every time the Prime Minister congratulates a British medal winner, his words will be eagerly reported. He will also be on hand whenever a foreign businessman announces a new investment in Britain. Cameron knows that looking like he is trying to gain partisan advantage from the Games would be disastrous. So he’s quick to stress that the public won’t confuse Olympic success with economic growth, something which remains alarmingly elusive. The economy shrank a further 0.7 per cent last quarter, meaning that we have had nine months of negative growth.

James Delingpole

Is there anywhere as perfect as a good prep school

Every speech day at Boy’s prep school for the last five summers I’ve watched the Year Eight leavers and their parents troop off to the dining room for their final farewell lunch with the headmaster and staff. This year it was our turn and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. In fact, I was so cut up I had to nip off for an uncharacteristic daytime fag round the back of the dustbins with the only master (‘Why do you call them “masters”? They’re called “teachers”, Dad!’) I knew smoked. ‘This is it,’ I thought miserably to myself. ‘The last time I’ll ever come to Papplewick. Probably the last time ever I’ll see most of these faces I’ve come to take for granted, all these strangers who became my friends.

Matthew Parris

An eye-opening day with a busy GP

I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming glorified receptionists for the specialist medical services offered by the NHS; that patients should be able to save time and money by going straight to a specialist if they were sure of their problem; and that GPs, though hard-working, were often busy with counselling that a less expensively trained and less well paid nurse practitioner or medical assistant could provide.

Rod Liddle

This sexist assumption that women are weaker. It’s right, isn’t it

There is something a little dispiriting about the furore over the Olympic women’s beach volleyball competition. Howls of anguish have greeted the suggestion that if our weather does its usual business in August, and rains, the nubile young women will feel inclined to dress in the manner of the Saudi women’s team, i.e. swathe themselves in clothing. Apparently ‘men’ are outraged at this prospect, having looked forward to watching four pairs of breasts bouncing up and down like excited puppies for a few moments. Really? I suppose if they were to stage the event in my back garden I might peer out of the window from time to time. But if it were held in, say, my neighbour’s garden, I don’t think I would drag myself from my desk to watch.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

No, honestly, I want to know: why haven’t the Lib Dems quit

Why would you be a Lib Dem? That’s a rhetorical question, obviously, because I think we all know that the bulk of well-meaning, ineffectual perverts actually read the New Statesman. But still, imagine you were one. What’s it all for? And, more to the point, why are you still in government? I keep asking this question of people cleverer than me, and they keep chuckling, as though I’m making a gag. But I’m serious. Why are the coalition’s junior partners still in there? Even the numbers of people prepared to have weird sex with them must be dropping on a daily basis. Why do they keep turning up for work? Argument one: the Lib Dems are actually achieving plenty, just quietly. Come off it. No they aren’t.

Rod Liddle

The final victory of middle-class football

John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of racially abusing another footballer, Anton Ferdinand, as everybody seemed to wish. Some chap ‘tweeted’ that Ashley Cole, who gave evidence on behalf of Terry, was a ‘choc ice’ — and of course now the police are involved. They had to be: it is deeply racist to liken black people to items of confectionery or popular snacks.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Sorry, but landscapes are better without barriers

From the moment I arrived in Bakewell, Derbyshire, as a carpet-bagger politician nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew I’d never leave. The attractions of the county and its sweet green hills and dales only grew. And in the end, though I had meant the Peaks to be just rungs on my ladder to the peaks of politics, politics turned out to be just a rung on my ladder to the Peaks. Here I stayed and here, I hope, I always will. So what comes next is difficult to write: so difficult that I’ve never written it before. But here goes… I don’t like dry-stone walls. There. I’ve said it. I don’t actually like the very thing so many tourists and residents love best and associate most with our glorious Peak District National Park.

James Forsyth

Does the end of Lords reform mean the end of coalition

With this government, it is not ‘crisis, what crisis?’ but ‘crisis, which crisis?’ We now have a coalition emergency prompted by the fact that Lords reform has been dumped in the long grass despite being in the programme for government. We have a Tory party crisis occasioned by the biggest rebellion of David Cameron’s leadership and a Liberal Democrat crisis caused by the fact that their first period in office in more than 70 years now looks likely to bring no progress on the constitutional issues about which they care so deeply. It hasn’t been the usual Liberal Democrat suspects sounding off against David Cameron this week.

James Delingpole

If Big Oil won’t stand up for free markets, who will

At the Spectator party this year I met a girl I hadn’t seen since Oxford. We exchanged pleasantries. She was looking good and she’d done really well for herself, which made me very happy for her. But then she mentioned that before her latest plum posting she’d been working in the ‘private sector’ for Shell. I said: ‘I hardly call Shell the private sector.’ And the conversation went downhill from there. When I was a child I used to love Shell. We’d never fill our tank anywhere else, if we could help it, because the Shell garages used to give you these brilliant collectable medallions — such as their 1969 Man in Space set — which you stuck into a cardboard display case and raced to complete before your friends.

Rod Liddle

What more must Cameron do to provoke a class war

I have been racking my brains to come up with new and imaginative ways of taunting the lower orders about their hilarious lack of wealth recently. Nothing I have come up with, however, quite beats the decision to let Sir Martin Sorrell — one of Britain’s richest people, and a brave and stoic defender of enormous salaries and bonuses for people like Sir Martin Sorrell — carry the Olympic torch through one of the country’s most deprived boroughs, Redbridge, while presumably cackling to himself.  The torch is meant to be borne aloft by unsung commoners, of course; ordinary people who have not been extravagantly rewarded in a financial sense.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Tom Cruise, Mitt Romney, and a hate that dare not speak its name

How weird are Scientologists? Other than the bright-eyed young men in sharp suits on Tottenham Court Road — who have somehow spotted my glaring personality problems at a distance and are adamant that I ought to step inside and identify them in more detail — I’ve never knowingly met one, so I don’t really know. My hunch, though, would be fairly. It’s not everybody who can go through life believing themselves to be covered in millions of tiny aliens which a tyrant called Xenu once stacked around volcanoes which he then detonated with hydrogen bombs. Mind you, I once went to a decent-sized town in Guatemala where they worship a plank in a hat by giving it cigarettes. So you never know.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

At the BBC, the Arab Spring has only just ended

Have you seen much on the BBC news about the persecution and indeed murder of Syria’s Christian population by the liberal-minded and agreeable rebel forces who are not at all Islamist maniacs allied to al-Qa’eda? Nope, me neither. There was a short report in April about the Christians fearing that they might be ‘caught in the middle’ of the fighting — in much the same way, I suppose, that Bosnian Muslims were somehow ‘caught in the middle’ between the Serbs and, er, themselves.  There was no suggestion that the rebels might, for some mysterious reason, have it in for the Christians: this wouldn’t fit the template for the BBC’s coverage.

Matthew Parris

A blackmail plot. A smear. Or was it both.

Like many of the best thrillers the Heath Caper affair involves sex, spies and blackmail, and an array of possible resolutions that are all eminently plausible yet cannot all be true. Or can they? I have something of a personal window into the worlds this story touches. It is an old story, that has just resurfaced — with a new twist — in a radio documentary and Sunday Times article by the BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera. The allegation at its centre was first published in a 1970s book by Josef Frolik, a defector from the Czech secret service.