Columns

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame immigrants for immigration – blame Ed Miliband

There is something attractive about Harriet Harman’s proposal that the leader of the Labour party must, by law, be a lesbian. It is only in the last couple of years that I have been able to accept that lesbians exist at all, so it will be doubly exciting for me to watch this sort of person lead the political party of which I am a member. According to Harriet, if no lesbians are available to lead Labour, the party should choose from a shortlist of endangered woodland creatures, such as pine martens or crossbills, so as to raise their profile among the wider population and ensure that their views are represented at the highest level.

Matthew Parris

Why don’t we want a government that is on the side of ‘ordinary people’? 

It’s often the peripheral that catches the eye, gets you thinking. My newspaper’s fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Liverpool this week, featuring an analysis of Labour’s standing by the Times’s Populus pollster, Rick Nye, was really centred on the immediate: what was the electorate’s perception of Ed Miliband-led Labour? Our guest, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, was there to discuss this with the audience. But a rather different question leapt at me from Mr Nye’s presentation: one of the very few polling questions to which respondents were returning consistently and overwhelmingly pro-Labour replies.

James Delingpole

Stung into stupidity – or heroism

I know lots of second world war veterans who rather enjoyed their war against the Germans. But I’ve never met one who enjoyed his war against the Japanese. As the Eastern Front was to the Western Front, so the Far Eastern front was to the European/North African front: the fighting was more implacably brutal, the conditions more ferociously grim, the chances of coming out in one piece notably slimmer. That’s why, in dark times like these, I find it of such great comfort to read a novel like Harold James’s The Scorpion Trap (Janus). It’s a brilliant fictionalised account by a former Gurkha officer of those hideous and terrifying early stages of the war when implacable Japanese overran our colonies.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Rugby players are thick middle-class upstarts – at least footballers know their place

Apparently, England recently beat Georgia in something rather ambitiously called the Rugby World Cup. The word ‘world’ is used here in much the same way as the Americans deploy it in relation to other vanishingly unpopular sports such as baseball or American football, i.e. sports which nobody else in the world plays except for the Americans and their satrapies. Only 27 people in Georgia have even heard of rugby, and only 15 of those are under the age of 127. (They are very long lived in Georgia: the oldest people in the world come from that region of the Caucasus, which has led many scientists to study their diets extremely closely in the hope that some intimation of immortality will reveal itself.

James Delingpole

Meet Finland’s answer to Vaclav Klaus

‘Finland, Finland, Finland — the country where I want to be. Po-ny trek-king or camp-ing. Or simply watching TV.’ But Monty Python got it wrong. Finland is more than just a cold, comedic nowheresville near to Russia. Not only is it the land of Nokia, bear pâté, the Moomintroll, and one of the few countries in the eurozone still doing business (one of only seven with an AAA credit rating) — but it may also save the world from the approaching euro armageddon. For this last, we must thank an implausible hero named Timo Soini: implacable Eurosceptic, leader of Finland’s fastest-growing political party (the True Finns) and a diehard fan of Millwall Football Club.

Hugo Rifkind

Surely no one goes to a party conference to meet politicians?

One should be wary, as a general rule, of making general rules based on personal experience. This is a general rule I’ve made, admittedly, on the basis of personal experience, which I’m aware is problematic, but there you go. I always think of the time, at school, when a bunch of my fellow 14-year-olds had declared an armistice, and were having a late-night conversation about matters of personal experimentation of which a 14-year-old is normally loath to speak. The guilty and personal was revealed as healthy and universal, and comradely good feeling rose. In time, one boy made a terrible mistake. ‘Guys?’ he said. ‘You know when you do that thing with your thumb?’ And of course nobody did. Because nobody else did that thing with their thumb.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Politics: Nick Clegg is in better political shape than anyone would have guessed

It is too early to call him the comeback kid of British politics, but Nick Clegg enters the party conference season in better shape than anyone expected him to be four months ago. Back then, his party did not dare put his face on its campaign leaflets. Even Liberal Democrat ministers didn’t expect Clegg to lead the party into the next election. This is beginning to change. Clegg looks happier than he has in months: the hunted look has gone from his face. Last week, watching him walk through the corridors of the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the way to a party for one of his aides, I was struck by how relaxed he was. A few months ago, it is hard to imagine that he’d have been as comfortable wandering around such a student hang-out.

Rod Liddle

Snorting coke and whoring? It’s all part of the new, non-toxic Tory brand

It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a black whore on his lap and three kilos of gak up his left nostril, allegedly. At a stroke, the popularly held image of the Conservative party was suddenly dispelled.

Matthew Parris

Absolute power corrupts one’s dress sense absolutely

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold.

James Delingpole

When the music stops, blame environmental madness

Even if, like me, you scarcely know the first thing about electric guitars, you’ll definitely be familiar with the Gibson. It’s the legendary American brand you can hear Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton playing on Cream’s ‘White Room’, and Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, and Dave Grohl on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Paul McCartney uses a left-handed Les Paul Standard as his main stage guitar; John Lennon wrote most of his songs on The White Album on a Gibson he borrowed in India from Donovan; Bob Marley’s Les Paul Special is buried with him; U2’s The Edge is a fan, as is Bob Dylan, as were Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Politics: Can the coalition survive the crises ahead?

Can the coalition survive the crises ahead? For something cobbled together by eight sleep-deprived men over four days, the coalition agreement has proved remarkably durable. Even now, with relations between the Tories and Lib Dems arguably more strained than ever, the document’s writ still runs. Both parties know that if they didn’t abide by its terms, the show would collapse. But the document can’t cover every crack, and the coalition has shown itself to be particularly vulnerable to events. In May last year no one expected, for instance, that there would be mass looting on the streets of London. When the riots happened, the coalition struggled to agree on a response: the two parties’ visceral reactions to the disturbances were just too different.

Rod Liddle

In the face of terror, Britain has surrendered to men in yellow fluorescent jerkins

Had your fill of 9/11 porn yet? I guarantee if you turn on the TV at this moment on some channel there’ll be a plane crashing into a building and a nutter from the Midwest telling you it was organised by the Jews via the offices of the Zionist Occupation Government, the towers packed with thermite, the Pentagon hit not by an aircraft but by a missile, Rumsfeld an alien lizard creature, Charlie Sheen or some other madman asking why They keep lying to us. Or one of the more upmarket programmes — same shot of the planes crashing in and people jumping out of the windows, but done in slo-mo with accompanying music by La Monte Young or Philip Glass.

Hugo Rifkind

Convenience seems a small, mean word – but sometimes it’s all we’ve got

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else. Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example?

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Michael Gove’s free schools are a triumph – but can they keep up with the baby boom?

When Michael Gove first proposed ‘free schools’ four years ago, he could have been written off as another Tory daydreamer. The idea of creating an education market, with independent state schools competing for pupils, was considered by Keith Joseph in 1980, then dropped when the depth of his department’s hostility became clear. English schooling was controlled by bureaucrats and unions, and sporadic ministerial attempts to change that always ended in failure. So Gove’s friends and enemies concluded that, as Education Secretary, his radical reforms were doomed. How wrong they were. This month 24 new ‘free schools’ will open, admitting about 10,000 pupils. Behind each school is a group of teachers acting on parental demand for something better.

Rod Liddle

Scottish football, double standards and the Notting Hill Carnival

Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. Sadly, I wasn’t among the 260 souls who watched Stranraer FC narrowly defeat Berwick Rangers a couple of weeks back. I’ve only been to Stranraer once, in 1975, when I watched my father stand by the docks and spit in the direction of Ireland, which loomed just beyond the edge of our eyesight. We were on holiday in this rather lovely and underrated neck of the Scottish woods and had ventured into Stranraer to buy provisions for the forthcoming evening meal in our camper van: a ‘salad’ — tomato cut in half, iceberg lettuce and processed ham sliced the width of a muon. And salad cream.

Matthew Parris

Day by day through someone else’s life

Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story? Is the book — the solid, rectangular repository of the whole damn thing, from Chapter 1 to Chapter 32 — always and in principle the superior vehicle for a story?

James Delingpole

When you really, really need the state, will it still be able to save you?

At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. At my uncle’s holiday apartment in Salcombe, Devon, is a tiny service lift so cramped and claustrophobic that you only use it in extremis: when you have heavy bags to carry up from the car, say, or a pile of sodden wetsuits which need drying on the balcony. Otherwise, it’s best avoided. Even the 40 seconds or so it takes to get from the bottom floor to the top are enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Politics: Will Gaddafi’s fall go to Cameron’s head?

David Cameron’s public utterances often appear to have been crafted to make him sound as much like Tony Blair as possible. David Cameron’s public utterances often appear to have been crafted to make him sound as much like Tony Blair as possible. But when he discussed the fall of Tripoli on Monday, he was trying to do the opposite. There was no democratic triumphalism, no paeans to liberty and no kaleidoscopes being shaken. Instead, he emphasised the post-conflict planning that had already gone on and warned, ‘no transition is ever smooth or easy’. The subtext was clear: ‘Libya is not Iraq, and I am not Blair.’ Iraq was meant to have put the public and politicians off foreign adventures for a generation.

Rod Liddle

Libya suggests that Cameron has a bad case of the Blairs

These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli. The news of the rebels’ victory may be a shade premature at time of writing — they have form in overstating their conquests — but it looks as if ol’ Muammar has had his lot. These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli.

Hugo Rifkind

Suddenly everyone wants an iron bar under their bed

I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘ I keep an iron bar under my bedside table. I was telling a colleague about it the other week, while mobs were rampaging across London. ‘Where did you get an iron bar?’ she wanted to know, and I told her I’d salvaged it from a towel rail. I think it was that little act of ingenuity which impressed her the most. It’s terrible, really, the hopelessness of the urban middle classes. It’s wonder we still know how to feed. She’d taken to sleeping with a screwdriver. What was she going to do with a screwdriver, I wondered. ‘What are you going to do with an iron bar?’ she retorted. Swing it, I said.