Columns

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Not your ordinary, everyday Tory selection contest in Stratford-on-Avon

Last Friday (as I write) I chaired the meeting to select a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Stratford-on-Avon. I say ‘chaired’ but the modern term is (I learned) ‘mediated’. My preference for the more old-fashioned verb will have been shared by almost all the assembled ranks of the Stratford-on-Avon Conservative Association: we were — very few of us, they or I — in the first flush of youth. We don’t do ‘mediated’. But around 300 of them came (the selection was open only to party members) on a freezing Warwickshire night, for a meeting that would last from seven until around midnight.

Saturday

James Forsyth

To win the election, the Tories must learn to fight dirty

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics Having to work on a Sunday is a chore — doubly so when that Sunday is Valentine’s Day. But there were plenty of worker bees at Labour headquarters on Victoria Street last Sunday, devoting themselves to the passion of their life: hounding Conservatives. They came to rebut a document that the Tories had just released on how Britain has grown more unequal under Labour. Late in the afternoon, all their Valentine’s dreams came true: they found a mistake. Somehow the Tories had managed to claim that 54 per cent of girls under 18 got pregnant in the most deprived areas of the country when the actual figure is 5.4 per cent.

James Delingpole

‘Post-normal science’ is perfect for climate demagogues — it isn’t science at all

No it’s OK, I didn’t mind one teeny tiny bit that Matt Ridley wrote an entire Spectator cover story on Climategate and the blogosphere last week without once mentioning the name of the brilliant Spectator journalist who broke the story on his Telegraph blog, and popularised the name Climategate, and got 1.5 million hits in one week, and whose anti-eco-fascist bulletins now have a massive following from readers all around the world who keep sending him emails like ‘Thank you for saving us from the horrors of ManBearPig’ and (I’m not making this up) ‘Someone should put up a James Delingpole statue in Trafalgar Square’. Because if I did it would be really petty, wouldn’t it?

Hugo Rifkind

I’m not saying that anyone who ever posts an internet comment is nuts. But…

Back when I was a diary columnist, they’d publish my email address in the paper every day. I did love the emails from lunatics. And we’re talking proper nuts here, not just xenophobes, or people with unusually strident views about Israel. My favourite was a guy from Glasgow, whose emails were all either impenetrable tracts about global macro-economics, or detailed, punctuation-free recreations of the arguments he’d had that week with his GP, fellow lunatics, or the local branch of the Hari Krishnas. I remember getting bored one afternoon and looking him up on Lexis Nexus. He’d twice been published on the letters page of the Daily Express. I suppose they’ve probably gone off email, the lunatics. Just like the way they went off letters.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The war over Joanne Cash — and what it tells us about Cameron’s Conservatives

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics If a committee of David Cameron’s advisers were to design what they regarded as the perfect Tory candidate, the result would look something like Joanne Cash. She is intelligent, successful, a talented lawyer, educated at a state school and with staunch, considered conservative principles. She was duly earmarked for a must-win Labour-Tory marginal: Westminster North. After she was selected she became even more of a Cameroon poster child as she is expecting a child. She could be used as living, breathing proof of how Mr Cameron has succeeded in modernising the party. But the best-laid plans of Cameron HQ can go awry — and, in the case of Ms Cash, spectacularly so. Instead of being lauded, she has been undermined.

Matthew Parris

The Australian bush says: ‘Come in’ — and then it breaks your heart

We are driving in inland New South Wales. We could be driving across grassy English lowland. Wide green hills roll towards a dove-grey horizon, and wisps of white curl down from wet clouds to touch the higher ground. Here and there a stand of trees dots a meadow, and small woods fringe pasture; but there is no forest, nothing dense or dark. Green here is not so much a colour in the artist’s palette as the canvas on which he paints. The whole aspect is damp, mild, open; and though wire fence strings the roadside and sometimes a lonely track is lined in wooden post-and-rail, the impression is of parkland: of a vast ducal estate, loosely maintained, from which His Grace is unaccountably absent.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The Tories cannot continue to fight the election on the vague promise of ‘change’

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics Even the Tories accept that they can’t go like this. For a while, David Cameron thought he could maintain his safety-first strategy and leave Labour to tear itself apart. But with the polls returning to hung parliament territory, the high command now accepts that there is a need for a course correction. This is welcome news. Recognising there is a problem is the first step to recovery. The problem is that the Tories are barely hitting 40 per cent in the polls despite the fact that they are running against a tired and discredited government led by a man whom most of the Cabinet, let alone the public, can’t abide. The root cause of this problem is that they have no central message.

James Delingpole

I hate weddings; funerals are almost invariably better in every way

If I’d written the film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion — as I was reminded the other week when I went to Tisbury, Wiltshire, to bid farewell to my old friend John Clanwilliam. John, you may remember, was the earl I killed last summer during a game of human Cluedo. At Christmas, he died for real and though I shall miss him dearly I don’t think anyone could be too unhappy at the manner of his leaving: a few months after two glorious 90th birthday parties (one in London, one in the country), cheery, well-loved and with all his faculties intact.

Hugo Rifkind

The things we thought Cameron thought — does he really think them after all?

Am I the only person who hears David Cameron say ‘Burglars leave their human rights at the door’ and thinks immediately of Pulp Fiction? Am I the only person who imagines Cameron and, say, George Osborne as two American hick security guards who capture burglars and punish them in a sort of Tarantino-esque manner I couldn’t possibly describe in The Spectator but which does, and not in a good way, involve oranges?

Saturday

James Forsyth

Cameron and Osborne must listen to their backbenchers — or face revolt

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When David Cameron and George Osborne move between their suite of offices at the eastern end of the parliamentary estate and the Commons chamber they do so with a pomp that would not embarrass a medieval monarch. A crowd of attendants accompanies them, constantly changing positions but never disrupting the order: staffer, Cameron, staffer, Osborne, staffer. The party moves through the corridors at breakneck speed, heads thrown back, staring into the middle distance rather than looking around at their colleagues. This display certainly succeeds in getting them noticed. But to the Tory MPs whom they march past without even a glance, the whole procession symbolises not power but the remoteness and arrogance of those who are running the party.

Hugo Rifkind

Will a Brown bombshell at the Chilcot inquiry win Labour the election? Place your bets

I have a theory about Gordon Brown and the Chilcot inquiry. It’s a bit half-baked, but you shouldn’t mind that. You want a fully-baked political theory, you don’t come around here. You want the Parris page for that, or one of those Nelson or Forsyth bits up front. Back here you get the leftovers. The off-cuts. The sort of analysis you might get if you imprisoned a renegade unit of soldiers from the Los Angeles underground in a shed full of odds and ends, and told them they wouldn’t be let out until they produced a column. Held together with whimsy, and references you won’t really get if you’re not quite the right age to have watched The A-Team. You know the drill. Anyway, my theory is this: Gordon Brown will ace the Chilcot inquiry.

Matthew Parris

The purpose of being unable to remember what’s on the tip of your tongue

The phenomenon I’m about to describe will be infuriatingly familiar to older readers, but will have been encountered by people of any age. Even in childhood we meet it, and as we grow old it happens more and more often. So common is the experience that it would surprise me if there was any language and culture that lacked an idiomatic expression to describe it. Spanish certainly has one: ‘En la punta de la lengua.’ So does French: ‘Sur le bout de la langue.’ The Poles, I’m told, say ‘Na koncu jezyka.’ In Wales they say ‘Blewyn tasod.’ All these idioms refer to the same thing. In English the curious phrase finds more than a million references in Google. The phrase is: ‘On the tip of my tongue.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The Tories plan a radically different education system, with new schools

James Forsyth reviews the week in Politics It is not often that David Cameron lavishes praise on a Labour achievement. But that’s exactly what he was doing on Monday morning at Walworth Academy as he lauded the school for having almost doubled the number of pupils getting good GCSE results. As one of Tony Blair’s academies, Walworth is a rare Labour success, a state-funded institution free from local education authority control. Yet Labour has turned its back on the academies, leaving Cameron and the Tories free to swoop in and claim them as their own. A Tory government would see the academy model become the norm. Schools would be state-funded and free but left to run themselves. This is a welcome development.

Hugo Rifkind

Three tips on how to survive an apocalypse

Looting. I mean, you just would, wouldn’t you? I’d start with a supermarket and a gun shop. Come to think of it, I should probably know where my local gun shop is. Let’s see. Archway? Really? Who knew? Obviously I’m not expecting an earthquake in north London. But who says it has to be an earthquake? Any one of the five modern horsemen of the apocalypse staples would do it, which is to say, nuclear war, natural disaster, disease, zombies and aliens.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Labour’s cycle of deceit?

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics There is something wonderfully self-perpetuating about mutiny in politics. Any attempt to depose a leader, successful or otherwise, triggers a cycle of rebellion. The danger for Labour after last week is being sucked into this cycle where treason begets treason. Indeed, the conspirators against Brown cite his actions as justification for their own. As Barry Sheerman put it, when challenged about whether he was betraying his leader, ‘I don’t need anyone who undermined the previous Prime Minister and who was utterly disloyal telling me that I am disloyal.’ When a leader has broken the bonds of party loyalty, he struggles to demand loyalty himself. Iain Duncan Smith, a Maastricht rebel, could never rely on the fealty of his party.

Matthew Parris

In Africa, where there are dreadlocks, there are white tourists being preyed upon

Guides, maps and tourist fact-boxes often adopt little pictorial symbols: shorthand icons that signal key facts or recommendations. A tiny canoe, and parasol, for example, indicate boating facilities, plus a beach. But less common have been warning shorthands designed positively to identify an unpleasantness or something to avoid. How about (for instance) an overflowing dustbin with wavy lines above it, for instance, indicating ‘smelly’; earmuffs against a hotel’s name, as a ‘noisy’ warning; or a trouser pocket with a wad of notes sticking out: ‘pickpockets operate here’?

Saturday

James Delingpole

If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right ones

The highlight of my Christmas holidays was taking the family to see Avatar. It’s not often a film comes along which wife, Boy (11), Girl (9) and I are able to adore in equal measure. But James Cameron’s $200 million epic ego-fest hit the spot perfectly and for those families out there still wavering, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Whenever I’ve mentioned this to my right-leaning friends, though, the general reaction has been one of appalled horror. ‘But how could you?’ they want to know.

Hugo Rifkind

Airport security is a giant exercise in arse-covering — and it doesn’t work (obviously)

Christina Lamb mentioned Abdullah al-Asiri on these pages a few weeks ago, but she was rather coy on detail. Allow me to be less so. Al-Asiri was the al-Qa’eda operative who — following a sojourn in the bogey-country de jour of Yemen — had defected back to Saudi Arabia, on the condition that he be debriefed personally by the Saudi anti-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef. Thereafter he was frisked, passed through two rounds of airport-style security, and sat down, presumably quite gingerly, with the Prince himself. Then, after some small talk, he detonated a pound of explosives that he had hidden in his bottom. A pound of explosives sounds like quite a lot to hide in a bottom. Such, I suppose, is the zeal of the jihadi.

Saturday

James Forsyth

This election is the most important since 1983. Seldom has so much been at stake

James Forsyth on what promises to be a transformative year in politics Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future‚ as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr rightly observed. But there are some things one can predict with (almost) total confidence: in this year there will be an election and by next Christmas one of the two main parties will have a new leader. And by the end of the summer, we will know if Britain is likely to tackle the single biggest threat to its prosperity and standing in the world: the gargantuan budget deficit, 12.6 per cent of GDP and counting. The election will divide the year. Until election day, the last remaining bubble in Britain — that of public spending — will be protected.

Saturday

James Forsyth

What Cameron really needs to think about over Christmas is why he wants to be PM

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics David Cameron is only taking a week off this Christmas. This is a pity, because he is facing a year that would test the stamina of a Spartan. From the moment politics resumes in the New Year, he’ll be in constant campaign mode. Then, if he wins, he’ll be governing a country in crisis; trying to push through unprecedented spending cuts and embarking on nothing less than the reordering of the relationship between the individual, society and the state. This may be his last chance in four years to recharge his batteries. A proper holiday would also give him some time to reflect on his style of leadership.