Columns

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 9 May 2009

Some secrets are too vulgar to be disclosed by any political party. Gordon Brown’s radical cuts agenda, encoded in the small print of the Budget, is one such secret. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to it, as it contradicts his pious claim that ‘you can’t cut your way out of recession’. David Cameron doesn’t want to call attention to the question of cuts either, as he would be asked where, precisely, the Tory axe would fall. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are against cuts, but also against more debt — a conundrum as yet unresolved. So it suits everyone in Westminster to keep quiet. The pain is scheduled to start in April 2011, to last for three years and utterly to transform British politics.

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 9 May 2009

It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire. Though they are not far from each other, the bleak Staffordshire moorlands are a different world to the sweet, grassy banks of the Derbyshire Wye where it flows through Chatsworth Park. And Andrew Cavendish and Ken Buxton lived anyway in different worlds, one a duke in his eighties, the other a supplier of plastic tanks in his fifties; and though both would have been friendly had they met, they could have had little to discuss. But something links them, and through each of their funerals it shone.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 2 May 2009

There’s a new application you can get for your iPhone called Baby Shaker, where a baby cries and cries until eventually you get so sick of it you shake your mobile so that large red Xs appear over the baby’s eyes and the crying stops for good. Or rather there isn’t, because someone took offence and complained to Apple and now, annoyingly, it has been withdrawn. Would I have acquired a copy myself? Well the graphics looked pretty rubbish but I still think it was probably worth the 99 cents, just on the off chance one might have found someone to offend. Sicko, child-related jokes are very useful in this respect, I find. One of my favourites when I was about 14 was: Q. What’s the difference between a truckload of babies and a truckload of marbles? A.

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 2 May 2009

Mandelson’s fixation with bananas repays study: it shows that he has not really changed Bananas on the mind. It’s Mandelson’s fault. There I was at the weekend, reading an interview with him in the Times. This was the new Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, the one who longs to go on Strictly Come Dancing, and only wears those soft cashmere jumpers, you can tell, to boost the impression that he could give you a kindly and wonderful hug. It was working. I was warming to the man. And then bananas. Bananas everywhere. How did Gordon Brown lure him back into government? ‘We sat down,’ he told the newspaper, ‘over a couple of sandwiches, a yogurt and a banana. I should have seen the telltale signs they were trying to corrupt me.’ Corrupt him?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 25 April 2009

Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist would regard Carl Jung’s work as mystical mumbo-jumbo and a branch more of literature than of science; but in the overlap there may be something of interest to both disciplines. Jung was the choice of my guest Ruby Wax for a programme we were recording for future broadcast in my BBC Radio 4 Great Lives series.

Saturday

Frank Field

Politics | 18 April 2009

It is difficult to overdramatise the danger that is engulfing our country. In some ways our position is more precarious than in 1940 when we stood alone against the Nazi tyranny. The danger can be stated easily enough. Far from building up reserves during the latter stages of the boom, the government went on a borrowing spree amounting to £200 billion or so. This borrowing disguised the fundamental structural imbalance in our national accounts. No government, however intent on making the pips of the rich squeak, has been able to raise in taxation more than 37 per cent of our gross domestic product. It is as though one of Adam Smith’s invisible hands has constructed a lead ceiling over the amount of income governments can lift off us taxpayers.

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense

The coppers round my part of south London are really pretty good. They chase the occasional burglar; they’re courteous when they come to your door; and if you can get hold of their direct lines or mobiles they’re even better. Last year, my friendly local rozzers did an excellent job of removing a large, noisy gang of criminally inclined hoodies who had taken to congregating on some steps by the estate at the bottom of my garden. This made all the homeowners in my neck of the woods feel much happier and more secure. ‘Hurrah! The police doing their ruddy job for once!’ we all thought. But stories like that are the exception rather than the rule, aren’t they?

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 18 April 2009

As time moves on, and we forget about their slurs and their malice and their rather telling fantasies about seeing George Osborne dressed up as Marlene Dietrich, perhaps what we should remember about Gordon Brown’s inner circle is their control freakery. They don’t trust hospitals to heal, they don’t trust schools to teach, and they don’t even trust scurrilous anonymous blogs to make up their own unsubstantiated gossip. They look out across this land and they see only sheep. Whereas, in fact, we are goats. No, seriously. It’s a good analogy. At least, I think it is. Let’s see. It comes from the great Terry Pratchett. ‘For sheep,’ he wrote, about something entirely different, ‘are stupid, and have to be driven.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 11 April 2009

The old wartime poster ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ has been reprinted recently and is turning up in the strangest places around Westminster. I have seen it on an MP’s desk and emblazoned on the cufflinks of a Treasury civil servant. It certainly captures the sense that we are undergoing an economic blitz, and acknowledges implicitly the temptation to panic. But at a time when Cabinet members are describing International Monetary Fund bailouts — quite extraordinarily — as ‘a kind of spa’, the case for keeping calm looks increasingly flimsy. The main question at the heart of the Budget on 22 April is not who will receive what, but how close the nation is to bankruptcy.

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 11 April 2009

What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years become. But it was with two other editors of this magazine very present in my imagination, that my (to me) astonishing moment of criminal madness occurred. I was coming back from dinner in Chelsea with Virginia Johnson, Frank Johnson’s widow. I loved Frank, the last-but-one editor of this magazine.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 4 April 2009

For the last 15 years, a four-letter word has terrified and paralysed the Conservative leadership: cuts. When it has been deployed by Gordon Brown on the electoral battlefield, the Tories have had no defence. Even after they surrendered and signed up to Labour’s spending plans, Mr Brown still accused them of planning ‘deep and painful cuts’. It is, as it happens, a charge entirely without foundation. Even now, the only people openly saying that state spending is too high are a bunch of supposed oddballs: Norman Tebbit, John Redwood — and 72 per cent of the British public. The last group has crept up almost entirely undetected upon Westminster — which is so often the last place to realise which direction the rest of the country has taken.

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 4 April 2009

It’s the little slights that really hurt. The ones where they just don’t seem to have thought about it. Certainly, we’re all thrilled that the great President Obama has deigned to make a visit to this little island vassal state. But why did he have to bring his own car? We have cars. Loads of them. And the thing is, Barack, ours even drive on the correct side of the road. Granted, they aren’t all so proficient at, say, withstanding a direct hit from an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) as your multi-ton behemoth (dubbed ‘The Beast’), but you’d be amazed at the number of RPGs we don’t have floating around in the UK. Or assault weapons of any sort, really.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 28 March 2009

To comprehend the scale of the sickening task awaiting George Osborne if he becomes chancellor, consider the following. If he were to raise VAT to 25 per cent, double corporation tax, close the Foreign Office, cancel all international aid, disband the army and the police, release all prisoners, close every school and abolish unemployment benefit he would still be unable to close the gulf between what the UK government spends and what it raises in taxes. Hopes of a relatively rapid economic recovery that could conceivably fill this gap are receding every month. And there is a limit to how long the government can make up the difference with borrowed money and refer to its profligacy as a ‘stimulus’.

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 28 March 2009

When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now. This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension the explanation of wind. Warm air, heated by the sun, would rise; and cooler air would waft in to take its place. Thus (I appreciated) a light breeze might waft from the cool sea to the warmer land during the day; but, by night, as the land grew cooler than the ocean, the airflow would reverse and a breeze blow from land to sea. All around the globe, as air pressures dropped or rose in one place or another, air would be sucked from one place to another to rebalance.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 21 March 2009

Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. How did that all happen, then? I could find out, probably, but only by asking one of those proper political journalists, you know the ones, who wear shiny suits and mysterious plastic passes, and use the word ‘lobby’ in myriad, self-satisfied ways, as though it were a weapon. ‘You can’t go into the lobby because you’re not in the lobby,’ they’ll say, smugly, before telling you that they spend half their life in the lobby with the lobby, but not lobbying, because only lobbyists lobby. God knows what any of it means. I suppose they’re usually pissed. But anyway. Sir Liam Donaldson, Gordon Brown and booze prices. Odd. Chronologically, I mean.

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 21 March 2009

Once a week, about half of the Cabinet make the rather pointless journey into an underground bunker in Whitehall to learn just how quickly the British economy is disintegrating. This is all to humour Gordon Brown, who calls them his ‘National Economic Council’ and has them meet in the nuclear-proof room as if they were at war with the recession. After six months of such meetings, it is depressingly clear to all concerned that the recession is winning, and in ways that they never really thought possible. Given that almost everyone in Westminster is trying desperately to read the politics of the recession, those summoned to the Brown bunker have at least one clear advantage.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 14 March 2009

At this rate, the throne might as well be replaced by a diamanté wheelchair Why do most parents who leave an inheritance leave it to their children? Why, when most people are well past middle age when their parents die, is this still considered the norm? Now that we live about a generation longer than people did when these rules evolved — in harsher times, many centuries ago — shouldn’t it be grandchildren who inherit? The question occurred to me while I was reflecting on the misfortune of Prince Charles, who is my age. It has always been said that the Queen regards her job as being for life, and there’s no sign of her flagging or of her capacities starting to dim.

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 14 March 2009

The right to keep one’s political affiliation secret is in many eyes a sacred feature of British life. There are households where married couples don’t tell each other how they vote. Those who grew up during the Cold War era remember the years when, in some countries, party membership was a grim prerequisite of a halfway decent life. So it is still a matter of pride that, in Britain, one is never required to discuss one’s political beliefs. Unless, that is, you want to do a certain type of business with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland. Geoff Robbins, a Cheshire-based computer consultant, recently approached RBS to ask for a credit-card processing facility for his business.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 28 February 2009

Some time ago I was in a room containing perhaps half a dozen other adults, a cat on a sofa-arm, and a baby in a carry-cot far from where I was sitting. The air was filled with the noise of general conversation. I had a cold. I coughed. The baby almost jumped out of its cot. The cat jumped. Nobody else moved. None of the adults (even those near me) flickered an eyelid. None so much as registered having heard the noise. Last weekend I returned to our house in Derbyshire, where my brother and his wife, their two children and their beagle dog were staying for a few days’ break. That evening we sat around the kitchen table eating the delicious meal my sister-in-law had cooked. The dog was under the table.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Politics | 21 February 2009

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The worst thing about this week for Gordon Brown is that no one has bothered to dub it his worst week ever. Normally, a few days which saw a Prime Minister receive the succession of blows that Brown has suffered since Saturday would lead to forests being chopped down and extra barrels of newsprint being ordered in.