Columns

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Freedom of speech is a foggy issue with no absolutes — and that’s sort of the point

It is a weird business when stories combine, even if they only do so in the mind of the commentator. On our screens, Tony Blair is about to fret about Jesus, making him look like a loony again. In Oxford, David Irving and Nick Griffin are cast, preposterously, as defenders of free speech. And in Sudan, that poor schoolteacher is banged up for allowing toddlers to call a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’. There is a link here, somewhere, although it’s foggy, and it bothers me. Does freedom of speech entail the right to call a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’? If not, do we have a problem? Oxford first. Ridiculous situation.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

A guide to ‘gaffes’, and why, in truth, they are always to be found in the eye of the beholder

Among the silly expressions that may one day be associated with our era — and I hope buried with it — is the little word ‘gaffe’. I ought to know, having been indicted often enough myself for the crime, and having just co-edited and published a whole book, Mission Accomplished, of so-called gaffes committed by politicians and world leaders. Yet the moment you start to examine in a thoughtful way the things we call gaffes, the concept disintegrates into a clutch of very different types of utterances, some of which are wholly commendable. All that such utterances have in common is that they are regretted. I do not even say ‘regrettable’ because in politics honesty, though often regretted, cannot be regrettable.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

The winners of the political year

This is the text of the remarks that Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, delivered at the Spectator Threadneedle Parliamentarian of the Year awards lunch at Claridge’s Hotel. My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the 23rd Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian Awards. Yes, once again, this is the big one: the Oscars of Westminster, the Booker Prize of our lawmakers, the Blankety Blank cheque book and pen of the political cosa nostra. First of all: thank you to Mark Malloch-Brown for lending us his study for the ceremony.

Hugo Rifkind

If Dave were a plumber, he’d launch a policy review on your broken boiler

If he was a plumber, though, what manner of plumber would David Cameron be? The Tory leader, summoned via the Yellow Pages to fix a problem with your boiler. You would let him in, I think. Nice face, easy manner. ‘There’s a problem with your boiler,’ he would say. Indeed, you would agree. So fix it. ‘I will,’ says David the plumber, ‘but not yet. First, I am going to set up a series of Boiler Review Groups. Some of these will be headed by really quite surprising people who have been harping on about boilers for years. They will look into the problem in depth, and then they will propose a series of solutions.’ Fine, you might say, boilers not being your personal forte. And then you’ll fix it? David the plumber might give a little chuckle.

Saturday

Claudia Rosett

The taxpayer is being stung so this Lord can live in Admiralty House

Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation. In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General’s chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros, the financier who forced Britain out of the ERM in 1992, and a major donor to left-wing causes.

Matthew Parris

I hate badges and ribbons, but this year I have decided to wear a poppy for the first time

Ted Heath was not always easy to love, but his grumpiness could be endearing. I remember him once inveighing against badges. Badges, he said, lapel-stickers, medals, tags, ribbons, bumper-stickers, rosettes, even T-shirts with writing on them — they all added up to the same thing: using yourself as a human billboard to advertise your convictions or good works. He detested the practice, he said. This diatribe had been prompted by a request to attach some perfectly harmless sticker — Save the Whale or whatever — to his coat. The young man who had asked him to do it was rather winded by the tirade. But I agreed with Ted. I still do.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Immigration policy can ‘swamp’ a party’s message. But Cameron knows this

Cameron enters the immigration debate The government’s failure to count up the number of foreign workers in this country rightly reinforces the public’s fear that control of the borders has been lost, that an unstoppable tide of migrants is flowing into the country. It is in these circumstances that unsavoury politics flourish. To Gordon Brown’s immense discredit, he has expended more energy trying to capitalise on public disquiet over immigration than on trying to fix the problem. So Mr Brown talks of ‘British jobs for British workers’ and promises to deport migrants who peddle drugs to ‘our children’. Short of promising to deport those who rape our daughters, he could not have made a baser — or more emotive — appeal.

Hugo Rifkind

In Dostoevsky time, you worry about stuff like heavy swing doors and Britishness

St Petersburg The first two things that grab you about Russia are the women’s clothes and the health and safety laws. Or, at least, that is what grabbed me. Wander the streets of St Petersburg, and you don’t see much of either. Wander the museums, even, and you don’t see much of either, either. In the Hermitage, I saw a girl in thigh-high boots and leopard-print hotpants gazing up at a Canaletto. Had she simultaneously been frying blinis on an leaky gas stove, I think I would have taken a photograph. There. That’s it. That’s Russia. I am here as part of the Liberatum Jewel of Russia Festival, one of a delegation shipped out for a few days by the organiser, the endearingly bonkers Pablo Ganguli.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Why I am sceptical about global warming — and a convinced green-energy convert

Last Sunday a group from Winster, a lovely nearby village in Derbyshire, had invited me to open their roadshow at 11 a.m. The group, Sustainable Winster, had organised a Climate Change Awareness Day. The area climate-change bus had arrived for the occasion, there were displays, posters, free linen bags containing packs of expandable chips to put in the cistern of your loo so it uses less water, a Morris Man, two rangers from the Peak District National Park, bright sunshine and an atmosphere of friendly evangelism.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

By the time they stop being mad, politicians are the right age for the House

This is a column about the reform of the House of Lords. I have a hunch it might not look like one, probably until pretty much the end, but that is what it is. Try to remember this if, at times, it appears to be about something else. ‘They should just clone ministers,’ says the Hugh Abbott character in The Thick Of It (2005), ‘so we’re born at 55 with no past and no flats and no genitals.’ How dated that seems, already. Flats, pasts and genitals remain problematic, true enough, but 55 has become unacceptably ancient. What is a suitable age, these days, for a senior MP? Fortyish? David Miliband, at 42, seems to be about optimum. Sir Menzies Campbell, all the way up at a lofty 66, never had a hope. You could see it in the chamber.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The quality of a political speech is a symptom of popularity not a cause

Epiphenomenalism is, as 16-letter words go, not an obvious hook with which, dear reader, to draw you to this column; but let me explain; because I think I may be an epiphenomenalist. My dictionary defines this as the doctrine that consciousness is merely a by-product of physiological processes and has no power to affect them: that we do not weep because we’re sad, but rather that we are sad because we’re weeping. The idea is not quite as crazy as it sounds. Tony Blair did not sound passionately sincere because he was passionately sincere. He mastered the knack of delivering his lines with such passionate sincerity that he became spellbound by his own performance, and believed in it.

Saturday

The Spectator

Brown bottles out, no election this year

Gordon Brown has ruled out an election this year following a poll of marginal seats that showed Labour significantly behind the Tories. No election is now expected until 2009. Coffee House has reaction and analysis to this news. Click here to read the latest from our political team.

Hugo Rifkind

The Tory conference made me feel like Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral

Hugo Rifkind on the party conference season Are we sure that party conferences are good things? Are we convinced that they do the job? Certainly, they are great fun. That, I would never dispute. The booze. The talk. And the rooms. Any connoisseur of weird, shabby, out-of-town hotels with ominously crumbly ceilings and carpets that suck would have been thrilled by my temporary berth in Blackpool last week. Five damp beds in my room for one, and two cold taps that only ran hot. An actual karaoke bar, through which I had to pass to get in and out. The ever-present smell of cigarettes and that other familiar tang which, after two days and with some surprise, I finally recognised as the smell of the London Zoo elephant pen. Oh, it was all very special.

Saturday

The Spectator

Did the Tories rock in Blackpool?

Spectator.co.uk has full coverage of the Tory Conference. Matthew d’Ancona and Fraser Nelson are reporting the latest development from Blackpool here. George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor and Tory election coordinator, is blogging for Coffee House, to read his thoughts click here. Up and coming Tory MP Nadine Dorries is also lending her unique perspective to Coffee House. While Tamzin Lightwater is keeping us up to date on all the latest gossip from inside Team Cameron. Norman Tebbit tells Cameron to ignore his advisers and instead listen to St. Paul, in his pre-conference essay. Frank Luntz, the American pollster, reveals what his focus groups are saying here. While Fraser Nelson previews the biggest speech of David Cameron’s life in this week’s cover story.

Matthew Parris

In the chaos of a conference morning, the celestial strains of a violin made my soul

Last Sunday morning found me at the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, the conference hotel for Labour’s 2007 gathering and — the reason I was there — the temporary home of the BBC television’s Andrew Marr Show. Along with my fellow journalist Anne McElvoy, I was Andrew’s guest reviewer of the morning newspapers. I was in to read them at seven, a huge red orb of a sun rising over the sea as I made my way along the cliff tops from my hotel on the East Cliff to the West Cliff and our studio. It was cool, breezy and beautiful, the Channel a choppy and restless autumn symphony of greys and blues. Inside the Highcliff another mood reigned. Beneath low ceilings and the glare of television lights, people rushed hither and thither.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

To understand Gordon’s ‘Big Tent’, imagine its inhabitants trying to put a tent up

Why does Gordon Brown have a ‘big tent’? Why does Gordon Brown have a ‘big tent’? Why, to be pertinent, does he have a ‘tent’ at all? There must have been leaders, throughout world history, who have ruled calmly and inclusively and by consensus. Yet if we were to group these people together on a Venn diagram, in their own little circle, surely this circle would not interlock extensively with the one representing ‘people who ruled from tents’. Genghis Khan ruled from a tent. Sheltering under felt on the harsh Mongol steppes, did he ever worry about reaching out to the other side?

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody

Monday Hooray! Labour no longer the Party of Economic Competence!! It’s all over! Or rather, it’s all back on!! Dave looks like a weight has been lifted. Fifteen different pictures of desperate people queuing at banks spread out on the conference table. We want to frame a few of them, as commemoration of The Day Our Luck Finally Turned, but Jed can’t decide which ones he likes best. It’s just so dramatic. Reminds me of the day they had a ‘buy one get one free’ on sacks of stud and youngstock mix at Wibberley Horse and Rider. Though not quite so hysterical. Meanwhile, the silly feud continues. Thatcher’s office on again. Is ‘David Cameron’ going to the No Turning Back gala dinner at conference?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The media resented the McCanns muscling in on their private terrain

My former sketchwriting colleague, Simon Hoggart, has a maxim he would cite when any of us parliamentary sketchwriters were tempted to showcase a genuinely and intentionally funny MP. Humorous journalists, Simon would warn, had no business giving a platform to would-be jokers in the world of politics. Humour was our trade not theirs. We should never laugh with them: only at them. In our sketchwriters’ guild it should be a union rule not to encourage competition from unpaid amateurs. ‘We make the jokes around here.’ In an altogether darker and sadder way, I wonder whether, in their relationship with the news media, this is the mistake Kate and Gerry McCann have made. As with humour, so perhaps with pathos.

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind

Our present fear of Chinese products masks our real fear of China — a swelling Other

How on earth did they get them through customs? ‘Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. How on earth did they get them through customs? ‘Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. Any lead paint? What’s that? Not any more? Just naked terracotta? Dearie dearie me. But presumably they do sport a CE Certificate of Europe mark, in compliance with SI/204 The Toys (Safety) Regulations 1995? You what? Older than that? Created by the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi 200 years before Christ? Never heard of him. Not today, mate. Take them home.’ It could have happened, couldn’t it?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Dishonesty in television may arise from lofty principle: but it still bears the devil’s fingerprint

My concern was born of direct personal experience. There was something rotten in the business of television programme-making, and it was endemic in the ethos of the small screen rather than (as TV bosses often prefer to insist) the influence of ‘a few bad apples’. I have written about this now more times than I can remember, and come at it from many angles: repeating (because it has never quite caught the public imagination and I keep hoping that with one more heave it will) the same argument. My argument is that Beelzebub has achieved something more cunning than subverting a few editors and producers into immoral practices driven by ignoble motives.