Features

Thursday

Katy Balls

Its own opposition: Labour’s conference was all about in-fighting

As the Tories faced multiple crises this week, Keir Starmer’s party was busy in Brighton doing what it does best: arguing with itself. The Labour conference has been dominated by internal rows about rule changes, a shadow cabinet resignation and whether or not Tories can be called ‘scum’. Labour’s failure to focus on the chaos at petrol stations or chastise the Tories for incompetence was enough to baffle international visitors. ‘Why didn’t Starmer start conference at a petrol station in Brighton trying to fill people’s cars?’ one experienced diplomat asked me. ‘It would have been everywhere.’ Starmer had hoped to use the conference to end his party’s navel-gazing and outline his vision It is a good question.

Andrew Watts

What will become of Jamaica’s Maroons?

Jamaican police entered farms in the village of Accompong in August to destroy ganja crops. The village chief, carrying a rifle, drove them away. ‘This is a gross disrespect and violation of Maroon territorial jurisdiction,’ said the chief, on his Instagram. Richard Currie talks a lot about sovereignty: he was elected colonel, or chief, on a platform of taking back control. A breathless profile in the Jamaica Gleaner refers to him as being like a cross between the hero and villain in Marvel’s Black Panther, but Accompong, with its 788 inhabitants, is no Wakanda. For nearly 300 years it has been more like Asterix’s village in Gaul, holding out against a hostile Empire. Some history. The year is 1739. Jamaica is entirely occupied by the British.

Jacqueline Wilson

Why I became a writer

Whenever I give talks to children about my books they always ask who inspired me to be a writer. I don’t really think anyone did. I was playing complicated imaginary games inside my head before I could read, and as soon as I could write I filled many Woolworths notebooks with my wobbly printing. But if pressed, I say that E. Nesbit might well have been an inspiration. I loved her books as a child and treasured a biography about her when I was struggling to earn my living as a writer. It was a relief to know that she too had to resort to writing little magazine stories while nursing a crying baby at the start of her career. I admired her short hair, her Liberty dresses and her many silver bangles too, and her habit of having buns for tea every time she sold a story.

Thursday

Francis Pike

The case against Aukus

Just weeks after the denouement of the West’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Boris Johnson is again committing Britain to a risky international venture. Aukus, the naval partnership between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, appears to tie Britain to an Indo-Pacific strategy that is militarily and geopolitically flawed. In December 1941, the catastrophic sinking of the then imperious new battleship HMS Prince of Wales along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaya led to the loss of Singapore and brought the curtains down on Britain’s Asian Empire. Britain was over-stretched and unable to commit resources to the defence of the Pacific. History rarely repeats itself exactly.

Harry Mount

End of the line: it’s time to rethink the queue

Flying to Kalamata this week, I did my own little bit to reduce the terrible queues at Heathrow Terminal 5. Heroically, I stacked up the grey luggage trays once they’d been emptied by passengers coming through security. As a result, there were more loaded trays for people to pick up, and a smaller tailback of passengers — including me — waiting to pick up their unloaded trays. It was just a tiny example of the hundreds of things that could be done to reduce queues in airports, hospitals, train stations, supermarkets… The British may be famous for their patient queueing but it doesn’t mean we actually like doing it. So why hasn’t more been done to eradicate queues?

Wolfgang Münchau

The stalemate election: can Germany move beyond Merkel?

Germany’s election campaign has taken many unexpected turns. In January, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), were leading by about 20 percentage points. By April, the Greens were ahead. By July, the CDU/CSU had bounced back, and then all of a sudden, the Social Democrats (SPD) came out of nowhere to a solid lead by last weekend. The gap has since closed a little ahead of Sunday’s election — and the joyride is still not over. What is also different about these elections is that, based on current polling, four, five or even six coalitions might be arithmetically possible. So the real battle will likely start only after the election.

Julie Burchill

Why do some women find killers irresistible?

Women who fall in love with killers have always fascinated and repulsed me. What drives them? Do they think they can ‘save’ these men? Are they secret sadists, acting by proxy? Are they masochists, getting a cheap thrill from communicating with someone who has tortured a fellow woman to death? Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, also known as hybristophilia, puts the case that, as an evolutionary reproductive trait, some women can be drawn to ‘bad boys’ who are prepared to break rules/laws and are therefore ‘stronger’. I was pleased to see that Denmark has now banned prisoners serving life sentences from starting romantic relationships while in jail.

Emma Thompson

The Church Closers’ Charter must be torn up

Over the past few months, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury have repeatedly assured us that they love parishes and parish churches. ‘I am passionate that the parish is essential,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Church Times recently. The Archbishop of York went so far as to describe the parish as ‘the beating heart of community life in England’. So why are they supporting a change to church law to make it easier to close parish churches? The paper which proposes the change is at stage one of a three-stage approval process. It has the unsexy name GS 2222, so I call it the ‘Church Closers’ Charter’.

Ian Buruma

The myth of Japan’s warrior spirit

Should we fear a new martial spirit in Japan? Is there a samurai lurking inside those armies of grey-suited corporate men waiting to spring forth? Even though Japan’s constitution, drawn up by the Americans after the war, forbids military combat abroad, the fear of a Japanese militarist revival has never quite gone away, especially in China where memories of Japanese wartime atrocities are kept alive and easily manipulated for political ends. One of the candidates to become the new Prime Minister of Japan, the former foreign minister Fumio Kishida, has promised to strengthen national security against China. He even hinted at the importance of defending Taiwan.

Robert Buckland

Now I’m a backbencher, I’m free to speak my mind

Politicians are supposed to have a survival instinct. Mine didn’t kick in last week, so I had no idea that my evidence session to a House of Lords committee on Wednesday would be my swan song. I was speaking about the work of the Ministry of Justice, where I had been lord chancellor for two years. The work, I said, is more than a series of desiccated processes. It is, and should always be, rooted in the rule of law, fairness and equality. With that off my chest, I rushed to Prime Minister’s Questions. In the middle of it, I received a text message saying that the Prime Minister wished to see me. By 2 p.m., my time in the cabinet was over and I was leaving government.

James Forsyth

New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?

In the space of just a few years, Britain has gone from China’s would-be best friend to part of a pact to counter it. When President Xi Jinping came to London in 2015, Downing Street pulled out all the stops. Xi stayed at Buckingham Palace, visited Chequers and signed — of all things — a cyber security agreement. The police went to extraordinary lengths to clamp down on protests by Free Tibet supporters and a Tiananmen Square survivor. Yet just six years later the UK has now joined with Australia and the US in Aukus, a new alliance designed to check China’s power in the Pacific. Britain is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between the US and China. It has firmly sided with the United States.

Thursday

Jack Rivlin

Are NFTs memes – or masterpieces?

You may think you have experienced buyer’s remorse. But until you’ve splashed out £4,000 on a Jpeg, you have not. That’s where I found myself the other day, after an adrenalin-fuelled afternoon bidding on a digital collectible ‘card’ depicting the Mona Lisa sitting on an easel. The item in question is a Curio Card, one of the earliest examples of a non-fungible token (NFT), a new technology used to buy and sell digital art. NFTs are the latest frontier for crypto-currency maniacs, the online gold rushers who keep financial watchdogs awake at night. Bored by a quiet summer for stock markets, memes and bitcoin speculation, the maniacs are piling into the fledgling digital-art market. It is booming.

Mark Mason

All bar none: there’s more to the pub than just drink

Life’s great joys are usually its little ones, and one of the greatest is ordering at the bar in a pub. The custom — as opposed to sitting at a table and being served by a waiter — was one of the things I missed most during lockdown. The period when pubs reopened but could only provide table service was miserable. A bar is more than just the place where drinks are dispensed. It’s a pub’s heart, the region where its name (short, of course, for ‘public house’) gets its meaning. You never know who you’re going to meet there. This is why pubs are always more exciting than members’ clubs. It is also why London became the financial capital of Europe.

Michela Wrong

When will Britain wake up to the horror of Rwanda’s President?

I doubt that Paul Kagame would have me assassinated, but it became clear to me late on Sunday afternoon that, at the very least, I am in his sights. As President of Rwanda, Kagame became the toast of the international aid community – and collected billions of dollars in aid. But is this money well spent? My book, Do Not Disturb, takes a closer look at how Kagame operates. He doesn’t appreciate the attention. My book kicks off with the strangling of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s spy chief, in a Johannesburg hotel in late 2013 — almost certainly on the President’s orders. It then explores the campaign of harassment, intimidation and murder that Rwanda has waged against dissidents scattered from Africa to Europe and Scandinavia to North America.

Matthew Lynn

Payday: who’s afraid of rising wages?

During the Brexit referendum, Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer, and chair of the Remain campaign, claimed that if Britain left the EU, wages ‘will go up’. This was, he added, in a rare moment of candour, ‘not necessarily a good thing’. But the idea that salaries might rise was exactly the reason that a great many people voted for Brexit. They were well aware that it suits the likes of Lord Rose to keep wages low, and they resented it. It is now nine months since Brexit’s transitional arrangements came to an end, completing the UK’s break with Brussels and Stuart Rose’s prediction has come true — spectacularly so. Wages are rising at the fastest rate in decades.

Rodney Pittam

Why Brits like me have abandoned trucking

I became a trucker by default. It was the 1980s and I was working three jobs just to pay the mortgage and keep my family going. I was a milkman, a taxi driver and a barman and I was tired and bored. We were living in a town with a ferry link to France and so at the evenings in the pub I got to know the truckers who drove back and forward from the Continent. I’d listen to their stories and think what fun it sounded. I saved up, passed my test, bought an old DAF tractor unit, hired a trailer and began my life on the road. Back then, it was just as weird and fun as I imagined it would be. On my very first trip, I met a one-legged prostitute who worked the service area at Auxerre and a Scottish driver who introduced me to the Congolese cocktail lumumba (brandy and chocolate milk).

Matthew Leeming

Kabul is now a city of the dead

I lived in Kabul for nearly ten years. I had a house there for many years and I loved being there. I loved the sense of life on the edge — even at the risk of sudden death — and the extraordinary array of interesting people who visited. I later became a partner in a fuel distribution business in Kabul, with a contract to supply the jet fuel used by Nato. We supplied $2 billion worth of jet fuel, amounting to around 100,000 tons a month, giving Nato the ability to bomb the Taliban. Several Afghans worked for me, friends as well as colleagues, and over the past few weeks I’ve been trying desperately to get them out of the country, but have come up against the brick wall of government bureaucracy.

Joel Zivot

Last rights: assisted suicide is neither painless nor dignified

Is euthanasia painless? The founder of the British pro-euthanasia movement (and sometime eugenicist) Dr Killick Millard declared in 1931 that his aim was ‘to substitute for the slow and painful death a quick and painless one’. His sentiment is echoed today by the pro-euthanasia group My Death, My Decision, which says that it wants the ‘option of a peaceful, painless, and dignified death’. The British Medical Association appears to agree and this week dropped its opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill, currently making its way through parliament. As a doctor and expert witness against the use of lethal injection for execution in America, however, I am quite certain that assisted suicide is not painless or peaceful or dignified.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Assetocracy: the inversion of the welfare state

To understand how the Tories ended up in such a muddle about who they are and what they stand for, take a walk down any of the nicer streets in Boris Johnson’s constituency. North Hillingdon is as idyllic now as it was a generation ago: spacious houses, with large drives, built before the war. The houses were, once, more or less affordable. One property on Parkway, for example, was bought for £175,000 just over 20 years ago. It’s now valued at £1 million. And what’s true in Hillingdon is true of the rest of the country too. The asset boom that started at the turn of the century has transformed the finances of families across the country, turning modest-income retirees into unexpected millionaires: a new ‘assetocracy’.

Nick Newman

Can cartoons be both funny – and diverse?

Of the many challenges cartoonists face — rejection, money, drink, or lack of — one of the trickiest is the growing pressure to depict diversity. Nowadays readers often write to publications complaining about the dearth of ethnic minorities in our drawings and demand for cartoons to be more inclusive. It’s like being trapped in a bad political cartoon, walking a tightrope above a minefield. A quick survey of my colleagues in the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation highlighted the following: Cartoons involve laughing at someone. If that person is black, you risk appearing racist; even including a BAME character in the background of drawing can lead to accusations of tokenism (‘background box-tickers’).