Features

Thursday

Sascha O’Sullivan

I’m a stranded Aussie – get me back in there!

In early March last year, I was self-isolating in my flat in London. Even though there were only a few hundred confirmed cases of Covid a day, I had met someone the week before who had tested positive. This was before anyone knew much about the virus, but people were worried by the news coming out of China and northern Italy. I made frantic calls to 111 to try to get a test. No luck. ‘Why don’t you just come home?’ my mum in Sydney asked. ‘I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I work here as a journalist, I have a flat, I have shelves full of books too heavy to ship back. I have a life. If it gets really bad, I’ll be on the first flight home — I promise.

Thursday

David Cohen

170,000 people go missing every year in Britain – my father was one of them

A couple of Southern Hemisphere summers ago, in January 2019, I was at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, New Zealand. It was an unseasonably chilly evening as I sat listening to an emotional solo piano performance by Nick Cave. He sang a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, a wonderfully gloomy piece of psychology set to music about the death of a father. This rather well-known Cohen track has particular significance for me. It always prompts thoughts of a slightly lesser-known L. Cohen, my own father, who had disappeared without trace 50 years earlier. Whatever became of him? Where did he end up? What might he have been doing at the same moment I was listening to Nick Cave that evening?

Paul Wood

America abandoned this fight before the Afghans did

The bravest woman I ever met was a schoolteacher in Afghanistan. She was a tiny figure in a black abaya and headscarf, but during the dark days of Taliban rule she had turned her home into a secret classroom for women and girls. Every lesson there was a victory against the odds. It was very difficult for her pupils even to leave their houses; usually they had to go out with a male relative. She would teach her class in whispers, everyone waiting for the sharp rap on the front door that would mean they had been discovered. When British soldiers arrived in her part of Afghanistan, Helmand Province in the south, she opened a proper school. On the day I visited, there were computer classes, paid for by the British taxpayer.

Simon Cooper

Right as rain: don’t blame climate change for the British weather

I spend a lot of my life worrying about the climate. When you have more than 100 miles of precious chalk streams under your care, rain becomes the currency of your life. Too much in summer. Too little in winter. Or sometimes the other way around. Other times a bit of both. For us river folk, as for farmers, the weather is never quite right. Who do I blame when it is not quite right? Well, mostly us. People. Society. Urbanisation. Too many people sucking too much water from too few rivers. Water companies pumping untreated sewage into already critically depleted rivers. Politicians who allow the building of houses on floodplains. Agriculture that gets a free pass to plough, plant and spray pretty much whatever it likes in sensitive river catchments. Do I blame climate change?

Martin Vander Weyer

Why I swapped my country pile for a tiny London pad

‘Londoners searching for more space during Covid are buying up English country manors,’ said a Wall Street Journal headline in January — and that was certainly the trend reported by eager out-of-town estate agents. The middle classes,spurred by a temporary stamp-duty cut, were deserting the city in search of green pastures, home offices and the safety of low rural infection rates. Except for me, that is. I was going the other way, swapping my ‘country manor’ for a flat that’s as compact as it is uncompromisingly urban in the historic enclave of Seven Dials. Why?

Cindy Yu

China is finding out the price of ‘zero Covid’

In January my 80-year-old grandmother had a large birthday party in her home city of Nanjing. For the British branch of her family, stuck in lockdown, it was surreal to see photos and videos of what can only be described as a banquet. A hundred people hugging, drinking, laughing — it was as if Covid didn’t exist. Normal life seemed to have returned to China, while in England even outdoor dining was a fantasy. Seven months on, the British are the ones ditching masks, hugging friends and heading to the beach while the Chinese face what state media has called the most serious domestic recurrence of the virus since the start of the pandemic. The fresh outbreak started in Nanjing, which the rest of China now views with the same mix of sympathy and disdain it once did Wuhan.

Leo McKinstry

How corporations rebrand poverty

The other week, when I was shopping in Margate, I saw a number of posters from Boots urging support for its campaign against ‘hygiene poverty’. Barely aware of the term, I looked it up online and was soon presented by claims that much of Britain is gripped by a crisis of personal neglect because of penury. According to the charity In Kind Direct, more than a third of people have either had to cut down on their hygiene essentials or go without them completely due to lack of money. The same charity warns that 43 per cent of parents of primary schoolchildren have had to ‘forgo basic hygiene or cleaning products’ because of the cost. These figures sound terrifying but do they bear any relationship to the reality of modern life in our country?

Alastair Crooke

Like it or not, the Taliban are now players on the world stage

Many years ago, before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, I was based in Peshawar in Pakistan, near Afghanistan. I was responsible for British diplomatic reporting on the war and engaging with Afghan leaders. I came to know the Taliban. They were, to put it mildly, not particularly nice guys: intensely parochial, geographically and politically sectarian, xenophobic, misogynistic, tribal and rigid. As fierce Pashtuns, the biggest minority in Afghanistan, they would kill other ethnicities wantonly: Shia Hazaras in particular, as apostates, were killed. They detested Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ‘lion of Panjshir’ and a hero of the resistance to the Soviets, because he was a Tajik.

Wednesday

Ahmed Rashid

Are we seeing a new kind of Taliban?

Are we seeing a new kind of Taliban? The men who seized Kabul with such ease last weekend are doing their best to sound more moderate. Women, they say, should be allowed to work and have an education. They have offered amnesty to officials of the now-deposed Afghan government, something the old Taliban never dreamed of doing. It’s far too early to tell just how much of this will last. But the more interesting question is not about the elders but the next generation of Taliban: the young commanders who were really the ones who conquered Kabul. The Taliban never really showed much interest in exporting their type of Islamic revolution around the world. They only cared about Afghanistan. But the new, younger members are much more militant and radical.

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Liberté, égalité, vacciné: France’s Covid passport revolt is just beginning

Montpellier Three weeks ago, 100,000 demonstrators turned out on the streets of France to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s hastily passed law to require vaccination passports to get on a train, eat at a restaurant or visit a shopping centre. A week later, the number had more than doubled. Last Saturday, it doubled again. One police union estimated that close to 500,000 had turned out, although as usual the Interior Ministry claimed a much lower number. Enormous demonstrations were staged not just in Paris but in more than 150 cities and towns across France, as well as in the overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Réunion. All this in the middle of the sacred summer holiday season. On the current trajectory, one million could be on the streets by September.

Matthew Lynn

How the ‘Nixon shock’ reshaped our economy

The dotcom bubble. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The oil price spiral of the 1970s. The launch of the single currency. It would be fun, in a nerdish kind of a way, to debate which was the most seismic economic event of postwar history. But in fact the answer would be this: the ‘Nixon shock’, a fateful day when the final link between gold and the money you carry around in your pocket, or on your bank card, was finally severed. And it happened 50 years ago this week. A half-century on — enough time for some historical perspective — how’s it going?

Matt Quinton

The great holiday Covid test rip-off

I holidayed in Malta last month with my partner, having chosen it because it was on the ‘green list’. Foolishly, I assumed this would mean we could waltz back to the UK without any hassle. I was wrong. We needed a test before departing Malta. Within a few minutes of looking on the Malta airport website, I found a provider, headed to their test centre, and €30 later, was given the all clear. But that wasn’t all. To complete my pre-flight passenger form, I needed a ‘Day 2’ test for when I was home. For this, the UK government has a website pointing holidaymakers towards a slew of private firms — 315 catering for the Greater London area alone. Costs range from £20 to £400 and you can filter the site to view the cheapest firms first.

Sean Thomas

Who’d want to move to America now?

There’s a biopic released this summer, Roadrunner, about the late great chef, writer, bon viveur and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain. It recounts the many invaluable lessons Bourdain taught, such as: never eat the lower colon of a warthog; never order fish in a restaurant on Monday (it will probably be three days old); and, most of all, the American Dream is over. This last fact may seem jarring. Bourdain was a proudly patriotic American. However, I firmly believe he reveals this truth in the 36th episode of his splendid food-and-travel TV show, No Reservations. In this particular episode Bourdain visits Cleveland, Ohio. In his boyish, enthusiastic way, Bourdain tries all manner of nosh.

Michael Wolff

Cuomo, Trump and the secret of eternal political life

There are many in Donald Trump’s inner circle who have tried to read his mind these past four years, together with a class of journalists who, on a daily basis, have catalogued his whims and outrages. But perhaps my attention to the former president, after writing three books about him, is unique. I now regard him as my own character, with an ever-so-fine line between what he actually does and what, in moments of inspiration, I imagine him doing. I am not always able to tell the difference in the Twitter of my dreams. We have a cottage in Amagansett, the most unHamptons Hamptons town (making it, in fashion’s dialectic, the most Hamptons town), that was bought with the proceeds from my books about Trump. Among its hoped-for benefits is to help me forget about him.

James Kirkup

In defence of net zero: yes, we can afford it

Late in 2013, David Cameron snapped. ‘Get rid of all the green crap,’ the then prime minister told energy ministers. His demand came after a backbench revolt over the surcharges tacked on to household energy bills to support onshore wind power. Not for the last time, his decision was based on a spectacular failure to see one of the big trends of the age: the stunning fall in the costs of renewable energy that was already under way. In the past decade, the cost of generating electricity from onshore wind has fallen by 40 per cent. For offshore turbines, it’s down almost a third. Globally, it’s now generally cheaper to construct and run new renewable generation than it is to build a new station to burn fossil fuels.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The true cost of net zero

When Theresa May committed the government to achieving ‘net zero’ carbon emissions by 2050, Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, likened it to President Kennedy’s 1961 promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. How we would achieve net zero might not yet be clear, but a combination of ambition and ingenuity would somehow see us through. Still, at least JFK had some idea about the cost and he did not make it a legally binding obligation for the US to visit the moon, thus inviting activists to sue the government if it failed. Rishi Sunak is now understood to be in rebellion against the costs of net zero — whatever they might be.

Thursday

Manfred Manera

Italians are seeing red over the Covid ‘Green Pass’

Rome Following Emmanuel Macron’s example, the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has announced the introduction of a ‘Green Pass’. Draghi’s initiative, which was announced at a press conference on 24 July and comes into effect on 6 August, has sparked protests all over Italy The Green Pass will discriminate between Italians who are vaccinated and those who are not. Anyone who has not received their jabs, or cannot show a recent negative test or that they have recovered from Covid in the past six months, will be denied access to indoor restaurants, museums, cinemas and exhibitions. Further restrictions under discussion would prevent them from access to trains and ferries. There are also plans to limit entry into schools and universities to the vaccinated.

Ciaran Martin

The heist: nobody is safe from Russia’s digital pirates

In April, the Harris network of London schools was held to ransom by hackers. ‘The first thing I did was panic,’ said Sir Dan Moynihan, the chief executive. It wasn’t simply that their computers didn’t work; many of the 50 schools couldn’t function. Some couldn’t open because their internet-controlled doors were jammed shut. A demand for £3 million arrived. Moynihan pointed out this was a ‘completely insane’ amount for an educational charity to pay — but his pleas through an intermediary were ignored. The hackers insisted that unless Harris paid up, the schools would continue to be locked out of their networks, and sensitive data would be leaked online too.

Philip Thomas

Why we shouldn’t fear a ‘fourth wave’ of Covid

A few weeks ago, as the government was preparing for a great reopening on 21 June, I wrote a cover story for The Spectator with some bad news: a third wave was coming, I argued, and it could be even bigger than the second. It jarred with the mood. Covid cases were falling and a great many people desperately wanted this to be the end of it. My model, the Bristol University PCCF (Predictor Corrector Coronavirus Filter), showed otherwise: the biggest wave could be yet to come. But with a vital difference: hospitalisations and deaths would be much lower than at the beginning of the year when we were largely unvaccinated. All of that has come to pass, with one exception.

Lynn Barber

‘I’m plagued by worries of disaster’: an interview with Dominic Cummings

I’ve been waiting over a year to meet Dominic Cummings. Any time Mary Wakefield asked me to interview someone for The Spectator, I said: ‘I’d rather interview your husband.’ And she promised he would do it, one day. I began to lose faith, but at last the day dawns. On the way to see him I run into Mary and their son Ceddy outside their home in north London and she takes me to the kitchen to meet Dom. He is friendly, hospitable, takes me to sit in the garden to talk, and gently shoos Ceddy indoors. The one thing everyone, friend and enemy alike, agrees about Dominic Cummings is that he has a habit of telling the truth. So I am quite surprised, to put it mildly, when he tells me that Boris offered him a peerage when he left No. 10. Seriously?