Features

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Why Pontins thinks I’m an ‘undesirable guest’

Oh curses, one less option for the summer holidays. Pontins, the holiday camp for those who don’t mind bringing their own cleaning products, has been exposed for issuing a list of surnames belonging to ‘undesirable guests’. Under the legend ‘You Shall Not Pass’ on the company intranet was an instruction: ‘Please be aware that several guests are not welcome at Pontins, however some of these will still try and book… We have been informed by our Operations Director that we do not want these guests on our parks. Please watch out for the following names on ANY bookings.’ There follows a list of 40. There are the O’Briens, the O’Donnells and O’Connells, the Carneys and the Lees, the Leahys, the Sheridans and the Wards.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

In defence of Meghan, the demonised duchess

The words pouring on Meghan’s head are written for a witch, because that is the natural progress of the story. The royal family are our national myth and sacrifice: our small flesh gods, without whom we would have to have a serious political system requiring serious engagement, instead of which we have this. Interlopers are sanctified if they comply and demonised if they don’t. It is a sort of trial by ordeal, it’s-a-royal-knockout — how much can you take? All interlopers get it — Prince Philip was once considered a dangerous moderniser — but the women have it worse. Sir Timothy Laurence might wonder where his made-up feud with his brother-in-law is. I have worked on a tabloid and I can tell you: he isn’t pretty enough.

Anil Bhoyrul

Why is it racist to wonder what colour your child’s skin will be?

Maybe I missed something here. Or maybe I am just completely naive. But why is it racist to ponder what the skin colour of a new baby will be? According to most of the American and British media, post the Harry and Meghan interview, it absolutely is racist. It’s horrendous. Evil. Bigoted. Especially so in the US (a country where barely over 10 per cent of the married population is actually inter-racial). But these are generally the views of people who don’t actually know what they are talking about. Because they are not part of, or in the slightest bit close to, an inter-racial couple. So first the obvious declaration of interest: I was born in Mauritius. I look Asian. Or brown if you prefer. My wife was born in Slovenia. She is white and blonde.

Francis Elliott

The dangers of televising lobby briefings

Like a tongue searching for an absent tooth, I keep wondering if I’m missing anything from my two decades as a lobby hack. Friends, of course, and perhaps the vast, grey field of sloping slate as seen from the Times’s parliamentary office. That empty and silent space, the roof of Westminster Hall, seemed austere and indifferent, a mental refuge from the babble beneath and within. The opposite aspect, towards the crumbling guts of the Palace of Westminster, elicits more complicated memories. I arrived in the press gallery aged 30 to take a job as Westminster correspondent for a clutch of provincial papers. On my first day my new colleagues took me to tea at 4 p.m. in the dining room. There was also a bar with its own barflies and a barman named Clive.

Julie Burchill

Confessions of a lifelong bitch

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made such a good one. And we bitches could use the recruits.

Sean Thomas

How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Like 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again), right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds. The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me, because that’s what I do: write thrillers.

Olenka Hamilton

Poles apart: why the Polish community doesn’t want the vaccine

There is a joke going around Poland at the moment which encapsulates the national character perfectly. A German is told he has to have the Covid vaccine. He is uncertain. ‘It’s an order,’ the doctor says, and so he agrees. A British man is told the same. He wavers. ‘Do it for Queen and country,’ the doctor says. He agrees. A French man is told ‘It’s the fashionable thing to do’, and he agrees, too. Finally, a Pole has his turn. The doctor says: ‘You’re Polish, you definitely won’t take the vaccine.’ The Pole replies: ‘Don’t tell me what I think. Give me that vaccine!’ Anyone who knows Poles (I’m half Polish, so I do) will find it unsurprising that they are sceptical about the vaccine.

Ian Thomson

My fight to stop the Chinese censors sanitising Dante

My book on Dante Alighieri was due to come out in Chinese translation later this year, but first I had to consent to sizeable cuts. Even by the standards of other authoritarian states the Beijing censors struck me as overzealous. It seems odd that the medieval Italian poet could cause such unease among modern-day totalitarians. A sanitised Chinese communist version of my book did not sit well with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1321, and in the end I withheld permission. The cuts were the work of Beijing’s blandly named Institute for World Religions. The institute undertakes ‘book cleansing’ operations on behalf of the state. No book can be published legally in China today without being vetted.

Freddy Gray

Battle royal: Harry and Meghan’s modern brand of revenge

Remember the Heads Together campaign? It was back in 2017. Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry, who’d recently begun dating a conspicuously woke actress called Meghan Markle, launched a charitable endeavour to raise awareness about mental health. The princes gave interviews in which they ‘opened up’ about their struggles. Such public emoting made fuddy-duddy monarchists nervous, yet a new generation of royal PR operatives and suck-ups saw the future. The royals were appealing to a younger audience, cleverly rebranding the monarchy for a new age in which it is OK to not be OK. Move over, stiff-lipped oldies, the Windsors were moving on. Then Harry married Meghan, the brothers fell out, and everyone went crazy.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Is this a once-in-a-generation chance to invest in central London?

Buy when there is gunfire on the streets, goes the old adage. But could this be a case of the right time to buy being when there is, well, hardly anything happening on the streets? Few investments have been as hard hit by Covid-19 as commercial property in central London. As shops and restaurants have been closed, and office staff made to work from home, landlords have struggled to collect their rent. In the six months to September, for example, Shaftesbury, which owns 600 buildings in the West End including 1.9 million square foot of retail and office space, managed to collect only 41 per cent of what was due, falling to 36 per cent in January. Moreover, many people believe that there will be a permanent shift in the way we work and spend our leisure time.

Kate Andrews

Rishi’s nightmare: will inflation crush the recovery?

At first, it seems to make no sense. Britain is in the middle of the worst economic crash in recorded history, with a Chancellor who is famously keen on low taxes, spending control and sound money. But Rishi Sunak this week presented a Budget that seems inspired, in parts, by Labour’s last manifesto. Debt surging to £2.8 trillion. Public spending up by a quarter in a year. And taxes: soon going up. Corporation tax, freezes to the personal tax threshold. The explanation most Tories comfort themselves with is that Sunak wants to explain to a high-spending Prime Minister that today’s cash splurge is tomorrow’s tax rise. But in truth, Sunak is motivated by something else.

Elisa Segrave

A quick fix: how Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn the dog to heel

A lot of nonsense is being written about Dilyn, the adorable Jack Russell owned by Boris and Carrie, a lookalike for my dog, Perry, now nearly 16. Is Dilyn the currently subdued Boris’s alter ego, one journalist wondered. We read that Dilyn allegedly humped Dominic Cummings’s leg, and at Chequers ‘mounted’ a stool made from the hide of an elephant shot by Teddy Roosevelt. He also peed on an aide’s handbag after she arrived at Downing Street for a meeting. Of course it is not the first time Boris has had a poorly trained dog in his life. When he was editor of The Spectator, a dandie dinmont called Laszlo terrorised the office, leaping on columnists and messing on furniture. The dog, who belonged to publisher Kimberly Fortier, was eventually castrated.

Jenny McCartney

The chilling rise of ‘IRA TikTok’

There’s an ever shorter period now, it seems, between the emergence of any new medium and its energetic use for promoting hatred. And no one can accuse the young fans of militant Irish republicanism of not keeping up with the times: the proliferation of ‘IRA TikTok’ is a case in point. The video-sharing network has inspired growing numbers of Irish-American and Irish youth — often those with ‘Up The Ra!’ in their TikTok profiles — to post clips of themselves clad in balaclavas, posing meaningfully with a fake gun, or mimicking planting a bomb by throwing a backpack under a car and racing away. The soundtrack is mostly provided by Irish rebel music or rap.

Jonathan Miller

The provocative writer who could be the next French president

Montpellier The French ‘grand’ journalist Éric Zemmour is among the most watched, provocative and frequently prosecuted writers in the country. He is now contemplating a piratical presidential challenge that could blow open next year’s presidential election. A poll last month conducted for the news magazine Valeurs Actuelles says that Zemmour could win 13 per cent of the votes in the first round of the French presidential election. That’s more impressive than it seems. In the cavalry charge of a first round, when a dozen or more candidates are possible, 13 per cent is more than enough to unsettle not just the re-election campaign of President Emmanuel Macron.

Katy Balls

The moral debate over Covid jabs for children

Israel has the world’s attention, becoming the first country to achieve mass vaccination. What it does now may be followed worldwide. The first big development has been the use of immunity ID cards which give vaccinated Israelis access to gyms, indoor restaurants and — soon — holidays in Greece. Britain is preparing to follow suit, with Michael Gove considering UK vaccine certificates ahead of the great unlocking on 21 June. He’s widely expected to come out in favour of IDs in some form. But the other idea attracting interest in Whitehall is Israel’s plan to vaccinate children. Israel’s deputy health minister Yoav Kisch has said those aged 12 to 16 could start to be vaccinated next month, pending regulatory approval.

Thursday

Jo Macfarlane

The mysteries of ‘long Covid’

Soon, as the rates of coronavirus deaths and infections plummet, we’re likely to focus more on those who suffer what is being called ‘long Covid’ — yet the truth is we know very little about what precisely it is. Long Covid began as a quiet murmur in the background: anecdotal stories about symptoms which extended beyond the predicted 14-day recovery time. There’s no agreed definition, so it’s hard to say how many sufferers there are, but a survey from the Office for National Statistics suggests it affects as many as one in ten of those who have had the virus. As the second wave retreats, the number of people left with long Covid may exceed those currently infected with the virus itself.

R.T. Howard

English beef: France’s loathing of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’

To find out who your true friends and rivals really are, just gauge the reaction to news of your latest success story. It is revealing, for example, that many French officials have taken grave exception to the stunning speed and efficiency of our national vaccination programme. This became clear at the end of January, when President Emmanuel Macron defied medical opinion by unjustly claiming that the AstraZeneca jab was ‘quasi-ineffective’ for elderly people. His cynical tone, remarkable even by the frosty standards of the rest of the EU, was echoed by his Europe Minister, Clément Beaune, who stated that ‘the UK has taken a lot of risks in authorising Astra-Zeneca extremely quickly’.

Ross Clark

Blair’s back – and advising Tories on vaccine ID cards

When the Prime Minister mentioned ‘Covid status certification’ as part of his route back to normal life, one man must have enjoyed the moment. For Tony Blair it was yet one more little victory in his UK comeback tour, made all the sweeter because Boris Johnson was once a principal opponent of the idea of any ID card system. Blair has been pushing vaccine passports like nobody’s business. A recent paper published by his Institute for Global Change advocated that we carry ‘digital health passports’ on our smartphones, which we could scan on entry to bars, theatres and other places. If you don’t have a smartphone, the paper suggested, the venue could take a photo of you instead, and check it against a database of people who have been vaccinated.

Alex Massie

The Salmond case has left the House of Sturgeon teetering

From a distance, Nicola Sturgeon seems unbeatable. Polls show her party with just over 50 per cent of the vote, quite a feat in a five-party parliament. But this week, she has found herself fighting for her political future. Alex Salmond’s sensational claim to be the victim of a conspiracy designed to destroy him — even ‘imprison’ him — has the potential to bring down the House of Sturgeon. Salmond alleges that his successor has misled the Scottish parliament on multiple occasions about her knowledge of (and involvement in) her government’s investigation into complaints of sexual misconduct made against him.

Katy Balls

The break-up: is Boris about to lose Scotland?

At the stroke of five o’clock last Friday, the new head of No. 10’s Union unit was due to brief government aides on the robust new strategy to counter the SNP. It was urgently needed: campaigning for the Scottish parliament election starts in a few weeks and if Nicola Sturgeon wins a majority — as looks likely — she’ll demand another independence referendum. Even if Boris Johnson refuses, the SNP will attempt to push on regardless. Any plan to save Britain must be put into action sooner rather than later. But an hour or so before the briefing, an email went around to say it was cancelled. What’s more its author, Oliver Lewis, had resigned, just two weeks into his job as head of the unit.