Features

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Europe’s panic: the meltdown over vaccines

The Dutch city of Leiden has rarely played a dramatic role in European history. Quiet, rainy and tucked away close to the sea, it is in many ways the Durham of the Continent. It was besieged by the Spanish in the Eighty Years’ War, Rembrandt was born and worked there, Einstein taught intermittently at its university — and that is about it. Yet this week Leiden is at the centre of European politics, and in a way that almost no one could have expected. In the city’s science park, the biotech company Halix has a crucial role in manufacturing the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. The European Union threatened to seize control of the plant, demanding that all its output be diverted from Britain to the Continent.

Fraser Nelson

Can Britain’s new military policy end decades of pretence?

Like most prime ministers, Boris Johnson has grown fond of deploying the military — albeit so far on the home front. Enthused by the army’s service in the London Olympics, he turned to them when the pandemic struck and 101 Logistic Brigade have been embedded in government ever since. They distributed PPE to frontline workers in March last year, and this year have become an integral part of the vaccine rollout. ‘The military don’t moan about health and safety regulation or a 40-hour week,’ says one minister. ‘Everything just works.’ The future of the military was this week laid out in a blueprint billed as the biggest strategic rethink for a generation.

Brigid Keenan

The lifelong effects of being a child in the British Raj

I belong to a dying breed. Well, not a breed exactly, but a dwindling number who witnessed a world and a way of life that will never be repeated: we are the last babies of the British Raj. In my view the doyen of our group was the writer Charles Allen whose many books, starting with Plain Tales from the Raj, are almost all about the India he left at eight years old. He and I were on the same ship coming ‘home’ in 1948: the SS Franconia. So were more than a thousand other British men, woman and children, from typists and missionaries to engineers and soldiers, sailing away from India for the last time, leaving behind the graves of perhaps two million other Brits. Allen died last year aged 80.

Cosmo Landesman

The agony of watching friends succeed

I’ve just had the first sign that things are going back to normal — and that I’m going back to normal, too. I was suddenly struck by a feeling I’ve not had since the first lockdown last March; a feeling writers and journalists know all too well. Literary envy. Whatever your profession, envy is something we all know. A colleague’s promotion or a friend’s pay increase prompts that inner voice of brattish resentment. Envy is the herpes of competitive capitalism — it disappears from view and just when you think it’s gone for good, up it pops. But envy hasn’t had much of a chance to surface during lockdown. Everyone’s career in the so-called creative industries has been put on hold.

Julie Burchill

Bristol is now a hotbed of ‘ventrification’

Seeing my hometown, Bristol, in flames this week following the violent ‘Kill the Bill’ riots, it was unrecognisable as the safe south-west city which I had dreamed of leaving since the age of 12 (when I started sleeping beneath a poster of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map). I finally escaped to the capital in search of fame, fortune, sex and drugs at 17. When some people say ‘I don’t recognise the place’, they’re usually talking about the effects of immigration, but that’s not my experience.

Katja Hoyer

Failing upwards: the story of Ursula von der Leyen

Ursula von der Leyen looks every inch the modern European stateswoman. Her tailored trouser suits, no-fuss hair and assured speeches: what’s not to like? When she was put forward by the European Council for President of the European Commission, her fellow Germans knew precisely what to expect. A poll found that only a third said she would be good at the job. Martin Schulz, a former president of the European parliament, did not mince his words. ‘Von der Leyen is our weakest minister,’ he said. ‘That is apparently good enough to head the European Commission.’ Having served as the deputy leader of Angela Merkel’s CDU party from 2010, she consistently achieved the lowest re-election results in the role’s history.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Unopposed: why is Keir Starmer making life so easy for the PM?

If there is one thing worse than being talked about, it is not being talked about — and this is the fate beginning to befall Keir Starmer. He is at risk of becoming an irrelevance. After not even a year of being Labour leader, Starmer finds his personal ratings on the slide: a YouGov poll this week showed his rating at minus 13, down from plus 22 last summer. Just over half of voters think he doesn’t look like a PM-in-waiting and Labour itself is consistently trailing the Tories in the polls. It’s not clear yet what Starmer stands for, and he is running out of time to make an impression on the public. There is some nervousness about the upcoming Hartlepool by-election despite the fact Hartlepool has never elected a Tory. This is telling.

Katy Balls

Starmer’s long game: party repair comes before opposition politics

What is Keir Starmer thinking? His approach might baffle Tory MPs, who wonder if he will ever spring to life. The answer, though, is that he’s playing a long game. He hopes he will be a strong opposition leader when the time is right. For now, it is time to offer support to Boris Johnson’s government. The pandemic has created tricky terrain for the shadow cabinet. Much like in wartime, normal political rules don’t apply, because ‘people want the government to succeed’. Starmer’s supporters say coronavirus means the Labour party has been squeezed out of the conversation. It’s not as simple as Starmer not knowing what he wants, even if some Labour MPs see this as the main problem.

Fiona Mountford

Awards season loses its shine when no one can go to the cinema

Here it is again, a couple of months later than usual but back nevertheless. It’s the time of the annual jamboree that is film awards season, a three-month extravaganza that predominantly revolves around three key events: the Golden Globes, the Baftas and the Oscars. All three of these celebrations of artistic excellence and mutual backslapping have been delayed due to Covid. The Globes took place — virtually — three weeks ago, Bafta revealed its shortlist last week and the Oscar nominees were announced on Monday. The starting gun has been fired — while all our cinemas remain closed. Have you seen Nomadland, The Father or Promising Young Woman? Of course you haven’t. No one, apart from the critics, has been afforded the opportunity.

Sean McMeekin

Churchill’s enigma: the real riddle is why he cosied up to Stalin

Dresden. Tonypandy. Gallipoli. Bengal. Winston Churchill’s reputation has withstood an array of charges, made by each generation with their own prejudices. Whereas in the 1970s it was Richard Burton and Jim Callaghan accusing him of a vendetta against the Welsh miners, today it’s racism, imperialism and white supremacy. The words ‘Was a Racist’ were scrawled on his statue in Parliament Square during last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Earlier this week police protected the statue at a rally as protesters chanted ‘Protect women, not statues’.

Francis Pike

Is Britain heading for war over Taiwan?

It is billed as a once-in-a-generation review of Britain’s foreign policy and defence strategies. ‘Global Britain in a Competitive Age’, Boris Johnson’s ‘new chapter’ for Britain, identifies two main adversaries: Russia — an ‘acute threat’ — and China — a ‘systemic competitor’. And while it nods at a geopolitical ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific, the more hawkish Tory MPs are disappointed, thinking Beijing should have also counted as a threat. They should perhaps be careful what they wish for. The Prime Minister is sending more than harsh words in China’s direction.

James Bartholomew

An open letter to my golf club

Dear Mike, Thank you for asking me, along with all the other members, whether I would like to become part of the golf club’s new ‘Equality — Diversity — Inclusion (EDI) Working Group’. The short answer is I would rather spend a couple of hours in the mud, picking up old beer bottles and condoms out of the river which winds though the course, than sit on such a ‘working group’. It is difficult to describe -exactly why I think this venture is a bad idea but I will have a go. Let’s take the words of the title of the new committee. What kind of ‘equality’ is it going to work at? Obviously the club cannot attempt to make all members financially equal.

Mary Wakefield

The ‘long Covid’ time bomb: an interview with Tim Spector

It sometimes seems as if Professor Tim Spector, of King’s College London, was conjured up especially to be a walking, talking rebuke to Public Health England. Where PHE has been lumbering, slow to respond to the fast-moving virus, Spector has been nimble, quick to see opportunity and adapt. This time last year, as Boris was preoccupied with the defining question of his premiership — who could possibly have leaked a disobliging story about his girlfriend’s dog — Tim Spector was concocting a plan for how to collect data about Covid from around the country. His Covid Symptom Study app (CSS), a year old this week, has been a triumph. There are now 4.5 million users, logging their symptoms daily.

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.