Features

Thursday

Yiannis Baboulias

Med alert: Greece and Turkey are in a battle for hegemony

No one should fool themselves about the nature of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision for Turkey. It’s an imperialist project that would see Turkey’s hegemony stretch from the Mediterranean Sea and Libya all the way to Iran. Erdogan’s plans for his country’s expansion are evident in the current stand-off in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece. Turkish frigates are accompanying a research vessel, the Oruc Reis, as it enters disputed waters to carry out a seismic survey in search of natural gas. In its path lies a joint force of Greek and French warships, attempting to prevent the Turkish from venturing further. The two sides have almost come to blows — two frigates accidentally collided this month.

William Moore

The joy of commuting

I was on a train from Sussex to London, my first since lockdown, when I realised I like my commute. The thought worried me a little. What kind of weirdo have I become? A commute is a psychological hurdle, something to be endured, not enjoyed. What’s next? The giddy thrill of waiting in a queue? A root-canal fan club? There are some aspects to commuting I don’t enjoy — the expense of a season ticket, of course, and frustrating delays — but overall, yes, I do like it. And during lockdown I actually missed it. What makes my enjoyment even weirder is that I have no interest in trains.

John Lee

Our immune system is the pandemic’s biggest mystery

What have we been witnessing these past few months? A worldwide crisis caused by the arrival of a new virus of exceptional virulence — or a crisis of awareness, in which incomplete information led to a wildly disproportionate reaction? Have lockdowns, face coverings and the rest saved millions of lives worldwide? Or have they had relatively little effect on the course of the pandemic, and ended up causing more harm than good? And why, so far, is Britain not seeing the surge of Covid-19 infections reported in Spain and France? What are we missing? We still know a lot less about Covid-19, and about viruses in general, than you might have been led to believe.

Freddy Gray

The Trump show: he could just win again

‘Keep America Great’ is President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election slogan and it sounds off. The phrase doesn’t have the same ring as Make America Great Again, the mantra that Trump pinched from Reagan and repeated to victory in 2016. As an acronym, KAG is uglier than MAGA. The words particularly jar when America’s cities are burning, homicide rates are spiking, almost 180,000 Americans have died of or with Covid, and the country is reeling from the largest economic shock of all time. You call that great? Then again, 2020 is an even crazier year than 2016, and the maddest news is that Donald Trump might be about to defy the odds again and win.

Fiona Mountford

Covid has exposed our confusion about food

These past five Covid-buffeted months have shone a spotlight as never before on the choices we as a nation make about and around food. We are quite confused when it comes to eating. The government’s two recent messages on the subject are in conflict with each other: it’s our civic duty to ‘eat out to help out’, we’re told, but also we need to lose weight to protect the NHS. These muddled messages were evidenced by the somewhat mad poster advertising ‘eat out to help out’: after listing the practical terms of the scheme, the optimistic last line reads ‘Look out for better health choices’. I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to dine out, I’m going to get something tasty and tempting.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The Foreign Office has lost the plot in the Middle East

Last Friday the UN Security Council rejected any extension of the arms embargo on Iran. That embargo — imposed in 2007 — began to get phased out after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But a ‘snapback’ provision was put in place intended to allow the return of all such sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the deal. Iran has been violating those terms for some time, but on Friday, when the United States hoped that its allies would join it in deploring this fact, only the Dominican Republic voted with it. The UK, like France and Germany, chose to abstain. On the question of whether Russia and China should once again start selling arms to Iran, this country apparently takes no view. It would be nice to be able to say that this was peculiar. But it isn’t.

Gerri Peev

The tragedy of the EU’s failed member state

My father’s faith in communism evaporated during a summer of backbreaking work at the docks on the Black Sea. Like all good young Bulgarian communists, he had to undertake a few months of hard labour during university holidays, unloading cargo before going back to his studies. He saw then the way the economy worked — or didn’t. It was all about gaming the system. The best jobs and most lucrative contracts went to party members and stooges. He began to work on his escape plan. Years later, he abdicated his legal counsel posting in a Middle East embassy and fled to the West. I often wonder what would have happened if our family had stayed put, given that my native Bulgaria is now a member of the European Union.

Ross Clark

University challenge: the next education crisis

On the insistence of university authorities, freshers’ week will be an online affair this year. But if this autumn is not much fun for students, it will be a lot less fun still for university staff whose admissions system has just been thrown into turmoil by the A-level results debacle. While some institutions now face overcrowding, others face financial ruin. When the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced on Monday that he was abandoning the algorithm devised by Ofqual to moderate A-level results and would allow candidates to keep the grades estimated by their teachers, students were relieved — many more will, after all, now be able to go to their favoured university. Admissions officers at the top universities were rather less happy.

Jo Johnson

It’s time to end Tory uniphobia

Before the exams meltdown, universities were losing both friends and influence on the Tory benches. They were deemed to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the referendum and then enemy combatants in a low-level culture war. The ministerial message to young people was shifting from the sensible ‘you don’t have to do a degree’ to the openly discouraging ‘too many go to university’. The high watermark of uni-phobia perhaps came last month when cabinet ministers denounced Tony Blair’s target of 50 per cent of children going to university and warned that any institution finding itself in financial difficulties would be ‘restructured’. To say our universities feel unloved by this government is an understatement.

Simon Cooper

Beware of beaver fever

Exmoor has just witnessed the first beaver birth in more than 400 years. Last August, fisherman Simon Cooper argued for caution when it comes to reintroducing the extinct species. The verdict is in: hooray for beavers! The rodents that once roamed the wetlands of Britain, hunted to extinction in the 16th century, have been gradually returning to our rivers for some years now. The first, discovered on the River Tay in 2006, had either escaped from enclosures or, more probably, were deliberately (and illegally) released into the wild. In England the first were found on the River Otter in Devon in 2013. Following a five-year report by the Devon Wildlife Trust, the environment minister Rebecca Pow this month gave them the right to live, roam and reproduce.

James Fenner

Solved: the mystery of the uncomfortable train seats

Readers may recall Matthew Parris’s Spectator article from August last year, ‘Who’s to blame for my terrible journey?’ From 2016 onwards, many rail operating companies, including Thameslink and GWR, began introducing new carriages with ‘ironing board’ seat designs. ‘My buttocks ache at the very recollection,’ Matthew complained. He demanded to know who was responsible and offered £200 to any reader who could produce the relevant names. In accordance with Matthew’s challenge, I sent a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Transport (DfT).

Isabel Hardman

Why hasn’t the government done more to protect domestic abuse victims?

From the start, it was obvious that lockdown would have a devastating effect on domestic abuse victims, although it wasn’t possible to know just how bad it would be. But the picture is becoming clearer now. Abused women have been telling their stories: a survey this week by the charity Women’s Aid found almost two-thirds of victims said the abuse worsened during lockdown. In a BBC documentary this week a victim recounted how her abuser, after watching Boris Johnson’s televised announcement of lockdown restrictions, turned to her and said: ‘Let the games begin.’ Victoria Atkins, the minister for safeguarding, has demonstrated a good grasp of the problems women’s refuges face.

Francis Pike

Hirohito, the war criminal who got away

This month the global media marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities’ destructions were momentous indeed, but the coverage has squeezed out other memories of the Pacific War. Who remembers Japan’s genocidal campaign in China that killed more than 20 million people — thousands of them by poison gas and canisters containing plague and typhus? Or the murder of 35 per cent of the 200,000 soldiers and civilians held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps that meted out unspeakable cruelties? Certainly not the BBC, which failed to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki into any kind of historic context.

Thursday

Steve Morris

Bring back the great British holiday camp

By the 1980s, after decades of immense popularity, the great British holiday camp was in terminal decline. The huge camps founded by Billy Butlin and Fred Pontin — the chalets, the dining hall, the redcoats (Butlin’s) and bluecoats (Pontins) — were becoming passé. Now the few that remain have been rebranded as holiday villages. But why not bring them back? Surely old-fashioned camps had exactly what we need today: simplicity, gentle fun and a sense of community. They were about team effort, not atomised nuclear families. Above all perhaps, they had a sense of identity. And they were a life-changer for me. I recently came across an online video of Gunton Hall, near Lowestoft, in the late 1970s.

Alex Massie

Here’s Nicola: can Boris Johnson stop Scottish independence?

Boris Johnson is far from being the first prime minister to holiday in Scotland. David Cameron used to slip off the radar at his father-in-law’s estate on the Isle of Jura, and plenty of other Conservative premiers have enjoyed a Scottish August on the grouse moor. But Johnson may be the first to holiday north of the Tweed as a matter of political calculation and convenience. He comes to Scotland to show his commitment to what he calls the ‘magic’ of the Union. About time too. At last — at long last, Scottish Unionists might say — the cabinet has recognised it has a problem in North Britain.

Kate Andrews

In the race to recovery, Britain is losing

At the start of lockdown, the government was obsessed with how other countries were dealing with the Covid crisis. In No. 10 press conferences, Britain’s daily death toll was shown next to numbers from the rest of the world, putting our handling of the virus into perspective. But when our death toll jumped, the government claimed the calculations were too different to compare and dropped the graph. A few weeks ago, the Office for National Statistics picked up where the government had left off, revealing that England had the highest number of excess deaths in Europe, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were in the top eight. The UK had lost the first leg of the Covid race. Now it looks set to lose the second: the race to recovery.

Lewis Feilder

The dangers of unconscious bias training

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through.

Paul Wood

The mood in Lebanon is for revolution

When 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate left in Beirut’s port exploded last week, a three-year-old girl named Alexandra Najjar was torn from her mother’s arms as they ran inside from their balcony. In the same instant, every-thing in the apartment was flying through the air — doors, window frames, shards of glass, the air-conditioning unit, the family’s piano — and something hit the little girl. She died later from her wounds and on Lebanese social media she has become the ‘Angel of Beirut’, a symbol of the innocent people ‘murdered’ by their government’s negligence and incompetence, as her father, Paul, put it.

Mark Honigsbaum

Why bats are the perfect hosts for viruses

The common horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus affinis, is a feat of biological engineering. The size of a small pear, it spends most of the day hanging upside down in dark, dank caves. To keep itself warm it huddles in tight colonies, wrapping its wings — which can measure up to two inches — around itself like a blanket. Even so, in winter its body temperature can fall as low as 43°F (6°C). Then, two hours before sunset, it emerges to forage for insects using a horseshoe-shaped sonar dish on its nose to find its bearings. But now it has a new problem: flying requires so much energy that its metabolic rate can spike as high as 34 times its resting level, and its core temperature can exceed 104°F, causing cells within its body to break down and release bits of DNA.

Jack Clover

Is this the end for Europe’s last dictator?

Alexander Lukashenko, labelled by the Bush administration as ‘Europe’s last dictator’, was never going to go down without a fight. In his final public address before Belarus went to the polls he offered a thinly veiled warning to those who wish to remove him from power: ‘[Our Belarus] is rather naive and a little bit fragile but she is beloved and when you love something you do not give it up.’ On election day, Lukashenko delivered on his grim campaign promise. Official exit polls gave the incumbent an implausible 80 per cent of the vote: his fifth landslide in 26 years at the helm. The lion’s share of presumed electoral fraud happened before polls opened. State media announced that around 40 per cent of the electorate had opted to vote early.