Features

Thursday

Qanta Ahmed

Pilgrimage in the age of pandemic

To complete the Hajj is the pinnacle of Islamic worship, required once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim who can afford the journey. In its 1,400-year history, the annual pilgrimage has been cancelled dozens of times, by wars, political strife and pandemics. As I found out when I made the journey, it is a swirling sea of humanity: some 2.5 million visiting Mecca over a few days, from all over the world. When the Covid crisis came, worship was suspended. But then something was attempted that would have once seemed impossible: carrying on the tradition, but under digitally monitored social distancing. The results were extraordinary.

Philip Delves Broughton

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

New York ‘Land of the Flee’, screamed the New York Post front page this week. Moving vans are lining up in Manhattan. Residents have had enough. It had been ‘another bloody weekend in Gotham’ with 21 people shot, and a rising wave of non-gun violence. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, a man leapt on top of a young woman on a subway platform in midtown and began grinding against her until a group of bystanders forced him to stop. You can watch the whole thing on video and decide never to take public transport again. Living in New York has always felt like walking on a very narrow beam. The chasms on either side are the thrill of it. They create extremes of excitement, anxiety, achievement and despair. But many are now deciding: to hell with the city that never sleeps.

Will Heaven

Downside’s downfall: the dissolution of a monastery

The monks of Downside Abbey in Somerset elected a new abbot last Thursday, according to sixth-century rules laid down by St Benedict. The next day, they sent an email notification saying they had voted ‘to make a new start and to seek a new place to live’. It was a shock to those who know the place. The monks will leave behind a beautiful abbey church built in the Gothic Revival style — its 166ft tower visible for miles around — a monastery and cloisters, the largest monastic library in Britain and a grand-looking public school with more than 300 pupils. It’s as if a piece of English Catholicism, like a decaying chunk of church masonry, has fallen away. But it has been a long time coming.

Andrew Watts

Why people have sex in graveyards

The oldest churchyard in Torquay is being used by people openly having sex and sunbathing nude in broad daylight. This was how it was reported in the local newspaper, of course — ‘broad daylight’ is a phrase that is only ever used by subeditors trying to make things sound more depraved. (Who sunbathes except in broad daylight?) It was not the first such report since the pandemic began: in June, a couple were witnessed coupling in Brandwood Cemetery in Kings Heath, Birmingham; police were called amid concerns over public indecency, and fears that they may not even have been from the same household. A few weeks earlier, another pairing was witnessed in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene, Sutton-in-Ashfield.

Jeremy Brown

The problem with fast-tracking vaccines

You have to admit it, Operation Warp Speed is a good moniker. It’s the name for the American interagency programme, initiated by the Trump administration, to produce 300 million doses of a safe vaccine for Covid-19 by January. Who couldn’t get behind this all-hands national effort to defeat the virus and end the pandemic, excitingly named after the faster-than-light space travel in Star Trek? While we wait for clinical trials led by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca in the UK, America warps ahead. Warp speed allows the Starship Enterprise to put aside the laws of physics. Vaccine development also has its own laws, or rather guides, that describe the way things usually happen.

Johan Norberg

The Covid trap: will society ever open up again?

The great pandemic of 2020 has led to an extraordinary expansion of government power. Countries rushed to close their borders and half of the world’s population were forced into some sort of curfew. Millions of companies, from micropubs to mega corporations, were prohibited from carrying on business. In supposedly free and liberal societies, peaceful strollers and joggers were tracked by drones and stopped by policemen asking for their papers. It’s all in the name of defeating coronavirus; all temporary, we’re told. But it’s time to ask, just how temporary? As Milton Friedman used to warn: ‘Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme.’ Measures that seemed unthinkable a few months ago have been implemented in haste and without debate.

Ross Clark

Government jobs don’t have to be in the capital

Boris Johnson has put a huge amount of stock in persuading reluctant civil servants to return to their desks in Whitehall. His campaign this week to get more people back to the office was tinged with the suggestion that those who were slow to return might be in danger of losing their jobs. This divided the cabinet, with Matt Hancock pointedly suggesting that he was happy with many in his department continuing to work from home. Never one to miss the opportunity for a battle with Westminster, Nicola Sturgeon suggested that the government’s campaign to get people back to the office amounted to ‘intimidation’. But why not see the slow return to the office as an opportunity? The government should be using the aftermath of the crisis to rebuild the state.

Tim Wigmore

The science of tennis grunts

The cancellation of Wimbledon this summer deprived fans of their annual exercise in moralising. There is one topic SW19-goers love to complain about every year: the grunting sounds that players emit as they hit the tennis ball. Maria Sharapova, who retired in February, was called the Queen of Screams. Her grunts were once recorded at 101 decibels, more than a Boeing 707 as it touches down. They even inspired a series of ringtones. ‘I’ve done this ever since I started playing tennis and I’m not going to change,’ Sharapova once said. Yet her grunts were said to be mysteriously absent on the practice court. Grunting can give players a tactical advantage.

Thursday

Emma Byrne

Is the government about to bankrupt thousands of homeowners?

Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government. It’s about cladding.

Cindy Yu

Has China really beaten Covid?

It has to be seen to be believed: a pool party attended by thousands, with the young bodies packed so tightly that you could barely see the water. There was a DJ, neon lights and outlandish acrobatics from performers on water jetpacks. The scenes, captured on video and sent around the world, were all the more extraordinary because the party was in Wuhan. It wasn’t long ago that the same people were locked down in their millions. They were not even allowed to go outside for exercise. The only people you would see on the streets were the kuaidi xiaoge (‘delivery bros’), gig economy workers who dropped off groceries, medicines and everything in between.

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.