Features

Thursday

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.

Thursday

Andrew Doyle

Could possession of the Bible become an offence in Scotland?

For the Scottish National party, the phrase ‘nanny state’ is not so much a criticism as an aspiration. This is the party that wanted to assign a state guardian to every child born in Scotland through its ‘named person’ scheme, only to be thwarted by the Supreme Court. Under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership, there have been repeated attempts to regulate the eating and drinking habits of people, including proposed bans on two-for-one pizza deals and minimum pricing on cheaper alcoholic drinks. It makes sense, then, that the party’s paternalism should extend to the question of free speech.

Gerard Lyons

London in limbo: can the capital survive this crisis?

We should worry about what is happening to London. Our capital is, after all, the country’s economic powerhouse. It accounts for just under a quarter of Britain’s GDP. In fact, three of its now most deserted locations — the City, the West End and Canary Wharf — account collectively for an eighth of the nation’s output. There is a danger that short-term damage to London’s economy could become permanent unless the right steps are taken. This was supposed to be the week when things would start returning to some sort of normality, as the government encouraged more people to go back to the office. Yet uncertainty prevails.

Richard Dobbs

Is our test-and-trace system ready to stop a second spike?

We are going to hear a lot about Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) in coming weeks, as we approach autumn and fears of a second wave of Covid-19 grow. Now we have moved away from national lockdown but do not yet have a vaccine, the test-and-trace system is our main bulwark against a resurgence of the disease. But how good a defence is it? A study published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health this week suggests there is a huge amount at stake.

Francis Pike

Sea change: China has its sights on the Bay of Bengal

Pangong Lake is the most unlikely of places for a naval conflict between two of the world’s nuclear-powers, India and China, with a third, Pakistan, looking on with not a little interest. Lying some 280 miles east of Islamabad, 360 miles north of New Delhi and 2,170 miles west of Beijing, Pangong Lake is in the remote northern Himalayas. In 1905, the explorer Ellsworth Huntington said that its beauty could ‘rival, or even excel, the most famous lakes of Italy or Switzerland’. It is a harsh world, frozen in winter, inhabited by a sparse indigenous population of hardy goat herders.

Christopher Meyer

Dear Boris: what happens if Trump doesn’t accept defeat?

Dear Prime Minister, You already have quite enough on your plate. So forgive me if I hoist a storm cone over another potential problem. I refer to the US presidential election on 3 November and the possibility of its ending in deadlock and confusion. I was the British ambassador to Washington during the Bush/Gore election of 2000. The outcome hung in suspense for a month. Everything turned on which contestant had won more votes in Florida. In the end, the matter had to go to the US Supreme Court for a decision. I was present at the hearing. After 9/11, it was the most dramatic moment of my time in Washington. The events of November and December 2000 were a stress test for the American constitution.

Alex Massie

Can the new Scottish Tory leader thwart Nicola Sturgeon?

As a boy, Douglas Ross, the new leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party, had two interests: cows and football. Growing up on a dairy farm in Moray, he never aspired to hold political office. He enjoyed the solitude of early morning milking. ‘Some people like big tractors, other people like sheep. I was just really interested in dairy cattle, and Holsteins in particular,’ he explained earlier this year. Now he finds himself faced with one of the more daunting tasks in British politics: thwarting Nicola Sturgeon and, in the process, preserving the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 2016, Ruth Davidson identified Ross as one of the most talented new Tory MSPs produced by that year’s Holyrood election.

Thursday

Harry Mount

The rise of the Econian

A study has shown that protestors who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations last year were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. Well, there’s a surprise. It turns out some 85 per cent of the London protestors had a degree, a third had a postgraduate qualification and two thirds described themselves as middle-class. Three quarters of those charged with offences lived in the south. And, if the accents I heard from the protestors as I biked through the throng on my way to work were anything to go on, a high percentage were public school--educated, too. I’d never seen so many Econians — the public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world.

Freddy Gray

The real Joe Biden: what would his presidency look like?

It is usually a bad idea for a presidential candidate to leave himself open to the accusation that he is soft on law and order. Yet last weekend Joseph Robinette Biden Jr did exactly that. He attacked the ‘egregious tactics’ of the federal officers trying to control the apparently never-ending riots in Portland, Oregon. Sensing an open goal, President Trump’s campaign promptly accused Biden of ‘siding with the criminals’. In any normal election year, such an exchange would be a major flashpoint. In the Covid-19-riddled anarchy cauldron that is America in 2020, nobody much cares. Joe Biden can say pretty much anything, or nothing at all, and his lead in the polls just grows and grows.

Colin Freeman

Why the US assassination of Iran’s top general didn’t spark a war

Iran’s new meddler-in-chief in Iraq is a bespectacled general called Esmail Ghaani. Brought in to replace Qassem Soleimani after his death in a US airstrike in January, he has the same green uniform as his predecessor, the same grey beard, and the same orders to make Iraq’s Shia militias do Tehran’s bidding. That, though, is where the similarities end. Soleimani was a legend among his followers in Iraq — he spent years building contacts with local commanders and joined them on the battlefield against Isis in Mosul. Ghaani, by contrast, is an owlish, uncharismatic figure who looks like he might be happier behind a desk. Unlike Soleimani, he doesn’t speak Arabic and has to rely on a translator during his visits to Baghdad.

John Lloyd

Should Nicola Sturgeon get a statue?

The Scottish National party and its supporters like the world to see Scottish independence as a final act of decolonisation, Scots throwing off the yoke of English imperialism and, with it, the taint of having been imperialists themselves. Last week Scots academic Sir Geoff Palmer compared it to the process that led to his native Jamaica gaining its independence. Yet Scots were the greatest of British colonialists and, for most of the 300-odd years of the Union, strong unionists. Scots statuary of figures from before the 1707 Act of Union is quite sparse. But even those few earlier Scots haven’t been exempt from the wider debate about our monuments.