Features

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Can Putin survive the coronavirus stress test?

Vladimir Putin knows that a poor state is a weak state. As a middling KGB apparatchik in Dresden in 1989 he saw the USSR’s authority over its empire collapse along with its economy. Two years later, the Soviet state itself imploded, unable to feed its citizens or command the loyalty of its own security forces. Rebuilding Russia’s security apparatus back to Soviet levels and securing it against another systemic collapse has been the touchstone of Putin’s two decades in power. With the coronavirus crisis, the Putin system faces a stress test every bit as radical as that which brought down Mikhail Gorbachev. The proximate cause of the USSR’s collapse was a 1985 decision by the Saudis — with American encouragement — to crash the price of oil.

Roger Lewis

‘Social distance shaming’ is getting nasty

The Queen said in her address to the nation that what’ll get us through the lockdown and its ramifications will be our traditional British good humour. I’m not certain. Tempers are beginning to fray — and as we are looking at another week, minimum, of house imprisonment, I predict disaster. It is getting quite tense out there. A day or so ago my wife and I, peaceable elderly folk, were bumbling along the promenade, here on the south coast. A jogger went past, shouting at us: ‘Effing morons!’ On his way back past us, he again said: ‘Effing morons! Take exercise!’ Had I a gun, I’d honestly have shot his head off. Joggers are always vile anyway, and the ones wearing face masks are the worst.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator writers in lockdown – by the people stuck with them

Andrew Watts (Tanya Gold) ‘I can’t eat this,’ said The Spectator’s restaurant critic, putting down her fork after one mouthful. Our son, who had not yet decided whether he liked mackerel, immediately declared that it was yucky-poo. The correction of taste is, after all, the function of criticism. When we’re not in lockdown, Tanya leaves the house to be a critic. I am left at home with the boy to eat fish, liver and haggis, all of which he loves when she isn’t here to tell him that they are, objectively, bad. I wouldn’t mind if she hadn’t gone straight from the kitchen table to sit in her study and eat Monster Munch while watching Spooks.

Matt Ridley

A cure for Covid may arrive faster than a vaccine

A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, whose job is to prevent you getting the disease. But what about a cure once you have caught it: why is there no pill to take? The truth is that, advanced as medical science is, we are mostly defenceless against viruses. There is no antiviral therapy to compare with antibiotics for treating bacteria. Arguably, virology in 2020 is where bacteriology was in the 1920s.

Wolfgang Münchau

Brexit, if used properly, can speed Britain’s post-Corona recovery

Will the recovery be shaped like a V or a U, some other letter or perhaps the Nike swoosh? This is a much-discussed question among economists right now — but it is not the most important question. We’re familiar with the idea of an up-and-down financial crisis where things return to their starting point: we had roller-coasters in the mid-1980s. Even after the global financial crash of 2008-09, financiers still kept their place as masters of the universe. Global supply chains were repaired and the old power structures remained in position. This time might be very different. Old fixes are being applied to a new crisis. Central banks, for example, have less scope to cut interest rates than they did ten years ago.

John R. MacArthur

How Graham Greene earned The Spectator a place in cinematic history

When Graham Greene impulsively took up film reviewing for The Spectator in 1935, he was not yet the renowned literary figure he was to become, and thus, like so many other writers in those parlous economic times, prosaically in need of cash. As it happened, the confluence of interests between a 30-year-old novelist of modest commercial success and Derek Verschoyle, The Spectator’s literary editor from 1932 to 1939, resulted in something extraordinary — for there is nothing prosaic about these reviews. Greene’s opinions about the films he critiqued for the magazine over nearly five years constitute an impromptu cultural history of the 1930s, in addition to being a joy to read.

Fraser Nelson

Spectator covers that almost were

Sometimes The Spectator goes to press very shortly after election results have been announced. In those instances, Morten Morland, our cover artist, draws versions to cover for any outcome.  These have since been framed and hung at Old Queen Street in the lavatories. For our 10,000th issue, we're sharing some of them. The last UK general election was on a Thursday and our cover went Friday morning: we had three versions. Boris winning, his being held to a hung parliament and (pictured) Jeremy Corbyn winning, depicted as an unlikely saviour with Jo Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon (who were talking about putting him in power via coalition deals) depicted as the parents around the crib.

James Forsyth

Boris’s difficult decision: When should lockdown be lifted?

When Chequers was donated to the nation, the accompanying Act of Parliament was explicit about the intended effect. ‘The better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule,’ it said. Prime ministers need time to think, as well as recuperate, and as Boris Johnson continues his convalescence there, he will be in need of that help. Not only is he still recovering from several days in intensive care, he is also facing a policy problem without precedent — and without good answers. Whatever solution he opts for will determine his premiership, the public’s faith in the British state and this country’s future standing in the world. In the absence of the optimist-in-chief, an air of depression has settled on the government.

Elif Shafak

Gone for a song: A short story

It was the week after New Year’s Eve, strings of fairy lights still dangling from the trees and silver stars decorating the windows, when they discovered the dead birds. Dozens, at first. Then more. Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight in total. Goldfinches, greenfinches, bullfinches, skylarks, reed buntings, yellowhammers, grey wagtails and red-throated pipits — those long-distance migrants with their rusty breasts and high-pitched songs, cut short. The Slovenian officer who made the discovery was a wisp of a man with soft brown eyes and a halo of grey-white hair. His name was Marko.

Sam Leith

Salman Rushdie: ‘The implausible has become everyday’

When I say goodbye to Sir Salman Rushdie in his offices at New York University in Lower Manhattan in early March, we bump elbows. Not that it’s much more than a gesture, by this stage: we shook hands unthinkingly on first meeting, and we’d just shaken hands again. It’s a novelty, still halfway to being a joke. As I descend in the lift to Cooper Square, it occurs to me that if I’ve given Rushdie coronavirus I will be halfway to achieving what the mullahs couldn’t. Halfway funny as a hypothetical; halfway not at this distance, writing the piece up three weeks later. As Alan Moore’s nihilistic Rorschach puts it: ‘Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.’ I don’t imagine Rushdie will take offence at this.

Rory Sutherland

Ad infinitum: 200 years of Spectator adverts show how little changes

A conventional hierarchy of print media would put serious journalism at the top. Far beneath that would be tabloid journalism. And then at the very bottom would be advertising. Except, in one respect, I think that order should be reversed. Yesterday’s advertising is much more interesting than yesterday’s serious journalism. I suspect this is because advertising, like tabloid journalism, reflects what people really care about — and always have done. Gossip. Sex. How to attract the opposite gender. What car to buy. Health complaints. Miracle cures. Death. Money. The Beckhams. The Windsors. The new 55in QLED 4K television. At last relief from embarrassing itching.

Tom Holland

Sugared with wit: How ‘Mr Spectator’ came to life

The Spectator is a child of the 19th century, and damned proud of it. First published in 1828, the link provided by its 10,000 issues to a long-vanished age of Regency waistlines and Romantic poets is one of the great wonders of journalism. Its success was built upon Victorian foundations, yet it is a peculiarity of the current media landscape that The Spectator, the only current affairs magazine actually to have been published in the 19th century, should in many ways seem the least Victorian of the lot. The New Statesman, Prospect, Standpoint: all have a certain quality of moral earnestness that one could imagine Gladstone admiring. The Spectator, by contrast, seems to breathe the coffee-perfumed air of an earlier age.

David Butterfield

The Spectator’s love affair with satire

The Spectator has always known when and how to wield the scalpel. A tour through its history reveals how, from the get-go, it mercilessly parodied the world in which it lived. When still six weeks young, The Spectator savaged the morbid obsessions of late-Georgian society. The caricaturist George Cruikshank exposed the press’s fetishisation of a contemporary murder: the accompanying article, ‘Points of Horror!!!!’, tartly noted that ‘the taste for murder in the enlightened public’ was ‘so extravagantly eager, that murderers will come to be held in the light of public benefactors’.

Aidan Hartley

Virus deaths may not be the greatest challenge ahead for Africa

Red roses are hardly a priority for people in a virus-wrecked global economy, and one day recently the world’s flower market pretty much collapsed. At the vast Aalsmeer auction in Holland, there were scented mountains of unsold roses, gerberas and tulips. Some last stems still find their way into bouquets across a world that has cancelled all gatherings except funerals. But in the coming months, cut flowers might become a sight as rare as bananas were for children in the Blitz. This story is a disaster for Kenya, my home country, which was until last month a top flower exporter. While western states repurpose their economies towards becoming vast hospitals, Africa is too poor to cope with the medical emergency, and virus deaths will probably not be the greatest challenge ahead.

Thursday

Niall Ferguson

Why Trump and Xi might both lose the corona wars

The Covid-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War II was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.

Colin Freeman

What lockdown? It’s business as usual for drug traffickers

On Tuesday this week border control cops stopped a van with a shipment of face masks coming through the Channel Tunnel. When they checked the masks they found almost £1 million worth of cocaine tucked in among them. It was a similar story a week earlier. A man called Benjamin Evans was pulled over by the Welsh police on the A40 Brecon bypass. Evans claimed he was a key worker but when the cops searched his car, they discovered nearly £60,000 worth of cocaine. ‘Possession of drugs with intent to supply does not qualify as essential work,’ said the arresting officer.

Leaf Arbuthnot

Bill Bryson: It’s impossible to be sick of England

‘It’s remarkable that bad things don’t happen to us more often,’ notes Bill Bryson in his latest book, a look at the ‘warm wobble of flesh’ that is the human body. He wrote it long before coronavirus upset the world, but parts of it are particularly relevant now. Viruses worth their salt know how to get around, writes Bryson. Researchers from the University of Arizona infected a door handle to an office and found it took just four hours for a virus to spread through the building, turning up on virtually every device inside and ‘infecting’ half the workers. Kissing, oddly, is among the least effective ways to spread germs. Ordinary touch is best. ‘A successful virus is one that doesn’t kill too well and can circulate widely.

Melanie McDonagh

The lie of the land: we’re not all in this together

There’s a friend of mine who likes to torture me occasionally. ‘I really don’t like to tell you this,’ she trills, ‘but I’m looking out on to a field of daffodils. In the hedge just outside the kitchen window there’s a blue tit nesting.’ If she wants to go for a walk, she heads into the woodland behind the house. She’s in her oather home in Wales (normal residence: Fulham) and rather fancies staying there, having got the hang of the whole working-from-home thing. Another friend, who’s getting on a bit, is in her other home (this isn’t just a holiday cottage, but a proper estate that they’ve had for years) in Cornwall (normal residence: Chelsea). She called the other day when it was hot.

A.S.H. Smyth

How to scale a mountain without leaving home

In January a friend visited me at my home in Colombo, and I promised him that we would climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (twice, actually), and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things changed. When lockdown came to Sri Lanka, I found I was already bored and irritable in the first week. Then I saw a cheery Facebook post about some chap called David Sharp who used his time in isolation to calculate how many stairs he would have to climb in his home to ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles. Virtual mountaineering, if you will. Well, I thought, why don’t I do the same with Adam’s Peak?

Isabel Hardman

Domestic abuse sufferers are the hidden victims of lockdown

For years, ministers from successive governments have conducted drills for all kinds of pandemic scenarios. But they never imagined a lockdown. It’s a new tool, and its implications — and side effects — have never been properly tested. So no one really thought about the effect it would have on something like domestic abuse. Before the lockdown, it was estimated that two women a week were killed by their current or former partners. But that was when they could move freely. Now, opportunities for escape are scarce. The only time a victim is alone is when their abuser goes to the shop, or if they’re allowed out for exercise.