Features

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

A deadly romance

For those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, there is a pungent but negative sense of time travel around New IRA statements. The New IRA spokesman is a ‘T. O’Neill’ — which, you might notice, is just a consonant and some bad blood away from the old Provisional IRA spokesman ‘P. O’Neill’ — and his sonorous words, like those of his predecessor, are carefully crafted to mask a sad, nasty reality. The most recent one, in the aftermath of the New IRA murder of the journalist Lyra McKee, offered an ‘apology’ which stated that ‘in the course of attacking the enemy Lyra McKee was tragically killed while standing beside enemy forces’.

Harry Mount

You can get the staff

 Montego Bay, Jamaica When the Kennedy clan were children, JFK and his siblings would tear off their clothes before leaping from the pier at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts — safe in the knowledge their servants would pick up their discarded clothes. That used to strike me as the ultimate in entitlement before I ended up here in a hotel in Jamaica. I’m being waited on hand and foot in a way that wouldn’t have disgraced the Kennedys — or a 19th--century duke. Someone’s just rung to ask when would be a good time to fill my fridge with beer. A driver is waiting to take me on a tour of Montego Bay. When a friend, also staying here, forgot her diary, her butler brought it from her room to our breakfast table.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The Scruton tapes

Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob. It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have him). That happened after one member of the audience at a conference in Korea tweeted something he had said about working with women and professed outrage at the comment’s alleged sexism. None of the institutions which dropped Hunt asked if there was any case for the defence.

Geoff Hill

Back door to Britain

I was working in Johannesburg when I first got wind of the fact that Ireland has become an illegal back door to the UK. If you’re from a country such as South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Fiji or Guyana, you need, not just a passport, but a prearranged visa, obtained from the local embassy for a fee, before you can even board a plane to Britain. It takes time, your details are checked, and you need to show a reason why you’ll go home at the end of your stay. In the 1980s most African nationals could come to Britain visa-free. But worries about terrorism and crimes committed once in the UK meant that, one by one, African countries had to join the visa scheme.

Katy Balls

‘I’m not stupid’

Rory Stewart has just been appointed international development secretary. Last week, he explained to Katy Balls why he would make a good Prime Minister: Almost nobody in Westminster admits to wanting to be prime minister. Rory Stewart is a cheerful exception. Most leadership hopefuls prefer to plot in dark corners and woo supporters in candlelit bars. The Prisons Minister is happy to sit in the sun in Hyde Park and talk openly about his ambition. It’s a tricky time for this country, he says. ‘In a normal situation I probably wouldn’t want to run.’ One of his friends thinks he’s mad: what’s the matter with just being MP for Penrith and the Borders? Why seek No. 10 now? Isn’t it a completely thankless task?

Mark Mason

Off the agenda

God save us from committees. They’re an increasingly outdated way of getting things done. But there’s a certain sort of person who loves them. What’s worse, they want you to love them too. Anyone who has spent more than 15 minutes as the parent of a school-age child will be familiar with the emails. ‘Joyce has now served as treasurer of the committee for seven consecutive years, and really does want a break. Please can someone volunteer to take over? It’ll only take a few hours of your time each month — and it can be great fun!’ Yeah, right. Then comes the emotional blackmail. ‘I’m sure your child loves attending the club every week, and all the great activities they get up to there. Now’s your chance to give a little back!

Julie Burchill

Keeping the faith | 25 April 2019

After hearing about the massacre in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I went to church, happily sang the word God and stuffed £20 in the collection plate. I’m a believer and am lucky to have a lovely church on the corner of the square where I live. I attend irregularly, but on my frequent walks to my volunteer job I always enjoy disapproving as I read the list of activities going on at the community centre which is in ‘the award-winning conversion’ (the sin of pride, for starters) of the nave of the church — bridge (gambling), astrology circle (false prophets), kung-fu (violence) and pilates (vanity), all in one week! Tutting happily, I go on my merry way.

Virginia Ironside

Not him, too

Over a drink recently I sat next to a man who announced, barely before he’d taken his first sip, that he was a feminist. ‘Like you,’ he added ingratiatingly. Like me?!? Poor sap. Did he imagine that this creepy statement would actually endear me to him? That I admired his courageous stand and was prepared to hang on his every word? Not a bit of it. From that moment, I despised him. Firstly, I’m no feminist and never have been. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I’m an equal-but-differentist, or would be if such a thing existed. And I have no desire to get my own back on women’s oppressors, if indeed, today, in western society, they are oppressors. I’ve never experienced them as such.

Wednesday

Jane Torday

Two great ladies

Mary Berry’s dependable The Aga Book — a book of the last century and part of my kitchen library — is full of the good sense of a domestic science instructor. There’s little hint Mary would later be crowned glam granny celebrity judge on TV’s The Great British Bake Off; neat as a pin in floral jacket, tough but twinkly, fair but firm. The iron hand in a pastry glove. Post-Bake Off, she is still unstoppable. There has been a surge of cookery programmes, accompanying hardbacks and further explorations into her life, her garden, her travels — recently being zoomed around Rome on a motorbike. Wherever we turn, there smiles Mary, instructing us beneath eyelashes rivalling those of Barbara Cartland.

Liam Halligan

Good Friday disagreement

The relationship between the UK and the Republic of Ireland has ‘reached a hunger-strike low’, says a new study by an academic from Trinity College, Dublin. ‘Relations have not been as tense since the early 1980s and political rhetoric that had vanished by the 1990s has re-emerged,’ the paper grimly concludes. The fragility of relations between Britain and Ireland is hard-wired into me. Having grown up ‘London-Irish’ in the 1970s and 1980s, all I ever wanted was for the two countries that define my ethnicity to get on.

Tom Holland

The way of the cross

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat in another cathedral, Winchester, listening to the bells peal.

Douglas Murray

Last rights | 17 April 2019

Four years ago, the Assisted Dying Bill was overwhelmingly defeated in parliament. The euthanasia debate hasn’t disappeared, however. One recent poll showed that 90 per cent of the UK’s population now support assisted dying for the terminally ill. So is a relaxation of the law inevitable? Would it represent progress? Or is it very dangerous? Our literary editor Sam Leith joined our associate editor Douglas Murray to discuss.   Sam: I find myself, possibly in accordance with my position as one of The Spectator’s hand-wringing liberals, in favour of assisted dying but I want to be clear on the narrowness of that position. The Assisted Dying Bill would not have allowed us to euthanise the incapable.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Thank God for hymns!

Before embarking on this hymn to hymns, I’ll admit that hymn-enthusiasts feel a slight sense of anticlimax on Easter Sunday, when the pleasingly austere hymns of Lent are replaced with the too-happy, exclamation-mark-ridden hymns of Easter. Within minutes of the start of the Easter Eucharist, our mouths will ache from repetitive singing of the over-vowelled word ‘Alleluia’. I’ll also admit that I sometimes long for hymns to be over. I check to see how many more verses there still are: three down, three to go. I’m relieved if the vicar says ‘omitting verses five and six’ of a slow seven-verser. Anything to speed up our increasingly padded and long-winded Anglican services.

James Tooley

They tuck you up

I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do…’ I was working as a volunteer in a care home for physically handicapped adults in Camden, north London. I had dropped out of school without doing my A levels. When I visited my parents over Easter, my father was angry about my newly acquired pierced ear and earrings: ‘What does it say about who you’re associating with? You’ve really upset your mother.

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel’s folly

 Montpellier An embattled, incompetent leader distrusted and disliked by a vast majority of voters. A wobbly economy that might be tipped into recession by Brexit. A re-energised opposition. Huge street protests. Squabbling with European partners. The government is paralysed, the opposition is emboldened — and the nation stands humiliated, as the world looks on in horror wondering how a leader who was so popular two years ago could get things so wrong. Not Theresa May, but Emmanuel Macron, the politician who may be the greatest Brexiteer of them all. As the saga of British withdrawal enters its final chapter, Macron has emerged as the loudest advocate for pushing Britain out the door, deal or no deal, consequences be damned. Why does he behave in this way?

Rachel Johnson

Kiss off | 11 April 2019

It’s out of control! If I play doubles first thing, have a lunch, then go to perhaps two parties in an evening, I can be embracing more than a hundred people in the course of my day. It’s so unhygienic — especially in the flu season, when someone gives you a sticky peck before telling you in the next breath how ill they are. It all makes me envy the royals, who have a trusty and time-honoured system of self-protection from this imposition. Princess Anne sticks out a white-gloved hand.

Mark Palmer

Boxed in

Friends in Herefordshire said they were both fit and well but confessed to ‘watching far too much television’. I thought nothing of it until a Wiltshire couple whom my wife and I have known for ever said almost the same thing but with more foreboding. ‘We’ve got to break the habit of watching so much — even the good stuff.’ That’s the problem. There’s just too much good stuff on telly. It’s starting to become an issue, a tyranny of sorts, and certainly a drain on what Americans like to call ‘downtime’.

Katy Balls

The bodycon Tory

‘Get some boomerangs,’ Liz Truss says to her aides. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury isn’t looking for something to throw — she is referring to the short videos on Instagram for which she is becoming famous. She has carved out a reputation in Tory circles for her love of social media, which she uses to poke fun at friends, rivals and herself while promoting her upbeat brand of liberal, free-market conservatism: what she calls ‘Tories with attitude’. If a battle is to be fought for the soul of the Tory party, it’s one she intends to join. Once described as a Cameron cutie, Truss has been on a journey since first entering government seven years ago.

Toby Young

iPlod

Monday wasn’t the best day for the government to launch Online Harms, its white paper on internet regulation. As Sajid Javid was proudly proclaiming that Britain would have the toughest internet laws in the world, it emerged that a British woman had been arrested on a trip to Dubai and faced up to two years in prison for describing her ex-husband’s new wife as a ‘horse’ on Facebook. So does the Home Secretary want the UK to have tougher internet laws than the United Arab Emirates? If so, he might find himself at odds with the Foreign Secretary, who has been working behind the scenes to secure the poor woman’s release.

Melissa Kite

Uncool Britannia

A famous actor looks tearfully into the camera. It is Michael Sheen, or possibly Ewan McGregor. His voice cracks as he says: ‘For just £5 a month, you could help an MP recover from the shock of having his Brexit amendment rejected. Just £5 will help pay for counsellors trained to help our brave MPs debate EU withdrawal motions. Please donate now so that MPs like Nick Boles know you care. They give so much of themselves, and ask so little…’ I exaggerate, but only a bit. We keep hearing from MPs about how the stress of Brexit is harming them mentally and emotionally. You might think the nation’s elected representatives would be apologising to the public for the mess they have made. Instead, they just moan to us that their mental health is at risk.