Features

Thursday

James Forsyth

Can the Tories save themselves?

Parties don’t get rid of their leaders unless things are going very badly. But this Tory crisis is different in scale and size to anything we have seen in recent decades. The question is not whether the Tories can win the next election, but whether they can survive. The dire state that the Tories are in hasn’t put anyone off running to be leader, however. We suddenly have the most crowded field we have ever seen in a leadership race.Whoever wins will become prime minister without having to go through a general election. It’s quite a prize. Given the unpredictability of Tory contests and the frontrunners’ ability to destroy each other, everyone thinks they have a chance. The parliamentary rounds of this contest are best thought of as similar to Wimbledon.

Qanta Ahmed

Africa’s liberal Mufti

 Kigali, Rwanda To most outsiders, Rwanda is still synonymous with genocide. Nearly a million killed in 100 days; almost three quarters of the Tutsi population dead. The country’s attempts to rebuild have been much commented on, but something else is overlooked: Rwanda has become an astonishing oasis of tolerant Islam and, in many ways, an example to the West. In Rwanda, there is an Islam which stands firm against the petrochemical ‘Gulf Stream’ of Wahhabi finance, despite lacking the huge wealth that Muslims in the Arab world enjoy. It also refuses to yield control to the neo-fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood now backed by Qatar and Turkey. This independence and liberalism are embodied by the spiritual leader of Rwandan Muslims, Sheikh Salim Hitimana.

Robert Hardman

Trumped

The Queen has seldom had more holes in a state banquet seating plan. The leader of the opposition, the shadow foreign secretary, the Speaker and the leader of the Liberal Democrats have all ostentatiously refused ‘Her Majesty’s command’ to attend her banquet in honour of Donald Trump next week. The fact that the dinner is in honour of our greatest ally — and in the week we celebrate D-Day — seems to matter less than virtue points on social media. Few will appreciate the irony of this petty posturing more than the Queen herself. For it is that same tranche of the liberal elite who remain responsible for the worst state visit of her reign.

Thursday

Christopher De Bellaigue

Iran alone

On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian long view; neither the Macedonians nor the Mongols were able to extinguish Iran’s vigour and creativity, which reasserted themselves as soon as the invaders had moved on or been assimilated by the superior civilisation around them. ‘Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone (sic),’ was how Zarif concluded his aspersion on American staying power.

Katy Balls

Keeping up with Farage

‘Labour are in so much trouble here you can’t even believe it,’ says Nigel Farage as we sit in a parked blue bus in Dudley in the pouring rain. Outside, a group of campaigners in anoraks wave Brexit party banners and sing ‘Bye bye EU’ to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. A mix of locals and supporters from out of town have assembled to hear Farage. A Japanese camera crew rush to film the circus around him. Reporters from New York are following the pack. Keeping up with Farage is exhausting. When Farage was last in Dudley, the town went on to vote overwhelmingly to Leave, by 67 per cent. Back then, he tells those assembled, the sun was shining. The change in weather, he says, reflects the change in our politics.

Nick Cohen

Corbyn isn’t working

Protestors on the anti-Brexit marches have sensed an eerie absence. ‘What is it?’ I thought back in March as I stood on a soapbox to address an audience so jammed by the weight of numbers on Park Lane that it could not escape. Then it hit me. ‘What the hell have they done with the left?’ There were no Socialist Workers Party placards or George Galloways. The people who hijacked every demonstration I could remember had vanished. I saw plenty of left-wingers. On the neighbouring soapbox, a succession of socialists spoke well on the need to protect migrants and workers’ rights in a reformed Europe.

Virginia Blackburn

Book case

I’ve just had new bookshelves put up in the hall, a whole wall-full of them, and for the first time in years, books that have been forgotten are finding a home. There are far more books than there is shelf space, so I’ve had to select which ones to display, and I’ve discovered a surprising amount about myself. Anyone coming into the flat will see them and make judgments on my literary tastes and so most of my new library is pretty erudite stuff. Martin Amis is getting a good show. The chick lit is banished to the spare room. But that’s not even the start of it. I am in possession of quite a number of books that I loathe, but that make me look well read.

Leah McLaren

Parent trap

The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private struggle — saw it coming. For days, waves of confusion and sadness emanated out through our patch of north-west London. This is the way of suicides in social groups. I’ve seen it before. They ripple and reach well beyond where they have any right to. But the peculiar thing about this tragedy was the way the news was disseminated — namely through the popular social media service WhatsApp.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cometh the hour

The worse things are for the Tories, the better for Boris Johnson. If the Tories were ahead in the polls, he’d have little hope of becoming leader. MPs would choose someone more clubbable, less divisive, and more interested in them personally: who didn’t annoy so many of them so much. But Tory MPs are now contemplating an existential crisis. Tory voters are defecting en masse to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The Conservative party’s survival may well turn on winning these voters back, and the former foreign secretary — the tribune of Leave, the buccaneering Brexiteer, the darling of the grassroots — is the most obvious person to do that. Suddenly, Boris is back and in contention for the leadership again.

Freddy Gray

His dark materials | 16 May 2019

If you have heard of Alexander Nix, you probably think he’s a villain. He is the former head of Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company that helped Donald Trump win the presidential election. Nix and his colleagues have been accused of all sorts of other dastardly deeds: conniving with the Kremlin to hack democracy, ‘dark messaging’ people with racist ads on Facebook in the run-up to Brexit, and more and worse. Nix lost his job after a Channel 4 investigation into Cambridge Analytica in March last year — the exposé won a Bafta last weekend. By May, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL had gone into administration, and Nix had been widely condemned as a Machiavellian crook. A year has passed, and Nix is ready to talk.

Paul Wood

Dictator in the dock

In the 1990s film The Usual Suspects, the detective character explains how to spot a murderer. You arrest three men for the same killing and put them in jail. The next morning, whoever’s sleeping is your killer. That’s because the nightmare of being on the run is over. It’s a relief to be caught. ‘You get some rest: let your guard down, you follow?’ I sometimes wonder if it’s the same for leaders arrested for crimes against humanity, a Karadzic or a Milosevic — and whether President Assad of Syria has the same feeling of being hunted. It’s true he has won the civil war and might think his position is secure. Yet there are several ways he might one day end up facing a war crimes prosecution.

Laura Freeman

Snog a Tory

Ew! Are you squeamish? Are you grossed out by meat, by fish, by eggs, by scales and suckers and shells and bones? We live in fastidious times. Now we pick, we prod, we send dietary requirements by return of post. ‘Super excited to see you guys! Btw I’m vegan, non-gluten, non-soy, no-nuts. Sorry to be a pain!’ Last year, Sainsbury’s launched chicken pieces in ‘no touch’ pouches for millennials who won’t handle raw meat unless it’s sans teeth, eyes, taste, everything. And at Somerville College, Oxford, students were served octopus terrine at a matriculation dinner, and a fresher complained that they had been ‘surprised’ by the dish.

Ross Clark

Clearing the air

We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health these days, is ‘worse than smoking’. According to the Royal College of Physicians, everyone in Britain is effectively smoking at least one cigarette a day, rising to many more in the most polluted cities. What’s more, as Bloomberg once put it, London has a ‘Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse than Beijing’s’. And London’s air pollution has ‘been at illegal levels since 2010’, according to the New York Times.

Karen Yossman

Writers blocked

It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival three years ago in which she decried the scourge of modern identity politics, Shriver observed that the dogma of ‘cultural appropriation’ —which demands no less than complete racial segregation in the arts — had not yet wrapped its osseous fingers around the publishing industry. But, she warned: ‘This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you.’ Reader, it has come.

Thursday

Camilla Cavendish

Mind games | 9 May 2019

‘Beep!’ This is one of the most maddening computer games I’ve ever played. I’m tracking a flock of birds, and when I hit the right one, it explodes with a satisfying ‘phutt’. But as I get better at spotting them, the birds scatter ever more wildly across the screen, and I hear that unforgiving ‘beep’: you missed. Frankly, I feel like giving up. But many players don’t dare. For this is HawkEye, a brain-training programme that claims it can sharpen my brain beyond simply getting faster at mouse-clicking. Trials have found that older people who play enough hours of this particular kind of game have fewer car crashes — and even, apparently, a lower risk of dementia.

Ben Macdonald

The scourge of the grouse moor

Britain’s hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land for hunting can radically protect our countryside. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror set aside this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy its aged oak pastures, Britain’s largest herds of free-roaming grazing animals, and a chorus of birdsong that has been lost in most other corners of our land. Britain’s original royal forests model is recognised around the world as a commonsense approach to hunting. From Alaska to Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists, invest huge profits to sponsor the natural world. Hunters take a quota of animals from these special places — and leave the rest.

Sam Leith

‘Come on: cancel me’

‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of a joke. I never really imagined that was on the cards for me. And I really haven’t done a lot of the things that you’re supposed to do to stay famous. ‘I haven’t published anything in ten years. I haven’t tried to write that novel that’s going to give critical acclaim or a prize or two — which I’ve never won. And I seem to be continually controversial and rub people the wrong way. And this has been for 35 years now and I can’t tell you why: I don’t know. I mean the big joke is: cancel me.

Joanna Rossiter

Home truths | 9 May 2019

As any parent of young children will tell you, toddler groups exist as much for the adults as for the kids, and my local meet-up is no exception. We knock back coffee and compete to see who has had the least sleep while the children run riot on trikes. The small talk always winds its way round to nursery: which ones are good, which ones are near work, how much they charge per hour. You’d be forgiven for wondering why any of us chose to have children, such is the zeal with which we plot our escape. ‘They just installed CCTV,’ enthused one mother to me recently. ‘So I’ll be able to watch her playing from the office whenever I like.’ I daren’t admit it to my circle of mum friends, but since having children I’ve become a secret nursery sceptic.

Damian Thompson

Sober reality

Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as a documentary maker who isn’t ‘award-winning’? Most journalists my age have picked up some sort of bauble. I sulked about this for years until a colleague reminded me that I did have an award: Private Eye’s ‘drunkest person at the Spectator party 1991’. I’d forgotten, perhaps because there was no awards ceremony. Shame. I like to think of myself clutching the prize — perhaps a tasteful statuette of someone doing a technicolour yawn — while insisting modestly that it should really have gone to the vicar who fell backwards into the rose bushes. Likewise, I was cross that I had never merited a single article about me in a national newspaper.

Thursday

Moby

The ideal brunch

Los Angeles has its shortcomings. Some are shared with almost all big cities (traffic, more traffic), while others are unique to this weird desert city (rattlesnakes on hiking trails, winters that are too sunny and warm). But despite its shortcomings, LA is also the place where the sublime can easily and surprisingly wrap itself in the clothing of the utterly banal. A few weeks ago, I woke up on a Sunday morning, went for a hike (dodging a few sleepy rattlesnakes), did some tai chi in the sun (please keep in mind that since moving to LA, I’ve become a perfect little LA cliché; a sober middle-aged vegan who alternates between yoga and tai chi), and took a look at my phone. I had the usual texts from sober friends — ‘Going to AA, want to come?