Features

Thursday

Conrad Black

Battle of Hastings

Sir Max Hastings, whom I engaged as editor of the Daily Telegraph in 1986 and who stayed in that role for about nine years, seems to have installed himself at the head of the rabid mob of journalistic haters of Boris Johnson. In recent pieces in The Spectator and the Guardian he has described Boris as ‘a tasteless joke’ interested only in ‘fame and gratification… a scoundrel or a mere rogue’ (a subtle distinction), and in any case a man afflicted by ‘moral bankruptcy’. Max concedes that Boris is likely to be the next prime minister and preemptively accuses him of conducting a ‘celebrity government as in Ukraine and the US’.

Gerard Baker

Chasing the dragon

It will be all smiles when Donald Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Osaka at the annual meeting of the G20: a show of comity for the cameras and financial markets. The two are midway through one of the biggest trade wars that the world has seen in recent years, with the US imposing tariffs on $250 billion of imports from China and Beijing retaliating in kind. It’s possible that some sort of truce will be reached, as it was when the two men met late last year. The next stage of escalation — additional tariffs, or worse — may be postponed again. Don’t be misled. The tariff fight is only the most visible, outward sign of a much larger struggle.

J. Meirion

Doctor who? | 27 June 2019

Last October, Phil Coleman, a journalist on the Carlisle-based News & Star, went to cover the trial of Zholia Alemi, a 56-year-old consultant psychiatrist who was accused of forging the will of an 84-year-old dementia patient in an attempt to inherit her £1.3 million estate. During the trial, Phil realised this complex scam could not have been the work of an amateur fraudster, and suspected previous mischief. How right he was. It turned out that Alemi had been practising in the NHS for 23 years without a medical qualification. Originally from Iran, Alemi moved as a young woman to New Zealand where she claimed she had graduated in medicine from the University of Auckland in 1992.

Melissa Kite

Casanova Corbyn

He has been married several times, has a way with the ladies and always seems to land on his feet no matter how colourful his romantic life. Not even the 20-year age gap between him and his current squeeze has tripped him up in the court of public opinion. His looks aren’t conventional and yet women seem to find our potential new prime minister unfeasibly attractive. I don’t get it, personally. But maybe I’m in the minority. When an old schoolfriend of mine met him at a business event recently she posted pictures of herself on Facebook hugging him. He clearly had her completely captivated. But as he could be the next leader of our country, should we not think a little more closely about his private life?

Mark Palmer

Prophets of gloom

There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life. Everything is broken! All is lost! The end is nigh! Which is fine if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or believe that the eschatological prophecies of the Bible have pretty much all come to pass. Every day we are told repeatedly that ‘catastrophe’ awaits.

Colin Freeman

Alms for arms

In the rush to declare Isis dead now that its caliphate has been routed from Iraq and Syria, it’s easy to forget that its Nigerian fellow traveller, Boko Haram, is still going strong. April’s five-year anniversary of the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, for example, passed with barely a celebrity tweet to mark it, despite the fact that 112 of the girls are still missing. Nor is much fuss likely to be made next month, when an insurgency that has killed nearly 30,000 will enter its second decade as violent as ever. Out of sight and out of mind, Boko Haram’s power is growing. And to find out why, all you have to do is follow the children who beg on the streets of Nigeria’s northern cities.

Thursday

Dea Birkett

Fool’s paradise

Islands have a special appeal. We imagine that on an island we’ll somehow ‘get away from it all’. In the era of Brexit and climate concerns, Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, more than 3,000 miles from the nearest landmass, is flooded with requests from people hoping to settle there. I would advise them to think again. I spent several months living on Pitcairn — a mile-by-mile-and-a-half volcanic rock battered by a hostile ocean, home to a handful of descendants from the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians they took with them. But I did not, as I’d hoped, discover a self-reliant paradise. What my time on Pitcairn taught me is that islands are no Edens.

Laurie Graham

Outside the box

In the summer of 1999 I did something radical. Spurred on by my husband’s universal loathing of television I took our TV set to the landfill and I haven’t owned one since. Twenty unrepentant years without the demon box, and alive to tell the tale. My family long ago accepted this stubborn eccentricity. They’ve grown used to the silence, the missing screen, the brutal fact that they won’t be able to watch the final of Strictly round at my place. A few friends have taken a different line, still hoping to sell me the benefits of owning a TV, particularly since my husband moved to a nursing home and I live alone. ‘It must get lonely,’ they say. ‘Get a cat, get a goldfish, get a telly.

Toby Young

Boris Derangement Syndrome

I switched on the radio last week and caught the tail end of a discussion about the Conservative leadership election. The presenter, who seemed to be in a highly agitated state, was talking about one of the contenders: ‘A man who’s lied to both of his wives, all of his mistresses, every constituent, every employer, every party leader, every colleague, every interviewer, every journalist he’s ever encountered, he’s not just lied to them, he’s actively agitated to deceive them…’ On it went. Even by left-wing shock jock standards, it was unhinged. He could only have been talking about Boris Johnson. In the US, Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, is a well-established phenomenon.

James Forsyth

Boris in No. 10

Quietly and discreetly, the planning for Boris Johnson’s premiership has begun. No one wants to be seen measuring the curtains, but his team are confident he’ll be the choice of Tory party members. It would be the most spectacular upset if he is not. Boris has fixed a Brexit deadline — 31 October — and time is short so his aides are concentrating on what to do when — if — he makes it to No. 10. The first few weeks in No. 10 are crucial for any prime minister, but particularly one who takes over in mid-term, without their own personal electoral mandate. Boris will have only 99 days to agree a Brexit deal that can pass through parliament, something which eluded Theresa May, with many MPs thinking that the government might collapse if he fails.

Paul Wood

The brutality of the Isis Beatles

 Beirut Television cameras get everywhere these days. Or maybe that was always true. Gore Vidal, the grand old man of American letters, wrote a book in which NBC gets the rights to the crucifixion, live from Golgotha, with St Paul as the ‘anchorperson’. So it was only faintly bizarre when CNN ‘crossed’ to a prison in northern Syria to speak to two of the so-called ‘Beatles’, the British jihadis accused of murdering British and American hostages while members of Isis. The interview was just as self-serving as if the remote link had been to some politician or celebrity. But it was also revealing, the most honest — or least dishonest — interview so far from the Beatles.

Melanie McDonagh

Lead astray

Is the pope a Catholic? You have to wonder. In the old days, a pope’s remit was modest: infallible, but only in the vanishingly rare cases when he pronounced on matters of faith and morals concerning the whole church. But even at their most bombastic and badly behaved, earlier popes would have hesitated to do what nice Pope Francis has done, which is to approve changes in the liturgy which amount to rewriting the Lord’s Prayer. That bit that says ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’ is, for Pope Francis, a bad translation. ‘It speaks of a God who induces temptation,’ he told Italian TV.  ‘I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I fall. No. A father does not do this.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Greener than thou

Even before the government this week announced a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, the Tory leadership contenders were competing fiercely to establish their green credentials. Andrea Leadsom has vowed to declare a ‘climate emergency’. Rory Stewart has upgraded it to a ‘climate cataclysm’ and wants to double the amount of foreign aid spent on climate change. Sajid Javid says he would treat fighting climate change like fighting terrorism. Even Boris Johnson, who once called wind turbines a ‘hideous Venusian invasion’, has leapt on the 100 per cent carbon-free bandwagon, marvelling earlier this week about wind farms and solar panels.

John Simpson

Hong Kong fury

Whatever the authorities in Beijing say, the anger on the streets of Hong Kong isn’t synthetic, nor is it stirred up by ‘foreign forces’. The serious, dedicated atmosphere of 2014’s umbrella protest, which lasted 79 days, is back, only this time with more violence. Of course, the vast majority of Hong Kongers won’t be personally threatened by the passing of the extradition law — which allows Beijing to try suspects who, as matters stand, cannot be rendered across the border — but legal changes like this eat away at everyone’s security. At first, no doubt, those extradited to the mainland will be rapists and murderers. But later the prime candidates for extradition will be people who have infuriated Beijing by their public statements.

Peter Oborne

It’s not just cricket

There are plenty of much-anticipated contests in the 2019 Cricket World Cup. But nothing to compare with this Sunday’s match at Old Trafford, where India are billed to play Pakistan in the latest epic in a rivalry that dates back to Partition in 1947. It’s a rivalry that is regularly punctuated by war. No cricket was played between the two countries from 1961 until 1978. The 1965 conflict, caused by Pakistani aggression, severed relations. By the time a ceasefire was declared, Indian tanks were on the outskirts of Lahore, where a 12-year-old Imran Khan was distraught not to be allowed to join a local militia. The two countries fought again in 1971 when India backed insurgents in the liberation war which led to the secession of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.

John R. MacArthur

A rotten party

 New York For leftist anti-Trumpers like me, the Mueller report was initially a godsend, though not for the more obvious reasons. I belong to a rarified group that hates liberal moaning about Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election: we ridicule the claim that Vladimir Putin and his henchmen stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton because we know that Clinton herself and neo-liberal Clintonism were the real causes of her demise. I often tell outraged Democrats to calm down and stop watching Russiagate obsessives such as Rachel Maddow on TV.

Cosmo Landesman

Daddy issues | 13 June 2019

When I was growing up in the late 1960s, boys like me craved the admiration and approval of our dads; we wanted nothing more than to impress them. And now that we are dads, we crave the admiration and approval of our children; we want nothing more than to impress them. But the curious thing is, they don’t care about impressing us. In fact, our teenage children are just like our dads were — distant figures who are busy getting on with their own lives. Today we demonise dads of the recent past for being cold and uncaring. For failing to change nappies, read stories at bedtime, provide the unconditional love and praise children need to grow into happy, well-adjusted adults.

Thursday

Cassandra Coburn

Protons and cons

It’s Asco week in Chicago: the biggest meeting of clinical oncologists in the world. McCormick Place convention centre, the largest in the US, is filled to its 2.6 million square foot capacity with people talking about cancer. And one of the hottest topics being discussed is something called proton therapy, a possible new tool in the anti-cancer arsenal. But does it actually work? Given that two private proton therapy machines have already been built in the UK, and that two more NHS machines are on their way at a cool £250 million, you’d think we’d know. The sad truth is that, for many cancers, the medical jury is still out as to how helpful these machines actually are. Proton therapy is a new kind of radiotherapy.

Ross Clark

Could a recession be next?

How can a new incumbent of No. 10 survive without a majority and with Brexit to solve? It defies the imagination. Yet if they do survive Brexit, against all odds, there could be an even bigger horror waiting around the corner: global recession. For three years the economy has defied doom-laden predictions by aggrieved remainers. Suddenly, though, the economic news is looking ominous. In May, retail sales fell by 2.7 per cent compared with a year earlier. The manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), an indicator which runs a month ahead of Office for National Statistics data, plunged from 53.1 in April to 49.4 in May, where any figure below 50 denotes shrinking activity. It was inevitably blamed by many on Brexit, but the gathering downturn is global.

Isabel Hardman

The in-tray of horrors

‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards — and good luck!’ Liam Byrne will forever be haunted by the note he left on his desk for his successor in 2010. Both coalition parties made much of what was supposed to be a joke about the difficulties of keeping Whitehall spending in check. David Cameron waved the note around in his victorious 2015 election campaign. Byrne later said he was so embarrassed by his mistake that he considered throwing himself off a cliff. There’s nothing funny about what Theresa May leaves on her desk for the next prime minister. Rather than just one pithy note, there’s a teetering, disorganised in-tray of decisions the Tory leader has been putting off.