Features

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Macron’s prophet

France’s literary event of the year took place this week with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Serotonin. Named after the brain chemical that regulates mood, his seventh novel has been described by one French newspaper as ‘prophesying the yellow vest movement’. The critics have lavished praise and the public are plucking it from the shelves. The initial print run was 320,000, which is quite something given that the average run for a novel in France is 5,000 copies. And it’s selling so fast that I haven’t been able to obtain a copy from the booksellers close to where I live in Paris. It’s a similar story in Germany, where the print run of 80,000 is virtually unheard of for a foreign author, and Spain.

Robert Jackman

Homegrown industry

If you were looking for an international drugs empire, Downham Market would not be the first place you’d think of. With a population of around 10,000, this sleepy Fenland town is probably about as typical as they come — typical, that is, apart from the smell. It was around two years ago that residents first noticed it: a distinctive pungent scent which seemed to hang on the wind before eventually engulfing the town for several days. Now locals say the gusts come and go. But when the odour first appeared, it was so strong that at least one resident phoned the police to complain about feeling nauseous. It turned out that the smell was coming from an 18-hectare cannabis plantation housed in some nearby industrial greenhouses.

Jane Kelly

Meat-free moggies

As I write, my cats and a visitor from the next street are hammering into their food, at nearly £5 a box. Once they only ate greens to make themselves vomit, but now they relish food labelled, ‘garden fresh’, containing carrots, pumpkin and pulses, plus ‘prebiotics to aid digestion’. I watch them eat and wonder how cats have evolved so quickly from savage carnivores into something more like middle-class ladies getting their five a day. Not that long ago, pets were fed scraps or, if they were lucky, Spratt’s Patent Food, which provided Puss and Fido with boiled horse flesh and beef blood, sold from barrows by street urchins. Tinned food arrived from the US in 1922. It made dog poop white, something that doesn’t seem to grace our pavements now.

Thursday

Sohrab Ahmari

The new boat people

When the migrant crisis started, about three years ago, it was seen as a mainly Syrian affair. Caught in the crossfire between Bashar al-Assad and sundry jihadist groups, ordinary Syrians were heading for Europe, part of the largest mass movement of people since the second world war. But as we now know, that analysis was wrong. Or rather, it was only one facet of the historical migration phenomenon that was unfolding then and still is today. As a reporter, I hit the migrant trail, following the new arrivals by foot, bus, train and ferry through the Greek islands and the Balkans. I heard many languages besides Arabic, among them Pashto, Urdu, Bengali and even French (spoken by a Congolese family I encountered at the Serbian--Hungarian border).

Christopher Caldwell

The death of Europe

The ‘yellow vest’ protests against President Emmanuel Macron that swept through Paris and other French cities last month have evoked overwhelming sympathy: 77 per cent considered them justified, according to a poll for Le Figaro. Even after Macron offered a budget-busting package of concessions to appease his critics, it was hard to silence the lacerating self-examination one undergoes after a soured romance: God, what was I thinking? Today, France’s café-goers wonder aloud how they could have voted so overwhelmingly two years ago for a president whom they disliked and disagreed with even at the time.

Fredrik Erixon

The last heave

There is a strange pre-revolutionary atmosphere in Brussels. At the various receptions and dinners before we broke up for Christmas, it felt a bit like the Last Supper. Elections to the European Parliament are usually predictable affairs, but this time Europhiles (like myself) fear it will be different. We have grown used to populists doing well in national elections over the years, from Sweden to Italy. But the European Parliament elections in May might lead to a landslide victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Italy’s League and other nationalist populist parties — and a victory may change the political face of the European Union. In the past, it never really mattered much if the Euro election was carried by the left or the right: the result was the same anyway.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The way we were

‘The Spectator, having quite recently been a very bad magazine, is at present a very good one.’ Those gratifying words began a full-dress leading article in the Times on 22 September 1978, headed ‘On the Side of Liberty’. Its occasion was this magazine’s sesquicentenary, which we celebrated with a grand ball at the Lyceum Theatre, and much else besides. Although I can’t possibly be objective, I think that the praise was deserved. The revival of The Spectator 40 years ago was wonderful: it assured what had been the very insecure future of the paper, and it was the time of my life.

Lloyd Evans

Brexit: the movie

‘I try to interpret the most generous version of somebody’s actions,’ says the dramatist James Graham. This rare ability to create open and sympathetic characters has turned the 36-year-old into our foremost political playwright. His breakthrough work, This House, chronicled the terminal decline of James Callaghan’s premiership between 1976 and 1979. Rather than focusing on Callaghan and his destroyer, Margaret Thatcher, the play looked at the backbenchers and party whips who laboured behind the scenes to keep Callaghan’s government afloat. Graham’s plays are comedic but he’s principally an observer rather than a satirist. Yet he recognises the value of caricature.

Douglas Murray

The darkest dawn

The centenaries of the Great War came to a close in November with commemorations of the 1918 Armistice. But one final British centenary associated with that conflict has just passed. Few people on the mainland will be aware of it, though it has certainly been marked in the Outer Hebrides. It is the commemoration of the worst peacetime naval disaster since the sinking of the Titanic. And one of the most terrible, poignant and final tragedies to have come from the Great War. On the evening of 31 December 1918, a vessel was boarding passengers at the Kyle of Lochalsh. His Majesty’s Yacht Iolaire had been requisitioned by the Admiralty to transport some of the hundreds of Royal Naval Reservists heading back to the Isle of Lewis and Harris after four years of service.

Mark Mason

Girl trouble

Talking to someone in her mid-twenties recently, I mentioned someone else of the same age. ‘She’s a really talented girl,’ I said. Then I checked myself. ‘Sorry… er… woman.’ Sara smiled. ‘It’s OK,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I call myself. I’m a self-identifying “girl”.’ Fair enough. But the exchange stayed with me. It brought back the episode of Have I Got News For You which featured the ‘Michael Fallon touched Julia Hartley--Brewer’s knee’ story. Quentin Letts offered the opinion that Fallon had been brave, on the grounds that Hartley-Brewer is a ‘big strong girl’. ‘She’s not a girl,’ responded the presenter Jo Brand.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The Javid manifesto

There’s an old joke that the most dangerous position in the Tory party is the favourite for the leadership. The frontrunner always ends up with a target on his back, which is why Sajid Javid should be feeling a little nervous right now. Theresa May survived a confidence vote but only after saying that she would resign before too long - so the hunt for a successor is on. He is Home Secretary, his fourth cabinet post. A poll of 700 Conservative councillors found they'd rather have him as leader than anyone else. He is also a former financier who made his name handling economic crises and is someone to whom MPs might conceivably turn if talks with Brussels fail and Britain looks set to crash out of the European Union.

Christopher Caldwell

Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?

The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. He leads her out to the colossal driveway of their newly built modernist mansion to show her just what: two brand-new GMC pickup trucks, a boxy, blue one for him and an effeminate, red one for her. Anyone who has watched more than an hour of American TV over the past decade will know what comes next. She happens to like the blue ‘man’s’ one, leaving him to admit meekly that, well, he’s fond of red.

Morten Morland

Brogues gallery

I spend most of my time drawing politicians, trying to work out what makes them distinctive. The eyes, the expression, their mood: it’s all about finding people’s peculiarities and accentuating them. When I started, I’d focus on the face. Everything else was an afterthought. It wasn’t until I came across a drawing by the Norwegian cartoonist Finn Graff – a cartoon of Helmut Kohl, I think – that I realised what I had been missing. How much you can tell from someone’s shoes. I didn’t discover this, so much as rediscover it. When I was a teenager, I worked in a shoe shop in my home town of Arendal, Norway. I used to challenge myself to identify the right shoe for a customer the moment they walked in.

Mary Wakefield

The imitation game

Imagine looking at a photo of a stranger and feeling in response, quite naturally, the sort of happy affection you might feel towards a spouse. Well, it’s weird. In July this year, when Benedict Cumberbatch was filming Channel 4’s upcoming Brexit film (Brexit: The Uncivil War) a friend sent me some photos by text message, tabloid snaps from the set. Benedict plays my husband Dominic Cummings, director of the Leave campaign, and the shots were long-lens and hazy: Ben/Dom pushing his son on a swing; Ben/Dom kissing his wife. The real son-of-Dom and I were halfway through our Rice Krispies when the photos came through and I remember how taken aback I was. It’s not that they look alike. ‘We have different shaped heads,’ Cumberbatch tells me later.

Max Hastings

Critical injuries

A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically. My wife reproved me: ‘What did you do that for? For a fee of a few hundred pounds you have made a dozen entirely gratuitous new enemies. If you don’t have something good to say about books, don’t write about them.’ Honest reviewing would grind to a halt if all its practitioners deferred to her advice. It is nonetheless true that victims of an unfavourable notice seldom forget or forgive. As authors, we commit our souls as well as our bodies. Memories of the most flattering reviews of my own books fade within hours. Yet wounds from the stinkers fester for years.

Robert Tombs

Beyond Brexit | 13 December 2018

None of us can predict the potential fallout from Brexit, good and bad. What began as a vote of confidence in our institutions has shown them to be dangerously fallible. A country where people usually rub along together is now marked by a cultural and emotional rift. If Brexit does continue to dominate our politics for years, will it mean a reform of our institutions, or a battening down of the hatches by a beleaguered elite? Will the House of Lords, having alienated its natural defenders, at last be seriously reformed? Shall we try to restrain the dangerously capricious powers of prime ministers? Shall we empower local government? Both Brexiteers and Remainers will be in a rather militant mood.

Prue Leith

My Christmas nightmares

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot. My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d omitted the teaspoon of glycerine in the icing which would have stopped it drying to concrete.

Freddy Gray

Ever Trump

 Washington, DC Trump never sleeps, loyalists say - he spends every hour Making America Great Again Donald Trump derangement syndrome works both ways. It makes the President’s enemies hate him so much they go insane. It also affects Trump’s allies and supporters, who love him so much that they have become demented. Among Republicans in Washington, you still have elitist Never Trumpers, who loathe him with a pathological fury. You also have a growing number of insider loyalists who revere him so intensely that they’ve gone blind. They are Ever Trumpers. Ever Trumpers are specialists in doublespeak. On the one hand, they talk about what a triumphant hero the President is.

Iram Ramzan

‘Someone had to stand up’

Saif ul-Malook greets me in the hallway of his daughter’s home. Pakistani hospitality dictates that a guest should not go hungry, so there are plates of samosas, kebabs and biscuits. I am also of Pakistani heritage, so know that etiquette dictates that I must politely refuse a few times — or until I can no longer ignore my rumbling stomach. Malook was flown out of Pakistan, because his life was in danger. Since leaving the country, he has kept a low profile in his daughter’s home, a modest detached house in a cul-de-sac off a busy road in a UK city. He asks for the location not to be revealed. The reason his life is in danger is because Malook was a key figure in one of the most renowned cases in recent times.

Lynn Barber

A life apart

Frank Field was given a standing ovation when he won The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year award two weeks ago. Normally there’s polite applause, but he is the hero of the current clash between the Corbynistas and what used to be the Labour party. His local party in Birkenhead has threatened to deselect him so he plans to stand as an Independent next time, and he said in his acceptance speech: ‘If I’m successful in winning the seat again, then in some small way, as with Brexit, we will begin to change British politics.’ I met him in Portcullis House at the height of the Brexit furore when all the commentators were saying they had never known such cliffhanging times.