Features

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Run, Beto, run

 Washington, DC   Ever since America elected Donald Trump, Democrats have fantasised about removing him from power. They’ve dreamed of impeaching him; of declaring him insane; of arresting him and parking tanks on the White House lawn. They’ve even thought about assassinating him. If you think that is an exaggeration, look up Kathy Griffin, the feminist comedian, who held up a severed Trump head, Isis-style. She wasn’t joking. The latest fantasy is more democratic in spirit. It takes the form of Texan congressman Beto O’Rourke, a skinny former punk-rock guitarist who oozes star appeal. Progressive America is going wild for him. Beto is now widely talked about as the man to beat Trump in 2020.

Martin Howe

May’s deal: a legal verdict

The most important point about the draft Brexit withdrawal agreement is that, once it is ratified, the United Kingdom will have no legal route out of it unless the EU agrees to let us out and replace it with another agreement. This makes it unique among trade treaties (including the EU’s), which always contain clauses allowing each party to withdraw on notice. Politicians who claim that this is just a bad treaty — one we can get out of later — are being ignorant or disingenuous. Halfway through the 585-page document, we find Art. 185, which states a Northern Ireland Protocol ‘shall apply as from the end of the transition period’. Once the Protocol is in force, the UK cannot leave it except by ‘joint’ decision of the UK and the EU.

Robert Tombs

The nation’s state

Did any of us, whatever our opinions, expect the level of blustering indignation that has emerged since the 2016 referendum? It seems to be reaching ever new heights — or depths — of invective and reciprocal disdain. On one side, ‘fantasists, crackpots, dunderheads… jabbering braggarts’ (as a Telegraph columnist described Leave MPs last week). On the other, a gaggle of ‘enemies of the people’, cowards and time-servers. Not so long ago, the sophisticated laughed that only a few eccentrics ‘banged on’ about Europe. Now we seem to have become a nation of head-bangers. As social media spreads extreme and insulting language far and wide, it is easy to think that we are in the midst of an unprecedented cultural war.

Leah McLaren

Class war

One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British people rarely drone on in a witless or self-aggrandising manner. They deflect, make jokes and generally aim to please. But there is one boring subject no one here ever seems to tire of and that is schooling. ‘So where do your kids go?’ I’ve learned is just as loaded and inescapable a London dinner party question as ‘What do you do?’ or ‘Where are you on Brexit?’ If you choose private, you’d better have a plausible explanation (e.g. ‘We just didn’t want to make our child the social experiment’).

Liam Halligan

Irish troubles

How did we get into this Brexit mess? Why is it proving so difficult to leave the EU? Was it Theresa May’s botched 2017 election, which vaporised her Commons majority? Or perhaps her general incompetence and lack of vision? How about the fierce determination of Europhile civil servants to save stupid Leave voters from themselves, cooking up a half-in-half-out withdrawal guaranteed to split the Tories? Maybe it was the cynical ambivalence of HM’s Opposition, with Labour simultaneously backing both Brexit and a second referendum, having always intended to cause chaos and spark a general election by voting down the UK’s exit, contradicting its own manifesto?

Thursday

Charles Parton

The fourth weapon

Chairman Mao talked of ‘three magic weapons’ for seizing power: the united front, the armed struggle and construction of the Communist party itself. Now the priority for China’s government is to remain in power. To ensure that, President Xi Jinping’s party is developing a fourth ‘magic weapon’. The social credit system is a part of this, but the ‘weapon’ also extends far beyond it. By combining big data, artificial intelligence, recognition technology and other police techniques, China’s government intends to create a comprehensive method of political and social control. It may not live up to everything that is promised: after all, government-implemented computer systems rarely work as well as intended.

James O'Malley

The all-seeing state

The bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai is the fastest in the world. It takes just over four hours to travel the 819-mile journey. From the train, it is impossible to ignore China’s economic success. There are cities the size of London that many westerners will never even have heard of. They are filled with glass towers and shopping centres, selling Cartier watches and Gucci bags. As the train sets off from each station, an announcement plays in both Chinese and stilted English: ‘Dear passengers, people who travel without a ticket or behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas, will be punished according to regulations and the behaviour will be recorded in the individual credit information system.

Tom Leonard

A league of their own

 New York There comes a point in a New York expat’s life when you suddenly realise that the liberal elites that run this town have feet of clay. You have watched them joining anti-Trump marches, opening their beautiful homes for Democrat fundraising parties and noisily bidding ludicrous sums at charity auctions. Then the time comes for their children to apply to university and the whole elaborate façade comes crashing down. My wife and I couldn’t help noticing that the parents of our daughter’s American friends didn’t exactly share our blind panic as we tried to work out where she should apply for university.

Juliet Samuel

BlackRock in the spotlight

A few months ago, an aggressive US pressure group called the Campaign for Accountability declared that it had a new target: the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. Quickly, the American press picked up on this campaign against excessive corporate power. Soon we were reading about how BlackRock, like Goldman Sachs before it, ‘rules the world’. Despite BlackRock’s supposed omni-potence, it is relatively unknown in Britain. It might be the biggest private manager of assets in the world but, in political terms, the company has existed in relative obscurity. That is, until last year, when it handed George Osborne a £650,000 contract for giving ‘advice’ one day a week. In recent months, the firm’s political profile has been rising.

Taj Nathan

Dangerous minds

There was no reason for Edward Drummond to believe this January day was going to be different to any other Whitehall working day. Having completed his civil service chores and visited the bank, he set off back to Downing Street where, as the prime minister’s private secretary, he had an apartment. He was passing a Charing Cross coffee shop when, without any warning, he felt a searing blow to his back and, according to a witness, his jacket burst into flames. The bang drew the attention of a quick-witted police officer, who dashed across the road as a man prepared to shoot at Mr Drummond again. But even with the assistance of passers-by, the officer struggled to disarm the shooter. He violently resisted and discharged a second shot, though this time without causing injury to anyone.

Tom Ball

Nervous laughter

At 8.45 p.m. I was back in the toilets again feeling pure terror. In front of me was a narrow window which I thought I might be able to squeeze out of if I dislocated both my shoulders. This seemed a more attractive proposition than the alternative: leaving the loo and stepping out on stage to deliver my maiden stand-up comedy performance. In theory, a few months ago, it sounded like a great idea. Everybody is anxious at the moment. I’m anxious, you’re anxious, everyone born after 1990 is anxious, or so the newspapers tell us. I stay up at night haunted by a sense of strange foreboding. I once went to a party and found four people crying in the bathroom.

Thursday

Tom Holland

Decline and fall | 8 November 2018

For a millennium and a half now, one of the great pleasures of being a commentator on current affairs has been comparing a political crisis to the fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing recently has quite so turbo-charged this perennial trend like the presidency of Donald Trump. The flamboyant egotism, the patent amorality, the porn stars: all seem conjured up from the reign of a peculiarly depraved Caesar. The vague sense that Rome fell because its rulers were decadent — no matter how divorced from historical reality such a myth may be — still lurks in the public imagination.

James Forsyth

Deal or no deal?

When the Lisbon Treaty was signed in 2007, the inclusion of Article 50 was hailed as a concession to British Eurosceptics. For the first time there was an exit clause: a clear, legal way for a country to leave the European Union. Whatever concerns Britain had about the federalist direction of the EU, it was now at least enshrined in treaty that this country had a right to get out should MPs vote for it to do so. It was intended as a reassurance that the United Kingdom had the sovereign right to leave the EU if it wanted to. What worries cabinet members about the current Brexit plan is there is no clear exit clause. Because of the so-called ‘backstop’, the UK will not be able to leave unilaterally. Even Downing Street has admitted this.

David Butterfield

No satisfaction

Should university students really feel ‘satisfied’? Or would we rather they felt challenged? For the honchos of higher education, the answer is clear — and alarming. The National Student Survey (NSS), which was introduced in 2005, collects data that allows crude comparisons to be made between universities. The survey asks 300,000 final-year undergraduates to answer 27 questions about their experience of teaching, academic support, assessment and feedback. Some of these are entirely unproblematic: all universities should want students to find that ‘staff are good at explaining things’, or that feedback on work has been ‘timely’. But others are double-edged.

Gavin Mortimer

Eclipse of the Sun King

Emmanuel Macron was elated when France won the World Cup in July. The photograph of him leaping out of his seat at the Moscow stadium showed a leader at the peak of his power. Or so he thought. Ever since then, he has been bumping back to earth. Last week, the French President took the unusual step of retiring to Honfleur for four days’ rest and recuperation. ‘His face has changed, he is marked by the weight of power,’ confided one of his team; another expressed concern about the President’s weight loss. Part of his deterioration is self-inflicted. Macron likes to boast that he gets by on four hours of sleep, and his texts to ministers in the early hours are legendary.

Laura Freeman

The Insta pilgrims

On Sunday morning, in Puy-en-Velay, I climbed the 275 volcanic steps to the tiny chapel of Rocher Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe. There, in the gloaming, among the silent stones that have stood on this site for 11 centuries, it was almost possible to imagine the awe of those very first Christian pilgrims who in the 10th century… CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! Ah yes, the sacred selfie, now as much a part of the modern Camino de Santiago de Compostela as the rosary, the walking stick and the scallop shell. A Catholic grandmother taking photographs of her penitent grandson, devoutly picking his nose. A teenager snapping Insta-incense shots. A honeymooning couple in walking boots taking turns to light candles for the camera.

Liz Hunt

We will remember him

The story is part of family lore. How, during the Battle of Mons, on 23 August 1914, two long columns of men from the Royal Field Artillery passed each other. One column was withdrawing from the frontline, the other heading into what was the first action between the British Expeditionary Force and the German army in the first world war. A shout went up: ‘Is Mulholland there?’ A reply in the affirmative from somewhere along the lines; a swift exchange of greetings between two brothers, Danny and Patrick; a mutual exhortation to ‘look out for yourself’ — and then they moved on. In opposite directions. It was the last time they saw each other. Only one would return home.

Thursday

Daniel Butler

Picky eaters

Autumn’s wild bounty is a cause for celebration across the Continent. In France and Germany, people rush into the woods, motivated largely by greed. Families drink, eat and forage, while the elderly show their grandchildren what is — and isn’t — safe to eat. In Britain, attitudes are different. Even conkers now seem suspect. We are particularly nervous about fungi, because we are told that picking mushrooms is both dangerous and bad for the environment. This is a shame. Britain has the perfect climate for some of the most flavoursome wild mushrooms known to man. They grow in our woods, pastures and hedges, yet almost all of us ignore them. I am a keen mushroom forager and regularly lead fungi forays, so keep a close eye on foraging developments.

Iain Dale

Can’t pay, shouldn’t pay

You probably haven’t heard of the loan charge. I hadn’t until a couple of months ago, when I told listeners to my LBC radio show that I would soon be interviewing Mel Stride, the financial secretary to the Treasury. Following this, I was bombarded by texts and emails from something called the Loan Charge Action Group and its many, many sympathisers. I then became acquainted with what might be the next storm to hit the government. The messages, many of them emotional and some borderline aggressive, told the same story: hundreds of what politicians like to call ‘hardworking families’ were facing unpayable and unjust tax bills as a result of a Treasury U-turn on what previously had been a perfectly legal tax scheme.

Douglas Murray

Mutti’s last days

Whatever anyone’s views on the enterprise, there was one question always begging to be asked of the European Union: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ At an early stage it wasn’t clear to everyone. Then the purpose and direction of travel seemed agreed — under the stewardship of Angela Merkel. She was there to settle disputes, authorise bailouts, offer German help to struggling nations and protect the project as it led to ever-closer union. Whatever else can be said of it, with Merkel at the helm at least the EU appeared to have direction. Not anymore. This week — after another political drubbing for the CDU in Hesse — the German Chancellor announced that she would not seek re-election as head of the party she has led for 18 years.