Features

Thursday

Jonathan Mitchell

The danger of ‘neurodiversity’

I’m an American man affected by the disability autism. As a child, I went to special education schools for eight years and I do a self-stimulatory behaviour during the day which prevents me from getting much done. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I have bad motor coordination problems which greatly impair my ability to handwrite and do other tasks. I also have social skills problems, and I sometimes say and do inappropriate things that cause offence. I was fired from more than 20 jobs for making excessive mistakes and for behavioural problems before I retired at the age of 51. Others with autism spectrum disorder have it worse than I do. People on the more severe end sometimes can’t speak. They soil themselves, wreak havoc and break things.

Freddy Gray

The frozen swamp

 Washington, DC As a prison worker in Florida put it, 'Trump's not hurting the right people' Washington is supposed to be recession-proof: when times are bad, the government just hires more. But the city isn’t shutdown-proof. There are more than 360,000 federal employees in the DC area, and many are among the 800,000 across America who last week received a salary bank transfer that said zero dollars and zero cents. A number of foodbanks have opened here, offering free meals to anyone with federal identification. Whole Foods, the upmarket supermarket, has gone a step further. It is serving spaghetti dinners to anyone who is hungry.

James Forsyth

The rebel alliance

Straight after the government’s epic defeat in the House of Commons on Tuesday night, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, the Business Secretary, Greg Clark, and the Brexit Secretary, Steve Barclay, held a conference call with business leaders to try to reassure them. The principal worry was about ‘no deal’. The Chancellor’s message of comfort was revealing of where power has shifted to. He emphasised how backbenchers are manoeuvring to stop no deal. In other words, they needn’t take his word that it wasn’t going to happen; they should take parliament’s. It was an admission that the government is no longer in control of Brexit.

Mark Piggott

Renter’s paradise

On turning 50, I realised I’d never own my own home. What bank would agree to give a mortgage to someone with no regular source of income? Even if I did somehow hold down a job, I would have just 15 years until retirement age. For a while, I was depressed. Owning your own home is the British dream. Why else would all those property shows I drool over be so popular? I won’t have anything to hand down to my kids. What sort of loser am I? Then I remembered: I live in a five-bedroom Victorian terrace in Islington, which is owned by the council. At £650 per month, our rent is far less than what private tenants might pay for a flea-infested bedsit in the same area.

Colin Freeman

Pirates of the Caribbean

Brian Austin, a fisherman from the small village of Cedros in Trinidad, is struggling to describe the men who robbed him out at sea last year. ‘They had guns, they wore T-shirts and hoods.’ Then he brightens: ‘Have you ever seen Somali pirates? They looked just like that.’ I have indeed seen Somali pirates, as it happens, and rather closer up than I’d have liked. Ten years ago, a bunch of them kidnapped me for six weeks while I was out reporting. That was in Somalia, though, a failed state where anything goes. I never expected to be writing about a plague of pirates here in the Caribbean. The last lot of Caribbean Blackbeards were hunted down by the Royal Navy about 300 years ago, bringing to a close the so-called ‘golden era’ of piracy.

Laura Freeman

Pale imitations

You can tell something about national character from the way a country clears its cupboards. In the States they have the yard sale. The American dream remains a detached house with a front and a back yard, all enclosed by a white picket fence. Daughter selling lemonade, son playing catch, consumer goods spread on the lawn. The French have the vide grenier — the emptying of the attic. The Frenchman in his romantic soul still imagines he is a poet or a painter starving for love and art in a bare, unfurnished room. The English have the car-boot sale. We take a picnic, waterproofs, stop at a stone circle on the way, and when we are ready to pack up and leave, we leave. Back in Blighty after a year in France, I have been finding homes for my attic trufflings.

Thursday

Brendan Simms & K.C. Lin

The dragon vs the bear

At the height of the Cold War, as the West faced off against Red China and the Soviet Union, people used to joke that optimists learnt Russian while pessimists learnt Chinese. Today, the debate about which of these two great powers represents the biggest threat to our way of life is once again in full swing — though with new battle lines. And it’s not clear that Britain knows what to make of it all. For some commentators, the main challenge still comes from Vladimir Putin’s resurgent Russia. Those who once scoffed at Mitt Romney’s 2012 claim that Russia was the principal enemy of the United States now need no persuading that Moscow wants to unravel the post-Cold War international order. The Salisbury poisoning was just the latest reminder.

Cosmo Landesman

A class act | 10 January 2019

The English love a story of posh people behaving badly, especially one that involves sex, drugs or drink — preferably all three at once — in some stately home or Mayfair pad. In 1963, following the Profumo scandal (yes, the one involving Christine Keeler) the nation was gripped by tales of sex parties involving prostitutes, pimps, peers and cabinet ministers. And then there was the infamous photograph of the Duchess of Argyll with something in her mouth that definitely wasn’t a silver spoon. The Denning Report — Lord Denning’s 1963 inquiry into what he referred to as ‘perverted sex parties’ — was a smash hit, selling more than 4,000 copies in the first hour of its publication.

Ross Clark

Project Fact

Food shortages, diabetics going without insulin, outbreaks of salmonella and swine flu: a no-deal Brexit has become a dystopia of the imagination that gives even the Old Testament a run for its money. To lend it extra credence, the doomsayers are not muttering men with long white beards but business leaders and figures from respectable-sounding thinktanks. Yet in just 11 weeks’ time, a no-deal Brexit could become a reality. Will we really be impoverished, hungry and living in fear of infectious diseases? Or is it just Project Fear, ratcheted up to a new level by those who see the clock ticking down and have become ever more desperate to persuade the public of the foolishness of its decision to vote for Brexit? Some dismiss the predictions of chaos as mere scaremongering.

Duncan Gardham

Quiet terror

They don’t like to use the ‘Q’ word in counter-terrorism. It’s a bit like blurting out the name of the Scottish Play in a theatre. At Christmas parties, members of the security agencies insisted they had never been busier but once the year had turned and they were no longer tempting fate, they were prepared to admit that 2018 was a bit ‘quieter’. There were, for instance, far fewer arrests for ‘attack planning’, as opposed to downloading or sharing instructional and propaganda material. Last year, there were only four foiled attacks and one unsuccessful vehicle attack on Parliament. Right at the last gasp, with three hours to go to New Year, a knifeman in Manchester stabbed a couple and a police officer, but did not kill anyone.

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.