Features

Thursday

Anne Applebaum

The wrong right

To the inhabitants of the British Isles, the nations of central Europe have always existed in a semi--mythical space, near enough to be recognised as somehow European, but too distant to be taken seriously. Neville Chamberlain dismissed them as ‘faraway countries of which we know little’; Shakespeare gave landlocked Bohemia a coastline. In British school textbooks, Poland appears for the first time in 1939 and then vanishes again, just as abruptly. In the feverish politics of the Brexit era, central Europe has once again returned — and, once again, it is in a semi-mythical form. This time, the region is playing the role of an imaginary alternative Europe, one perfectly suited to the needs of Brexiteers.

Diarmaid Macculloch

The real Cromwell

One of the many pleasures of writing the life of Thomas Cromwell was to reach out behind the various versions of his life published in the past few years and glimpse the real man lost for so long: a complex, often admirable statesman who set England and Ireland and their successor-kingdom on to new paths. From page one, the story needs rewriting. The great opening of Hilary Mantel’s modern-classic novel Wolf Hall is the boy Thomas reeling under blows from his father. This dark picture of the bad pub landlord Walter Cromwell is good fiction, but not history: in fact, it’s Victorian fantasy, cheekily made up by a 19th-century antiquary.

Paul Collier

The hard centre

The Conservative party has to move beyond Brexit and leaders: what is it going to be about? I suggest it has to be about healing capitalism. Capitalism is the only system that is capable of delivering mass prosperity, but it cannot be left on autopilot. Once every few decades it veers off track and requires active public policy. In the mid-19th century, the old Tory party was revolutionised by Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ agenda, correcting the social catastrophes of early industrialisation. In the 1930s, there was no Disraeli: indeed, no political party rose to the challenge of mass unemployment, which was addressed as an inadvertent by-product of rearmament.

Quentin Letts

Causes without a rebel

One of the better plays at the National Theatre in recent weeks has been about a 21st-century banker, Judy, who quits her job to become a 1950s-style housewife. In Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling, Judy ditches her corporate wardrobe for a kitchen pinny and feather duster. She could have stepped from the Good Housekeeping domestic guide my mother was given after her wedding in 1954. Judy scorns modern technology and she dislikes coarse language. She is, at initial view, a faux-nostalgic figure, to be mocked. Yet the word used for her stance is ‘rebellion’ and by the end of the play she may, to a small extent, have made us re-examine today’s assumptions about work and happiness. Judy, though slightly mad, is fresh.

Thursday

Katy Balls & James Forsyth

Move aside, Boris

When Boris Johnson compared Theresa May’s Brexit plan to wrapping a suicide vest around Britain’s constitution, the harshest response came from a fellow Tory MP, Tom Tugendhat, who tweeted: ‘A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand. The carnage was disgusting, limbs and flesh hanging from trees and bushes. Brave men who stopped him killing me and others died in horrific pain. Some need to grow up. Comparing the PM to that isn’t funny.’ The response was a reminder of how high feelings are running in the Conservative party — and that Tugendhat is not one to pull his punches.

Rick Wilson

What Trump hath wrought

 Washington, DC Republicans observing a rising wave of liberal and progressive candidates, policies and election results in the United States may wish to blame Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or billionaire donors like George Soros or Tom Steyer. They’re missing the mark. The real cause of political disaster coming at the GOP like a Cat 5 hurricane is none other than President Donald J. Trump. Everywhere American Republicans turn, they see progressives and liberals more energised than in any election cycle in recent memory and for one reason: Trump. Like so much of what Trump does, the effect he promised to have on American politics is the opposite of what he has delivered.

James Forsyth

All battle, no plan

It looks as if the Conservative party is already at war. Fifty or so Brexiteer Tory MPs openly meet to discuss deposing the Prime Minister —  yet they have no strategy and (at present) no chance of defeating her in a confidence vote. On Twitter, Tory backbenchers and even ministers can be found threatening to destroy each other. This isn’t just about personality. In the last few months, the question of what Britain’s relationship with the EU should be and who should be Prime Minister have fused together — so the most divisive issue in British post-war politics has been combined with a drawn-out leader-ship contest. The Prime Minister has produced a plan: the Chequers proposal.

Laura Freeman

The Tiger trap

There is a Tiger on the loose. It is stalking our high streets. It is prowling our train stations. It has cubs in every shopping mall. It is the Tiger of Tat. And when it roars, it roars: BUY. Tiger, a home accessories chain which opened its first UK shop in 2005, is an emporium of the ephemeral, a grand bazaar of the banal. Here is everything you never needed: oddments and sodments, party bits and barbecue bobs, plastic flotsam and cardboard jetsam. Come buy, come buy! Whoopee cushions and avocado stress-balls, spangled hula hoops and fingerless yoga mittens, cheerleaders’ pompoms and sequinned bow ties. There are walls of coloured playground ‘slime’, tubs of gunk in lurid colours. Everything is something else. A Sellotape dispenser in the shape of a frog.

Paul Wood

‘People don’t care which weapon kills them’

 Beirut 'The planes have already hit the hospitals', said an aid worker. 'They always do that first' The customs man wore a white linen suit. He had a large moustache. His ample belly touched the edge of his desk. The scent of cardamom wafted over as a tiny cup of coffee was placed in front of him. I was not offered one. This was Beirut airport in the summer of 2011. We were travelling on to Syria, next door, where a civil war was beginning. The customs man lazily flicked through my passport and took another sip of coffee. ‘Everything will be seized,’ he announced with satisfaction. Television cameras, satellite phones and flak jackets were taken away.

Robert Hardman

The Eurosceptic Queen

There has been much inconclusive speculation on the Queen’s views on Brexit. In 2016, the Sun asserted that she was in favour (later overruled by Ipso as ‘significantly misleading’). Last year, pro-EU commentators claimed that the blue hat with yellow stars she wore to open Parliament showed coded support for Remain. For now, we are none the wiser. What we do know, however, is that the monarch must be finding things a good deal easier on the way out than on the way in. Rewind to 1972 and a damp May evening at the Palace of Versailles.

Thursday

William Galston

But it wasn’t just the crash

We often hear it said that the financial crash created populism. It is now a familiar story: that the Lehman Brothers collapse and the Great Recession exposed a shocking and colossal failure of economic stewardship in general. Ordinary families suffered, while bankers were bailed out. This led to people losing confidence in mainstream parties and established institutions. And this, in turn, fuelled the populist upsurge that upended American and British politics — with Donald Trump and Brexit being two of the results. While this account is not wrong, I now believe that it represents only a portion of the truth. There are many other cultural and demographic trends at work. Take, for example, the way in which most cities are now thriving but most smaller towns are not.

Paul Burke

Trust me, I’m a Scotsman

There was once a belief that for TV and radio commercials, a Scottish voice was more ‘trustworthy’. This was particularly the case for financial services ads. It was, however, a belief entirely without foundation. ‘We made it up,’ a banking executive once told me. ‘We’d moved our call centres up to Scotland, so we decided to use Scottish voices on our adverts.’ The ‘trustworthy Scot’ myth quickly gained currency. From the late 1990s onwards, you could hardly turn on the radio or television without hearing a Scottish voice telling you about mortgages, loans, terms and conditions. Soon the demand for Scottish voices moved beyond the financial sector: they began advertising everything from mobile phones to DFS sofas.

Christopher Caldwell

Macron vs Salvini

The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock in Sicily. Macron reacted with disgust. ‘The policy of the Italian government,’ a spokesman for his political movement announced, ‘is nauseating.’ Salvini responded that if the French wanted to show their open--heartedness, they might make good on their unfulfilled pledge to feed and shelter some of the 100,000 African migrants Italy had until recently been receiving each year.

Damian Thompson

The Pope’s cardinal errors

The Catholic Church is confronting a series of interconnected scandals so shameful that its very survival is threatened. Pope Francis himself is accused of covering up the activities of one of the nastiest sexual predators ever to wear a cardinal’s hat: his close ally Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington, DC. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI are also implicated; they did nothing, or almost nothing, while Mc-Carrick was seducing every seminarian he could get his hands on. (‘Hide the pretty ones!’ they used to say when he visited seminaries.) Yet powerful cardinals kept quiet and are now suspected of lying their heads off after Mc--Carrick’s crimes were recently made public. McCarrick is the world’s only ex-cardinal.

Simon Barnes

On bended knee

Every so often sport bursts its banks, spills from its usual courses and goes flooding incontinently onto the news pages. This year we’ve already had Australian cricketers doing unspeakable things with sand-paper, Gareth Southgate’s World Cup waistcoat and the return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon a few months after an emergency caesarean. And now we have Colin Kaepernick. He is currently an unemployed quarterback of America’s National Football League. He famously — heroically if you like — refused to stand for the pre-game national anthem, in protest against social injustice and police treatment of black people. Many other footballers followed suit.

Liam Halligan

The world the crash made

With September marking a decade since the Lehman Brothers implosion, stand by for a slew of economic retrospectives. Any meaningful analysis, though, needs to get beyond historic balance sheets and plunging share price graphs — however dramatic the data. For the most significant impact of the biggest financial and economic upheaval since the Great Depression has been the growing loss of faith in western liberal capitalism. Politics has been upended by the 2008 crisis — doing much to explain Trump, Corbyn and the broader shift away from centrist parties towards extremes. The demise of Lehmans, a once-impregnable investment bank, exposed a US financial sector riddled with chronic debts and fraud.

Isabel Hardman

Bleak House

It takes seven years to know your way around Parliament. That’s what I was told when I arrived in the Commons press gallery seven years ago, but I am still none the wiser about how to get from the Snake Pit to the North Curtain Corridor, and have only recently discovered the location of the Yellow Submarine. As a building, the Palace of Westminster is a confusing, contradictory rabbit warren of underground corridors, secret briefing rooms at the top of towers and rooms with strange names. The very fabric of the building is dysfunctional, with pieces of masonry falling onto cars, and mice creeping through kitchens.

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

Sweden ablaze

 Uppsala, Sweden When I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told me, ‘but how can I explain this to my young kids?’ As Sweden goes to the polls next weekend, its politicians face another conundrum: how do they explain all this to the country? I live in Uppsala, a leafy and prosperous university town north of Stockholm. Around Gothenburg, the attacks have been far more dramatic: in mid-August, 80 torched vehicles made the city’s normally dull boroughs seem more like Aleppo.

Katy Balls

Remainers rally

It may seem odd that a cabal of politicians, celebrities and millionaires can successfully present themselves as a great democratic force and seek to overturn Brexit. But the people behind the People’s Vote have one big advantage: their opponents are in disarray. Vote Leave ceased campaigning after the referendum. Its organisers felt they had accomplished their mission, and the Conservative government could be trusted to execute Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Boris Johnson now describes that decision as an ‘absolutely fatal’ mistake. As foreign secretary, Johnson admitted to dinner guests earlier this summer that ‘some of us were seduced by high office in government’.

Qanta Ahmed

I’m pro-Boris, loathe jihadis and love Islam. Here’s why

When Muslims make headlines, it’s invariably for the wrong reasons. The fuss over Boris Johnson’s burka joke is a case in point: he was making an argument in defence of Muslims, but was instead condemned for attacking us. Why the confusion? Because of how little our faith is understood. Let’s start with the burka. Islam makes various demands of its followers, but — despite what you might think from the headlines — covering our faces isn’t one of them. Based on the media’s fascination with these strange and oppressive garments, you might wonder why any modern woman would ever choose Islam. So here’s my answer. I’m a London-born doctor, raised in a Muslim family and now working in America.