Features

Thursday

Ross Clark

The straight dope | 21 June 2018

Was there ever a more fatuous contribution to a political debate than Lord Hague following up the case of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell — the boy whose mother says he needs cannabis oil to control his epilepsy — with a demand for recreational cannabis to be legalised? But the former foreign secretary has done us a favour of sorts. He has inadvertently explained why Billy Caldwell has become such a cause célèbre over the past few days: the drug-legalisation lobby has cottoned on to his huge propaganda potential. The reason why cannabis oil is not licensed for use as a treatment for epilepsy in Britain has nothing to do with the prohibition of cannabis as a recreational drug.

Paul Wood

Britain’s collusion

 Washington, DC Reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand deliver this incendiary material to the CIA When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited London in 1978, the British government did some serious sucking up. Ceausescu was an egomaniac and possibly crazy. When he went hunting outside Bucharest, his body-guards shot game with machine guns so he could be photographed at the end of the day with a shoulder-high pile of dead animals. He was also said to be a germophobe, sterilising his hand with pure alcohol if it touched a door handle. The French president telephoned the Queen to warn her that when the Ceausescus came to the Élysée, lamps, vases, ashtrays and bathroom taps went missing from their rooms.

Cosmo Landesman

Bringing sexy back

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin famously wrote, began in 1963. And listening to contemporary commentators, you’d think that it came to an end in 2017 with the birth of the #MeToo movement. For these voices of doom, the end of the erotic is nigh; Britain is on the brink of sexual apocalypse. The recent news that Netflix has banned flirtation from film sets — along with lingering hugs, requests for phone numbers and extensive touching — is for these commentators just the latest example of #MeToo sexual correctness gone mad. They fear we are witnessing the making of a bland new world where the rules and regulations governing social relations between the sexes will become so oppressive that the very sexiness of sex itself will be snuffed out.

Thursday

James Innes-Smith

The rise of the pop-up brothel

I had been in Los Angeles for less than a month when I received the call from a concerned neighbour back home in London. ‘Why are there men queuing up outside your flat at 3 a.m.?’ It was a good question. ‘And are you aware that a locksmith came over the other day to change your locks?’ I had no idea. ‘Oh and by the way, your tenant has put some kind of security camera outside your front door.’ Concern turned to panic. ‘And there’s been rather a lot of … erm, activity, you know … to-ing and fro-ing. That tenant of yours certainly has an appetite for the ladies.’ My neighbour must have been mistaken. I had rented my apartment to Alan and Ada, a respectable young Chinese couple.

Fraser Nelson

Next up, Nato

For Theresa May, the most worrying part of Donald Trump’s talks with Kim Jong-un came two days before the two men met. The US President had arrived in Singapore early after escaping the G7 summit in Canada, still sore at being upbraided by his European and Canadian counterparts about tariffs. With time on his hands, he took to Twitter to hit back by switching the conversation to defence and one of his favourite bugbears: Nato. ‘Germany pays 1 per cent (slowly) of GDP towards Nato, while we pay 4 per cent of a MUCH larger GDP,’ he announced. ‘The US pays close to the entire cost of Nato-protecting many of these same countries that rip us off on Trade (they pay only a fraction of the cost-and laugh!)’. This situation, he said, would soon end.

Harry Mount

All hail Æthelflæd!

This week, Prince Edward was paying tribute to a much-loved Queen. Not ‘Mummy’ — but Queen Æthelflæd, Alfred the Great’s eldest child, the Lady of the Mercians and one of our greatest, if largely forgotten, Anglo-Saxon leaders. If it wasn’t for Æthelflæd kicking the Danes out of Mercia during her reign from 911-918, we’d all be speaking Danish. You could call her the first Brexiteer. Æthelflæd died in 918, 1,100 years ago this week, in Tamworth, Staffordshire, heart of her Mercian kingdom (roughly equivalent to Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire). In the West Midlands some people call her the Founding Mother of England.

C.A.R. Hills

The best place to be poor

I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many years of trouble and wandering, I have come to rest in the streets where I was born. And in my usual cunning way I have become one of the roughly 300 or 400 people living in inner London you perhaps think of as ‘homeless’, making the rounds from drop-in centres to churches, from morning till night, in the hunt for free food. For this is what my life has come down to as I stand on the threshold of old age, the endless movement from one soup kitchen to the next, which at least gets me to the end of the day by a pleasant route. Or it might be not so pleasant, because of course a lot of conflict erupts at places where a large number of people benefit from organised kindness.

William Cook

Becoming German

In the end, after all the waiting, the document didn’t look like much — a sheet of A4 paper adorned with a German eagle, and one of those tongue-twisting Germanic compound nouns beneath it: Staatsangehörigkeitsausweis. At last, my Certificate of German Citizenship had arrived. How did I feel? Elated, tearful, overjoyed. It was at this moment that I finally understood how so many Brexiteers must have felt when Britain decided to leave the EU. When Britain voted Leave I was distraught, but I wasn’t at all surprised. For anyone with eyes and ears, it was clear that a great many Britons were passionate about leaving, and that a lot of Remainers were merely lukewarm.

Peter Hitchens

What happened to communism?

I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my Moscow block of flats. It was about the size of a cow and made out of a gritty grey metal alloy which had, like almost everything in the USSR, never looked new or clean. Once, these objects had been all over the city. Now they were vanishing. Nobody else seemed especially interested in its departure, probably because there were — more excitingly — eggs on sale down the street. A few weeks later, I would watch the Soviet Army’s last Revolution Day parade trundle through Red Square.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin’s rot

This is Putin’s time. Next week, the Fifa World Cup kicks off in Moscow, and the Kremlin has spared no expense to showcase Vladimir Putin’s new Russia as a vibrant, safe and strong nation. Half a million visitors will be welcomed — with the Russian press reporting that the notorious ‘Ultra’ hooligans have been officially warned to behave themselves or face the full wrath of the state. Despite four years of rock-bottom oil prices, Putin has nonetheless found the cash to build or refurbish a dozen new stadiums. Moscow has undergone a two-year city-wide facelift that has left it looking cleaner, fresher and more prosperous than any European capital I have seen.

Stephen K. Bannon

Europe’s new democracy

By 25 May the world was learning of the Italian populist parties’ plans to form a coalition government. This would ditch the ideological divide of left vs right while unifying the country’s north and south and its populists and the nationalists against a long history of technocratic governments and European Central Bank demands. Over the next 48 hours, a combination of foreign politicians, foreign capital and foreign media descended upon Italy to demand the Italian people’s choices in voting for the right-wing League and the left-wing Five Star parties were dismissed. And indeed they were dismissed. The Financial Times called the coalition ‘the modern barbarians’, while the German press called the Italian people ‘less grateful than beggars’.

Hannah Stuart

The jihadi sisterhood

‘Does the pin make me go 💥?’ Like most 16-year-old British schoolgirls, Safaa Boular was adept at using emojis. She wanted to ask her online mentor if, when she detonated a bomb belt, she could be sure of killing both herself and her target. Safaa was a fast learner and, before too long, was planning to involve her older sister and her mother in an attack on the British Museum, among other targets. So when she was found guilty this week at the Old Bailey, it confirmed the latest British jihad innovation: our first all-female terror cell. For those who have been involved in profiling terrorists (a job I used to do) it has all become a little more complicated.

Cosmo Landesman

Too kind

I originally thought of calling this piece: ‘Kindness is the New Rock ’n’ Roll’ — but only as a joke. And then I discovered that the rock band Peace have a new album out called Kindness is the New Rock’n’Roll. And they aren’t joking. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that kindness is the new mindfulness; but there’s already an offspring of the two that has been dubbed kindfulness. Suddenly, kindness is cool. And hot (or so zeitgeist-watchers keep telling me).

David Goodhart

The age of incivility

How long ago it now seems that the big political worry was apathy. Today, wherever you look — Brexit negotiations, US politics, the latest news from Europe — the talk is only of polarisation, division and a coarsening of political behaviour and language. According to a Ipsos MORI survey, most Europeans believe their countries are more polarised than ten years ago. But are we really as divided as the new consensus presumes? What if recent political trends represent instead a long overdue rebalancing of interests after nearly 30 years of liberal domination — both economic and social — favouring the affluent and educated, and so a case of democracy not failing but working (albeit not to the taste of most of the political class)?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The people vs the EU

This week the EU revealed its true nature. Rather than hand power to a Eurosceptic, the Italian President Sergio Mattarella defied the democratic process, and the wishes of most Italians, and put a puppet in place. Once again a major European democracy has seen the results of a legitimate vote dismissed; swept aside because the EU can’t countenance dissent. It’s hard not to conclude that those who voted Leave in our own referendum so as to ‘take back control’ had a point. The governing elite in Europe simply can’t afford to relinquish control. They can’t let real people have a real say in who leads them because the grand EU project matters above all. In Italy, in March, the people went to the polls and were deemed to have returned the wrong verdict.

Stewart Dakers

Another country | 31 May 2018

One day there won’t be anyone to deliver the mail any more, and then what will the City types do? I heard this prediction more than 20 years ago when I worked behind the bar at one of the pubs here in my rural town. At the time I considered it melodramatic, but now it seems like straight prophecy. Quite out of sight of central London — and other metropolises — the English countryside is suffering from a terrible immigration problem. These migrants don’t arrive on the back of lorries or in overcrowded boats, but in removal pantechnicons and SUVs, carrying laptops and trailing children.

Byron York

A failure to impeach

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News? That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, mostly refraining from attacking him directly, and hoping the investigation would somehow go away.

Damian Thompson

Papal surrender

Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead could be seen storming out of Sunday mass halfway through the service. Why? Their parish priest had come on too strong. He had not only ordered them how to vote but also supplied grisly details of an abortion procedure. Presumably some of them voted to repeal the eighth amendment. The ‘Yes’ campaign couldn’t have won its two-thirds majority without the support of practising Catholics. Very few of these, we can assume, were militantly pro-choice. Instead, they were reassured by promises that any future law would be limited in its impact — and determined to ignore a Catholic hierarchy contaminated by child abuse.

Tim Wigmore

The people’s cricket

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003. The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20.

Rachel Johnson

All over the shop

A few years ago, some friends came to stay with us on Exmoor. After they unfurled from their Volvo, they presented us with some unctuous Parma ham and a few bottles of Barolo, all of which I received eagerly. ‘Thank you so much!’ I cried, adding, ‘Such a shame we don’t have any Charentais melons, otherwise we could have this as a starter tonight!’ Even though he’d just ferried his family four hours from Primrose Hill and up our bone-shaking unmade track to reach the valley, Justin looked stricken at the thought of Parma ham sans melon. ‘No problem, I’ll run and get some,’ he said, jumping back into the driver’s seat. Then he poked his head out of the window. ‘Where’s your nearest Waitrose?