Features

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The great Tory health splurge

A fortnight before Philip Hammond delivered his last Budget, the chief executive of the NHS gave a speech making the case for more funding. Simon Stevens had brought with him picture of a Vote Leave poster, promising £350 million a week for the health service, which he showed to his audience. What a good idea, he said. He wasn’t coming out as a Brexiteer, but he did think the Leavers had a point about giving an extra £350 million a week to the National Health Service. In fact, he went so far as to say that the ‘public want to see’ this promise honoured. And if politicians don’t cough up?

Ed Husain

The real special relationship

In all the agonising about Islamism, and what to do about it, it would be a mistake to forget a very useful fact: that Britain has a special relationship with Islam and has done for centuries. The friendship with Islam is unique. Spain was home to Andalusia, a Muslim empire for 700 years. The Germans, Poles and Austrians saw off Turkish Muslim invaders in the Siege of Vienna in 1529 and then again at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The French lived in the shadow of 732 and the Battle of Poitiers. Britain alone, cut off from Catholic Europe, forged a relationship with Muslims built on trade, the rule of law, mutual respect and an exchange of ideas and cultures. It would be a terrible shame to forget this friendship now.

Molly Watson

The lure of the saddle

When asked to describe in three words what it means to win Badminton, the world’s most challenging and prestigious equestrian event, Jonelle Price — this year’s victor and the first woman to take the title for a decade — knocked back a glass of champagne and answered: ‘Dreams. Come. True.’ For the past 20 years Jonelle has relied on dreams and phenomenal willpower to get to the top of the exclusive and very expensive sport of eventing. Hers has been a different route from the classic one of ‘Daddy bought me a pony’ (or in the case of her fellow competitor, Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Tindall, ‘Mummy’). The child of suburban parents, Jonelle first sat on a horse as an eight-year-old.

Lloyd Evans

L’Europe, c’est moi

I meet Bernard-Henri Lévy in a colossally luxurious hotel on a tree-lined avenue just behind the Elysée Palace. The French philosopher is half-reclining on a sofa, with one ankle tucked under his thigh, beneath an ornamental bookcase bearing a bust of Voltaire. He wants to discuss his new play, Last Exit Before Brexit, which will receive its world premiere at Cadogan Hall, London, on 4 June, under the auspices of the Hexagon Society. The play takes the form of a 100-minute monologue. What’s it about? ‘A group of anti-Brexit intellectuals decide to organise a last-chance event in the symbolic city of Sarajevo. They ask me to deliver the keynote speech.

Prue Leith

The waiting game

When my husband, John, was born in 1946, doctors were the chief agents of adoption. His mother was young, single, pregnant and desperate. Her doctor had another patient, a happily married but childless woman in search of a baby. The doctor, knowing the two women, solved both their problems by handing John to his new parents at birth. Thirty years later I adopted my Cambodian daughter, Li-Da, with minimal fuss. We had a visit from a social worker to check us out. Within days a legal guardian was appointed, and we were allowed to foster Li-Da at once. After three months, with the occasional visit from her guardian, we adopted her. How very different it is today.

Mark Palmer

Political football | 24 May 2018

Politics and sport should never mix is the hoary old chestnut — but they always do. It’s a thrilling concoction. In just under three weeks, the World Cup kicks off in Russia and while I can’t vouch for the quality of the footie, the whole extravaganza is likely to be edge-of-the-seat stuff. At the end, Vladimir Putin will either be grinning like a creamed-up cat or grinding his teeth in rage, lamenting about what might have been. Never has there been a backdrop quite like this. A couple of months ago there were calls (including from Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary) for England to boycott the tournament altogether.

Henry Jeffreys

In praise of bangers

I was collecting my daughter from school when my path was blocked by an enormous black Range Rover sitting in the middle of the road. As I squeezed past, one tyre on the pavement, I opened my window and asked, as gently as I could: ‘Why don’t you drive on your side of the road?’ The woman looked down from on high and said: ‘Why are you driving a banger?’ I’ve been trying to come up with a clever response ever since. I’d never thought of my car as a banger before. It’s a nearly 20-year-old Ford Focus, in excellent condition for its age with just a touch of rust on the boot lid. But by modern standards I suppose it is.

Thursday

Fredrik Erixon

Macron’s next move

It was a moment to cherish, not to spoil. But I wasn’t the only one at the grand Charlemagne prize ceremony for Emmanuel Macron in Aix-la-Chapelle last week to wonder if the French President has already accepted that the federalist game is up. The medal is awarded for services to the cause of European unification, a cause that Macron has done his best to advance. But first the Brits bailed out. Then the Hungarians and Poles dissented. Now Italy looks set to become the first of the EU’s six founding states with a government abandoning the federalist project. Angela Merkel and her German conservatives had poured cold water on Macron’s idea of a massive shake-up involving a single finance minister for the eurozone.

Nicholas Farrell

Italy vs the EU

It looks indeed as if Italy — the beating pulse of European civilisation — will be the first country in western Europe to fall to what’s popularly known as populism. Those who regard populism as an affirmation of democracy are pleased; those who regard it as a negation of democracy are appalled. The markets remain silent. For the moment. The alt-left Five Star is on the verge of forming a coalition government with the hard-right Lega in the EU’s fourth largest economy, which has been stuck in more or less permanent stagnation since the global banking crisis of 2008.

Peter Oborne

False friends

Harold Macmillan once remarked that: ‘There are three bodies no sensible man ever directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers.’ Today it’s tempting to add a fourth name to this list: the Conservative Friends of Israel. The CFI counts an estimated 80 per cent of Tory MPs among its members. It can whistle up cabinet ministers for its dinners and has superb access to Downing Street and Whitehall. This week, the CFI pulled off what looks like yet another coup with the remarkably muted British government reaction to Israel’s killing of approximately 60 and wounding of more than 2,500 Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border.

John R. MacArthur

The right stuff | 17 May 2018

To some, Tom Wolfe’s death might seem a greater loss for readers on the right wing of American culture and politics, since he viewed himself as a conservative, very much in keeping with his upbringing in the Richmond, Virginia, of the 1930s and 1940s. His gentleman’s manners and soft-spoken demeanour recalled another era — a class-defined and racially segregated world of courtliness and formal collars. Wolfe famously picked on liberal targets throughout his remarkable career: his most savage satires addressed the pretensions of leftish icons from Leonard Bernstein to, most recently, Noam Chomsky.

Matt Ridley

The art of the impossible

The extermination of every single one of South Georgia’s rats, for the sake of its birds, was confirmed at a press conference in London last week. A summer of searching with dogs and bait two years after the last poison was deployed turned up no sign of a rodent. This achievement is remarkable, not least because it was deemed impossible right up until it was achieved. It was a barmy idea, way out there, crazy, bound to fail. Like lots of other ideas. Maybe there’s a lesson here. The island got infested with rats from whaling ships centuries ago, and they soon exterminated endemic pintails and pipits from the main island, driving the remnant populations of prions and petrels into the rat-free mountains. Only the penguins were rat proof.

George Mccoy

The whip hand

Spanking is back in the news. Le vice anglais was meant to be a dying art — a vestige of a time when men were more repressed, but it’s recently become clear that British men enjoy a thrashing just as much as they ever did. In the past few weeks a London barrister, Robert Jones, has claimed he was unfairly dismissed after a consensual spanking session with a junior worker, while up north a ‘dungeon master’ called Shaun O’Driscoll, who has thrashed diplomats and a duke, gave evidence at Bolton Crown Court. Then there’s the big one: the claims by the erotic actress Stormy Daniels that she spanked Donald Trump with a rolled-up copy of Time magazine that had his face on the cover. Why do powerful men like to be spanked?

Lara Prendergast

The House of Soho

I have a phobia of wedding lists. They always seem very presumptuous. Friends ask for monstrous amounts of things that I’m sure they don’t really want. I look at their lists and my heart sinks. I know I should buy something, but what to choose from all the overpriced paraphernalia? I wonder if the guests of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle felt the same way when their royal wedding invitations arrived. It had been announced that the pair didn’t want presents and instead, donations should be made to seven charities that reflected their ‘shared values’. But then came the news that their ‘private’ wedding list would be held with Soho House. Does a royal couple really need their friends and family to buy them stuff to set them on their way?

Thursday

Christopher De Bellaigue

Trump’s folly

In the White House on Tuesday, with the world just where he wanted it — eyes on the TV, transfixed by his boldness — President Trump uprooted the Iran nuclear deal. Under this agreement, which was signed in July 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany, the Iranians mothballed significant parts of their rapidly advancing nuclear industry in return for sanctions relief. The country is now considerably further away from a bomb than it was before, and its nuclear facilities are subject to inspections of unusual intrusiveness.

Dominic Green

The end of the deal

For someone so frequently denounced as a liar, Donald Trump keeps an awful lot of promises. In the 2016 election campaign, he promised that he would take the United States out of the ‘terrible’ Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the ‘Iran deal’. Last October, he insisted that the Iran deal be renegotiated. In January, he warned that he was recertifying the deal in its original form for the last time, and again called for its renegotiation. On Tuesday, he kept his word. The despair with which this decision was met — especially by Britain, who sent Boris Johnson to plead on Fox News for the President to change his mind — seems to overlook an important point. The deal isn’t working.

Robert Tombs

Universities challenged | 10 May 2018

British universities have serious problems. The recent strikes protesting against a sudden reduction in pension rights were unusually effective, and a symptom of wider discontent. Yet international comparisons invariably show our universities to be among the best in the world, and incomparably the best in the European Union. This apparent paradox is easily resolved: universities in other countries have problems too, and often worse. Our problems are serious nevertheless.

Alastair Thomas

The ‘woke’ who do coke

Midnight in Shoreditch, and snaking round the brickwork of old east London is a line of chattering clubbers. Everyone seems to be queuing for something here: a new restaurant, or a new microbrewery. Inside the club, hipster students, bearded professionals and wealthy tourists fill the dance floor. I easily spot the drug dealers weaving in and out of the throng, full of entrepreneurial determination. Conspicuous, too, is the queue of clubbers waiting for the toilet. I feel a tap on my shoulder. ‘Mate, need any gear?’ I glance down to a hand clutching a bag of powder. I tell him I’ll pass, thanks. He doesn’t look disappointed; business is good. Two miles up the road in nearby Hackney, there were several more stabbings last week.

Laura Freeman

The emoji con

Smiley face. Sad face. Smoochy face. Sick face. Edvard Munch ‘Scream’ face. How are you feeling today? Any of the above? When I worked as a teacher at a Saturday school for children who were struggling with English and maths, my pupils, all of whom were primary school age, had two emotions: they were ‘good’ (breaktime) or they were ‘sad’ (seven times table, spelling test). Sometimes, when teaching one-on-one, working our way through cat, cat, cats and mat, mat, mats, with the boys who were furthest behind, I would ask: ‘How do you feel about school?’ They would say: ‘I feel sad.’ But they didn’t mean that. They meant: I feel frustrated. I feel thwarted. I feel ashamed, persecuted, wronged, neglected.

James Forsyth

Aussie rules | 10 May 2018

When friends speak, you should listen — and you would be hard pressed to find a better friend of this country in the London diplomatic corps than Alexander Downer. The 66-year-old, who has just finished a four-year stint as the Australian High Commissioner, is an Anglophile by instinct and upbringing. He spent much of his childhood here because his father was appointed to the job in 1964. When Downer’s father left in 1972, he worried about this country joining the European Economic Community and what that would mean for relations with Australia and other Commonwealth countries. So there is a neat symmetry in his son being High Commissioner when Britain decided to reverse that decision. But Downer is not particularly ideological about Brexit.