Features

Thursday

James Forsyth

Things can only get worse

The European Union might have many flaws, but one of its great strengths is its ability to sense weakness. It is telling, then, that Michel Barnier didn’t mince his words on his trip to the Irish border this week as he made the case for a goods border in the Irish sea. This is something that Theresa May has said no British prime minister could ever accept, and it’s anathema to most of her cabinet colleagues, not to mention the Democratic Unionist party’s MPs on whom she relies for support. So why would Barnier return to this theme? Because even from Brussels, it’s clear what a bind Mrs May is in. Not so long ago, she was hailed as the indestructible Maybot: the queen of all she surveyed.

David Goodhart

Notes on a scandal | 3 May 2018

The idea that left vs right has been replaced by open vs closed is one of the most self-serving conceits of contemporary politics. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society, but I have met plenty of people who think that the forms of openness of the past couple of decades have not served their interests. Factories and offices have moved abroad. EU free movement has brought a new workforce to compete with the one already here, and an extra four million people overall have arrived in the past 15 years, while wages have barely grown. Combine that with open public services and an estimated illegal migration population of at least 500,000 and you can see why so many people have not needed Nigel Farage’s help to worry about borders.

Cindy Yu

The wedding tourists

If you’ve walked by the red telephone boxes on Parliament Square, chances are you have seen an Asian couple in full wedding dress posing for a photographer. A strange place to go after a wedding, you might think, but the odds are that they’re not (yet) married — and won’t be for some time. This is, instead, a new Chinese phenomenon: the pre-wedding photo shoot. Pre-weddings are now as essential to young Chinese couples as honeymoons are to the British. With ever more money to splash, and their sights set on farther horizons, a sweet pose under a blue sky is no longer enough, as it was for my parents. Today’s twentysomethings demand to see what it would be like to be the protagonists in their own global fairy tale: gown, tiara and all.

Mark Palmer

Good grief

Just over a year ago, my best friend dropped dead. He was in his early sixties and many of us expected him to die, because he was hugely overweight and desperately unhappy — and the ciggies can’t have helped. ‘If you don’t look after yourself, we’re going to lose you,’ was the polite refrain from those who knew him well. Chris had no money, no real job, precious little hope. We first met as new boys aged eight at our boarding school, where he went on to become one of the best sportsmen the school had ever had and sat a scholarship for Harrow. Early success might have played a part in what was to come. We all know people who peak prematurely. On leaving school, Chris and I and then shared a tent while hitchhiking through Canada and America.

Nancy Mitford

Diary of a revolution

In May 1968, civil unrest, bordering on revolution, exploded on to the streets of Paris. Student protesters and striking workers brought France’s economy to a standstill. President Charles de Gaulle warned of civil war. The Spectator’s then editor, Nigel Lawson, asked Nancy Mitford for a diary on the unfolding drama, which she followed from her house, about a mile from Versailles. This is an edited extract. 16 May We have heard the young leaders of the revolution on TV for three quarters of an hour. Having said how much they despised everything in life, especially money, they keenly gave the numbers of their bank accounts so that we could hurry out and send them some. There was a great deal of wailing about their treatment by the police. I despise them for it.

Melanie McDonagh

The Irish question

The Irish referendum on abortion takes place in just under three weeks’ time, and while the polls suggest a hefty majority in favour, the narrative of inexorable change towards a more liberal Ireland sometimes goes off script. At a feminist forum last month, the anarchic grande dame of Irish republican feminism, Nell McCafferty, 74, brooded out loud: ‘I’ve been trying to make up my mind on abortion. Is it the killing of a human being?’ She couldn’t answer. ‘But it’s not that I’m unable — I am unwilling to face some of the facts about abortion.’ You can’t imagine that kind of plain speaking in Britain. Yet the debate in Ireland revolves around first principles to an extent that would be impossible here.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Hooray for the adventuress

I’m keen on all sorts of my fellow females — broads, gold-diggers, career girls — but the best is the adventuress. According to Merriam-Webster, she is ‘a) a woman who seeks dangerous or exciting experiences; b) a woman who seeks position or livelihood by questionable means’. To me she is an admirable character who simply seeks to make life an awfully big adventure rather than be merely hatched, matched and dispatched as women historically were expected to be. If people are either radiators or drains, she is a blast furnace determined to use her youth and beauty as fuel to be burned rather than fruit to be preserved.

Jenny McCartney

Meghan’s hour

The wedding of Prince Harry, sixth in line to the British throne, and Meghan Markle, actress and former star of the legal drama Suits, is almost upon us. The cake has been commissioned from a Hackney bakery — ‘a lemon elderflower cake that will incorporate the bright flavours of spring’, according to a palace statement — and alterations are still being made to the wedding dress (the bride reportedly keeps shrinking). By 19 May, the spotlight will be firmly on the bride and groom, since William and Kate are again in the bleary-eyed enchanted zone of new parents, this time of a baby boy: Kate has thus been relieved of any formal role, save the task of turning up with the wriggling newborn at the wedding.

Liam Halligan

‘We need to get creative’

‘It was Plato who said storytellers rule the world,’ observes Mariana Mazzucato, her powerful voice tempered with a beaming smile, ‘But the stories we’re constantly told about how value is created are largely myths. We must rethink where wealth really comes from.’ An economics professor at University College London, Mazzucato is fast emerging as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. From her high-ceilinged office in Bloomsbury, a host of grant-making bodies on speed dial, this 49-year-old Italian-American is determined to ‘replace our current parasitic system with a more sustainable, symbiotic type of capitalism’. Mazzucato emerged from the academic shadows five years ago, when she wrote The Entrepreneurial State.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Cricket, unlovely cricket

In 2005 I published a book called The Strange Death of Tory England, and a long article called ‘Cricket’s final over’, lamenting the decline of the game. The book appeared shortly before an election in which, although Labour easily kept its majority, the Tories gained seats, presaging a great revival, or so Charles Moore later claimed while genially deriding my book. The piece on cricket appeared, with even more faultless timing, in the September issue of Prospect, at the very moment when England had just regained the Ashes, with the victorious team, including a gloriously hungover Andrew Flintoff, touring London in an open-topped bus and inevitably bidden to meet Tony Blair, while a wave of enthusiasm swept the country.

Guy Walters

Appetite for destruction

Have you ever thrown something away and then realised that you needed it? Surely all of us have done so. There is even a collective noun for such items in The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: ‘nottage.’ However, it is not just people who have nottage, but governments as well. Last week, we learned how the Home Office in October 2010 had destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival by boat of immigrants into this country. These slips, stored in the basement of an anonymous tower block, had been particularly useful for Home Office caseworkers when seeking to prove how long somebody had been resident in the UK.

Ross Clark

Save the Scouts

A couple of years ago, Simon Barnes wrote a moving piece in this magazine about how his son Eddie, who has Down’s syndrome, had changed his mind about political correctness. Political correctness might be met with derision, he wrote, but it was also what made his son’s life bearable. In the not-so-distant past, Eddie would have been shut away and people like him made fun of in everyday conversation; now he is received everywhere with kindness and consideration. Simon was right. I am in the same position as him: I have a daughter, Eliza, who has grown up in a world of kindness that is a world away from that in which I grew up. I hate to think of the bullying and abuse she would have to endure if she were transported back in time to the 1970s classrooms I knew.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Brexit blunders

A few months ago, Britain’s most senior ambassadors gathered in the Foreign Office to compare notes on Brexit. There was one problem in particular that they did not know how to confront. As one ambassador put it, the English--language publications in their cities (it would be rude to name them) had become rabidly anti-Brexit: keen to portray a country having a nervous and economic breakdown. Their boss, the Foreign Secretary, later summed it up: many believe that Brexit was the whole country flicking a V-sign from the white cliffs of Dover. The job of his ambassadors is to correct this awful image. But how? Their plight has not been made much easier by the Prime Minister.

Dominic Green

A bipartisan bungler

Americans forget their corruption in order to savour their innocence. When Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find ways forward and the presidency is all over the road, the combat of ex-FBI director James Comey and reality television star Donald Trump is almost heartening. For, despite partisan division and the rise of China, the drama of the American psyche survives. The puritan grips the porn-ographer, and the spirit of the civil servant contends with the flesh of the president. The excitement over last Sunday’s ABC News interview with Comey was almost as much as that around Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury. So much has happened since that worthy mishmash of secondhand gossip hit the remainder bins in January.

James Tooley

We’re not talking Eton

Private schools in the United Kingdom are affordable only to those on the highest incomes. But surprisingly to many, this is not true across developing countries, where low-cost private schools are ubiquitous and affordable to all. For nearly two decades I’ve been researching this phenomenon. I’ve visited low-cost private schools in more than 20 countries, from the vibrant slums of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to remote mountain villages in South-east Asia and the gang-dominated barrios of Central and Latin America. It truly is a global phenomenon, serving huge numbers of children. In Lagos State, Nigeria, alone, there are an estimated 14,000 low-cost private schools, serving two million children.

Aidan Hartley

Let kids learn

Why would anyone who claims to care about the world’s poorest children try to shut down their schools? It’s strange and sad, but several British charities, in cahoots with some British unions, are making a concerted effort to close down hundreds of schools in Africa. They are doing this because they dislike private education, seeming not to care that this will destroy the life chances of thousands of desperate children, forcing them, at best, into state schools where the teachers are often absent, drunk or incapable. The campaign involves not only an alphabet soup of left-leaning charities from Action Aid to Amnesty International but also Unison and the National Union of Teachers (NUT).

Christopher Coker

The future of war

Imagine Peace. These were the words that appeared on an otherwise blank page in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 2013. They were paid for by Yoko Ono and they are of course an echo of John Lennon’s most famous song. A few days later, the Guardian conducted an opinion poll in which it asked its readers whether they thought the advert would produce world peace. Surprisingly, a third of the respondents thought that it would, though there was little evidence around the world to confirm them in that hope. By then, the civil war in Syria had already claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 people. It’s now about 400,000. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if war were just an idea, a very bad one, and that universal peace could be achieved by just imagining it?

Thursday

Paul Wood

Countdown to war?

 Beirut ‘Gas!’ Bodies piled up grotesquely in a stairwell. No sign of injuries. A father cradles two small children. Still, pale as ghosts. A doctor says the victims died suffocating, foaming at the mouth. One man declares: ‘I could feel my lungs shutting down.’ Babies getting hosed with water in a makeshift hospital. These words and images from the Syrian town of Douma filled the rolling news channels on Monday. They capture the peculiar terror and moral repugnance of chemical weapons … if it is true, as reported, that these weapons were used. One viewer in particular was glued to cable news, as is his habit: Donald Trump.

Freddy Gray

En marche

Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal relationship as leaders of their respective countries by interlocking palms and refusing to let go. They kept at it for a good 30 seconds. They didn’t release even as Trump began kissing Macron’s wife. It looked like the beginnings of a bitter rivalry. But Trump and Macron weren’t clashing. They were flirting. The night before, the two men — plus wives — had had an intimate dinner in the Eiffel Tower, and they bonded. A great bromance had been born. For all his posturing, Macron treated the US President like an emperor in Paris.

Fraser Nelson

Meeting the Mooch

When Anthony Scaramucci announced that he was writing a book about his time with Donald Trump, the joke was that it should be entitled ‘Ten Days That Shook the World’. This, he says, does him an injustice because he managed 11 days as White House communications director before being fired — after a lava flow of stories that seemed extraordinary even by Trumpian standards. But he remained loyal to the President, and has been speaking in his defence ever since. This book promises to reveal one of the deepest mysteries in American politics: how Trump’s mind works. ‘I’m almost done with the manuscript,’ he says, fresh from a meeting with his publishers in New York. ‘Obviously, my short stint in the White House won’t be a major drama.