Features

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Momentum isn’t hard left. It’s a theatrical cult

Hard left, my arse. Sorry to be vulgar, but surely that’s how Jim Royle, couch-potato patriarch of that glorious sitcom The Royle Family, would have reacted to reports that the ‘hard left’ Momentum movement is planning a ‘massacre of the moderates’ in the parliamentary Labour party. Don’t get me wrong. Having seized control of Labour’s National Executive Committee, Momentum is itching to purge the party’s benches of MPs who are insufficiently obsequious to Jeremy Corbyn. But calling this fragile political sect ‘hard’ left is silly. ‘Far’ left, perhaps — but let’s not confuse Momentum activists with the powerful Marxist bruisers of 40 years ago.

Jenny McCartney

The new feminist war: young women vs old women

The #MeToo movement began, I thought, primarily to allow women to speak out about harassment from men, which they had previously found too intimidating to declare openly. What is striking is how quickly it has turned into a row between women. Social media is crackling with barely concealed inter-generational rage between feminists of different vintages. Younger feminists are very keen on ‘calling out’ slut-shaming, victim-shaming and fat-shaming. They’re less vocal about age-shaming, though, because they’re quite often doing it themselves. The combative 78-year-old Germaine Greer, for example, has long been deemed philosophically flawed by younger feminists because of her view that trans women are not ‘real’ women.

Thursday

Ross Clark

The great plastic panic

Has an albatross ever wielded so much influence? The bewildered chick who regurgitated a plastic bag in front of Sir David Attenborough’s camera crew — fed to him by his mother after she had scooped it from the sea — has caused one of those regular ructions in public opinion. The supermarket chain Iceland has announced it would phase out all plastic packaging from its own-brand foods. The compulsory 5p charge on supermarket plastic bags is to be extended to all shops in England and a 25p ‘latte levy’ may be put on coffee cups containing plastic. Plastic ‘microbeads’ have been banned from cosmetic products. Such initiatives are largely a reflection of a sudden and violent public concern over plastic.

Tom Ball

Red sunset, red dawn

Last year, more than 15,000 communists gathered in the Russian seaside town of Sochi for a week-long commemoration of the centenary of Lenin’s revolution. Nearly every nation was represented. Stalls manned by party members from Zimbabwe, Greece, Cuba and India lined the narrow concourse of the event’s main piazza. Under the eye of the Russian police, celebrants staged rallies, meetings and marathon seminars. The daughter of Che Guevara was there. After giving a lecture on the legacy of her father, she received a standing ovation that lasted more than five minutes. ‘It feels like 1959 again,’ someone said when the cheering had finally died down.

Colin Freeman

Amazing grace | 18 January 2018

Last week, Peregbakumo Oyawerikumo, aka ‘The Master’, was finally caught and shot by the Nigerian army. Oyawerikumo and his Egbesu Boys had styled themselves as local Robin Hoods, taking riches from oil companies in the Niger Delta, but they won’t be much missed. In the remote swamp town of Enekorogha, their demise will be celebrated, because this was the scene of their most notorious crime. It was here, last October, that the Egbesu Boys kidnapped Ian Squire, an optician from Surrey who was working at a clinic, and three fellow Britons: Cambridgeshire GP David Donovan and his wife Shirley, and optometrist Alanna Carson, from Northern Ireland.

Douglas Murray

A star is born

Last Sunday night a capacity crowd of mainly young people packed into the Emmanuel Centre in London. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood at the back of the hall. When the speaker entered, the entire hall rose to its feet. It was his second lecture that day, the fourth across three days of sold-out London events. For an hour and a half the audience listened to a rambling, quirky, but fascinating tour of evolutionary biology, myth, religion, psychology, dictators and Dostoyevsky. Occasionally a line would get its own burst of applause. One of the loudest came after the speaker’s appeal for the sanctity of marriage and child-rearing. Yet this was not a Christian revivalist meeting. At least not explicitly or intendedly so.

Ian Thomson

Steamy encounters

With my friend Maurice, I have long frequented the Ironmonger Row baths behind Moorfields Eye Hospital. As married men, we appreciated the circumspect and respectful behaviour; for a few quid one felt properly laved and rejuvenated. Nakedness is a great leveller. City traders mingled with taxi drivers; a High Court judge might ‘testiculate’ (talk bollocks) with Maurice, a Labour peer. Afterwards in our robes we relaxed in the cooling-room over cups of tea; the steam induced a state of blissful lassitude. In 2012, after an ill-spent £16 million refurbishment, the baths were reopened as the Old Street Spa Experience. At a stroke, the local community was priced out: only transient businessmen and affluent Islingtonians can afford the exorbitant entry fee.

Harry Mount

Holy lands

Holy smoke! The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon. This month, it emerged that since 2010 the church has laid claim to minerals under 585,000 acres of land, including territory it doesn’t actually own. Its current holdings amount to only 105,000 acres, but it retains the underground mineral rights to vast areas that used to belong to the church. And it’s making damn sure it retains those rights. The church has sent letters to thousands of people, telling them they don’t own the gilt-edged minerals below its land. In its defence, the church says it’s just doing its statutory duty in registering the rights.

Theodore Dalrymple

Let’s abolish parole

The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unwork-able in practice. The only thing that it is good for is the employment of large numbers of officials engaged in pointless or fatuous tasks who might other-wise be unemployed. The system is predicated on the ability of experts to predict the future conduct of convicted prisoners. Will they or will they not repeat their crimes if let out early? It is true that, using a few simple statistical measures, such as numbers of past convictions and age, you can predict this with an accuracy somewhat better than chance. But all further efforts to refine prediction actually reduce, not increase, accuracy.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Twitter inquisition

A friend of mine at university had a rule: he didn’t want anything to appear online that might ruin a future political career. On nights out, when photos were being taken, he’d quietly move out of the picture. While we were all wittering away to each other on social media, he kept schtum. Strange, I remember thinking. Why so paranoid? I thought of my friend when Toby Young started making headlines. After Toby was appointed one of the 14 non-executive members of the Office for Students, he discovered to his cost that his past — preserved as it is online — could be dredged up by those who wanted to sabotage his advancement. The campaign against him worked. The Twitter-storm gathered such strength that it sucked in newspapers and politicians.

James Grogono

Smooth operators

In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, written early last century, the knife-happy surgeon invents a nut-shaped abdominal organ, the ‘nuciform sac’. It is situated near the appendix, ‘full of decaying matter’, and requires removal, assuming the patient can afford the fee. The surgeon, Cutler Walpole, has the line: ‘The operation ought to be compulsory.’ Bernard Shaw labours the point that removal of the nuciform sac equals 500 guineas, and not removing it equals nought guineas. He then suggests, wickedly, that we want our surgeons to be mortal, ‘quite as honest as most of us’, not God-like.

Melissa Kite

A bird-brained scheme

While walking or riding on the beautiful heathland near my home, I have noticed a growing number of signs telling me to respect ground-nesting birds. I keep the dogs close. I don’t let the horses trample through the undergrowth. But that is not proving good enough for the wildlife authorities who have begun to spend millions of pounds on a bizarre programme to divert human beings from large areas of heathland — not only where I walk but in dozens of other places across the south-east of England, so that these popular beauty spots can be left for the birds.

Boris Johnson

Girl power | 11 January 2018

The world is blessed with a brilliant and industrious UN secretary-general, and it was certainly worth tuning in last week to watch António Guterres deliver his New Year message to the planet. As season’s greetings go, it was not exactly festive. Intercut with shots of attack choppers and bombed-out cities, the UN secretary-general discharged a one-and-a-half minute jeremiad in which we learned that inequality was deepening; global warming was out of control; xenophobia and nationalism were on the march, not to mention war, famine, pestilence and other afflictions, as though 2018 were beginning with a positive cavalry charge of apocalyptic horsemen. He was putting out an alert, he said, a ‘red alert’ on the state of humanity.

Owen Matthews

Political football

Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of nation states competing for glory that appeals to leaders who wish to show off the greatness of their country to the world. Berlin ’36, Moscow ’80, Sochi ’14 — nothing says ‘we’re here, get used to it’ better than a giant sporting jamboree. The 2018 football World Cup doesn’t offer quite the same degree of validation as an Olympic Games. But for Vladimir Putin, it’s still a major opportunity to demonstrate not only Russia’s new-found greatness but also its continued membership of the civilised world.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Look down on me at your peril: I’ll eat you alive

Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk. It’s there for inspiration, she says, a daily reminder of the general incompetence of the Conservative government and the need for its removal. ‘That picture motivates me, in a strange way,’ she says when we meet. ‘They are doing such a bad job of Brexit, and a lot of people will be let down. Again. The people who already think that politicians are lower than a snake’s belly.’ The anger is with politicians in general. ‘It just feels that this generation is not doing a very good job.’ Ms Rayner, 37, has been a politician for not even three years and her rise has been nothing short of extraordinary.

Douglas Murray

Indefensible silence

If there is one lesson the world should have learned from Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ of 2009 and the so-called Arab Spring that followed, it is this: the worst regimes stay. Rulers who are only averagely appalling (Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) can be toppled by uprisings. Those who are willing to kill every one of their countrymen stay. So it is that after almost half a million dead we enter 2018 with Bashar al-Assad still President of Syria and with Iran’s mullahs approaching the 40th anniversary of their seizure of power in 1979. Last week this lesson got a chance to be learned again when protests broke out on streets across Iran, and the world wondered which date this one might echo. A revolution finally to counter 1979?

David Goodhart

Continental divides

What do Europeans really think about Brexit? Do they secretly admire our unexpected decision to walk away from all those pesky regulations and sub-committees? Or are our former ‘European friends’ relieved the arrogant, entitled Brits are leaving them alone? The official response of the European political class is one of regret combined with studied indifference and a determination not to let Brexit weaken the project. That, broadly, seems to be the unofficial response too. The EU, after a couple of decades of declining popularity and a rising populist challenge, has actually seen a small up-tick in popularity since Brexit, according to the Eurobarometer polling organisation. Trust in the EU stands at 42 per cent, ten points up since 2015 and the highest level since 2010.

Nigel Jones

Anthem for groomed youth

This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first world war. A bare week before the conflict concluded in a grey November, another poet, Sassoon’s friend and protégé Wilfred Owen, whose work now epitomises the waste and futility of that struggle, was cut down by a machine-gun as he tried to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal in one of the war’s last battles. Owen’s sombre verse, the ‘poetry of pity’ as he called it, came to represent the disillusion and despair that set in as casualties climbed into the millions and the blood of Britain’s youth drained hopelessly away in the Flanders mud.

Mark Mason

Read ’em and weep

Subtitles are taking over the world. It’s increasingly rare these days for a video clip to be free of those irritating little bars along the bottom, rendering before your eyes what your ears are coping with quite easily, thank you very much. That interview you clicked on from Twitter? There are the speaker’s words subtitled below. That report on a news website? There are the subtitles again, spelling out everything from the presenter’s narration to the sound effects in the background. Even pop songs have their lyrics displayed. It’s driving me mad. ‘Don’t look at the subtitles,’ comes the reply. But that’s the really annoying thing: you have to look at them.

Jon Moynihan

Falling short | 4 January 2018

Hedge funds have already spotted it: Jim Mellon’s latest book, Juvenescence, reviews the new science that will lengthen our lives by 20 years. Through regeneration (stem cell) and repair (DNA) technologies, we’ll soon be living healthily and happily to 110 or more. How soon? Who knows. But the repercussions will be enormous. Major insurance companies will go bust; speculators will make a fortune shorting them; 90-year-olds who bought annuities will become destitute when their annuity provider fails; there will have to be a total rethink of the nation’s state pension age. The annuity recipients; those without savings; company pension funds (many of which are already in negative cash flow): all will be in trouble.