Features

Thursday

Joel Edington

My identity crisis

I’m sitting at home working, minding my business, and the mobile rings. It’s DC Lyle from Wandsworth police station. He says that my name was given to Crimestoppers anonymously as a potential witness to the ‘Putney Pusher’ incident. Remember that nutter who barged a woman into the path of a bus on Putney Bridge while out for his morning jog? Well, six months on and they still haven’t found him — and DC Lyle wants to meet. I say I couldn’t possibly help as I wasn’t a witness. DC Lyle says he still needs to meet. I reaffirm there really was no point, I could be of no value; I wasn’t there. DC Lyle insists, and in doing so mentions that he has my email address, and that he tried to see me at my office yesterday (I wasn’t in). What?

Emmanuel Macron

My plan for Europe

The European Union has languished and become enfeebled — and we are all to blame. There is a noticeable paucity of ideas and methods. The whole system has capitulated and is at a standstill. Summits bringing together heads of state and of government have become a parody: getting together behind closed doors, repeating lofty principles, changing a word or two in a statement so that it sounds slightly different from the last one. The system is cut off from the world and from real life. What did the Breton farmers I have met in the past few months think? They did not say that they were against Europe, or against the Common Agricultural Policy that is so important to us.

Fraser Nelson

Salman’s Arabia

There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp. Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old, and his effective seizure of power means he defines the kingdom for a generation. He’s seen in Whitehall as a history maker, whose ruthless impatience might not only liberalise his country but create an alliance with Israel that could change the region. Minsters talk about MbS (as he’s known in Whitehall) with admiration and awe. He recently laid on a trade fair, and the British delegation was amazed to hear a band playing upon arrival at the airport.

John R. Bradley

Desert storm

Until last weekend, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh’s exclusive Diplomatic Quarter was colloquially known as the Princes’ Hotel. It was a luxurious retreat from the heat, where royals could engage in the kind of wheeling and dealing with the global business elite that had made them millionaires on the back of the 1970s oil boom. No deal could be brokered without paying a bribe to at least one prince. Last Saturday that era of boundless opportunity and total impunity came to a dramatic end. The VIP guests were booted out, the front doors were shuttered, and heavily armed security forces took up positions around the perimeter. A Saudi who lives nearby sent me a message about what he thought was an unfolding terrorist incident.

Matthew Lynn

Thank havens

Maybe we should blame John Grisham. In his breakthrough best-seller The Firm, the young lawyer Mitch, played by Tom Cruise in the movie, has to make regular trips to the Cayman Islands where the corrupt law firm he works for creates hundreds of shell companies for the assorted cast of money launderers, tax dodgers and gangsters who are its core client base. Ever since then, the murky ‘offshore centre’ has become a staple of the post-Cold War thriller: a place where, amid the palm trees and skyscrapers, sharply dressed financiers salt away billions, safely out of view of any government.

Jenny Coad

The tables turned

Dining rooms have been in the doldrums for decades. Even Mary Berry has given up on hers. ‘Most of us, I think, live in the kitchen,’ she said recently. She’s right. Plenty of us don’t have a dining room to give up on, me included. Plenty more have knocked down what once divided a dining room from a kitchen to create an airy, open-plan ‘living space’ where we do battle with avocados and everything else. We might be obsessed with what we are and aren’t eating but we don’t stand on ceremony. Nigella Lawson admits she slurps noodles ‘hypnotically’ while watching TV on the sofa. ‘If it can be eaten out of a bowl, I’m very happy to eat while I watch,’ she said.

Melissa Kite

Sex, truth and politics

This one goes out to all the male MPs I’ve taken to lunch. I want to apologise to each and every one of you. Some of you know who you are and what went on. Some of you were so tipsy you may not have been fully aware of how shockingly you were being exploited. I estimate there are dozens, if not hundreds, of you whom I’ve taken to lunch, dinner and drinks during my time as a political correspondent. In dark bars and expensive restaurants, or just casually in Commons corridors, I’ve sidled up to you in a designer outfit and pretty much said ‘Howdy, right honourable!’ Look, it was a long time ago and I’m practically an old lady now, in media years.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Blurred lines

We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries, this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear, and nearly all sexual opportunities into a legalistic minefield. The rules are being redrawn with little idea of where the boundaries of this new sexual utopia will lie and less idea still of whether any sex will be allowed in the end. It is partly whipped along by the fact that each episode in the revolution is so grimly fascinating, and each has its own internal propulsions. For instance, nobody outside Hollywood could regret the disgrace of an overpraised toad who spent far too long surrounded by overly attractive people.

Lara Prendergast

The sexual reformation

Nell Minow, an American film critic, recently described how in 2010 she had interviewed the Friends actor David Schwimmer. When the noise in the restaurant grew too loud, he asked her whether she might like to move to a room upstairs with him, and if so, would she like a chaperone present. She praised him for this behaviour. ‘He understood what it is like to have to be constantly on the alert and he wanted to make sure I understood I was safe.’ When I read Minow’s story, my reaction was to think what a patronising arse Schwimmer must be. A woman journalist shouldn’t need a chaperone when she is doing her job. But, in the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein allegations, it has become clear that, for many women, safety is starting to trump liberty.

Colin Freeman

Despot hero

James Sackie would make a good frontman for a campaign to help ex-child soldiers. At the age of 17, he was press-ganged into one of Charles Taylor’s juvenile militias. Twenty years on, he talks movingly, in his matter-of-fact pidgin English, about the dreadful things he saw, including the day he had to stop his own baby son, JR, being whisked away as lunch for a general called Eat Human Being. But ask Sackie about Taylor himself and he changes. Taylor is a war hero, not a war criminal, James insists. And if he were freed from his jail cell in Britain, where he’s currently serving 50 years for war crimes, James would welcome him back as leader of Liberia. Not the kind of talk that gets donors reaching for their chequebooks.

Paul Wood

The Wasp’s sting

 Kiev Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort worked for the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych started out as a petty thief in the bleak Soviet city of Donetsk. He stole fur hats from men using its outside toilets. He would reach over the door as they squatted, defenceless, and flee while their trousers were still around their ankles. Even among the criminals of Donetsk, this was thought low behaviour. ‘It’s hard to imagine now that we had such a character as a president of the country,’ said Alex Kovzhun, a Ukrainian political consultant. Kovzhun joyfully put this story on thousands of mock newspaper front pages during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Madeleine Kearns

Class struggle

Once one of the best in the world, Scotland’s education system has been steadily marching backwards for the past ten years. From the outside, it seems baffling: why, given that Scottish spending per pupil is among the highest in the world, are things going so wrong? From the inside, it’s far easier to understand. You can explain it in three words: Curriculum for Excellence. I’d heard stories about it before I started training as a teacher. By the time I qualified — in April last year — how I wished I’d listened to them. The story starts in 2010, when the new system was introduced with four aims: to create ‘confident individuals’, ‘successful learners’, ‘responsible citizens’ and ‘effective contributors’.

Thursday

Carey Layton

A model life

This season, as London fashion week was starting, Vogue posted a video following the new model of the moment Kaia Gerber (who is Cindy Crawford’s daughter). It was so far from the reality of being a model that I almost couldn’t watch it: Kaia walking for all the top designers in her very first season; Kaia entering her ‘home for the week’ (a hotel room bigger than my apartment); Kaia being driven everywhere in a Mercedes SUV; Kaia and her friends jumping around on her massive bed, clad head to toe in Chanel and ordering room service… When I first started modelling I expected it to be just like that. It’s the picture pushed by the media and the fantasy of teenage girls worldwide.

Lenore Skenazy

The danger of no danger

We all know about helicopter parents and how terrible they can be. In New York, where I live, a mother sued her child’s $19,000-a-year nursery because her four-year-old was spending too much time playing with two-year-olds, thus ruining her chances of one day getting into an Ivy League university. Huge story, but I suppose I can’t talk, since I’m the gal who let her nine-year-old take the subway alone and got dubbed ‘America’s Worst Mom’. Still, the other mom’s shame came from not believing her kid would be fine. She didn’t realise that mixed-age play is the greatest thing for kids since the invention of the sippy cup. For her daughter, lording it over those two-year-olds could have taught her how to rule the world.

Rod Liddle

The kids aren’t all right

Now that the Scots have banned people from smacking kids — both their own and, presumably, those that belong to other people — I suppose we will dutifully follow suit and another one of life’s harmless little pleasures will have bitten the dust. Fair enough, we can still say horrible, frightening things to them in order to exert a bit of discipline. But the immense satisfaction of hearing them howl in pain from a sharp slap to the leg, or a nasty pinch to the upper arm, will be gone for good.  Not many parents do hit their kids any more. It is already a vanishing art. Smacking unruly brats has been de trop for ages, especially among the middle classes.

Julie Burchill

The return of Lady Muck

My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant — and like most women of her kind who grew up before the 1960s, she never swore. Not a ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ ever passed her lips, though she certainly loathed a lot of women and always had at least two feuds on the go. In her eyes, using words like that would have made her just as bad as the targets of her disapproval. No, her ultimate diss for females she disliked was ‘Lady Muck’.

Jonathan Maitland

The idiot box

How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality and television host’. To which I would add only: ‘Britain’s first TV superstar.’ (To some he was also ‘The Bubonic Plagiarist’, but we won’t dwell on that.) That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report and The Nixon Interviews made him a key cultural figure of the 1960s and 1970s. But his true significance struck me only recently. He may have damaged Britain, unintentionally, as much as anyone in living memory. Frost, in my view, was a Pied Piper who helped to lure a generation of the brightest and best away from meaningful careers and into the often vacuous, inconsequential world of television.

Frank Field

Destitution is the new British disease

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises when a family or individual is hungry, unable to afford gas and electricity, and on the brink of homelessness. It was apparent to me then that too many people at the bottom of the pile who fall on hard times are slipping through holes in the nation’s safety net — some are even forced through those holes by the modern welfare state. The model of how society worked, which I had picked up as a child of the 1945 Attlee Government, survived my decade at the Child Poverty Action Group and many of the years I have spent as Birkenhead’s MP. It is the model that most voters held — a great story of British progress.

Mary Wakefield

The universal credit crunch

It only dawned on me in late summer just how terrible our new benefits system, universal credit, might be both for the poor souls who depend on it and for the bedraggled Conservative party. An old friend, Terry, alerted me to the depth of the problem. Terry is 70-odd and has learning difficulties, though he’s astute in many ways and quite startlingly kind. He has a room in a shared house, but like many in precarious or temporary housing, he’s a regular on the homeless scene: part of a growing drift of men and women who move around London morning till night, from the St Martin-in-the-Fields day centre to the Hare Krishna food vans in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

John R. Bradley

Arabian nights

Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you get an idea of the hysteria currently surrounding gay men in Egypt. That’s not an arbitrary analogy. The social ramifications of coming out as a ‘gay man’ in most parts of the Middle East are the same as for some chap on a council estate in Barnsley declaring in a packed pub at closing time that he has a 12-year-old girlfriend. Two detained gay rights campaigners who waved the rainbow flag at a recent Cairo pop concert, and thus provoked the clampdown, are presently learning that the hard way.