Features

Thursday

James Forsyth

Theresa’s choice

The Brexit ‘inner cabinet’ met on Monday. It was meant to be an important meeting, one which made some real progress on deciding what kind of economic relationship with the EU the UK is seeking. Senior civil servants had been told that the crucial topic of the Irish border would be on the agenda. This is one of the hardest parts of the Brexit equation to solve, and the answer will reveal plenty about the kind of trade deal the UK is seeking and the trade-offs it is prepared to make. But when the agenda for the meeting was circulated on Friday night, Ireland was not there. This left only data and security — the two least controversial of the nine questions that the Brexit cabinet is meant to address.

Freddy Gray

The man who wouldn’t be president

Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew. Russia needs a tough politician in the presidential chair and I am not that man.’ Titov knows that on 18 March, Vladimir Putin, the toughest politician of our age, will be re-elected as Russia’s Supreme Commander-in-Chief. ‘Everybody understands that,’ he says. ‘We are not stupid. I have common sense.’ Which prompts the question: why run?

Cosmo Landesman

MenToo

These are tough times for what I call the #MeToo Men — those white, liberal, high-minded men who pride themselves on being good feminists. Disgusted with Trump and horrified by Harvey, they want to show solidarity and be good allies to the women of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. So they wear their feminist hearts on their sleeves and their Time’s Up pins in their lapels — and they wear them with pride. But pride comes before the fall, especially if you try to parade your feminist credentials in public. Just ask actor James Franco and comedian Aziz Ansari. After appearing at the recent Golden Globe awards, both of these #MeToo Men were spotted sporting Time’s Up pins and ended up being denounced for sexual misconduct. Poor Franco.

Jason Mitchell

Inside out

‘I murder people!’ says Elanger matter-of-factly in response to my question about what he does for a living. From the comfort of my home in the UK, I have managed to get in touch, through contacts of contacts on Facebook, with someone serving 19 years in prison for double murder in Venezuela. The country has some of the most notorious jails in the world. Inside one of them, Elanger has got hold of a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. Between 2010 and 2014, I lived in a student city called Mérida in the Venezuelan Andes. It is a beautiful old colonial town and was a fun place, full of bars and discos.

Simon Ings

A robot to love

‘I gotta be me,’ Sammy Davis Jr. croons as the android Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) steadies her horse, stands up on her stirrups, takes aim with her Winchester, and picks off her human masters one by one. The trailer’s out at last and the futuristic TV series Westworld is set to return in the spring. It’s a prescient show, but not in the ways you might expect. It’s not about robot domination. Westworld is about an uprising of pleasure cyborgs in a futuristic resort. It is, for all its gunplay, about love. And that makes it a very timely show indeed. In the real world, robots are actually being designed to love us — to fill traditional caring roles for which we have neither the time, energy, nor resources.

Thursday

John Osullivan

A new Europe | 25 January 2018

The occasion was a central European conference on the subversive disinformation campaigns of Putin’s Russia (which, incidentally, are real, subtle, and potentially effective). The speaker was an American warning that the central European democracies were in imminent danger of succumbing to the lures of authoritarian populism, even of abandoning democracy itself, under this influence. He cited the probable election of the media billionaire Andrej Babis as prime minister in Czech elections as one sign of this democratic collapse. A heavy sigh came from a European participant, standing next to me: ‘Why do Americans exaggerate so?

Alex Massie

Ukip’s victory

The continuing saga of Henry Bolton’s notional leadership of Ukip continues to amaze and amuse and appal in equal measure. The press loves a freak show and, in the absence of anything better, Ukip is the best circus in town. You might think it odd to give so much attention to a party that won just 2 per cent of the vote in last year’s general election — but this is all about Kipperism, which is bigger than Ukip. Much of the time, it seems as though this is Ukip’s Britain. The rest of us just live in it. It amounts to the most stunning reverse takeover in modern British political history. The party’s death throes recall David Cameron’s original description of Ukip as a collection of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly’.

Paul Wood

The mess in Syria is putting America’s credibility on the line

 Beirut ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense,’ said Alice. ‘Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?’ For the United States, and for the rest of us, Lewis Carroll is as good a guide as any to what is happening in northern Syria right now. Turkey — America’s Nato ally — has sent tanks rolling across the border to attack the Kurds, America’s ally against Isis. Thus the United States finds itself supporting both sides in the same war. You see? Some wit in Turkey’s defence ministry has named the offensive ‘Operation Olive Branch’.

Elizabeth Roberts

Admission of failure

I am in a good position to report from the NHS frontline, having been in hospital with pneumonia for just over a week from 28 December. I was admitted following an early evening visit from a district nurse to the home I share with my younger daughter, her husband and their three children. The nurse rang A&E to advise them of my impending arrival but warned us that there was a four-hour wait for an ambulance. My daughter therefore decided to drive me in, and we arrived at a packed casualty unit. I was desperate for oxygen and my daughter begged at the reception desk for me to be triaged to access some, with no success. At 11.30 p.m. I was finally examined and hooked up to an oxygen supply. I was found a bed in the admissions ward at 4 a.m., in an atmosphere reminiscent of a war zone.

Nicholas Shakespeare

A huff to the music of time

You’re in the index, but not in the book. This ghostly sensation has been my experience since 1990 after commissioning Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts. Waugh’s verdict appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 20 May that year. Next morning, Powell resigned in a celebrated huff from the sister paper, of which I happened to be literary editor. When, seven years later, Powell published his Journals, I wanted to know how he dealt with this incident which had caused acute distress. The index directed me to page 40, yet my name wasn’t there. Nor any entry for 20 May 1990; nor one for Auberon Waugh, as promised, on page 49. The absence hinted that lawyers may have been at work.

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.