Features

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

A fighting chance

‘We remember it not only for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the dead, but also for the courage and bravery of the men who fought here.’ The Prince of Wales was in good voice on Monday at the centenary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele — more properly, ‘Third Ypres’. It was a pity he couldn’t say that we should remember it not only for the incompetence of the high command, but because the majority of the British troops were at best only half-trained. One of the enduring myths about war is that armies can be raised quickly. They can’t, because armed conflict is the most complex human interaction known. A soldier’s skill is nine parts judgment.

Ross Clark

Road to nowhere | 3 August 2017

When I heard the government’s announcement that petrol and diesel cars are to be banned from 2040, I resorted, as I often do for entertainment, to the British Pathé news archive. I found a 1967 film showing trials of a prototype electric Mini, as well as a similar experiment from Ford. Then came this rather delicious prediction, delivered in clipped tones: ‘In the next few years there is the prospect of seeing millions of them on the road.’ The hype over electric cars has been going on a long time. Had Harold Wilson been moved by it and done what Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has just done, he would have passed a law banning petrol and diesel cars from 1990 — and the country would have been virtually immobilised when that year arrived.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Trump’s eastern front

 Kiev There is no lavatory paper to be found in government buildings in Kiev. Plan ahead, locals advise, if you visit a tax office, the council or some other arm of the bureaucracy. This state of affairs is one small sign of the corruption that pervades Ukraine. Even the trifling sums spent on toilet roll are stolen by dishonest officials. Patients bribe doctors to get treatment; students bribe professors to pass exams; citizens bribe tax inspectors… actually, many people don’t bother with tax in the first place, working instead in a vast shadow economy. Two Ukrainian journalists tell me all this as we sip drinks in a surprisingly expensive Kiev café.

David Starkey

Blatant not latent

It’s exactly 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality, received the Royal Assent on 27 July 1967 after an impassioned late-night debate in the Commons. I wish I could say — death of Kennedy-like — that I remember where I was. But I don’t. I had only one concern that summer. It was to get the First which would enable me to return to Cambridge to study for my PhD in Tudor history under Geoffrey Elton. The goal achieved, I relaxed like a spent fish. But I did do one thing that mattered. I lost weight and changed from a fat and frumpy teenager into a svelte and rather fetching young man. Which stood me in good stead for the next milestone in gay history.

Gavin Mortimer

How cool is Macron?

For a man with a reputation as a bit of an egghead, Emmanuel Macron has acquired a sudden passion for sport. In recent weeks, he’s been seen at rugby matches and football internationals, invited the Lyon women’s football team to the Élysée Palace to celebrate their Champions League win, and found time to chat with Chris Froome during the cyclist’s ride to a fourth Tour de France title. He’s even donned boxing gloves and sparred with a young pugilist as a means of promoting Paris’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics.

Will Heaven

‘I like making things’

Sir James Dyson would make a good therapist for anxious Brexiteers. Everything about him is comfortingly precise — his manner and way of speaking, his owlish round glasses and blow-dried white hair. He exudes a Zen-like calm. What he has to say is reassuring, too. He is as sunnily optimistic about leaving the EU as he was before the referendum last year. ‘I am very confident,’ he says, ‘in our ability to negotiate trade deals outside Europe — with Japan, Australia, China, America and so on — because it’s very easy. It’s just us negotiating with them. It’s very, very straightforward and you don’t have to satisfy 27 other people.’ The implication is that a deal with the EU will be harder.

David Butterfield

Persistent buggers

The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least — goes to Harold Wilson’s government, the Labour MP Leo Abse, and the Conservative peer Arthur Gore, 8th Earl of Arran. Yet more than a decade before the Sexual Offences Act received royal assent, a journalistic campaign to overturn an unjust and unworkable law had begun in the pages of The Spectator. After the dust had settled in post-war Britain, disparate MPs held the sincere but mostly tacit belief that the law criminalising homosexuality desperately needed amendment, if not scrapping entirely.

Julie Burchill

Diana the diva

Twenty years in August since Diana died. The anniversary is sad for me on many levels — she was definitely the final famous person I’ll have a pash on, and it reminds me that I haven’t yet earned back the whopping advance I was given for my book about her. To be fair, the book was an absolute stinker, written through a haze of gin, tears and avarice, containing such clodhopping clangers as ‘with blue skies in her eyes and the future in her smile’ and ‘affection swooshed out of her like a firework from a bottle’. Nurse, the screens! But there was good stuff in it, too. Namely, the way I served it to the Prince’s Party who continue to curdle Diana’s memory much as they tried to ruin her reputation during her lifetime.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

Madness in the Med

Following the EU’s deal with Turkey over people smuggling, the issue of migrants trying to cross, and quite often drowning in, the Mediterranean has largely disappeared from the British media. There have been no more images like that of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach after the rubber dinghy in which his family were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos capsized in August 2015. Now, people smugglers and migrants know there is little point in trying to make the crossing from Turkey to Greece because they will only be sent back, in return for the EU taking refugees directly from camps in Turkey.

Laura Freeman

It’s got to be perfect

When I order a cup of tea in Costa, the barista says: ‘Perfect!’ I ask for tap water in a restaurant: ‘Perfect!’ I buy a card in Paperchase and at the till it’s: ‘Perfect!’ And: ‘Perfect!’ again as I put in my PIN. ‘Perfect!’ when I say I don’t need a bag. It used to be ‘Great!’ and even that was too ecstatic a response to a side-order of creamed spinach. Now, there’s been a service industry upgrade. No longer is the customer always right; they are perfect. A little thing, yes, but a symptom of a wider mania for perfection. Everything from breakfast muesli to career, home and family must be perfect. Perfect interiors. The perfect diet. A perfect body.

Melanie McDonagh

Deus ex machina

Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel part of ‘a more connected world’. That got a dusty response. Facebook as church, eh? So the man who helped an entire generation to replace real friends with virtual ones and online communities is sounding off about people feeling unconnected? Cause and effect or what? He wasn’t quite touting Facebook as an alternative church.

John Major

Test of time

I first walked into the Oval as a small boy in the early 1950s. My family home was in Brixton, only a few minutes from the ground. More than 60 years later, those early memories are still vivid. I sat on what were then very uncomfortable wooden benches with sandwiches, an apple and a bottle of Tizer. On my lap was a schoolboy scorebook in which I recorded every run. The Surrey team that won the championship for seven years in a row held me transfixed. I still believe they were the greatest county side of all time — although Yorkshire would dispute this vigorously. The team’s supreme bowling attack was led by Alec Bedser — stately as a galleon as he ran up to the crease. His opening partner Peter Loader was as thin as a rail and fast as a whippet.

Will Heaven

Must Colston fall?

Edward Colston, mega-rich philanthropist around the year 1700, is the nearest thing Bristol has to a patron saint. The largest stained glass window in the cathedral there is dedicated to him. Go and do thou likewise, it commands. There’s no doubt Bristol owes Colston. He funded almshouses and schools here; made countless donations to churches and charities, some of which work wonders to this day. And many signs of Victorian civic gratitude to him litter the place. There are half a dozen Colston roads and three Colston schools, for instance — including one which churns out more England rugby players than Eton creates prime ministers.

Douglas Murray

Poor conduct

Last weekend Daniel Barenboim brought the Staatskapelle Berlin to perform at the BBC Proms for a cycle of Elgar’s symphonies. As Elgar only finished two of the things, it is among the easier symphonic cycles to pull off. But the Staatskapelle played beautifully over two nights at the Albert Hall, with moments of outstanding musicianship. They were let down only, at the end of the second evening, by their conductor. Turning around on the podium to face the audience, he announced that there was something he wanted to say. ‘I don’t know whether all of you will agree with me, but I would really like to share that with you.’ And then he began to spoil the evening.

Miles Goslett

Kids Company faces the music

It was surreal to sit in the Donmar Warehouse and watch Committee, a musical based on the investigation into the charity Kids Company. The first oddity was that anyone ever thought to write a musical based on the transcript of a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The second, that this production wouldn’t have existed if The Spectator hadn’t published an article (by me) raising questions about Kids Company’s appallingly managed finances and the behaviour of its chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh. It’s strange that Camila has come to this. In February 2015, it was considered sacrilege to utter a word against her.

Thursday

James Forsyth

‘Everyone’s out for Boris’

There is nowhere better to plot than the Palace of Westminster. There are alcoves to conspire in, little-used corridors and discreet watering holes. And no group enjoys plotting more than Tory MPs. Add a general election result that made the Tory leader a lame duck and you have the perfect ingredients for political mischief. But the Tories aren’t just plotting against Theresa May — that would be too simple, since her departure is a question of when not if. Nor is the principal conversation about who the leader should be. No, for a Tory the first stages of any leader-ship battle is to identify who they don’t want and then to set about destroying them. No one is more plotted against than Boris Johnson.

Paul Wood

A junior scandal

 Washington D.C. Political scandals sometimes throw up deliciously eccentric minor characters. Trump-Russia — a scandal or merely a crisis, according to taste — now has one: Rob Goldstone. He is described as a British former tabloid journalist, a music promoter, former Miss Universe pageant judge, and friend of the Trumps. Facebook videos reveal a short, tubby man with a northern accent and voice that seems a couple of octaves too high for his bulk. Twitter photos show him in a black shirt with a shiny gold tie; or holding velvet loafers up to his double chin, the word ‘Sex!’ embroidered on the toecaps; or wearing a gold baseball hat bearing the legend ‘CUNTY’. (Urban Dictionary: ‘Cunty, adj, conceited, cocky, acting like a bitch on the rag.

Markus Krall

A view from Germany

 Frankfurt ‘This is not about punishing Great Britain,’ declared Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s interim foreign secretary, on his recent visit to London. I fell about laughing, because this is precisely what’s going on. It is as obvious to us Germans as it is to the Brits: the EU cannot tolerate the thought of a successful United Kingdom outside the Brussels sphere of influence because, if that were allowed to happen, others might dare to start thinking about leaving the club too. Everything we hear from Brussels flows from this.

Simon Barnes

Is Johanna Konta British?

Have you been cheering for the excellent Johanna Konta at Wimbledon? Go, Jo! Or should that be Go, Yo? Johanna (pronounced Yo-harner) was born to Hungarian parents in Sydney and came to Britain when she was 14; her parents moved to Eastbourne while she went to train in Barcelona. She became a British citizen in 2012. Is she really British, then? Or is she a Plastic Brit, exploiting our great nation for what she can get? Greg Rusedski came from Canada to represent Britain at tennis in 1995, aged 22, even wearing an ill-advised Union Jack bandana. The Lawn Tennis Association (Britain’s national federation) later tried to persuade Novak Djokovic to become British; there were agitated talks during the Davis Cup tie between Britain and Serbia and Montenegro in 2006.

Sebastian Vella

Letter to my uncle (contd)

Dear Uncle James Thank you for your thought-provoking comments on my last letter (8 July). I accept that personality played a part in my deciding who to vote for. However it also seems to me that your own criticism of the Labour party is centred around personality — i.e. based on Jeremy Corbyn’s personal view of socialism rather than the actual policies put forward by the Labour party, which are not socialist. I agree that socialism hasn’t worked in the examples you’ve given. However, I don’t think that this is relevant to us today since a Labour government would not turn the UK into a socialist dictatorship. When it comes to policy, it is those of the Conservative party that caused me concern.