Features

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Can we be friends?

Have you heard the one about the new Labour MP who refuses to be friends with Tories? When Laura Pidcock dropped into an interview with a left-wing website that she has ‘absolutely no intention of being friends with’ any Tories, she was surprised by the fuss that followed. It might have seemed odd to her, but within Parliament it’s well known that friendships that cross the divide spring up the whole time. Sometimes it’s personal: Kezia Dugdale, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, caused headlines when she started dating a nationalist MSP. But more often, political: to achieve something, MPs from different parties often have to work together. But the new member for North West Durham sounds as if she is appalled at the whole system.

Ross Clark

Crime and prejudice

Nothing spoke of the fractious atmosphere in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum more than the death of 40-year-old Arek Jozwik in a shopping centre in Harlow, Essex in August 2016. What might, on any other weekend, have been passed over as just another grubby Saturday-night incident on Britain’s drunken high streets became elevated into a symptom of Brexit-induced racial hatred. James O’Brien, an LBC radio talk-show host, declared that certain Eurosceptics had ‘blood on their hands’ as did ‘anybody who has suggested speaking Polish in a public place is in any way undesirable’. This was the premise of almost all reporting on the story: a man seemed to have been murdered for being Polish.

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s last best hope

You have to hand it to Mikheil Saakashvili: the man doesn’t give up. After a tumultuous nine years as president of Georgia, which began with a furious anti-corruption purge, culminated in a short but disastrous war with Russia in 2008 and ended with accusations of embezzlement and authoritarian practices, he is determined to return to power — not in his own country, but in Ukraine. Saakashvili is brilliant and divisive. His many fans, principally drawn from the educated and the young of Georgia and Ukraine, see him as exactly the kind of clear-thinking, fearless leader who can sweep away the tangle of cronyism that has turned most former Soviet states into kleptocratic autocracies.

Thursday

Jenny Coad

Decision breakers

‘The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision,’ said Maimonides. How right he was. Today, we are racked with choice, and decision-making has never been more fraught. It’s hell. Look at restaurant menus. Anything longer than a page is alarming. So much margin for error. ‘Hold on a minute, I just need another look.’ ‘What’s the special, again?’ Glance at a neighbouring table. ‘That looks nice, is it the lamb?’ Turn to your partner. ‘What are you having?’ At least you’ve settled on a restaurant.

Munira Mirza

Theresa May’s phoney war

Next month, Theresa May is expected to launch her long-awaited audit into racial disparities in public services. We are being prepared for the worst. Unnamed Whitehall insiders say that they have been ‘shocked’ by the picture it reveals of racial discrimination in the UK. All this suggests the scene is being set for another bout of political self-flagellation regarding the subject of race in Britain, in which half-truths are peddled by lobbyists and swallowed wholesale by officialdom. Several studies have already shown   that some ethnic groups experience different outcomes in policing, health, employment and education. There are many causes behind these disparities but the evidence will be carefully selected to suit a predetermined agenda.

Nick Cohen

The scandal of privatised water is going to blow

Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy, yet offers nothing beyond token gestures to stop the young being priced out of home ownership. Enough, too, has been said about graduates being overcharged, pensioners soaking up the largesse of the tax and benefit systems, the failure to upgrade infrastructure, the obesity crisis, and all the other problems that can’t be tackled because of half-thought-through Tory prejudices. Allow me instead to concentrate on the scandal of the privatised water industry. Journalists and academics have been banging on for what feels like an age about an ‘organised rip-off’, to use the words of the usually sedate Financial Times.

James Tooley

Our browbeaten universities

Are university vice-chancellors paid too much? The government clearly thinks so, and is planning to fine universities that can’t justify paying their leaders more than the Prime Minister’s salary of £150,000 per annum. Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of Oxford University (salary £350,000), strongly disagrees, and has contrasted her salary negatively with those of bankers and footballers. But bankers and footballers work in the private sector and so are not the concern of government. It’s surely an established principle that government can intervene in the pay of chief executives of public bodies, but not of private ones. And any fool knows that universities are public bodies. Or are they? Actually, Professor Richardson is on to something important.

Damian Reilly

The straight dope

It’s not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled. The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Michael Karam

Ya Allah!

Last month Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, warned that anyone who yelled Allahu Akbar (‘God is the greatest’) in his city was liable to be shot dead by a police sniper. A bit harsh you might think, but it’s weird how tricky it’s become to use the world’s fifth most spoken language in Europe, let alone invoke the Arabic name for God. Three days after the London Bridge attacks, a trio of Muslim women attacked a female nursery worker on Wanstead High Street in north-east London. One of her colleagues told the Daily Mail they were ‘chanting the Quran, and invoking Allah’.

Thursday

Prue Leith

Our big fat problem

The good news is that Theresa May has dropped the threat to withdraw universal free school meals. Thank God (and the PM) for that. School lunches are the biggest weapon we have to fight obesity. The UK is sixth in the supersize race of OECD countries, with a quarter of the population obese. The fact that six of the fattest nations (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and the UK) are English-speaking should tell us something about our food culture. But sadly even Japan and South Korea, the slimmest nations, are fattening up fast on burgers and chips. What is to be done? No country is going to have the courage to ban junk food, as they have drugs. Maybe we’ll come to that one day.

Cristopher Snowdon

The fat tax fallacy

James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that North Korea and Cuba had got a ‘handle on obesity’. With impressive understatement, he attributed this to both countries being ‘quite controlling on behavioural trends’. It was a bad point poorly made, but in a roundabout way he drew attention to the major obstacles faced by those who want to reduce obesity rates in the rest of the world: freedom and affluence. Only Venezuela was missing from his list. Its people lost an average of 19 pounds last year as its basket-case economy unravelled, but this only serves to underline the point.

Katherine Forster

Starting again at 48

My name is Katherine and I’m an intern at The Spectator. What does that say about me? If you had to guess, you’d probably assume I was just finishing university and that I’m perhaps the niece or goddaughter of someone important. Because that’s how the media works, isn’t it? That I’m probably unpaid, but it doesn’t matter because my parents will sort me out — that’s if they didn’t buy this internship for me in a charity auction in the first place. And to be honest, that’s exactly how I imagined interns, too. Yet here I am, a 48-year-old mother of three. I felt embarrassed telling my husband I was applying for this scheme, suspecting he might think l had taken leave of my senses.

James Delingpole

The green giant

Environmentalism has gone too far; renewable energy is a disaster; scares about pesticides and chemicals are horribly overdone; no, the planet is not going to end any time soon; and, by the way, the answer is nuclear… This isn’t me speaking, but the views of an environmentalist so learned, distinguished and influential you could call him the Godfather of Green. His name is James Lovelock, the maverick independent scientist perhaps best known for positing the theory that our planet is an interconnected, self-regulating organism called Gaia. Not ‘Sir’ James Lovelock, I was mildly surprised to discover when I met him at his Dorset home, perched idyllically just behind Chesil Beach. ‘But I am a CH,’ he says, meaning Companion of Honour.

David Adams

The lure of the abyss

I received a sad letter this week: Steve is back in prison. Each day the mail comes down to the wing in a pouch, and the office is closed while the staff sort through it, marking a board next to the name of each lucky recipient. When a board is put out, we all have a look, playing it casual but really hoping for a letter, a card, a few quid; anything provides a bit of interest, and the feeling that someone, somewhere has thought of you. It’s nice. Usually it’s nice, but not this time. I knew the handwriting straight away, because health problems that affect his coordination have left Steve with, shall we say, a distinctive script. I opened the letter, and saw the printed header, with the address of a prison in Yorkshire.

William Cook

The Merkel supremacy

 Berlin Under the PR system we gave them, it's inevitable that Merkel will have to govern in some sort of coalition ‘Capitalism is armed robbery,’ reads the graffiti on the subway wall, but here in Berlin, German capitalists are doing what capitalism does best — creating new jobs and new industries. Berlin used to be regarded as ‘poor but sexy’(as Berlin’s former mayor Klaus Wowereit put it), but last year the German capital boasted the highest growth in the country — 2.7 per cent, 0.7 per cent above the national average. A city of squats and bombsites has become a city of high-tech start-ups, and now tech giants such as Google and Microsoft are moving in. Cheap rents and a lively nightlife attract smart millennials from across the globe.

Theodore Dalrymple

Love rats

 Paris The rat is an intelligent, flexible and determined creature that's difficult to eliminate A rat’s not called a rat for nothing, and — as we are repeatedly told — we are never very far from one. Certainly not in Paris, where I sit, which has seen a great increase in their number recently. There’s also been a rise in the number of people living on the streets, and perhaps the two are in some way connected. On the other hand, the increase in the rat population may be due to the ban on the use of certain kinds of rat poison, as when arsenic rat poison was banned. Anyhow, the Ville de Paris has undertaken not to rid the city of rats altogether — that would be utopian — but to reduce their numbers.

Thursday

Sandeep Mander

Too Indian to adopt

I am not surprised that the mother of a white Christian girl should be upset that her daughter was placed by Tower Hamlets council in London with a foster family reported to adhere to a strict form of Islam. But my experience is very different — one in which cultural sensibilities were taken into account, but to an extreme and absurd degree. Our story is about adoption, not fostering, but one assumes that similar decision-making guidelines govern the placement of vulnerable children. My wife and I are British Sikhs, but not practising ones. We have open minds — we like to think there is something out there but we are far from being religious. We both, as it happened, went to Roman Catholic schools. We both work in business and our closest circle of friends are white British.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s great comeback is now underway

Theresa May has always made her holidays sound as sensible and lacking in exoticism as she is. But something strange happens to the Prime Minister when she takes a break. After her last break, she decided she wanted a snap election. Now she's back from the three-week holiday that was supposed to help the Conservative party calm down, and she's declaring that she is here 'for the long term' and that she does want to fight the next election for the Conservatives. Her colleagues had urged her to take a long break this summer. They might now start getting a little suspicious when their leader next starts talking about some annual leave.

Fraser Nelson

Lessons from Houston

The numbers are awesome. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Harvey dumped nine trillion gallons of rainfall on Houston and southeast Texas: at one stage, 24 inches of rain fell in 24 hours. Like all American cities, Houston is prepared for hurricanes and floods — but Harvey was of a different magnitude. ‘We have not seen an event like this,’ the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, William ‘Brock’ Long declared. It led rapidly to unprecedented flooding in one of the world’s richest cities. The photos from Houston have been heartbreaking. Pensioners have been pictured sitting half-submerged in retirement homes, awaiting rescue.

Aidan Hartley

‘Kill! Kill!’ yelled the mob

 Laikipia, Kenya Following Kenya’s recently concluded elections, I took a walk on my Laikipia farm and lit up a cigar, stale because I had saved it for a day when I might hear a bit of good news that never seemed to come. I felt it was the end of a terrifying five-year ordeal when I frequently sensed my life was in extreme danger. A few weeks before at a rally on the plains near our farm boundary, our local MP, Mathew Lempurkel, had allegedly declared: ‘If we win this election we will take this land… We will make sure all wazungus (white people) go to their homes.’ This speech was recorded by witnesses, and Mathew was arrested and charged with incitement. But my MP was no stranger to criminal cases.