Features

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Save aid!

Bill Gates is worried about Britain. For years, the UK government has been one of the world’s largest donors in overseas aid, and about £60 million has been given to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But aid has been rather unpopular lately, prompting questions about whether a generous country like Britain needs charitable donations collected by the taxman. And indeed, whether the aid spending pledge might be dropped in the general election campaign. Mr Gates senses a different tone of debate in Washington and London, with too few people making the case for government aid. So the world’s richest man is stepping in.

Jenny McCartney

The Irish problem | 20 April 2017

When David Cameron called his Brexit referendum, the potential difficulty of Northern Ireland was not uppermost in his mind. Nor does it seem to have worried Theresa May greatly when she announced a snap general election this week. Even before this fresh electoral battle, Northern Ireland’s politics were already — to paraphrase Sean O’Casey — in ‘a terrible state of chassis’. Perhaps May thought the existing chassis in Belfast couldn’t get any worse. On reflection, I’m not so sure. The last Assembly election in March left the DUP and Sinn Fein, the two tribal behemoths, delicately balanced on 28 and 27 seats respectively. Unionists lost their overall majority.

Jonathan Miller

Faute de mieux

Who will win the French presidential election? Does it even matter? Nothing in the programmes or personalities of the leading contenders gives confidence that any of them can fix the Fifth Republic and the corruption, dysfunction and stagnation that it has inflicted on the French. At Marie-Trinité’s café in the southern French village where I am an elected councillor, the mood before the voting is one of weary resignation and disgust. Yet this election does matter, and it can make a difference, not only because all of the probable outcomes threaten to make things even worse, but because almost all of them have the potential to be particularly painful for Britain, whatever the result of our own election on June 8.

Wednesday

Nick Robinson & Charles Moore

Bias and the BBC

Last week, Nick Robinson wrote an article in the Radio Times saying Radio 4’s Today programme no longer has an obligation to balance its coverage of Brexit. This led to criticism from Charles Moore that he was, in effect, admitting to BBC bias. The two met for a discussion in The Spectator offices. Nick Robinson: As you’re so fond of pointing out, Charles, most economists, business organisations, trade unions and FTSE 100 chief executives were Remainers. The BBC’s difficulty is that news tends to be about interviewing people in power: scrutinising them, asking tough questions. It’s right that we should go and look for other voices, look for critics.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s Syria problem

For Vladimir Putin, Syria has been the gift that kept on giving. His 2015 military intervention propelled Russia back to the top diplomatic tables of the world — a startling comeback for a country that had spent two decades languishing in poverty and contempt on the margins of the world’s councils. At home, the war took over as a booster of Putin’s prestige just as the euphoria over the annexation of Crimea was being eroded by economic bad news caused by low oil prices and sanctions. In the Middle East, Russia was able to show both friends and enemies that it was once again able to project power every bit as effectively as the Soviet Union had once done.

Simon Barnes

Side-saddle is sexy

These days there are more than 1,000 members of the Side Saddle Association. Well, of course there are. People go to Bisley to shoot muzzle--loaders with black powder instead of modern rifles with laser-sights; people prefer Bugattis to brand-new electric cars. And of course it’s a bit mad. We mustn’t go around criticising things just because they’re mad; that would leave us all terribly vulnerable. I once rode side-saddle with three members of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. No, seriously. They were all saddlers, fascinated by this unexplored aspect of their craft. I joined them at an event hosted by the SSA, expecting to find it horrible and unnatural, and it was nothing of the kind. Because you’re not actually sideways.

Rod Dreher

The Benedict option

Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with yearning of what she had back home and how painful it is to live so far away. I wondered aloud why she and her American husband had emigrated to the United States from that idyllic landscape, the homeland she loved. ‘Because we wanted our children to have a chance to grow up Catholic,’ she said. It’s not that she feared losing them to the Church of England — it’s that she feared them losing Christianity itself. She and her husband Chris, an academic theologian, are now raising their four young children in Philadelphia, a city with a historically large Catholic presence.

Tanya Gold

Trump, the emptiest mind

Howard Jacobson awoke to the news of Trump’s victory in November. He had no newspaper column so, what could he do? Write a novel, said his wife, and he did, in six weeks. It is called Pussy, and it is a short and horrifying hypothetical biography of Donald Trump, now an infant prince called Fracassus, born into a noble family of property developers. Fracassus hates words. He hates women. He tweets. Jacobson throws every weapon — every word — he has into Pussy. He is the voice of the metropolitan liberal elite emitting a death rattle, and that is a grave calling.

Cosmo Landesman

Do you know a flake fatale?

It was the third time in a row that she had cancelled our date for drinks. The first time she’d forgotten. The second time she remembered a previous engagement and the third time she claimed she’d got the dates mixed up. The next day I got the text she always sends: ‘Sorry darling, I’m such a flake!’ I used to have friends. Now I have flakes — people who are always screwing up arrangements to meet. Flake has become the catch-all explanation and excuse for the bad manners or bad behaviour of friends and loved ones. Cosmo Landesman and Freya Wood discuss the modern affliction of flakiness: We all know about ladies who lunch. But what about the ones who forget you were even having lunch?

Thursday

Ian Acheson

Inmates and Islamism

In response to the Westminster attack, a 100-strong new counter-extremism taskforce has been announced to deal with the terrorist threat in prisons. I’m taking some credit for this badly needed focus. In the autumn of 2015, the then Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, asked me to lead an independent review of the threat posed by Islamist extremism in prisons, the probation service and the youth justice system. I used to be a prison governor in what was known until just a few days ago as the National Offender Management Service, so I agreed on the understanding that I reported only to him and that I had his full support to go where the evidence led me, without interference from bureaucrats. To his credit, he agreed immediately. Gathering information was a complex task for a small team.

Ahmed Rashid

War-war, not jaw-jaw

It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist’. This is not true. In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarisation of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced but it is happening, and much of it without consultation with Nato or other key allies, or any debate in Congress or the media. A few weeks ago, US aircraft carried out over 30 air strikes against Islamic militants in Yemen — almost the same as the number carried out there all last year. In Iraq and Syria there have been many reports of civilian casualties in US raids. As many as 200 are thought to have been killed in air strikes on Mosul, although Iraqi authorities dispute that. Andrew J.

Andrew J.

Kaiser Donald

 Massachusetts All politicians wear masks. Donald Trump’s favourite is that of Maximum Leader. It was on display during this past week. ‘If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will,’ he said at the weekend, ahead of his meeting with Xi Jinping — a throwaway comment that could end up causing mayhem in the Far East. Next, his reaction to news of a chemical bombing in Syria. Trump blamed the atrocity on his predecessor’s ‘weakness and irresolution’, suggesting that he is keen to show the world what strength and resolve look like. The President, it seems, is not too dissimilar to the nightmare his political enemies warned us about: a nuclear-armed hothead itching to show the world how tough he is.

James Forsyth

Trump’s plan for Pyongyang

On several foreign policy issues, Donald Trump has toned down the campaign rhetoric now that he is in office. His administration still has concerns about the Iran nuclear deal, but it is backing away from the idea of simply ripping it up or unilaterally rewriting it. On the European Union, he is calming down too; his White House no longer says Brexit marks the beginning of the end of the European project. But on North Korea his positioning is hardening. Hence his warning that ‘if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will’. Not only does Trump want this problem fixed, but his National Security Council is already working on plans to do so. Washington has been trying to work out what to do about North Korea for 20-odd years.

Mark Mason

My towering problem

Why don’t tall people get the same sympathy as short people? Everyone feels sorry for minnows, cutting them slack when they talk loudly in meetings or get themselves elected Speaker of the House of Commons. But tall people are seen as life’s victors; the ones you want to be, the ones who get everything their own way. It just isn’t the case. I’m not actually that tall — 6ft 1in — but even I encounter problems. Cashpoints are too low, hotel beds are too short, train seats don’t have enough leg room. In the days of phone boxes, I spent every call hunched over (not enough lead). I regularly have to bend at the knees to use mirrors, and am sometimes forced to take showers kneeling down, because the head hasn’t been fixed high enough up the wall.

Douglas Murray

In defence of  Ken

We never loved each other, Ken Livingstone and I. We first clashed in public more than a decade ago, and have enjoyed castigating each other ever since. But now that he has been suspended from the Labour party for a second year in a row, I come not to bury him but to praise him. For there is something valorous, even glorious, about his downfall. It was the MP for Bradford West who triggered his demise. In April last year Naz Shah was exposed for sharing anti--Semitic content on social media. Among these posts was a graphic advising the deportation of all Israeli Jews to the USA. Though such views are hardly a problem (can even be a boon) for a Bradford MP these days, any ambitious young politician may still find them a hurdle. Sure enough, Shah performed all the textbook PR moves.

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

The rescue racket

What is happening in the 300-mile stretch of sea between Sicily and Libya, day in and day out — in other words, what ‘we’ are doing there — is beyond reasonable doubt insane. A sane person would assume that the 181,436 migrants (a new record) who made it by sea to Italy last year had done so under their own steam in flimsy fishing boats and dinghies at least some of the way across the Mediterranean. This, after all, is the message aid agencies and governments put out. In fact, every one of those 181,436 was picked up by EU and non-government aid-agency vessels off the Libyan coast just outside the 12-mile territorial limit, then ferried across to Europe.

Fredrik Erixon

There will be a trade deal

Most diplomats in Brussels will tell you that Theresa May has just embarked upon a fool’s errand, that Britain might wish for a free-trade deal with the European Union but will have to learn that it can’t cherry-pick. Anyway, they say, nothing of any value can be agreed in two years. This received wisdom can be heard, under various iterations, in most capitals in Europe — and it’s natural that the EU will be sore, perhaps a little defensive. But there is a free-trade deal to be struck. First, a declaration: I didn’t want Britain to leave the EU. I’m a Swede running a free-trade thinktank in Brussels and can tell you that the UK’s absence will be sorely felt by all of its allies.

James Forsyth

The friendly alliance

On 29 March 2019 the Queen should have a state dinner and invite the European Union’s 27 heads of state and its five presidents. The evening’s purpose would be to toast the new alliance between the United Kingdom and the EU: one based on free trade, security cooperation and shared democratic values. This celebration of the new alliance will be especially welcome after two years of negotiations which are bound to be fraught and, at times, ugly. The complexity and the sums of money involved pretty much guarantee this. There is, though, a particular onus on Britain to keep things civil. We have chosen to end this failed relationship, so we should brave the insults and not feel the need to respond to every Juncker jibe.

Damian Reilly

Fighting chance

Middle age is OK by me. National Trust membership, a Waitrose loyalty card, lying on the sofa drinking red wine and yelling at the telly — since I turned 40, this stuff all just feels right. But by a mile, the best consolation of middle age I’ve found is the cagefighter Conor McGregor and living vicariously through his kicks, punches and verbal smackdowns. How dull my previous enthusiasms for cricket, tennis and football now seem by comparison with the heroic derring-do of this 28-year-old killing machine, a former plumber from Crumlin in Dublin.

Ross Clark

A hard lesson is coming

It is one of the great mysteries of modern British politics: how public schools managed to survive three periods of Labour government with their tax breaks intact. How was it that an education secretary, Anthony Crosland, could say: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England, and Wales and Northern Ireland’, and yet do nothing to make life difficult for independent schools? Suzi Leather, Tony Blair’s appointment as head of the Charity Commission, demanded private schools do more to justify their charitable status.