Features

Thursday

John Hemming

Lost city of fantasy

The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act. Percy Fawcett joined the army immediately after school, with a commission in the artillery in 1886. The next 20 years involved garrison duty in Ceylon and postings in Malta and England.

Thursday

Paul Collier

The camps don’t work

The civil war in Syria, and the resulting displacement of half the population, has been the tragedy of our times. We cannot turn our backs on the ten million people who have been forced to flee their homes. Every decent society knows this and knows that it’s our moral duty to come up with a workable way of helping the refugees. But while the scale of the displacement is substantial, it is not unmanageable. The 21st century should be capable of dealing with such catastrophes and we must prepare ourselves actually to do so. To rise to the challenge, we need to combine the instinctive compassion that mass suffering arouses with the dispassionate analysis necessary to craft an effective response. We need the heart supported by the head.

Jenny McCartney

Lest we forget | 23 March 2017

I never met Martin McGuinness, but I was certainly affected by him from an early age. His decisions, and those of his colleagues on the IRA Army Council, indelibly coloured my childhood. Belfast in the 1970s and ’80s was a grey, fortified city, compelling in many ways, but permanently charged with the unpredictable electricity of violence. Our local news steadily chronicled the shattering of families, in city streets and down winding border lanes that were full of birdsong before the bullets rang out. There were regular, respectful interviews with pallid widows and dazed widowers, and funerals attended by red-eyed, snuffling children tugged into stiff, smart clothes to pay formal respects to the end of family life as they had known it.

Stephen Robinson

Cameron adrift

It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard last week that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole Foods supermarket almost directly underneath the paper’s Kensington newsroom. That man was David Cameron, and inevitably someone with journalistic instincts spotted him, snapped him on her phone, and tweeted it. Stephen Robinson and James Forsyth discuss Cameron and Osborne's diverging retirement plans: We congratulate ourselves on the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of British politics.

Matthew Walther

Pressing back

  Washington, DC I hate to admit it, but I think I’m falling in love with Sean Spicer. No doubt Donald Trump’s stocky, gum-chewing, sartorially challenged press secretary will strike many readers as an unlikely object of passion. But it’s hard not to get red-hot for a man capable of inspiring so much outrage among the most boring, self-important people in America. As press secretary, Spicer’s only real job is to run the President’s daily press briefing, one of those bizarre, quasi-official American institutions — like the State of the Union address or the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn — whose utility no one ever seems to question.

Emily Hill

The importance of being trolled

Ever since a Twitter troll was elected 45th President of the United States, the Twitterati has agonised over who to blame. But since it was Twitter that gave American voters unfettered access to Donald Trump’s brain, they really ought to be blaming Twitter itself. It’s not possible to say anything balanced or nuanced in 140 characters — that’s a format for jokes, insults and outrage. If you want to seize the world’s attention today, you must troll or be trolled on Twitter. And since this is the one skill at which Trump is utterly unrivalled, he’s now busy trolling both America and himself.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Double trouble | 16 March 2017

Theresa May is a cautious politician. She has risen to the top by avoiding unnecessary risks; no one survives 18 years on the Tory front bench by being a gambler. But few prime ministers have the luxury of choosing their battles, and she would not have chosen the two that may now define her premiership: successfully negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union while saving the United Kingdom. If she achieves both, she will join the pantheon of great prime ministers. If she fails, she’ll be keeping Lord North company in the history books. Unlike David Cameron, May has been preparing for a new Scottish referendum from the moment she entered Downing Street.

Qanta Ahmed

Uncover her face

I was raised as an observant Muslim in a British family. Women, I was taught, determine their own conduct — including their ‘veiling’. We’d cover our hair only if we freely chose to do so. That’s why I’m baffled by the notion that all good Muslim women should cover their hair or face. My entire family are puzzled by it too, as are millions like us. Not until recent years has the idea taken root that Muslim women are obliged by their faith to wear a veil. It’s a sign, I think, not of assertive Islam, but of what happens when Islamists are tolerated by a western culture that’s absurdly anxious to avoid offence. This strange, unwitting collaboration between liberals and extremists has been going on for years.

Boyd Tonkin

Why Milton still matters

Just 350 years ago, in April 1667, John Milton sold all rights to Paradise Lost to the printer Samuel Simmons — for £5, with another £5 due once Simmons had the first run of 1,300 copies off his hands. That sounds like a bargain for the 12-book epic poem of Satan’s war with Heaven, Eve’s ‘fatal trespass’ and the expulsion from Eden that soon became a monumental pillar of the literary canon. Samuel Johnson — who as a Tory deplored Milton’s revolutionary politics — placed it first (for design) and second (for execution) ‘among the productions of the human mind’. Some readers, though, have always found it dear at any price.

Mary Wakefield

Redemption for the Ripper

In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching (‘In Naples the doctors would have perished, in Berlin the Jews’) but warned that ‘this devil’ might never be caught. By January 1889, Townsend and Hutton were calling for an end to all the ‘morbid interest’ in the Ripper’s crimes.

Simon Barnes

Little birds, big trouble

A British military base is being used for a multi-million-quid criminal enterprise, possibly involving the Russian mafia — and Britain seems powerless to prevent it. Last year they had a crack at enforcement and had to give up. Mafia 1, British army 0. It’s happening in Cyprus, in the British Sovereign Base Areas. The situation in Cyprus is a bit like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, but with more complex problems of nationality, culture and power. It has let this criminal enterprise thrive and prosper on the fringes, with the result that Britain is providing the infrastructure for a major illegal business with suspected links to Russian criminal organisations. Which is a touch embarrassing. And it’s all about little birds.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Poison, spies and lies

 Washington DC   Roger Stone — political consultant, agent provocateur, friend and confidant of Donald Trump — arrives for lunch with a bodyguard in tow. ‘I’ve had way too many death threats,’ he explains. He says he’s recovering from poisoning by polonium, a radioactive substance used to kill the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko, he says, had ‘a much larger dose, probably done by British intelligence’. But the British government named the Russian agents responsible, I reply. ‘What was the proof?’ he asks. ‘It’s all mirrors. You know that.’ Stone blames his ‘poisoning’ on ‘the deep state’, a term that in Trumpworld means the intelligence community.

Damian Thompson

The plot against the Pope

On the first Saturday in February, the people of Rome awoke to find the city covered in peculiar posters depicting a scowling Pope Francis. Underneath were written the words: Ah, Francis, you have intervened in Congregations, removed priests, decapitated the Order of Malta and the Franciscans of the Immaculate, ignored Cardinals… but where is your mercy? The reference to mercy was a jibe that any Catholic could understand. Francis had just concluded his ‘Year of Mercy’, during which the church was instructed to reach out to sinners in a spirit of radical forgiveness. But it was also a year in which the Argentinian pontiff continued his policy of squashing his critics with theatrical contempt.

Jenny Coad

Calendar clash

On a Friday evening in May 2018 I am going to see the Broadway show Hamilton. We had to book the tickets two weeks ago. Fair enough, you might say — some theatre tickets sell out long before rehearsals have begun. Nonetheless, it seems a madly long way off and what if I forget about it between now and then? This week I’ve tried to pencil in the cinema with a group of friends — no one was free until April — and Saturday supper with a couple: they couldn’t do until July. Jenny Coad discusses spontaneity with Isabel Hardman: This is far from unusual. My diary tends to be filled weeks in advance and there is little room for unexpected pleasures without a shamefaced untangling of best-laid plans.

Harry Mount

Dumbing down the house

Osterley Park on the western fringes of London is a rare survival. A Robert Adam house, with splendid Adam interiors, it’s still surrounded by its Elizabethan stables, an 18th-century landscape and classical follies — in the middle of urban Hounslow. Over the past decade, this Georgian gem has been increasingly despoiled and dumbed down by the National Trust. The Trust is spending £356,000 to turn Osterley Park into a child-friendly leisure centre. As one of the huge posters strapped to the park fence says, the money will pay for ‘A new skills area for young families providing kids with a safe place to learn to cycle and gain confidence’. Why splurge this vast amount of money on something you can already easily do on the paths at Osterley, i.e. bicycle?

Danny Kruger

How to make drugs boring

Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto, slides into his restaurant chair and twinkles at the waitress. He’s 6ft 6in, white-haired now but perky. Bill has 120 years of policing behind him. He, his father and his grandfather all served 40 years in the force. Now he’s an MP and he’s legalising cannabis in Canada. The restaurant has been here since early in Bill’s father’s time on the beat. It claims to have invented the bacon cheeseburger. We sit round a plastic-topped table and Bill tells me how he ended up pushing drug reform. ‘When I left the force all three political parties wanted me to run for office. I’ve spent my life avoiding politics and the other parties reminded me why. They just wanted me for political kudos.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Back into battle

On 24 June last year, in the Georgian splendour of her official residence in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square, Scotland’s First Minister offered her reaction to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Since Scottish voters endorsed Remain, it was now, Nicola Sturgeon said, ‘highly likely’ there would be another referendum on Scottish independence. Since then that promise — one viewed with dread by the two million Scots who voted to preserve the Union in 2014 — has been variously ‘on the table’, ‘more likely’ than ever and even ‘all but inevitable’. The clock is ticking. Later this month, Sturgeon will address her party’s annual conference.

Douglas Murray

Memory games | 2 March 2017

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories?

Rosa Monckton

Let my daughter work

Freud said ‘Love and work… work and love, that’s all there is.’ And ‘Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.’ What is life like for people with learning disabilities who have the cornerstone of the love of their parents, but who have little prospect of work? Approximately 1.4 million people in the UK have a learning disability, yet 1.3 million of them are unemployed. Think of the misery that figure represents, the isolation and loneliness. The October 2016 Department of Work and Pensions Green Paper, Improving Lives, states: ‘The evidence is clear that work and health are linked.’ It says that there are 1.

Camilla Swift

Flock horror

Pity the poor sheep. Every other animal has its champions. There are fox fanatics, dog obsessives, campaigners for cat welfare. Pigs, once a celebrity pet of choice, have their supporters, too. But it’s sheep who need friends right now, because they are, quite literally, under attack. My Facebook pals are mostly country types and barely a day goes by without one of them posting a picture of a sheep mauled, often fatally, by untrained, unrestrained city-dwelling dogs. Camilla Swift is joined by Ben Fogle to discuss the plight of sheep: Sheep-worrying used to be quite a minor problem but it is now getting much worse in terms of the number of incidents. The police say that up to 15,000 sheep were killed last year, which is ten times higher than previous estimates.