Features

Thursday

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.

Jenny McCartney

Star power

The ongoing war between Donald Trump and the Hollywood A-list has entered a new and unpredictable phase. Celebrity criticism of Trump — keenly anticipated as the chewy takeaway from last week’s Academy Awards ceremony — was instead overshadowed by a celebrity cock-up. Thanks to a mix-up of the sacred envelopes, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway temporarily awarded Best Picture to La La Land, rather than the real winner, Moonlight. The result was an unforgettable tableau of confusion at the ceremony’s crowning moment. Trump had earlier let it be known that he wasn’t watching.

Thursday

Christopher De Bellaigue

Islam’s lost Enlightenment

I am quite used to people smirking into their sleeves when they hear that I’ve just written a book called The Islamic Enlightenment. The really helpful wags say they expect something along the lines of The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew, which was billed as a collection of all the memorable aphorisms of the former US vice-president, and contained only blank pages. So, the Islamic Enlightenment — good for a laugh. But we’re all familiar with the serious argument that lies behind the jests; that Islam has not been through an Enlightenment, a Reformation, or any of the other rites of passage that have formed our modernity, and that, ergo, Muslims and modernity are strangers.

Andrew J.

The McMaster plan

When Lt Gen H.R. McMaster was appointed by Donald Trump to the post of national security adviser, newspaper reports hailed him as a military strategist. It’s not fully clear what the phrase means: not, presumably, that he originated a big idea akin to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of seapower or Billy Mitchell’s conception of strategic bombing. More likely it is supposed to mean ‘a soldier who thinks’. Or more crudely, ‘not a knuckle-dragger’. Or ‘preferable to the cretin who Trump just fired’. Of course, the responsibilities of the position to which McMaster now ascends extend well beyond mere military matters. The national security adviser operates (or should operate) in the realm of ‘grand strategy’.

Freddy Gray

L’anti-Trump

If you believe the hype, Emmanuel Macron is l’anti-Trump. He is what the inter-national centre-left, reeling from the shocks of Brexit and the US election and fearful of a victory for Marine Le Pen in France, is crying out for: a politician who can win again. He is only 39 years old, handsome and radical sounding. He’s not a career politico; he used to work as a banker for the Rothschilds (every-body loves them). He wears sharp suits and he’s written a book called Révolution. Better still, he has a buzzing movement behind him: his ‘En Marche!’ (Let’s go!) campaign has excited trendy progressives. He is not bogged down with formal connections to the loathed establishment.

James Forsyth

The new third Way

Forget left and right — the new divide in politics is between nationalists and globalists. Donald Trump’s team believe that he won because he was the America First candidate, defying the old rules of politics. His nationalist rhetoric on everything from trade to global security enabled him to flip traditionally Democratic, blue-collar states and so to defeat that personification of the post-war global order, Hillary Clinton. The presidential election in France is being fought on these lines, too. Marine Le Pen is the nationalist candidate, a hybrid of the hard right and the far left. She talks of quitting the European single currency and of bringing immigration down to 10,000 a year, while cursing international capitalism with an almost socialist fervour.

Melanie McDonagh

Against Queen Camilla

How would you feel about a Queen Camilla, as in the wife of King Charles? Personally I’d be dead against, for reasons I’ll bore you with later, but what matters is how the nation feels. Because the Prince of Wales very much wants Camilla to be queen when he becomes king. As has been reported elsewhere, there’s now a veritable ops department at Clarence House — jovially called ‘QC’ by its members — who are responsible for ensuring that the middle class is prepared for just this outcome. Actually, that’s probably over-egging it. Seems QC is more of a concept than a war cabinet, but also that if you’re not with the programme, you don’t last long in Clarence House.

Susan Hill

A bookseller’s duty

To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you don’t borrow them. But both have a duty to provide books (space and budgets allowing) reflecting a wide range — as wide as possible — of interests, reading tastes, subjects and points of view. Walk into one of either and there are the thoughts and feelings, beliefs and dreams and creations and discoveries of many men and women, and that is part of their never-ending excitement.

Frank Field

Brutish Britain

Life in Britain has become much cruder, meaner and more spiteful practically everywhere. It can be seen in people’s behaviour on the street; in those abominable neighbours from hell; in companies piling up the profits with no care whatsoever for the degree to which they are sweating their workers on terms that, until quite recently, would have been unimaginable. The incivility of one to another can be seen most sharply and poignantly in the degree of cruelty to children which, at the beginning of my working life, would have had every alarm bell ringing wildly. Children have to be almost on the point of being murdered before they are taken into care. Outside that protection, some are subjected to brutal treatment by parents who are also brutal creatures.

Mary Dejevsky

Make way for Ubercare

There is much to be faulted in Uber, which has branched out from delivering people into delivering meals, under the unappetising name UberEats. But even I, someone who can rarely bring herself to write the word ‘sharing’, as in economy, without inverted commas, am prepared to give credit where credit is due. Uber has made private door-to-door transport accessible to far more people than before. It has thus done a lot of people a favour and hugely expanded the market, harnessing new technology to do so. It has provided jobs for people who did not have them, or who prefer to work in the semi-autonomous Uber way.

Thursday

John Blake

Mick Jagger’s lost memoir

Ask any publisher of popular non--fiction anywhere in the world which book they would most like to sign, and it is an odds-on bet that they would eventually, mostly, come up with the same title. Obviously the Queen does not plan to reveal all any time soon. Tom Cruise would certainly be interesting if he desired to talk about the crazy, outer-space cult which rules his women and his life. But for sheer history, global presence, intelligence and insight, there really is only one chap — the guy Ben Schott recently described in this magazine as ‘the most seen person on the planet’. Yes, the old prince of darkness himself, Sir Michael Philip Jagger. Of course he’d never do it. He has said again and again, in countless interviews, that he never will.

Harry Mount

Bye bye, Buller

RIP the Bullingdon Club, 1780–2017. It isn’t quite dead — but it is down to its last two members. That’s barely enough people to trash each other’s bedrooms, let alone a whole restaurant, as the Bullingdon was wont to do, according to legend — not that we ever did that sort of thing in my time in the club, from 1991 to 1993. The Bullingdon, or Buller, as it is sometimes known, just couldn’t survive 11 years of bad headlines — from 2005 to 2016, when three of its former members, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, were the most powerful Conservatives in the country. For more than a decade the Bullingdon exerted a totemic power so mighty that it spawned several conspiracy theories.

Jason Mitchell

Corbyn’s blueprint

Twenty years ago Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world. Now it is one of the poorest. Venezualans are starving. The farms that President Hugo Chavez expropriated, boasting about the great increase in production that would follow, have failed. Inexperienced management and corruption under both Chavez and the current president, Nicolas Maduro, mean that there is less of each crop each year. Across the country, supermarkets are empty and most ordinary people queue for hours every day just for flour. Many of the animals in Caracas zoo have starved to death, but even those who survive aren’t safe — Venezuelans have taken to raiding the cages to butcher and eat whatever they can find: horses, sheep, pigs.

Paul Wood

‘Isis? Bomb those suckers’

These are the last days of the ‘caliphate’. The place Isis made their capital, Raqqa, in Syria, is encircled and cut off. They have already lost half of Mosul in Iraq, their largest city. Really, what did they expect? This was inevitable from the moment Isis declared war on everyone not in Isis. Defeat was even foreseen by one of the group’s leading thinkers, Abu al-Farouq al-Masri. ‘Announcing enmity to the world will strangle the caliphate in its cradle,’ he said last year. ‘This will bury our project alive.’ Al Masri (the ‘Egyptian’) is or was an elderly cleric and he was delivering a sermon in Raqqa meant as a warning to the leadership.

Angela Patmore

Gaslighting the nation

Arguably the cruellest thing you can do to human beings is to rob them of faith in their own sanity. People can endure physical torment, even torture, so long as their minds are clear. If they feel sane, they can still make sense of what is happening to them and work out how to survive. But if you undermine somebody’s mental stability, they soon unravel. In the words of John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;/And in the lowest deep a lower deep,/Still threatening to devour me, opens wide.’ Chipping away at a person’s mental health is known as ‘gaslighting’, after Gas Light, the Patrick Hamilton play that in 1944 became a classic Hollywood melodrama.