Features

Thursday

Bryan Appleyard

A different class of snob

‘Ah, beware of snobbery,’ said Cary Grant, who was surprisingly often the smartest guy in the room. ‘It is the unwelcome recognition of one’s own past failings.’ In Britain, the only place where true toffs abide and, let’s face it, the place where modern snobbery was most successfully codified, it is still a more powerful force than we like to acknowledge. Brexit was a comedy of the thwarted snobbery of the right and left. A referendum was organised by a Remainer toff who assumed he would win because, well, he was a toff. He was, in the event, comprehensively defeated and deposed.

Peter Oborne

How to beat terrorism

Until a few years ago, Pakistan was one of the most dangerous countries on earth. The tribal areas in the north were infested by the Taleban, whose bases stretched to within 100 miles of the capital, Islamabad. Western intelligence agencies feared that the Taleban could seize one of the country’s nuclear installations, then hold the world to ransom. Large parts of the country elsewhere were lawless or terrorised by armed groups. It would be foolish to claim that Pakistan’s security problems are over. But something extraordinary and unexpected has certainly happened. Since it fails to fit the established narrative of Pakistan as a dangerous nation, it’s gone unacknowledged in the West. Violence has not just dropped a bit.

Matthew Lynn

The real Brexit risk

At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started lining up at three, getting ready for a six o’clock start. In Edinburgh, hardy shoppers braved flurries of morning snow to make sure they were first in line for Boxing Day bargains. Whatever else is happening at the close of this year, British shoppers are as indefatigable as ever in their determination to keep spending. Surely it wasn’t meant to be like this? In the wake of the vote to leave the EU back in June, mainstream economists were unanimous in their view that we would be in a recession by now.

Thursday

Hanif Kureishi

A radical mistake

In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns a young man who comes to London from the provinces to study and finds himself caught between the sex-and-ecstasy-stimulated hedonism of the late 1980s and the nascent fundamentalist movement. At the end of the novel the Asian kids — as they were called then — burn The Satanic Verses and attack a bookshop. I followed this up with a story published in the New Yorker, ‘My Son The Fanatic’.

Simon Kuper

Knowing the score

When I come home from work and stick my key in the door, there is a pitter-patter of tiny feet as my eight-year-old twin boys run up to me and shout: ‘Paris St-Germain won 3-1! First he scored, then he missed, then…’ They are suffering from a harmless case of sports geekery. I had it myself as a child, and have gone on to hold down a job, albeit in the dying industry of journalism. The only difference is that as a child I wasn’t encouraged to bore my dad with my findings, because helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented yet. A complicating factor in our family is that we live in Paris, and when my sons recite sports statistics in strangely accented French children’s slang I often struggle to understand them, especially at breakfast.

Matthew Parris & Matt Ridley

Unforgiven

Now that almost six months have passed since the EU referendum, might it be time for old enemies to find common ground? Matthew Parris and Matt Ridley, two of the most eloquent voices on either side of the campaign, meet in the offices of The Spectator to find out.   MATTHEW PARRIS: Catastrophe has not engulfed us yet, it’s true. But I feel worse since the result, rather than better. I thought that, as in all hard-fought campaigns, you get terribly wound up and depressed when you lose. Then you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. But my animosities — not just towards the Brexit argument, but towards a lot of the people who advanced it — haven’t softened, I’m afraid.   MATT RIDLEY: I noticed that.

Max Hastings

Red with the people’s blood

Few 20th-century historians doubted that the 1917 Russian revolution was one of the most influential events of their time, indeed of all time. As the centenary commemoration approaches, however, it seems remarkable how far and how fast the ideology that inspired Lenin and millions of his worldwide followers has receded in significance. Many are the imperfections of capitalism, but almost nobody outside Jeremy Corbyn’s office any longer supposes that communism, least of all the old Soviet brand, offers a credible alternative. This would amaze our grandparents’ generation on both sides of the struggle. The novels of C.P. Snow are indifferent fiction but intriguing middle-class social history.

Gary Bell Qc

Season’s beatings

My colleagues at the commercial and chancery bar are all at their chalets in Gstaad, funded by the endless fees from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and the family bar are out en famille in Mustique, awaiting the festive fallout — there’s something about turkey, port and the Queen’s Speech that pulls marriages apart like a pound-shop cracker, and divorce doesn’t come cheap. But for we poor criminal hacks, it’s business as usual: crime never sleeps, and never less so than when Santa Claus is coming to town. As a junior barrister I made out like a bandit. Booze flows, blood follows; office parties are a magnet to drug dealers keen to ensure that all enjoy the right kind of white Christmas.

Mark Forsyth

The invention of Santa

Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural terms. Over the course of the 1870s the venerable British figure of Father Christmas was consumed by an American interloper. Father Christmas (first recorded in the 14th century) was the English personification of Christmas. Just as Jack Frost is a personification of the cold and the Easter Bunny is a rabbitification of Easter, so Father Christmas stood for Christmas. He was an old man (because Christmas was ancient) and he was plump (because Christmas was a feast). But Father Christmas did not give presents, did not come down the chimney, had nothing to do with stockings or reindeer and did not live at the North Pole.

Anthony Horowitz

The Netflix revolution

There have been two revolutions in television during my lifetime. The first happened in 1975 when Sony launched its Betamax video system — which allowed viewers to record shows and see them when they wanted. Of course, Betamax was found to be clunky and unreliable and it was soon replaced by VHS but, without realising it, the networks had lost control of their audience. No longer would we watch the films they wanted us to watch when they wanted us to watch them. Never again, as the technology spread, would the whole nation come together as one to find out what the newscasters had been up to on Morecambe and Wise. The second revolution has been even more profound — and it’s happening right now. It can be defined in one word: Netflix.

Christopher Buckley

When the Donald met the Vlad

SpeccieLeaks presents: Transcript of private meeting between President Trump and President Putin, 14 February 2017, Andreyevsky Hall, Grand Kremlin Palace   PUTIN: So how are you liking Russia? TRUMP: Fabulous. Amazing. And this room — incredible. You have beautiful taste, my friend. Beautiful. PUTIN: You like gold? TRUMP: Very much. We used a tremendous amount of gold in the Trump Tower. PUTIN: Yes, it’s something. Truly. I have seen it on television. TRUMP: Those chandeliers there. How much were those? PUTIN: Well, I don’t know. But I will have this information provided to you. TRUMP: That would be great. We just opened a new hotel in DC, right next to the White House? It’s got these high ceilings? A couple of these babies would look amazing.

Fraser Nelson

‘I get so frustrated with Whitehall’

The Prime Minister’s office is a small, unimpressive room in 10 Downing Street with miserable views and unexceptional furniture. Since moving in, Theresa May has spruced it up — but only a little. There is now a large glass meeting table; her predecessor preferred to chat on the sofas. She has also delved into the government art collection to retrieve two pictures of Oxford, where she honed her interest in politics and met Philip, her husband. She has also picked a painting of an English country church (she is of course a vicar’s daughter), and that’s about it. It’s a place for work and — very occasionally — interviews. We meet a few weeks after Mrs May won The Spectator’s Politician of the Year award.

Tim Shipman

Brexit’s breaking points

Trying to write the first draft of history on the EU referendum and the leader-ship mess that followed had both its dramatic and its comic elements. My phone never stopped ringing with Eurosceptics keen to tell me why their contribution to a meeting that had previously escaped my notice was the decisive factor in securing victory. But when a vote is so close — 52 per cent to 48 per cent — then it would not have taken much to push the result the other way. Donald Trump’s victory adds some credence to the idea that Brexit was pre–ordained, part of a wave of history. But the campaign turned on several events that were the result of accident, farce or both. If a relatively small number of those who backed Brexit had voted the other way, Remain would have triumphed.

Quentin Letts

My naughty list

In the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge, here, in no particular order, are my current irritants:   • Paddy Ashdown   • Lady (Shami) Chakrabarti of Kennington   • First Minister Nicola Sturrrgeon   • Brussels grands fromages Michel Barnier, Guy Verhofstadt and Monsieur Tipsy Jean-Claude Juncker   • Three out of five Newsnight discussions   • Dance judge Len Goodman (those teeth are whistling again, Len)   • Donald Trump’s hand gestures   • Sir Philip Green   • Lady Green and that dog of hers   • Nicky Morgan   • Business Secretary Greg Clark, the cabinet’s fruity-voiced answer to Clifford the Listerine dragon   •.

Richard Madeley

From goth to Chancellor

If only I’d known. If only I’d foreseen that the teenage classmate who strode through our school gates every morning, rolled-up Daily Telegraph tucked incongruously (and insouciantly) under one arm, dark leather trench-coat flapping rhythmically in sympathy with the long, swaying black crows-wings of shoulder-length hair, square-heeled boots clicking and clacking their way into morning assembly… if I’d somehow intuited, as I say, that this lanky 15-year-old with the questing, beaky nose and rimless glasses, this proto-goth, would one day be Chancellor of the Exchequer… Well, actually, I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised. I don’t think any of us who knew Philip Hammond back in 1971 at Shenfield School in Essex would’ve been.

Thursday

Richard Ekins

Who’s on the Supreme Court

Ordinarily, the Supreme Court sits in panels of no more than nine. All 11 justices will hear the government’s appeal, to avoid any suggestion that the composition of the panel might make a difference to the outcome. Caution is understandable: judges differ in philosophy, temperament and in how they understand their role. Lord Neuberger has been the court’s president since 2012. He has denied that the UK has a (proper) constitution and asserted that joining the European Convention on Human Rights has been a journey from ‘the dark ages’ to ‘the age of enlightenment’. In Nicklinson, two years ago, he was willing to extend human rights law to try to force change in the law of assisted suicide.

Joshua Rozenberg

Brexit in the balance

For once, a cliché is justified: the government’s appeal to the Supreme Court next week really will be a landmark case. The underlying issue could not be greater: the political future of the United Kingdom and its relationship with the European Union. The number of judges could not be greater either: 11 is the largest panel to have heard a single appeal, not just since the court was created seven years ago but since its predecessor was established in 1876. But perhaps the greatest issue at stake is the reputation of the judiciary, at a time when judges are under attack as never before. Nigel Farage had threatened a 100,000-strong march on the Supreme Court. He has since changed his mind, but there will be no shortage of drama.

Tom Goldsmith

Called to the bar

If you’ve missed the endless articles whingeing about pub closures, it must be because you’ve been too blotto to focus. It is impossible for a mediocre drinking hole to close its doors for the last time without some thirsty hack reaching for his collected George Orwell essays and waxing lyrical about the Moon Under Water and the death of the English pub. It’s true that many pubs are closing (27 a week, according to the Campaign for Real Ale) and demographic changes have called last orders for numerous decent pubs — and some gems — in areas where changing populations have seen demand dissolve quicker than a morning Alka-Seltzer. But the main reason why most pubs closed is simple: they were dreadful.

Luke Coppen

Ultimate fighting president

Last month a rich, boastful alpha male savoured the greatest victory of his life in New York City. Almost no one thought he could do it, but he made it look easy. In the build-up he ridiculed his opponent mercilessly and feuded with enemies on Twitter. ‘I’d like to take this chance to apologise,’ he said straight after his win, ‘to absolutely nobody!’ This wasn’t Trump Tower, but Madison Square Garden. Conor McGregor had just become the first two-weight champion in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) history. Thanks to the Irishman, who combines the athletic talent of Muhammad Ali with the comic ferocity of Bill Hicks, the event broke the arena’s ticket revenue record.

James Forsyth

Europe: the Next step

It often seems like the European referendum campaign never really ended. Everything from budget forecasts to Britain’s Olympic performance is simply the cue for another round of In-or-Out arguments. But Simon Wolfson, the mild-mannered chief executive of the high street fashion chain Next, is trying to move things on. Having been one of the biggest business names in favour of leaving the European Union, his aim is to form a coalition between Leavers and Remainers to forge a certain type of Brexit. ‘There is a natural alliance between those people who voted Out but who believe in an open, free, tolerant economy and those people who voted to remain.’ Wolfson tells me when I meet him in Next’s London headquarters on the Tottenham Court Road.