Features

Thursday

Mark Mason

Aga can’t

Earlier this year my partner paid several hundred thousand pounds for an Aga. There’s no other way of putting it. A major cause of her excitement about our new house was the presence in its kitchen of the whacking great oven. I, on the other hand, was unsure how I felt about it — Aga-nostic, if you like. Six months later I’m sick of the bloody thing. What’s more, I’ve worked out why Aga lovers go on about them so much. For those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered one of these beasts, the facts are these. An Aga has to be kept on constantly, sapping your fuel source (ours is electric) 24 hours a day. My model has two ovens, one at a fixed high temperature, the other at a fixed low temperature. There are two hotplates, ditto. And that’s it.

Thursday

Mohammed Ashfaq

Confessions of a rent boy

I am not surprised that Keith Vaz has been caught sleeping with male hookers. I’m one myself and so I know that overweight married Asians are our staple. We often joke that without Indians and-Middle Eastern guys, we’d all be broke. They are always married. I’ve always been sickened by the way they betray their wives, but they aren’t paying me for my judgment. There are different types of rent boy. Some are very young, slim and smooth. They are called twinks. I am dark, hairy and muscled, which appeals to certain clients who want a ‘real man’. I’ve been escorting for nearly four years, and I’ve had hundreds of different and weird experiences. I see men of all different ages and backgrounds. I meet lawyers, businessmen, all sorts.

Jeremy Norman

Mystery on Mount Athos

I have just returned from one of the world’s most secretive states. I had to apply for a visa a month beforehand and send in a copy of my passport. There is no way into this place by road; you have to arrive on an authorised boat and a policeman checks your visa against your passport before you board. Private boats must keep well offshore and may not land. The visa is valid for only three nights; you have to book each night in advance and may not spend more than one night in the same place. Only ten visas are granted a day. Women have always been forbidden here — this rule remains strictly in force. A secretive body of Elders governs here and all citizens are bound to total obedience.

Sean Thomas

Corbyn the parasite

It’s a long way from Westminster to the banks of the Zambesi. But last week, for me, they linked up. I was lolling on my bed in the Sausage Tree Safari Camp, writing up notes for a travel article. Then a single, iridescent, rather delicate green wasp buzzed into my room and settled on my mosquito net. I folded my laptop. Looked at the wasp. And I got a sudden vision of Jeremy Corbyn and the fate of the Labour party. To explain. The reason I was able to identify the wasp so quickly — and assure myself that it was no threat — is because this wasp is one of the 200,000 species of wasp which are parasitic. And I once spent a year researching parasites for a thriller (my conceit was that religion might be a cerebral parasite).

Ross Clark

The Brexit bounce

Next time it comes to redesigning the PPE course at Oxford, I suggest a module beginning with a quotation from George Osborne. It’s something he said to the Treasury Select Committee in May, back when he was still Chancellor: ‘If you look at the sheer weight of opinion, it is overwhelmingly the case that people who look at the case for leaving the EU come to the conclusion it would make the country poorer, and it would make the individuals in the country poorer, too.’ There might be advantages to Brexit, he said, ‘but let’s not pretend we’d be economically better off’. In other words: it wasn’t just George Osborne’s opinion that Britain would be worse off if we left the EU; it was objective fact.

Peter Oborne

Mugabe’s last gasp

Last week rumours swirled round Zimbabwe that Robert Mugabe, the 92-year-old president, had either died or been incapacitated. The government banned demonstrations after Mugabe’s-presidential aircraft had been diverted in mid-air to Dubai during a scheduled journey to Singapore. Then the man himself turned up alive (though far from well) at Harare-airport, where he made a reasonably good joke about his ‘resurrection’. The president, who has ruled his country throughout its 36-year history, is nevertheless mortally wounded. We are entering the last few months of the Mugabe era. His health is not the real problem.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Local heroes | 8 September 2016

In one village after another across the country, pubs are closing, as many as 25 a week by some counts, and this is accepted with English fatalism. But the people of South Stoke, near Bath, chose not to accept the loss of the Packhorse mutely; the locals decided to save their local. And in the process they may have demonstrated that ‘community’ and indeed ‘local’ or localism are not merely empty rhetoric. Part of the charm of Bath is its setting, lying in a valley ringed by hills, a town surrounded by villages.

Patrick Allitt

Death of an anti-feminist

Phyllis Schlafly could have been America’s number one feminist. She graduated from good universities, wrote important books on serious topics, was an outspoken orator and political organiser, didn’t let her life be defined by her husband’s career, and stood up to bitter abuse from her opponents. In reality, however, she was America’s leading anti-feminist. Her death this week, at the age of 92, marks the passing of an organisational and publicity genius who did all she could to fight against the spirit of the age. When passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution seemed imminent and inevitable in the mid-1970s, she created a democratic grassroots pressure group, ‘StopERA’, that managed to kill it once and for all.

Thursday

Tove Lifvendahl

Sweden’s refugee crisis

 Stockholm For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence.

Heri Joensen

Save the whale-hunt!

 Toftir, Faroe Islands Almost twenty years ago I founded a heavy metal band called Týr. Our songs, with titles such as ‘Blood of Heroes’ and ‘Lady of the Slain’, might not appeal to all Spectator readers — but we’ve released seven albums and toured several times across Europe and America. Our album covers depict bloodstained swords and skulls; nobody finds them too upsetting. But when I posted a picture of myself cutting up a whale on Facebook, all hell broke loose. I live in the Faroe Islands, where whaling has been part of our way of life for centuries. Last month, I was working on a long-finned pilot whale the day after it had been killed.

Freddy Gray

The Clinton problem

′Love Trumps Hate' has become one of Hillary Clinton’s official campaign slogans. It’s a clunky pun but you get the point. Hillary stands for love — i.e progressive global values, equality, that sort of thing. Donald Trump represents white nationalism, bigotry, all the nasty stuff. Love is good; hate is bad. Trump must be trumped, so that history can keep marching in the right direction. The trouble is, Americans don’t love Clinton. The feeling they have for her tends more towards hate, actually. Clinton’s ‘favourability ratings’ are famously bad. Between 30 and 40 per cent of Americans say they have a ‘highly unfavourable’ opinion of her.

Lara Prendergast

‘I have become their voice’

When the model and actress Anastasia Lin was crowned Miss World Canada last year, a fairly easy and lucrative career lay in front of her: magazine shoots, sponsorship opportunities and being paid to turn up to parties. She instead decided to use her position to confront the Chinese Communist party and call out its human rights abuses. Her new film The Bleeding Edge is a feature-length dramatisation about the organ trade in China. It might not be in a cinema near you soon, but it does screen in the House of Commons next week, in front of MPs and peers. And this is the audience that 26-year-old Lin is seeking. Her website has the slogan ‘beauty with a purpose’, and Lin has both in abundance. Speaking from Toronto before her visit here, she tells me her unlikely story.

Stephen Pollard

Warrant for alarm

A concerted effort is under way to make sure that, when it comes to the European Arrest Warrant, Brexit does not mean Brexit. The Police Federation, for example, will hear no ill spoken of the system. And the same might be said of the Prime Minister, who as home secretary praised it to the skies. As she put it in October 2014, without the European Arrest Warrant, ‘British criminals would be able to hop on to the Eurostar or fly to Spain, safe in the knowledge we wouldn’t be able to get them back to prosecute them.’ Without it, the UK would become ‘a honeypot for all of Europe’s criminals on the run from justice’. The statistics appear to back her.

Thursday

Ariane Sherine

Marriage for one

As far as the bride was concerned, the wedding was perfect. Her dress was beautiful, the vows were traditional and she changed her name after the ceremony. The clifftop scenery was breathtaking, the seven bridesmaids were encouraging and supportive: move over Princess Di. There was only one thing missing: the groom. Like a growing number of single women, Sara Starkström had decided to marry herself. ‘I thought about people marrying other people without loving themselves first,’ says Starkström, a writer, explaining what many would call a bizarre overreaction to finding herself single at the age of 29. ‘How could they pledge to do all this stuff for another person when they couldn’t promise themselves the same thing?

Liam Halligan

The Bank of Wonderland

What should we think about negative interest rates? What kind of Alice in Wonderland world are we living in when companies and households are paid to borrow and charged if they save? Seemingly crazy, negative interest rates are spreading nonetheless. Implemented by central banks in Europe, Japan and elsewhere, they now apply in countries accounting for a quarter of the global economy. Should we be worried? Could we see negative rates in Britain? Earlier this month, the Bank of England cut interest rates for the first time in seven years, from 0.5 per cent to a new record low of 0.25 per cent.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The vanity line

Jeremy Corbyn may not be right about many things, but when he sat on the floor of a train, hoping to raise awareness about overcrowding, he was at least on to something. Of course, in classic Corbyn style, he proved to have ignored reality to make his point: there were plenty of seats on that particular train. It was nonetheless a point worth making. Millions of passengers jostle for standing space every day; Britain’s rail system is in urgent need of help. And there is apparently money to be spent. It just won’t be going on the most overcrowded lines. Instead, the cash is destined for High Speed 2 — one of those mysterious vanity projects that refuses to go away even though common sense begs it to. Polls show the vast majority of us are against it.

Jan Moir

Diamond geezers

Ring a ding-ding — here comes the he-bling. Tony Blair started it. The war, that is. On good taste. This summer he was photographed on holiday relaxing in shark-print trunks and gangsta sunglasses under a blue Mediterranean sky. The former prime minister was on a yacht off the coast of Sicily but — uh oh! — what in the name of sunken treasure was that monstrosity moored between his moobs? Closer inspection revealed it to be a giant gold cross, gleaming like a gilded anchor submerged in greying seaweed. Look at the size of that thing! Perhaps it comes in useful for skewering sardines off the grill at a beach barbecue? Whatever its function, it succeeded in making him look a bit shifty, like a half-baked mafioso, a Tony Mezzo-Soprano.

Frances Robinson

Bring back bonkbusters!

Life is starting to look a lot like the 1980s: Russia is flexing its muscles, the Labour party is tearing itself apart, and there’s a woman in No. 10. Political thinkers are falling over themselves to over-analyse the geopolitical precipice upon which the world seems to be balanced. But life doesn’t have to be serious all the time, so it’s worth reflecting on another aspect of heading back in time: we’re due a revival of the-bonkbuster. Frances Robinson and Camilla Swift discuss the return of the bonkbuster: Jilly Cooper’s new book Mount! is published next month, and features the return of Rupert Campbell-Black, 30 years after he first appeared in Riders.

Thursday

Jonathan Spyer

Who should rule Syria?

The long civil war in Syria is still far from conclusion. Any real possibility of rebel victory ended with the entry of Russian forces last autumn — but while the initiative is now with the Assad regime, the government’s forces are also far from a decisive breakthrough. So who, if anyone, should the UK be backing in the Syrian slaughterhouse, and what might constitute progress in this broken and burning land? It ought to be fairly obvious why a victory for the Assad regime would be a disaster for the West. Assad, an enthusiastic user of chemical weapons against his own people, is aligned with the most powerful anti--western coalition in the Middle East. This is the alliance dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Alex Massie

Highland sting

There is no party in Britain quite as fake as the Scottish National Party. The SNP, now entrenched in its dominance of Scottish politics, imagines itself a revolutionary force for change. Its mission to break up Britain bolsters that impression. But if the SNP campaigns with zeal, it governs with caution. These are the most conservative revolutionaries on the planet. On health, education and taxes, the SNP stresses continuity. The party saves its radicalism for issues the public considers trivial. One is Trident. Another is land reform. According to an opinion poll earlier this year, just 3 per cent of voters consider nuclear weapons one of the three most important issues facing Scotland. Just 2 per cent think that of land reform.