Features

Thursday

Simon Barnes

The medal machine

Never forget Atlanta. Every time a British athlete wins a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Rio, remember the Atlanta Games of 1996. I was there, and I saw some great sport — and absolutely none of it was British. Great Britain finished 36th in the medal table, behind Kazakhstan, Algeria, Belgium and Ireland. There was a single British gold medal, and I missed it. It was won by Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, now both sirs: two enormous boys on the burning deck. For the rest, eight silvers and six bronzes seemed to confirm the nature of our sporting culture: the nation that aimed low and missed. Simon Barnes on Team GB’s Olympic success: Why were we so bad at sport? If you worked as a sportswriter back then, you needed a good answer.

Nicholas Farrell

Italy’s migrant purgatory

 Ravenna At a car park a short walk from Dante’s tomb, one of the gang of illegal immigrants who tell motorists where to park and hound them for cash agreed to talk to me for €20. His name was Billy, he said, and he was 22. He was from Senegal and a Muslim. He had come to Italy by fishing boat 14 months ago from Libya, where he had arrived via Mali and Algeria. He paid €200 for the trip (the going rate is said to be at least €1,000) and his boat landed at Lampedusa, 160 nautical miles from Tripoli. ‘Why did you come?’ I asked. ‘In Senegal, no jobs,’ he replied. No war either, I pointed out: ‘You’re not refugees.’ ‘Yes, we are,’ Billy insisted. ‘Tribes are fighting in Senegal.

Johan Norberg

Our golden age

‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt and the social fabric is fraying.’ Who said that? Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen? It’s difficult to keep track. They sound so alike, the populists of the left and the right. Everything is awful, so bring on the scapegoats and the knights on white horses. Pessimism resonates. A YouGov poll found that just 5 per cent of Britons think that the world, all things considered, is getting better. You would think that the chronically cheerful Americans might be more optimistic — well, yes, 6 per cent of them think that the world is improving. More Americans believe in astrology and reincarnation than in progress.

Susan Hill

The perfect holiday cottage

‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I rang. ‘Bit off the beaten track but it’s quiet all right,’ said the owner. It was also unfurnished. ‘We can get some basics together for you.’ So, in the summer of 1968, I drove down to Dorset and my first holiday cottage. It was backed by a large wood, surrounded by fields of dairy cows and meadows of wild flowers, bordered by elms. Remember elms? God’s finest trees. They whispered in the wind. Furniture. A deal table and chair. Cooker. Enough crockery, cutlery and utensils for one. An armchair, old and comfortable. A bed, old and uncomfortable. A small table with a mirror. Pegs for hanging clothes.

Thursday

Mark Palmer

In defence of dinner parties

In or out? Almost two months on and I’m afraid the great debate shows no sign of abating, certainly not in our divided household. And while we’ve had several referendums over the matter, the result is always a stalemate. The only upside is that this argument has nothing to do with Brussels. It’s far more rudimentary. The battle in Palmer Towers is whether we eat in or out when wanting to see friends. My wife Joanna — who, as it happens, was for In over the country’s EU membership — is a firm outer, while I, who voted Out on 23 June, am a determined inner. As with the EU conundrum, there are good points to be made on both sides.

Lara Prendergast

Heads in the cloud

The Spectator podcast: Listen to Isabel Hardman, Lara Prendergast, Charlotte Jee, Editor of Techworld, and Professor Martin Conway, head of psychology at City University discuss the memory gap. Ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and I couldn’t tell you. Names disappear as swiftly as smoke. Birthdays, capital cities, phone numbers — the types of facts that used to come so readily — are no longer forthcoming. I’m 26, yet I feel I have the memory of a 70-year-old. My brain is a port through which details pass, but don’t stay. I’m not alone. Many young people feel our memories have been shot to pieces. It’s the embarrassing secret of my generation. We can hardly recall a thing.

Christopher Caldwell

Trump holds the aces

Last week, the New York Times ran the page one headline ‘Pence Supports Ryan, Showing GOP Turmoil.’ There was turmoil in the Republican party because Mike Pence, its vice-presidential nominee, had endorsed the candidacy of Paul Ryan, its most powerful congressman. One wonders what the Times would have called it had the two men actually disagreed about something. The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had waited days before endorsing Ryan, a signal that he had not forgotten Ryan’s slowness to back him in the spring. And the whole press is now in a frenzy of negative reporting about the Trump campaign. These have been ‘weeks of self-inflicted controversies and plummeting poll numbers’ among Trump’s Republicans.

Matt Ridley

Don’t grouse about grouse

The vast Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe is slightly larger than County Durham, as well as much hotter and drier. Yet both contain abundant wildlife thanks almost entirely to the hunting of game. In Bubye Valley, it’s lions and buffalo that are the targets; in the Durham dales, it’s grouse. But the effect is the same — a spectacular boost to other wildlife, privately funded. Bubye Valley was a cattle ranch, owned by Unilever, until 1994 when it was turned over to wildlife. A double electric fence was put round the entire 850,000-acre reserve. Gradually the buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra and antelope numbers grew.

Mark Mason

Straight talking | 11 August 2016

Thirty years ago this week, Queen performed what would turn out to be their last gig, at Knebworth. Their penultimate concert, at Wembley, was shown on Channel 4. I recorded it, and became obsessed. Time after time I watched-Freddie Mercury prance on to the stage sporting a moustache you could have swept a factory floor with. I watched him simulate the act of self-love with his famous sawn-off mic stand. I watched him preen, pout and posture, shaking his backside at the crowd, reappearing at the end dressed as the Queen. The previous year I’d watched him at Live Aid wearing a skimpy white vest and a leather armband studded with metal. Not once did it occur to me that-Freddie Mercury was gay. Those of you born since then-probably won’t believe that.

Andrew Kenny

The rainbow election

 Cape Town South Africa has just seen her most encouraging election results ever. The general election of April 1994, which brought full democracy, was important in itself but its results were a foregone conclusion — the black majority voted for the ANC, as expected. The local elections this month were different and immensely hopeful. There has been a large vote against the ruling party, the ANC, bringing an end to the great curse of post-colonial Africa under which the people keep voting for the ‘liberation’ party however corrupt and incompetent it is. The ANC still won 54 per cent of the votes, but this is the first time its share has fallen below 60 per cent.

Thursday

Felicity Lloyd

My wild success

I’ve just tripped over the damned hedgehog for the second time in as many days. He has retreated into the greenhouse and is glaring out at me from under the workbench, rigid with indignation. I suspect he has learnt this expression from my cats. Truth be told, after 14 months’ acquaintance, with time out for hibernation, we’ve got each other’s measure by now. My two elderly rescue moggies barely spare the drama king a second glance. I’ve worked hard to acquire a hedgehog. And a great spotted woodpecker, goldfinches, greenfinches, chaffinches, grey squirrels, dunnocks, tits of every persuasion — you get the picture. But Mr Hog is my triumph to date, proof of a project that is nearing fruition.

Anthony Whitehead

Blood and soil

A declaration of nationality is a profound statement. To say ‘I am British’ suggests that somehow I am composed of Britishness — that my fabric, my very being, is British. Except I personally, apparently, am not particularly British. The results are back from my DNA ethnicity test, and I am 63 per cent Irish, 20 per cent Western European, 11 per cent Scandinavian and 3 per cent Iberian. How do I feel about my nationality now? Half a test-tube of saliva was all it took for Ancestry, the genealogical organisation, to come up with these figures and, once you get results like this, the immediate reaction is to say: ‘Well it doesn’t make any difference. I am British, born in England, of parents also born in England, and that’s that.

Paul Wood

Clueless in Syria

The other day I was speaking to a Kurdish journalist who was held in Isis captivity for ten months. He and a colleague had had the bad luck to run into an Isis checkpoint in Syria. ‘How do you perform the midday prayer?’ they were asked after their car was waved to a halt. Unable to answer — they were not believers — they were immediately beaten around the head. Then one of the jihadis from the checkpoint was put into the back of their car and they were told to drive to the Isis base. The fighter had a pistol pointed at them the whole time, which was superfluous because he was also wearing a suicide belt. ‘Make a move and I’ll detonate myself,’ he said. ‘We’ll all die together.

Kevin O'Sullivan

Zero tolerance, zero sanity

For 20 months, I stood accused of a hate crime: homophobically motivated common assault. The British Transport Police pursued my case with extraordinary zeal. So too did the Crown Prosecution Service. I was plunged into a world where common sense withered and died. The nightmare began when I was travelling home to London after a funeral in Kent. I was chatting with a friend on the train when a strange man started shouting at us from across the carriage. ‘Shut up!’ he yelled before accusing us of conducting a sexist and misogynistic conversation at high volume. This was, in his opinion, ‘offensive’. Brendan O'Neill and Kevin O'Sullivan discuss the real hate crime scandal: We were bemused.

Brendan O’Neill

We are not a hateful nation

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place. Brendan O'Neill and Kevin O'Sullivan discuss the real hate crime scandal: If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in 2016, you aren’t alone.

Daniel Hannan

Brexit means sovereignty

We know what people voted against,’ say half-clever ­pundits, ‘but it’s far from clear what they voted for.’ Actually, it’s very clear: the ­British voted to leave the EU and take back control of their own laws. They didn’t ­dictate precisely what kind of deal we should have with our neighbours after leaving: that is for ministers to negotiate. But when Leave campaigners invited people to ‘take back ­control’, voters understood what that meant: legal supremacy should return from Brussels to Westminster. Remainers spent the campaign trying to suggest that the EU was just one among several international associations in which Britain participated.

Thursday

Mark Edmonds

My pedigree chum

The backlash has been brutal, unforgiving and, in common with the left’s reactions to so many things, almost hysterical in its hot-blooded fury. My crime? Starbucks shares? Casual racism? Advocating military action in North Korea? No, I have just bought a puppy, a pedigree puppy — and not just any pedigree, but an aristocratic-looking Cavalier King Charles spaniel — the apotheosis of canine privilege. Here’s a sample of some of the more printable rants from north London friends and colleagues. It makes dispiriting reading. ‘That dog looks very posh… what’s wrong with a mongrel?

Damian Thompson

Mass murder

On Tuesday morning, an 85-year-old man was forced to his knees while his throat was slit by Islamic fanatics. The murder of Father Jacques Hamel in the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, has been recognised by western public opinion as an act of unspeakable barbarity. One could say that the facts speak for themselves. But for Catholics, this atrocity possesses a special horror. Father Hamel was killed while re-enacting the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is the essence of the Catholic Mass, which — unlike Protestant commemorations of the Last Supper — is presented to the faithful as the same sacrifice offered by Jesus.

Douglas Murray

Europe’s summer of terror

How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and our justified scepticism of the undiscriminating ‘open borders’ brigade mean that we have so far been spared the delights of what Angela Merkel’s growing army of critics refer to as her summer of terror. Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq discuss Europe's summer of terror: It is now a fortnight since Mohammed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ploughed a truck along the Nice seafront, killing 84 people.

Anne Applebaum

Trump ♥ Putin

Spy novels and James Bond movies; post-war Vienna and East Berlin; Manchurian candidates and Third Men. The pop culture of the Cold War era created a set of stereotypes about hostile foreign intelligence services, especially Russian intelligence services, and they still exist. We still imagine undercover agents, dead drops, messages left under park benches, microphones inside fountain pens. It’s time to forget all of that, because the signature Russian intelligence operation of the future, and indeed of the present, is not going to unfold in secret, but rather in public. It’s not going to involve stolen documents, but rather disinformation operations designed to influence democratic elections.