Features

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Downwardly mobile

Last year, I found a pair of trainers in our communal recycling bin: Nike Air Max in black and grey size 10, very smart and hardly worn. I’d been wearing them a week when the teenager who lives in the flat below pointed at them and laughed. He told me that he’d discarded them because they were scuffed. This is where I’ve got to, I thought: wearing trainers that I found in a bin on a council estate. Such foraging isn’t un-usual for us. The sideboard in our kitchen, the bookshelf in the hall and the big mirror in our bedroom were all found on our street. I worry that we might be dropping out of the middle class entirely. Our daughter, who goes to the local primary school, now has a strong south London accent.

Harry Mount

Give us a break!

As Boris Johnson will know from his love of Greek tragedy, hubris leads to nemesis. And it is Boris’s own hubris — in playing cricket with Lord Spencer the weekend after Brexit, and not finishing his leadership speech on time — that supposedly led to his downfall. I well know from working with Boris at the Telegraph that prompt timekeeping is not his forte. For five years, my Wednesday nights were destroyed as Boris regularly missed the 7 p.m. deadline for delivering his column. ‘It hasn’t arrived,’ I’d say to him over the phone at 7.01 p.m. ‘Ah, Christ, sorry,’ said Boris, ‘Bloody internet! It must be pinging its way down those threadbare copper wires as we speak, old man.

Patrick Marnham

Frexit – oui ou non?

In France, Brexit has provoked resentment and shock. For many years-Britain has been seen in both Paris and-Brussels as the European ‘bad boy’, out for what it can get and intending to give as little as possible in return. The first news was greeted with headlines such as ‘Can Europe-survive?’ but there was also a note of relief: ‘End of 40 years of love-hate’. Even before the referendum, Emmanuel Macron, the finance minister, had denounced the British record in Europe, claiming that the-United Kingdom had hijacked the great project and diverted the Union from its political destiny in order to reduce it to a single market.

Thursday

James Forsyth

So will it be Boris?

The Tory party is in a deeply emotional state. Remain-supporting MPs cry tears of rage when they discuss the referendum. Bitter emails and text messages have been exchanged. Leave-supporting MPs have been accused of unleashing dark forces that they cannot control, of putting immigrants in Britain at risk. Yet the leadership candidates who have so far emerged seem strangely united in their vision for post-Brexit Britain. All want to heal the divide between rich and poor that the referendum has exposed. It is tempting to concentrate only on the division in the party, the fear that David Cameron’s resignation has injected even more poison into the Tory system than either the downfall of Margaret Thatcher or the Maastricht debate.

Iain Martin

Sturgeon’s bluff

It ought not to be a surprise that Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister, has declared that the vote to leave the European Union is the trigger for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Salmond thinks everything is an excuse for another go. If a new Bay City Rollers album suffered poor reviews south of the border, or an English football pundit failed to declare Archie Gemmill’s wonder goal for Scotland against Holland in the 1978 world cup the best ever, Salmond would be right there on the UK’s television screens, chortling at the brilliance of his own wit, before intoning gravely that this insult is surely the final straw for the United Kingdom. Salmond has been demanding a second Scottish referendum almost from the moment he lost the last one.

The Spectator

Reasons to be cheerful | 30 June 2016

Noel Malcolm It may sound both Pollyannaish and paradoxical to say this, but leaving the EU will enable us to have stable, friendly, cooperative relations with all our EU neighbours. Being cooped up in a dysfunctional system, where so much depends on backroom arm-twisting and competing for favours in a zero-sum game, doesn’t produce stable friendships. For those of us who feel (as I do) like real Europeans, it will be so much better to be the friendly next-door neighbour than the unwanted in-law in the quarrelling family home. Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Nicholas Farrell

La bomba Britannica

In Italy, media coverage of the triumph of Brexit has been wall-to-wall as Italians worry about the collateral damage and wonder if they too dare… So far La bomba Britannica has hit the Milan stock market much harder than the London one. On Friday, Milan fell by 12 per cent against the FTSE-100’s 3.5 per cent. Italy’s banks — too numerous, too small, undercapitalised and saddled with alarming levels of toxic debt — took the biggest hit. New eurozone rules that ban government bailouts for big depositors have turned them into sitting ducks. Shares in Monte Paschi di Siena (bailed out once already in 2013 by Italy’s central bank) fell by more than 13 per cent. In the past six months, Italy’s banks have lost 56 per cent of their share value.

Ariane Sherine

Left bereft

Dear Jeremy, Please don’t go. I know you’re even more unpopular than the England football team right now — your shadow cabinet is currently emptier than the promise of a weekly £350 million for the NHS. Every few seconds a disloyal minister sends you an insincere letter full of veiled enmity which might as well say: ‘Dear Jeremy, since nobody likes you I’ve decided I don’t like you either, so I’m taking my ball back! Find someone else to play with — if you can.’ So I thought I’d write you a letter of my own, to let you know that someone still thinks you’re wonderful and wants to be in your gang. You don’t know me, but I feel I know you intimately (though not as intimately as I’d like).

Liam Halligan

Project Hope

Boris Johnson famously said that Winston Churchill would have voted for Brexit. The wartime leader’s grandson — staunch Remainer and Tory grandee Nicholas Soames — dismissed such claims as ‘appalling’ and ‘totally wrong’. This bad-tempered referendum rift between two traditionalist, Old Etonian Conservatives symbolises, somewhat incongruously perhaps, the broader state of the nation. Deep and traumatic divisions have been drawn between friends and families everywhere — and, of course, within political parties. David Cameron’s dignified resignation speech has quickly given way to a grim determination to ‘Stop Boris’ from taking the Conservative crown and the Premiership.

Peter Oborne

Pakistan’s great leader

There have been three great captains of Pakistan. The first was A.H. Kardar, the country’s first Test captain. Born in Lahore, and talent-spotted by the senior Nawab of Pataudi, Kardar played for India before Partition. He led Pakistan to victory over India in its second-ever Test match in Lucknow in 1952, and even more famously over England at the Oval Test in August 1954. Uniquely, Kardar won at least one Test match in Pakistan’s inaugural series against each other country. Pakistan’s next great captain was Imran Khan, the all-rounder who inspired his country to a famous World Cup victory in 1992, and now has honourable aspirations to become Pakistan’s prime minister. The third is Misbah-ul-Haq, and he has a claim to be the greatest.

Brendan O’Neill

Not thick or racist: just poor

The most striking thing about Britain’s break with the EU is this: it’s the poor wot done it. Council-estate dwellers, Sun readers, people who didn’t get good GCSE results (which is primarily an indicator of class, not stupidity): they rose up, they tramped to the polling station, and they said no to the EU. It was like a second peasants’ revolt, though no pitchforks this time. The statistics are extraordinary. The well-to-do voted Remain, the down-at-heel demanded to Leave. The Brexiteer/Remainer divide splits almost perfectly, and beautifully, along class lines. Of local authorities that have a high number of manufacturing jobs, a whopping 86 per cent voted Leave. Of those bits of Britain with low manufacturing, only 42 per cent did so.

Freddy Gray

Our antidote to Trump

Is Donald Trump an idiot or a genius or a mad idiot genius? He seems driven by some demented force that even he doesn’t understand. What else made him come to Scotland on Friday last week? The ostensible reason, and probably the motive in Trump’s head, was that he wanted to reopen one of his golf courses. That’s weird enough in itself, given that he is the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, and in a few months could be leader of the free world. What’s he doing still jetting about promoting his businesses? What’s even weirder is that The Donald landed on Brexit day, of all days.

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Britain’s great divide

In Notting Hill Gate, in west London, the division was obvious. On the east side of the street was a row of privately owned Victorian terraced houses painted in pastel colours like different flavoured ice creams. These houses, worth £4 million to £6 million each, were dotted with Remain posters. On the west side was a sad-looking inter-war council block, Nottingwood House, which had dirty bricks and outside staircases and corridors. No posters there. But that is where my fellow campaigners and I headed — down to the basement entrances with their heavy steel gates. We looked up the names on the canvassing sheets and rang the bell of one flat after another until we found someone who would buzz us in. This was the hunting ground for the Leave campaign.

John Osullivan

A sadder, wiser referendum

In June 1975, I was given the heavy responsibility of writing the Telegraph’s ‘light’ op-ed on the conduct of the first Euro-referendum campaign, which duly appeared on the day of the vote. My theme was that it had been the nicest possible stitch-up. ‘From the establishment and the respectable anti-establishment, from the Economist and the New Statesman, from the Lord Feather [of the TUC] and Mr Campbell Adamson [of the CBI], from Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, from the Royal Commission Volunteers to “Actors and Actresses for Europe”, the same advice, the same dire predictions of life outside the Market…’ It rings loud bells today.

Laura Freeman

The happiness police

On a recent sodden weekend walk, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking: it’s not so bad. Not the slugs or the sky or the rain making its way down a gap between neck and waterproof. But I couldn’t do it. Losing heart, I turned back. Glump, glump, glump through the puddles. It rained through breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Same the next day. And the day after. I wore grey and sighed at the window. But I am aberrant. Melancholy is against the rules nowadays. I should have put on my yellow wellies, twirled my spotty umbrella, photographed myself in the garden and put it online with the hashtag #singingintherain. That’s what everyone else seems to be doing. If, like me, you are a natural Cassandra, then the present Pollyanna tendency is a trial.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Bear baiting

Oh those Russians. When they’re not beating up English football fans, they’re cheating at the Olympics. They occupy other countries and shoot down civilian airliners, then pretend it wasn’t them. They’re helping Assad win the Syrian civil war. They’re even driving up London house prices. There’s no infamy, apparently, of which Russians are not guilty. ‘OK — we did do all those things,’ admits a Moscow broadcaster friend, a little sheepishly. ‘But everyone else does them too! We’re the only ones to get punished, because everyone hates us.’ Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russians have become the world’s official pariahs.

Josie Appleton

Abuse of justice

It’s easy to forget that laws are supposed to do something useful. Legislation is increasingly press-release law, which makes everyone feel good but causes havoc when applied to the real world. Take the mad, bad idea about to go out for consultation: ‘mandatory reporting’ will make it a crime for child and health professionals to fail to report signs of child abuse to the local authority. This would allow David Cameron to be seen to make a stand against child abuse, and which politician doesn’t want that? But what a mess it will make. Failure to report signs of abuse could be punishable by up to five years in prison. This raises the possibility that someone could be criminalised for their failure to report ‘abuse’ that was not in fact abuse.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Trump’s train wreck

If you think the Conservative party is in a bad way over Europe, spare a thought for the Republicans of Washington DC. Their presidential candidate is Donald Trump, and he’s a nightmare. The party can’t stand him, he can’t stand the party, and somehow they’re supposed to win an election together. The omens don’t look good. Even the influential Republicans who wish Trump well — and there aren’t many — can’t figure out how to get along with him. ‘I just have no idea how you get an idea into Trumpland,’ says Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who is known as ‘the most powerful conservative in DC’. He adds, ‘In any campaign, the circle of trust shrinks as the campaign goes on.

Andrew Watts

Daddy issues

Just in time for Fathers’ Day, when thousands of British men will receive cards addressed to ‘The World’s Best Dad!’, a new report from the Fatherhood Institute has come out demonstrating the statistical improbability of the claim. The average father in the UK spends only 24 minutes looking after his children for every hour their mother spends, the lowest ratio in Europe. And given that these figures are based on self-reporting questionnaires, rather than a researcher with a stopwatch, this is almost certainly an overestimate. The Fatherhood Institute concludes that government action is needed, in the first place by increasing the parental leave available to fathers.

Nick Cohen

Brexit’s bitter harvest

Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss The Spectator's decision to back Brexit: We British flatter ourselves that common sense is a national personality trait. Giddy Europeans may follow the abstract notions of dangerous leaders, but we could not be more different. We are a practical, moderate breed — if we do say so ourselves — who act according to the evidence, not fantastical theories. Let me see how this dear delusion is bearing up. It feels as if the Leave campaign will win the EU referendum. But even if Leave loses, it seems certain that it will perform so well as to produce an existential crisis in both our main parties. Our fabled common sense should also tell us that the British economy could have a crisis of its own.