Features

Thursday

Andrew Gilligan

Robocop returns

To the casual glance it looks like a normal police car — same markings, same lights, same faces at the wheel. Only the two small yellow circles, one at each of the top corners of the windscreen, tell you that this is a mobile armoury. It will often be a BMW X5: a SUV’s suspension copes better with the weight of the weapons, the gun safe, the ballistic shields. Inside, the occupants will be wearing Glock 17 pistols and have access to weapons which could include, in ascending order of bullet size and ‘penetrative power’, the Benelli Super 90 shotgun, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, the G36 carbine, the Sig Sauer automatic gas-piston operated rifle, and the G3 sniper and assault rifle.

Simon Jenkins

Letting terror win

There is nothing a government in a remotely free country can do to stop a suicide bomber in a crowded space. As a weapon, he has the precision of a drone missile. The only preventive task open to the police and security service is to penetrate and destroy a terrorist cell in advance. This means assiduous intelligence. It has clearly held the key to disarming some 50 ‘terror plots’ known to the police over the past decade. Every lesson in counter-terrorism warns against overreaction. But David Cameron seems oblivious to this truth. He appears to have no faith in the police to protect British citizens from terrorism.

Christopher Caldwell

Trump’s women trouble

Washington DC In La Crosse, Wisconsin, on Monday night, Donald Trump said, ‘If we do well here, folks, it’s over.’ He was right in theory. There were signs that the billionaire’s crusade against the Republican party establishment and the plutocrats who run it might find an ear in Wisconsin. The state has an industrial working class. It has lately seen plants close and good jobs flee. On the other hand, there were signs that Trump might go up in flames. Wisconsin is well-educated. It is one of the last places in the country where the party system resembles the sociological cliché of the 1950s: rich Republicans in the suburbs, working-class Democrats in the cities and the boondocks.

Stewart Dakers

Live fast, die not too old

As an old man, well past my Biblical sell-by date, I cannot for the life of me understand why increased longevity is received as such a universal blessing. One thing’s for sure; its celebrants are not the oldies themselves, so it is time someone challenged this assumption. Let me start with a parable. It concerns an Eastern European country whose parliament was considering a total smoking ban. In response, a consortium of tobacco companies demonstrated that the savings made in healthcare as a result of the decline in smoking-related diseases were chicken feed besides the reduced payout in pensions as the result of premature death — not to mention the fiscal increment from the habit. In 1999, the report said, the Czech economy enjoyed a net gain of 5.

Mark Palmer

White power

Ruby Wax makes the point (repeatedly but it still gets a laugh) that the British discovered the practice of brushing their teeth in the 1980s. I dare say our dental hygiene is the butt of more jokes throughout North America, where wearing a brace is something of a fashion statement. But something strange is happening on our side of the pond. This struck me — in fact, almost blinded me — a couple of weeks ago when a hotel manager introduced himself at a central London gathering and dazzled me. His teeth were super-white. They were super-straight, too, but it was the brilliance that startled me. It was as if someone had told the poor fellow to open wide and poured a pot of Dulux gloss into his mouth. I couldn’t take him seriously.

Melissa Kite

Chips with everything

When Laura Rennie was told that the cat she lost as a kitten had been found 18 years after it wandered off, she was overjoyed. An animal welfare officer turned up at her home to say the tabby had been located and traced to her, thanks to its microchip. Toby had been hit by a car, but was alive and at a local vet’s. Even if it were just to say goodbye, or take charge of his veterinary care, Ms Rennie would at least be able do the best for Toby. What a wonderful story, you might say, and what great proof, as complaints mount over the compulsory microchipping of dogs which became law this week, that pet microchipping is a much-needed resource.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

How to save the monarchy

On 21 April Queen Elizabeth II marks her 90th birthday, the first of our reigning monarchs ever to do so, and it will be a very happy occasion, just as her Diamond Jubilee was in 2012. Five years ago there had been a more sombre milestone for the queen’s eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales. He passed the mark of 59 years spent as heir to the throne set by his great-great-grandfather, Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII in 1901. The prince will be celebrating his mother’s birthday as enthusiastically as anyone, while oppressed by unmistakable frustration. He’s now 67; the Queen’s mother, the late Queen Mother, lived to 101; when he inherits the throne, he will be well beyond most people’s retirement age.

Daniel Hannan

Bought off by Brussels

A letter appeared in the Independent a few weeks ago signed by various environmentalist grandees — heads of green lobby groups, former chairmen of eco-quangos and the like. It warned against Brexit on the grounds that EU laws had ‘a hugely positive effect’ on the environment. It didn’t explain why a post-EU Britain wouldn’t retain, replicate or even improve these ‘hugely positive’ laws. As usual, it implied that voters needed to have such things dictated to them. The really interesting thing, though, was the list of bodies that followed the signatories’ names: Natural England, the Green Alliance, the RSPB, the Natural Environment Research Council, a couple of universities — you get the picture.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The return of eugenics

The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary for the sake of protecting the race. — The Spectator, 25 May 1912   It’s comforting now to think of eugenics as an evil that sprang from the blackness of Nazi hearts. We’re familiar with the argument: some men are born great, some as weaklings, and both pass the traits on to their children.

Alex Massie

Referendum rage

In Scotland’s grittier pubs, a simple rule has long applied: no football colours and no talking about politics. With enough drink, talking about either can lead to violence — and pint glasses are expensive to replace. With an ordinary general election, the prohibition is easy to obey. The wrong buggers might well win, but they can easily be removed at the next election. A referendum, however, is different. It’s not just temporary — it’s for life. And like life, it’s unavoidable. Socially, as well as politically, there is no hiding place. The Prime Minister is, it seems, experiencing the referendum effect for himself.

Simon Barnes

The brain-damage game

In the course of a queasy hour in Harley Street 30 years ago I learned a great deal about the brain — what Woody Allen called ‘my second favourite organ’ — and altered the course of my life in sports writing. Dr Peter Harvey concluded: ‘Boxing is a contest in which the winner seems often to be the one who produces more brain damage on his opponent than he himself sustains.’ Last weekend, after a boxing match for the British middleweight title, Nick Blackwell was in an induced coma with bleeding to the brain. Things would have been a good deal worse if his opponent, Chris Eubank Jnr, had not been told by his corner to stop hitting Blackwell in the head and confine himself to body shots.

Henry Jeffreys

The moths are coming!

Last month a friend invited me to lunch at the Garrick Club. As an impoverished writer, I don’t get many offers like this, so the week before, in a state of anticipation, I took my good suit out of the cupboard to check it wasn’t too rumpled. To my horror there were two holes the size of a five-pence piece in the trousers. Moths! I tore through my wardrobe and found web-like trails all over my coats, suits and sweaters. ‘No!’ I cried and shook my fist at the heavens. This year we’ve enjoyed the warmest winter since the 17th century, so you may not have been snuggled up in your woollens. But something else almost certainly has been. Mild weather is perfect for Tineola bisselliella, the clothes moth. Insect experts are warning of an unprecedented epidemic.

William Cook

Confessions of a Saga lout

It’s chucking-out time at my local pub, and the high street is full of idiots. They’ve all had a lot to drink, but they’re in no hurry to go home. They’re looking for a party, somewhere loud and lairy to go on to. They’d settle for more booze, but some speed or skunk would be even better. It’s a scene I’ve seen a thousand times, but lately something’s changed: these tearaways aren’t teenagers — they’re in their fifties and sixties. Meet the Saga louts, those feckless folk who refuse to grow up even as they approach old age. Saga louts are a pain, and I should know because I’m one of them. I turned 50 last year, making me one of the youngest members of the tribe.

Gary Dexter

The poetic state of the nation

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-eugenics-torywars-poetry/media.mp3" title="Gary Dexter and Dean Atta discuss the poetic state of the nation" startat=1169] Listen [/audioplayer] It was past midnight in Norwich. There was a keen wind rifling up London Street. It was dark and it was January. I was hoarse, my feet hurt and, more to the point, I was cold. I had been punishing myself for four-and-a-half hours reciting poems by Eliot, Larkin, Wordsworth and Whitman. I stopped a pretty Hungarian girl and her boyfriend to ask for their favourite poem. ‘Anything by Pablo Neruda,’ she said. I told her I would recite some Neruda and offer my hat for a donation if they enjoyed it.

Wednesday

Julie Burchill

Feminists for Brexit

For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde. The adored MP of my childhood, Tony Benn, preached against it in any shape or form. ‘When I saw how the European Union was developing,’ he said, ‘it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don’t like it you can change it.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The price of a cathedral

We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake, not a parish church: they must be rich, with all those gold-coloured vestments and choristers in ruffs. But if we want our cathedrals to be alive and singing psalms in 20 years’ time, this misconception about cathedrals must change. Indeed, the sub-dean of Coventry is openly clamping down.

Theodore Dalrymple

Why we need migrants

This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just a migrant, of course. Indeed, to speak of migrants in general is to deny them agency or even characteristics of their own, to assume that they are just units and that their fate depends only on how the receiving country receives them and not at all on their own motives, efforts or attributes, including their cultural presuppositions. It takes two to integrate, after all. But I want to point to what seems to me a curious paradox.

John R. MacArthur

The Clintons made Trump

   New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning 16 March, and the queen consort of the Democratic party had seemingly sewn up the presidential nomination — a coronation promised years ago by her king but thus far denied by unruly subjects. As I scanned the headline in the New York Times, ‘Clinton and Trump Pile up the Delegates’, I felt sick at heart. The Times has functioned throughout the campaign as court gazette for the Clintons, but there was no denying the basic accuracy of the story.

James Forsyth

The Conservative crack-up

No one does political violence quite like the Tories. The fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 unleashed a cycle of reprisals that lasted until David Cameron became leader in 2005. During that time, Tories specialised in factionalism: wets vs dries, Europhiles vs Eurosceptics, modernisers vs traditionalists. Cameron’s great achievement was to unite the party in pursuit of power. Now that unity is coming undone. You can blame Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour for the latest Conservative breakdown. The Tory wars of the mid-1990s were fuelled by a sense that defeat was inevitable: since the Conservatives weren’t going to beat Tony Blair, they felt they might as well fight each other.

Jenny McCartney

Feedback frenzy

I used to enjoy ‘giving feedback’ in the glory years when nobody wanted it. Now, upon completing a routine transaction, the customer is bombarded with breathless demands for response. The neurotic corporate catchphrase is ‘How was it for you?’ The world is now in feedback frenzy. Companies endlessly prod us for our views so they can brandish positive statistics at each other — or sack somebody. A new app, called Impraise, even invites workers to evaluate their own colleagues anonymously. You could spend your whole day just rating every interaction as something between poor and excellent. From Uber drivers to call-centre workers, everybody’s chasing a tick of recorded acclaim.