Features

Thursday

Emily Hill

All they need is Gove

Lately, people only have to look at me to splurge their deepest, darkest secret. Last May, they did a terrible thing. They voted Tory. Now they’re contemplating greater deviance: voting to leave the EU — if only, they say, the campaign was fronted by someone they could believe in. And who do they want? The answer surprised me. Theresa is no temptation, as it turns out, nor even Boris. No, it’s Michael Gove they fancy. Westminster types might read this and splutter, ‘What tosh! If there’s one thing we know about the British public, it’s that they hate him.’ But these are the experts who failed to predict the outcome of the general election. Whereas I was sure the Tories would win, simply from talking to my relatives.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Investment: Buy to lose

Take a quick look at the UK buy-to-let market and you might find it tough to understand exactly what it is that makes it so very popular. Dealing with tenants is difficult and boring. House prices have a horrible tendency to go down as well as up (Londoners — ask anyone living in the north of England about this). And rents have long been so low relative to prices that getting a worthwhile net yield is all but impossible after costs. Given this, you might wonder, why on earth would 14.5 per cent of all mortgage lending in the UK in the third quarter of last year have been to buy-to-let investors? Good question. The answer (as is the case with everything to do with modern money) is that it is all about leverage.

Ross Clark

Investment: This dragon won’t bite

At the risk of sounding like Neville Chamberlain, how bizarre that we should be panic-selling our stock-market investments in reaction to the news of a slight economic slowdown in a faraway country to which we export little and whose direct investments in our own economy created fewer than 5,000 new jobs last year. Throughout the mini-crash of 2016, it has become received wisdom that a Chinese slowdown is threatening the global economy, spreading contagion to every corner of the globe. The fear manifested itself in a 3.

Matthew Lynn

Investment: The great pension robbery

Scrapping the cuts to tax credits. Ring-fencing health care, and spending a few billion on a high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham. Despite all the howls of outrage from the left about austerity, for a country that was meant to be broke, we have a government that still throws around a lot of cash. Where’s it all coming from? If you have been saving for a pension, the answer is: probably from you. Over the past few years, George Osborne has become almost as skilful as Gordon Brown was at raising taxes without anyone noticing too much. Since his early and brutal rise in VAT, a tax that hits everyone every time they shop, he has put his revenue-raising measures into the small print. The self-employed have been stung with new ways of taxing their personal service companies.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Fighting over the crumbs

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Vote Leave's Stephen Parkinson discuss Euroscepticsm"] Listen [/audioplayer]Eurosceptics could hardly have asked for more favourable conditions for a referendum. After barely surviving a financial crisis, the European Union has been overwhelmed by an immigration crisis — one made much worse by its failure to control its own borders. The European Commission seems determined to make itself even more unpopular in Britain, and is considering whether VAT should be levied on food and children’s clothes.

Damian Thompson

The bad book

The decline of the Church of England has been one of the most astonishing trends in modern Britain. The pews of churches in this country are emptying fast. Next week, a book was to be published about this collapse entitled That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People. But suddenly the publishers, Bloomsbury, decided to pull it. The book, it seemed, was a little too incendiary. Those reviewing the book received a panicky message: ‘Following the receipt of a legal complaint, Bloomsbury are recalling all review copies of this book and ask you to immediately return the copy received…’. Apparently there has been a legal action because of ‘a disputed passage about a Christian leader’. It sounded intriguing. But which leader?

Patrick Marnham

Hollande’s own emergency

The terrorist attacks of 13 November have had an enduring effect on people living in Paris and France’s other big cities. Hotel bookings and restaurant reservations are down, and some people will no longer go out in the evening. There have been several other minor terrorist outrages across the country since November, and tension — prompted by repeated government warnings — remains high. The campaign for the 2017 presidential elections will start in July, but François Hollande’s popularity, which soared after the Charlie Hebdo attacks a year ago, has been sliding again. Hollande’s polls rose slightly after he declared a state of emergency on 14 November.

Nigel Farndale

Inside the new Navy

The Royal Navy is known as the Senior Service because of its illustrious history; Francis Drake and all that. But the days when it ruled the waves have long gone. In 1945 it had almost 900 warships and a million men. By the time of the Falklands War it was down to 70 warships and 70,000 men. Now it is less than half that, with more admirals than there are fighting ships. The arrival this year of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the much-heralded new aircraft carrier that has cost £6 billion (for 50-odd years of life), will draw unwelcome attention to the Navy’s significant manpower shortages. As one senior officer put it, the carrier will bring ‘new challenges, relearning old tricks perhaps, and some new — not least how to man it’.

Joe Baron

A lesson in self-censorship

According to my former colleagues, history teachers in an urban English state school, anyone who votes for the Conservative party is ‘thick’, the British Empire was ‘unambiguously evil’ and capitalism leads to ‘mass inequality and misery for the vast majority of working people’. The only answer was, you guessed it, socialism. Yes, the cliché of the Little Red Book-carrying schoolteacher is alive and well. As the only right-of-centre teacher in the history department, I found lunchtime particularly galling. My colleagues would sit around denouncing the British empire, Michael Gove’s changes to the national curriculum and the government’s ‘ideologically driven’ attempts to cut the nation’s deficit.

Anil Bhoyrul

Death on the NHS

I’ve never understood the phrase ‘died peacefully’. Two weeks ago I watched my mother die, in the very same NHS hospital where I watched my father die almost ten years earlier. There was nothing peaceful about it, at least from my unwanted ringside seat. The end — acute pneumonia providing the final nail in a soon-to-be purchased coffin — was painfully slow. It dragged on and on and on. She struggled for her last breaths and appeared distressed, confused and frightened to the end. The last time I had been to St Helier hospital in south London was September 2005, as my father slowly slipped away. Naturally the memories came flooding back. And so did confusion. Ten years is a long time, especially in the NHS.

Lara Prendergast

Fear of the baby-snatchers

Baby George was born into a happy family. His mother and father love him dearly. He lives in a cottage in a pretty village, with a six-year-old sister who adores him, and his grandmother lives nearby. His parents both have good jobs and his nursery is filled with toys. By most measures, George has had a good start in life. It was only when his mother was diagnosed with post-natal depression that George’s prospects looked bleaker. Not because his caring mother was feeling blue, but because in this, paranoid, post-Baby P era, the authorities take no chances. The slightest whiff of a mother unable to cope, and they swoop down, ready to whisk the baby away. When Rosie first realised she was depressed, she assumed the doctor would be able to offer her advice about how to cope.

Thursday

Melanie Phillips

In defence of gender

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3" title="Melanie Phillips and Jacqui Gavin, a trans activist and civil servant, discuss gender"] Listen [/audioplayer]Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry.

John Butler

Turkey’s climate of fear

   Istanbul Few AK party supporters hanker after the Isis way of life: for many of them, it would be a death sentence Turkey is less and less a democracy, more and more a paranoid one-party state. If you don’t believe that, look at what happens to those who draw attention to the government’s failures and crimes. The editors of Cumhuriyet, a centre-left broadsheet, have been delivering their editorials from jail since November. A statement issued this month by the Izmir Society of Journalists claimed that 31 journalists were in prison while 234 were in legal limbo awaiting trial. Over the course of last year, they added, 15 television channels had been closed and 56 journalists refused accreditation.

Jenny McCartney

No, women can’t have it all

You can’t accuse the redoubtable Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation think tank, of giving up easily: she has arrived in London fresh from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where she slipped on the ice and broke her wrist, spending two days in a Swiss hospital. One arm is therefore out of action, and her voice is hoarse, but she is soldiering on through a dense thicket of meetings and interviews to talk about her new book Unfinished Business, on how the work-life balance is broken and how to fix it. The trigger for the book was a rare, traumatic moment when Slaughter was stopped in her tracks, back in 2011.

Simon Barnes

Game over | 28 January 2016

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3" title="Simon Barnes and Alex Massie discuss the crisis in sport" startat=830] Listen [/audioplayer]Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe.

Andy Martin

Calling the shots

   Las Vegas They say that there are more guns in America than human beings and most of them seemed to be at Shot Show in Las Vegas last week. Shot (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show — the firearms industry’s biggest shop window — occupied several floors of a building roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, wedged between a couple of casinos and a replica of the Grand Canal. Like a kleptomaniac at Harrods, I didn’t know what to try out first. I was momentarily torn between being Dirty Harry (at the Smith & Wesson stand, with the most powerful handgun in the world) and James Bond (I couldn’t find the Walther PPK, it seems to have given way to the PPQ).

Thursday

Tim Montgomerie

Lashing out in all directions

   Washington People think a reckoning is needed. Big business and big banks need taking down a peg or two The best explanation for the Donald Trump phenomenon was given to me by a woman I met at one of his recent rallies. She’d spent the best part of three decades backing conventional Republican candidates. But, she said, ‘not again — not ever again’. A good politician, she said, does enough unpopular things to make a difference to the nation — but not so many that they couldn’t be re-elected. The mark of a good politician is ‘which unpopular causes they choose’. She had had enough of Republican politicians explaining to her that putting a time-limit on abortion was ‘too unpopular’.

Freddy Gray

The Trump phenomenon

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsrise-racismattheoscarsandcameronscentre-rightsecret/media.mp3" title="Freddy Gray and Janet Daley discuss Donald Trump's rise"] Listen [/audioplayer]Ronald Reagan wooed America with sunny optimism. From the offset, Donald Trump has offered something much darker. He began his presidential campaign on 16 June by declaring that the ‘American dream is dead.’ He said that the country was being run by ‘losers’. ‘We have people that don’t have it,’ he said. ‘We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain.’ He insisted that only he, Donald J. Trump, had what it took ‘to make America great again’.

Michael Henderson

Elite sport

England’s cricketers won a remarkable Test match inside three days in the bearpit of Johannesburg, a victory that put them 2-0 up in the four-match series, with only the final Test to play. It is a remarkable achievement by Alastair Cook’s team because, before a ball had been bowled, most judges expected South Africa, the No. 1 ranked team in the world, to claim another triumph by right. In particular it was a wonderful tribute to the public schools which sharpened the skills of the star players. Stuart Broad, who took six prime wickets for only 17 runs on that tumultuous third day, reducing South Africa’s second innings to rubble, was educated at Oakham. Joe Root, who scored a superb century to set up the bowlers, was a sixth-former at Worksop College.

Lara Prendergast

Rise of the Norland nanny

The young nannies arriving for their morning lectures at Norland College in Bath make quite a sight. Although the road is empty, they bank up along the pavement waiting for the lights to change. They are in their winter uniform of brown hat and gloves, hair in a neat bun; some push old-fashioned Silver Cross prams with plastic babies in them. Eventually the green man appears and the nannies cross. These girls look as if they are being trained for a bygone era — and that is certainly part of their appeal — but they are well prepared for modern life. Founded in London in 1892, Norland College made its name providing nannies for British aristocrats and royals.