Features

Thursday

Daniel Hannan

What Brexit looks like

‘So what’s your alternative?’ demand Euro-enthusiasts. ‘D’you want Britain to be like Norway? Or like Switzerland? Making cuckoo clocks? Is that what you want? Is it? Eh?’ The alternative to remaining in a structurally unsafe building is, of course, walking out; but I accept that this won’t quite do as an answer. Although staying in the EU is a greater risk than leaving — the migration and euro crises are deepening, and Britain is being dragged into them — change-aversion is deep in our genome, and we vote accordingly. Europhiles know that most referendums go the way of the status quo, which is why their campaign is based around conjuring inchoate fears of change. What is the alternative?

Liam Halligan

High finance, low tricks

It amazes me, simply amazes me, that journalists aren’t all over these stories. Doesn’t it amaze you too?’ I’m in a plush room in a swanky central London hotel, in conversation with Michael Lewis. He is all fired up, leaning forward as he perches on the hard edge of the cushion-strewn sofa. He oozes incredulity, palms upward, shoulders raised. ‘I’m not saying there aren’t good financial journalists,’ he concedes. But the qualification seems half-hearted — and is quickly reversed. ‘The Wall Street Journal is a much worse newspaper than it was 20 years ago,’ he asserts, taking aim at the bible of US high finance. ‘The news side of the paper has the fingerprints of the finance industry all over it’.

Thursday

Ivar Arpi

Sweden’s shameful cover-up

   Stockholm It took days for police to acknowledge the extent of the mass attacks on women celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne. The Germans were lucky; in Sweden, similar attacks have been taking place for more than a year and the authorities are still playing catch up. Only now is the truth emerging, both about the attacks and the cover-ups. Stefan Löfven, our Prime Minister, has denounced a ‘double betrayal’ of women and has promised an investigation. But he ought to be asking this: what made the police and even journalists cover up the truth? The answer can be discovered in the reaction to the Cologne attacks. Sweden prides itself on its sexual equality and has even pioneered a feminist foreign policy.

James Forsyth

Project Fear

The negotiations may be ongoing, but David Cameron has given up waiting for the outcome of his talks with the European Union. The Prime Minister has made up his mind: he wants Britain to vote to stay in the EU — and the campaigning has already begun. His closest allies have been assigned to the task; Downing Street is already in election mode and a strategy is being devised. As with the Scottish referendum campaign, the In campaign will consist of vivid warnings about the dangers of voting to leave. In Scotland it was dubbed Project Fear, and that’s what Cameron is planning again. In theory, the Prime Minister has until the end of next year to call the referendum vote. In practice, he wants it over with.

Isabel Sunnucks

Educating Pakistan

Pakistan society intended Seema Aziz to be a wife and mother. Her father arranged for her to get married at a young age, and by her early thirties she had a comfortable life as a Lahore housewife, married to a chemical engineer. Then she took charge of her own fate. In the late 1970s, well before the era of jihad, Pakistan was flooded with western products. People began wearing jeans and T-shirts, leading Seema to conclude that there was a market for high-quality Pakistani clothes produced locally. She opened her first shop in 1985, when she was 34, in Lahore’s ancient cloth market. Her family told her they were ashamed because she had gone into business, but her instincts were vindicated: the clothes flew off the shelves.

Julie Burchill

Brighton’s gone Brideshead

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3" title="Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton's Brideshead set" startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs. But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since the Prince Regent pushed off.

James Bartholomew

Keynes’s big mistake

Some things are universally accepted as true. Water finds its own level; crumpets are best eaten in winter; and the England football team will not win the World Cup again, ever. On a par with these things, the most accepted part of economics is Keynesianism. Of course, John Maynard Keynes said lots of things about economics in between his many and varied sexual encounters. But, as is the way of the world, one of the things he said turned out to be particularly influential. It is so influential that it has gone around the world. It is repeated and relied upon by Japanese finance ministers, New York Times columnists, Nobel prize winners and anti-austerity demonstrators. It is in textbooks around the globe. It is on page 262 of the Edexcel Economics A-level text book.

Thursday

Paul Wood

Desperate state

The latest video from Isis introduces a new British executioner, a successor to ‘Jihadi John’, and it is a classic of the genre: bombastic, pompous, ridiculous yet terrifying. ‘O slave of the White House, O mule of the Jews,’ says a man in a ski mask, addressing David Cameron, ‘how strange it is that the leader of a small island threatens us with a handful of planes. Only an imbecile would dare to wage war against a land where the law of Allah reigns supreme.’ He has a cold, arrogant look in his eyes and brandishes a pistol held sideways, aping American ‘gangsta style’. Kneeling before him are five men in orange jumpsuits identified as ‘British spies’.

Douglas Murray

The Isis executioner and me

Even if Abu Rumaysah does turn out to be the new ‘Jihadi John’, shown on video this week presiding over the murder of five innocent men, I’m not sorry I encouraged him to go to Syria and join Isis. The last time I saw the 32-year-old Briton (born to a UK Hindu family as Siddhartha Dhar) was at a BBC studio in London. He was one of a group of people who had been central to the extremist group al-Muhajiroun and its offshoots for years. In 2009 they had, through a front organisation, lured me into a set-up with more than a hundred Islamists which soon became violent and from which I was extracted by the police. It was unpleasant, but it did lead to the then Labour home secretary finally proscribing al-Muhajiroun.

Michela Wrong

Rwanda’s new tragedy

Never lighthearted, my African political exile friend sounded particularly lugubrious on the line from Washington. His voice was low and pensive. For the past few months, he said, he’d been hearing of plans hatched by the regime back home for his assassination. ‘They are very gruesome, very gruesome indeed.’ It was not the first time. In the past he’d always passed the details on to the FBI, which had also called him up several times when they thought he was in danger. This time he hadn’t bothered. ‘I always ask them: ‘What are you doing to protect me?’ and they say, ‘Well, if you see anything suspicious, call 911.

Alex Massie

The painful truth for Ruth

Minority sects are often more interesting, and more colourful, than their more popular rivals. That must explain why the Scottish Tories continue to be the subject of so much fascination. Barely a month passes without someone, somewhere, asking if this — at long last — is the moment for a Scottish Tory revival. Spoiler alert: it never is. Logic says that at this year’s Scottish parliament elections, things should be different. It is generally agreed that Ruth Davidson, the party leader in Scotland, had a ‘good independence referendum’; generally agreed, too, that after Nicola Sturgeon, she might be the most impressive politician in Scotland.

Leah McLaren

Sticking to his guns

Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my Uncle Bill in Texas, a retired military man, practising Catholic, Republican, NRA member, community volunteer and civil libertarian who lives in a gated community with my Aunt Bev (a retired nurse) on the outskirts of Houston. Uncle Bill likes to email me redneck jokes in the hope of getting my progressive Canadian dander up. Here’s a recent one: The premier of Ontario is jogging with her dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the premier’s dog, then bites the premier. She calls animal control. Animal control captures the coyote and bills the province $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.

Cosmo Landesman

Public trans sport

I had just sat down on the top deck of a number 38 London bus when I saw him looking at me. He was black and wore a fake-fur coat and orange leggings. There were glittering rings on his fingers, fake diamonds around his neck and bright red lipstick on his lips. In his large hands, a mauve purse. He looked like the kind of Andy Warhol drag-queen who wiggled on the wild side of life back in the 1970s. He made strange chirping sounds and he batted his heavy eyelashes my way. I couldn’t tell if he was a touch crazy or just over-the-top camp. Then he smiled at me. Uh-oh, I thought. But I decided to be brave, so I gave him one of my big, anxious chimp smiles back. He then came over and plopped himself next to me. ‘Hi,’ he said, with a soft, low American purr.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

. . . and I won’t be Boris Mark II

As soon as votes were counted in the race to be Tory candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith’s problem became clear. He had won comfortably, but just 9,200 party members bothered to vote — compared with the 80,000 who took part in Labour’s contest. Goldsmith praised his party for a ‘civilised and constructive’ debate, unlike the ‘divisive and vicious’ battle won by Sadiq Khan. But if Labour can call on a machine whose activists outnumber the Tories by nine to one, the Conservative candidate faces a real disadvantage. The size of Khan’s vote, Goldsmith thinks, is deceptive and swollen by trade union members. But in May, he concedes, ‘They will be out en masse, combined with the Corbyn-istas. So yes, they know that this matters.

James Forsyth

I won’t be Corbyn’s man in London . . .

Sadiq Khan has long been known as one of Labour’s most pugnacious politicians: someone who likes to fight, and likes to win. The son of a bus driver, he became a human rights lawyer, entered parliament in 2005 and that same year was named newcomer of the year at The Spectator’s parliamentary awards. He ran Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign in 2010 and led Labour’s fierce — and surprisingly effective —campaign in London last year. Now, his sights are set on reclaiming City Hall for Labour and persuading even those on the right that he is the natural heir to Boris Johnson. ‘I want Spectator readers to give me a second look,’ he says, when we meet in the House of Commons.

Jan Morris

From Celtic tiger to pussycat

After a healthy Irish lunch I drove blithely off through the streets of Roscrea, I think it was, to find that everywhere I went the populace was cheerfully waving at me, smiling, gesticulating or blowing horns. When I stopped to ask them why, I found that I had left on the roof of my car a wallet containing my entire worldly wealth, cash, credit cards and all. So paradoxically enjoyable was all this, so irresistibly amused and sympathetic were the bystanders, that I came to think of the event as a sort of leitmotif of my visit to Ireland. For whatever else has happened to the Republic, through it all the populace has remained fun, quick, laughing and kind to foolish visitors.

Mark Palmer

Planet of the canapés

Even the name is pretentious. And something of a misnomer, too. After all, a canapé comes from the French word for ‘couch’ — the idea presumably being that a garnish of some kind or other sits on top of tiny slices of bread or small crackers in the same way that tasty people plonk themselves down on a sofa. Except that the whole business of dainty finger food — as liberated Victorians used to call it — has got so out of hand that wherever you fetch up, chefs are going to extremes to outdo each other. During the preamble to new year, I attended one bash at a swish hotel in central London where the canapés kept coming (and heaven knows what they must have cost) but all they did was make everyone long for a proper dinner.

Harriet Sergeant

How to spot a charity snake

How do we judge a charity? Very badly, it turns out. Until The Spectator revealed the full horror of Kids Company in July, not even the press had asked hard questions of the charity or its founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh. The subsequent political scrutiny showed our democratic process at its best. When Paul Flynn, a veteran Labour MP, told Batmanghelidjh at an electrifying House of Commons hearing to stop talking ‘psychobabble’ he stripped away in an instant the glitz that had allowed one small charity whose sole qualification was the charisma of its leader to fritter away £48 million of taxpayers’ money. ‘We do not live on the moon,’ Flynn told her. ‘We represent areas that have great problems. We know about them.

James Bartholomew

Where’s the joy gone?

Have you seen Spectre, the latest Bond film? If not, the opening sequence is terrific. Lots of action and excitement. The whole film is full of stunts and thrills. But after watching it, I realised there was something missing: joy, or joie de vivre. Daniel Craig plays Bond like an android who has spent too much time muscle-building instead of having a good time. Contrast Spectre with From Russia With Love, one of the early Bond films. The first scene in which we see Sean Connery as Bond, he is humorous and amorous as he snogs a beautiful woman in a punt moored at the side of a river. He lifts out a bottle of champagne which he has left cooling in the water, tied with a piece of string. He tests it to see if it is cool enough.

Robert Colvile

Bye, George

The race to be London Mayor is the biggest personality contest in politics. And one personality looms largest: George Galloway, back from Bradford and seeking his fortune on the capital’s streets. In his public appearances, the Respect party leader has been on his usual bombastic form. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent that his campaign — and his career — is on the shakiest ground. In 2012, Galloway won the Bradford West by-election by 10,000 votes: a staggering coup. But at the general election this year his party was drummed out of town. Not only did Galloway lose, but Respect’s four councillors (who had only recently rejoined after a spat with their leader) have abandoned it again. Its registered headquarters is now a tanning salon.