Features

Thursday

Alistair Jackson

The Met have found no evidence for an abuse network linked to No10. It’s time they admitted it

Almost exactly three years ago, Tom Watson stood up in parliament and demanded the Metropolitan police investigate ‘clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No. 10’. It was an incendiary claim which, because it was made during Prime Minister’s Questions and broadcast on live television, set hares running on social media and beyond. We know, now, that the police found no evidence to support an allegation of rape made against Leon Brittan by a woman known as ‘Jane’. But the question remains: what about that link to No. 10? I have spent much of the past three years looking into this. Working for BBC Panorama means following the evidence — no matter how tough and painful the process.

Mark Palmer

Bring back the bungalow!

Sheila Pugh is 91 and in good health. She lives on her own in Congleton, Cheshire, where she takes pleasure in cooking for herself and moving about the place with a dustpan and brush, albeit a little gingerly at times. She has a private garden with a pond and views over arable land. A lot of her friends and a great number of people of a similar age have had to move into retirement or care homes, cashing in their savings and surrendering their independence in the process. Mrs Pugh’s good fortune and the difference between her and so many other ninetysomethings is simple: she lives in a bungalow. ‘It’s a real lifeline for her,’ says her daughter, who is a friend of mine. I get that.

Jenny McCartney

The new sexual revolution

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedisasterofthesnp-silliberal-one-partystate/media.mp3" title="Jenny McCartney and Paris Lees discuss the new sexual revolution" startat=1710] Listen [/audioplayer]The first thing you need to know about the new sexual revolution isn’t how to do it: it’s how to talk it. Confining yourself to terms such as straight, gay and bisexual — which once, perhaps, covered most of what you thought you needed to know about a person’s orientation — is indicative of adherence to a ‘binary’ view of sexuality. It is fast becoming the equivalent of walking around in plus-fours, peering at human desire through a monocle.

Mark Palmer

The wonders of Zanzibar’s Stone Town

Zanzibar has become a honeypot for honeymooners — with good reason. This exotic island is a mere six degrees south of the equator and is roughly 60 miles long and 25 miles wide. That means it’s toasty all year round, while being big enough for some exploration if you want it. Its white beaches are stupendous, its people desperately poor but rich in spirit. The sea is a glorious turquoise, with plenty of coral reef for divers, and when the tide is out on the eastern side of the island, the horizon is dotted with women in bright kangas (wraps) wading through the water, scooping up chunks of seaweed that are later weighed and shipped off elsewhere, often to pharmaceutical companies in China.

Katy Balls

Cable cars, cheese and chic on the quieter side of the Alps

'It sounds like you’re having an Ann Summers party up there,' a male traveller called, as our group erupted into girlish hysterics on the viewing terrace of Punta Helbronner, a mountain in the Mont Blanc massif. Unfortunately for him there was no lingerie in sight; instead our shrieks had been brought on by the threat of a lightning storm hitting us at 3,462 metres up. As my hair stood on end and my phone crackled, a guide ushered us back to the cable car, part of the new Mont Blanc skyway which offers the idler Alpine adventurer an easy way to get close to Europe’s largest peak. Still, there’s something alluring about a storm in the Alps, especially when the lightning-lit mountain peaks can be viewed from the safe confines of a rotating carriage.

Lara Prendergast

The young entrepreneurs making the best of Spain’s crisis

There was much talk about the anti-austerity party Podemos when we visited Andalucía in June. It was hot and sunny, and the orange trees smelt wonderful, but at the same time, youth unemployment sat at 49 per cent, second only to Greece, and that seemed to be what people wanted to chat about. Podemos, which means ‘we can’ in Spanish, does seem to have generated some hope for bright but frustrated young things, many of whom have given up hope of ever finding a professional job. In Seville, a story was doing the rounds about a low-paid receptionist job that had received 2,000 applications, although tales like this were apparently not unusual.

Michael Henderson

My Schubert cruise was a transport of delight

'Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire…' Auden wrote his words for the young Benjamin Britten, who was born on St Cecilia’s Day, and who set them to music, but his poem would also be a tribute to the composer that Britten admired above all others except Mozart. Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797, and died there 31 years later. ‘Let us honour the memory of a great man,’ he said, raising a glass after attending Beethoven’s funeral in March 1827, ‘and drink to the man who shall be next.’ Schubert died in November the following year, having heard only one concert in his lifetime dedicated to his own work. It is the greatest loss in the history of music, yet what riches he left behind!

James Delingpole

Sri Lanka makes me yearn to be a pre-war tea planter

Sri Lanka In my next life, I’m going back in time to become a tea planter in pre-war Ceylon. I half knew this even before I’d ever set foot in Sri Lanka. After a blissful couple of days at Rosyth, an estate house in old tea- growing country about an hour from Kandy, I understood exactly why: the climate, the views, the staff, the sundowners… Which are the same reasons the colonial British took so particularly well to tea-growing, whether in Assam, Darjeeling, Kenya or Ceylon. It thrives in just the conditions British people tend to find most congenial: pleasantly warm but not boiling; plenty of rain to keep the foliage all lush and green; a bit of height, for the attractive vistas.

Thursday

Owen Matthews

How Putin outwitted the West

Saddam Hussein hanged: is Iraq a better place? A safer place? Gaddafi murdered in front of the viewers: is Libya a better place? Now we are demonising Assad. Can we try to draw lessons? — Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, United Nations, 1 October Russia was right about Iraq and Libya, and America and Britain were dead wrong. Regime change doesn’t seem to have changed Middle Eastern countries for the better, as Vladimir Putin has been warning for years. His policy is not to support any armed groups ‘that attempt to resolve internal problems through force’ — by which he means rebels, ‘moderate’ or otherwise.

Damian Thompson

This year, Catholic conservatives are ready for Pope Francis

Pope Francis’s three-week Synod on the Family began on Sunday. Most of the 279 ‘Synod Fathers’ are senior bishops, many of them cardinals. They have no authority to change any aspect of Catholic teaching or pastoral practice. They are discussing the ‘hot button’ issues of communion for the divorced and remarried and the spiritual care of gay Catholics — but, once the meeting is over, power will rest entirely in the hands of the Pope. Conservative Catholics aren’t happy. Last year, at a preparatory ‘extraordinary’ synod, officials hand-picked by Francis announced in the middle of the proceedings that the Fathers favoured a more relaxed approach to gay relationships and second marriages.

James Bartholomew

I invented ‘virtue signalling’. Now it’s taking over the world

To my astonishment and delight, the phrase ‘virtue signalling’ has become part of the English language. I coined the phrase in an article here in The Spectator (18 April) in which I described the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous. Sometimes it is quite subtle. By saying that they hate the Daily Mail or Ukip, they are really telling you that they are admirably non-racist, left-wing or open-minded. One of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous. It does not involve delivering lunches to elderly neighbours or staying together with a spouse for the sake of the children. It takes no effort or sacrifice at all.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Why Carly Fiorina (probably) can’t save the Republicans

The Republican party is showing all the attention span of a hyperactive toddler this primary season, moving from one shiny toy to the next. Donald Trump still dominates the nursery, like some giant plastic fire engine. But the pieces are starting to look careworn and the battery is going on the siren. The former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now tied with Trump in some polls, is the teddy bear dragged around the playground a few times and now slumped in a corner. Fresh out of the box though is Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, gleaming amidst the gaggle of tired rivals. At the most recent Republican debate, Fiorina wore what seemed from podium height upwards to be an electric-blue wetsuit.

Polly Morgan

Women are still scared to talk about IVF. Let’s change that

As a result of a ruptured appendix, I am infertile. The appendicitis was followed by gangrene and peritonitis, which permanently blocked my fallopian tubes and left me having to do IVF for a chance to have my own child. I have never felt shame about my situation but I have felt isolation and grief, both of which would be very much more bear-able if people were prepared to talk openly about in-vitro fertilisation — to dispel the taboo that still surrounds it. IVF in its various forms is incredibly common these days. More than 2.5 million babies born in the past seven years began their life in a Petri dish.

Thursday

John R. Bradley

Sex and the Saudis

A young Saudi prince, Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud, has apparently fled to the Wahhabi kingdom on his private jet after a bleeding woman was found trying to escape from his Los Angeles mansion. She filed sexual assault charges against him, claiming her injuries were sustained when he tried to force her to give him a blow job. Other alleged female victims have since detailed a three-day orgy of violence. But what are the chances they will have their day in court? The prince will certainly not be compelled by the Saudi royal family to return; and we can be equally sure that Washington will not hold its Saudi masters to account for facilitating his escape. Two Nepalese women imprisoned as sex slaves by a sadistic Saudi diplomat in New Delhi are unlikely to see justice either.

James Forsyth

Is it all over for Boris?

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/boris-nickyandthetoryleadership/media.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss who could be the next Tory leader" startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Five months ago, allies of Boris Johnson were ready to launch his bid to become leader of the Conservative party. The election was imminent and even David Cameron was fretting that the Tories were going to lose. A sympathetic pollster had prepared the numbers that made the post-defeat case for Boris: he extended the Tories’ reach, and a party that had failed to gain a majority for 23 years desperately needed a greater reach. There was a policy agenda ready to magnify this appeal, too: compassionate conservatism, based around adopting the Living Wage.

James Forsyth

She could be a contender

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/boris-nickyandthetoryleadership/media.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss whether Nicky Morgan could be the next Tory leader" startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Nicky Morgan has been Education Secretary for 15 months now. Yet her office looks like she has just moved in. She has some family photos on the desk, a small collection of drinks bottles by the window and a rugby ball in her in-tray. But, unlike other cabinet ministers, she has made no attempt to make her office look like her study. This is not someone who sees their office as a home away from home. When Morgan was made Michael Gove’s successor last year, it seemed an unusual appointment. She’d only been an MP for four years.

Simon Barnes

How to save the hedgehog

Here’s a strange truth about British life: we love a hedgehog. Britain is conspicuously short of an anti-hedgehog lobby. No one runs down a hedgehog with malice. None of us can see a hedgehog crêpe without a twinge of regret. It takes an unfeasibly tough human to look at a hedgehog — even a photograph — without an unbidden softening of the heart. So if wishes were hedgehogs, our country would be an erinacean paradise. Why, then, have we lost a third of our hedgehogs over the last decade? The British Trust for Ornithology — they’re experts on censusing and go beyond their original remit — cites estimates of 30 million hedgehogs in Britain in the 1950s. This fell to 1.5 million in the 1990s and now stands at fewer than a million.

Ross Clark

Where there’s smoke…

What fun it is watching again all those smug Volkswagen ads on YouTube, featuring men in mid-life crisis revving up their Golfs and Passats. German carmakers vie with French farmers for their sacred status in the European Union. That it has taken US authorities to sniff out the company’s cheating on emissions tests doesn’t say much for European environmental law, which is good at telling us we can only have low-powered kettles, but apparently unable to sniff out high emissions from overpowered diesel cars. But the VW scandal isn’t just a story of corporate turpitude. It is part-product of an environmental policy in Britain as much as across the EU which has become fixated on carbon emissions to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

Molly Ceglowski

Baby steps

When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted cost of having your first baby.

Mark Mason

Fancy that

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/boris-nickyandthetoryleadership/media.mp3" startat=1677] Listen [/audioplayer]Stand by your remotes, girls: the second series of Poldark is under way. Filming has started — yes, he’s out there somewhere, wearing those trousers, not wearing that shirt, swinging that scythe. You’ve only got to wait for someone to edit it all together and then Sunday nights can be special again. You’ll be able to gaze and sigh and imagine. Us blokes, meanwhile, will be considering an anomaly: why is that women can express lust without sounding seedy, but men can’t? I didn’t watch the first series. About three weeks in, when the Twitter drums had really started beating, I asked a female friend if it was that good.