Features

Thursday

Douglas Murray

France’s civil war…

In the wake of the massacre in Paris, President François Hollande said that France was ‘at war’ — and that it must be fought both inside his country and outside in the Middle East. As the French air force began dropping bombs on Raqqa in Syria, another operation was under way in towns and cities across France: 168 raids in two days. A battle on two fronts has begun. Chartres cathedral is one of the great monuments of western civilisation, but Chartres was also home to one of the Bataclan theatre suicide bombers. A man from the same area died last summer in Syria, fighting for Isis. In Lyon, theraids turned up a rocket launcher. On Tuesday night, a large-scale counter-terror assault was launched in St Denis in Paris.

Nick Cohen

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t anti-war. He’s just anti-West

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/parisattacksaftermath/media.mp3" title="Nick Cohen and Freddy Gray discuss whether Jeremy Corbyn dislikes the West" startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]Before the bodies in Paris’s restaurants were cold, Jeremy Corbyn’s Stop the War Coalition knew who the real villains were — and they were not the Islamists who massacred civilians. ‘Paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in Middle East’ ran a headline on its site. The article went on to say that the consequence of the West’s ‘decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention’.

Angela Patmore

How ‘stress management’ can make your blood pressure soar

We seem to be in the grip of a terrible stress epidemic. According to a new study by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, a professional body for managers in human resources, two fifths of all organisations stated that stress-related absence has increased. It even causes terrorism, apparently: the mother of Paris suicide bomber Ibrahim Abdeslam said she believes her son might have blown himself up because of stress. The total number of cases of work-related stress, depression and anxiety in the past year was 440,000, according to the Health and Safety Executive, up from 428,000 cases two years earlier. So extensive is this plague that, in the HSE’s view, stress accounts for no less than a third of all work-related ill-health cases.

David Rose

The disturbing case of Roger Khan – and the cost of cheap justice

The defendant, Roger Khan, was on trial for a vicious attack that left a man’s skull shattered and his brain exposed to the elements, but he had no lawyer representing him in court. He was dyslexic and had no legal knowledge, but the judge had told him that, if he fired the legal-aid lawyers he no longer trusted, he would have to defend himself. In fact, the only legal advice he was getting came from the prosecution. Throughout the four-week trial, a junior Crown barrister went down to the cells each morning to advise him on how to conduct his defence — although naturally enough, the prosecution’s aim was to get him convicted and sent to prison. Even more strangely, some of those in court had been acquainted with each other long before the trial began.

Mary Wakefield

Isis bombs have exiled the Vicar of Baghdad to Surrey… but he’s itching to go back to the Middle East

Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, is not, in person, at all as I’d imagined him. His memoir, about life as first a medic, then a cleric, is chock-a-block with famous friends. Pope John Paul II was a pal, the Grand Ayatollah of Baghdad, General David Petraeus. ‘Oh, Andrew knows everyone,’ I was told when I asked anyone about him, and I’m afraid my heart hardened. I arrived in the rain at his house in Liphook, Hampshire, preparing myself for a vain man, full of his own derring-do. More fool me. Canon White is instantly, unusually lovable. He greets me wearing a sweatshirt with the caption ‘Real men become vicars’. ‘Look!’ he says delightedly. ‘Look at my hoodie!

Simon Barnes

Through terror and scandal, the joy of sport endures

Ain’t it rum? Last week sport was morally bankrupt, finished, no longer worthy of taking up an intelligent person’s time for a single minute. This week it’s shining out as one of the glories of the human spirit. And yet sport can cope with the contradiction quite effortlessly. It’s hard to know the worst thing in athletics right now, but it’s either the fact that Russia has been implicated in a state-run doping programme or the possibility that the former president of the sport’s world governing body is accused of taking bribes to cover it up. In football the acronym of Fifa, football’s world governing body, means corruption: nothing more, nothing less.

Thursday

Katia Florman

A trust betrayed

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3" title="Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors" startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]Like many of my fellow junior doctors, I trusted a Conservative government with the NHS. If it’s to stay strong and up to date, a health service cannot remain static. It needs not just money but carefully thought-out reform — as well as a strong economy to support it. Just after the general election, David Cameron laid out the problem as he saw it: a ‘weekend effect’ where a patient admitted to hospital on a Sunday is 16 per cent more likely to die than one admitted on a Wednesday.

Max Pemberton

The wrong cuts

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3" title="Dr Clare Gerada and Fraser Nelson discuss the row over junior doctors" startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]It has long been rumoured that when Jeremy Hunt took over as Health Secretary, Cameron told him to do one thing with the NHS: keep it out of the headlines. Given that the NHS is an enormous institution, the public take an avid interest in it and it is frequently rocked by scandals and financial difficulties, this was no easy task. Until a few weeks ago, Hunt had managed it with aplomb. And then the junior doctor fiasco happened. It has been cataclysmic, one of the worst public relations disasters to rock a government department for years, and it shows no signs of abating.

Michael Karam

How Lebanon is coping with more than a million Syrian refugees

Beirut If any of the Syrian refugees who have made it to the relative safety of Europe have been watching the smash-hit TV show Homeland (season five), they would be baffled by its warped depiction of their compatriots’ plight in Lebanon. Unlike the vast majority of Homeland’s viewers ,they would know there are no government-sanctioned camps guarded by nervy UN soldiers and run from the inside by menacing Hezbollah operatives. This is out-and-out nonsense and insulting to the Lebanese, who have arguably done more than any country to absorb this unfolding human tragedy. For the record, Lebanon, a country a tad bigger than Wales, plays host to around 1.5 million Syrians, a number equivalent to a third of its population.

John R. Bradley

The caliphate strikes back

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3" title="Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next" startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world.

Mary Dejevsky

The war on pensioners

Who controls the media in Britain? Depending on your political outlook, you might answer: the Conservatives, the liberal-left chattering classes, Rupert Murdoch or the BBC. But if the coverage of the elderly is anything to go by, then we can perhaps agree on one thing: the headlines are decided by a cohort of 25- to 45-year-olds who believe that other people’s parents and grandparents — a.k.a. Britain’s pensioners — have stolen their future, dashed their dreams and nabbed all the plush property. How else to account for a headline such as ‘No pay rise?

Camilla Swift

Send in the clones

How much do you love your dog? Do you secretly wish, as he or she grows older, that you could have another just the same? I’ll bet that tens of thousands of Brits feel this way — and soon their dreams could come true. When most of us last thought about it, cloning was an off-putting and futuristic prospect. Dolly the sheep was the poster girl, and things didn’t turn out too well for her. But times change, science creeps on, and last year a Brit called Rebecca Smith had her beloved dachshund, Winnie, cloned in South Korea. The going rate for Mini-Winnie would have been £60,000, but Rebecca won a competition and so — except for the obligation to appear in a TV documentary about the process — Mini came for free.

Joe Baron

Lessons in jargon

‘Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ’Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put out in KP.’ How I cheered when Airman Adrian Cronauer mocked Lt Steven Hauk’s fondness for acronyms in Good Morning, Vietnam. Using jargon is an act of unconscionable self-indulgence. It is designed to make the user feel superior while saying not much, and Adrian, played by the late Robin Williams, spoke for millions of cheesed-off employees when he attacked it. Jargon, acronyms and corporate-speak — all too common in offices — should be banned from schools.

Thursday

Harry Mount

The secret brilliance of Prince Philip’s ‘gaffes’

Prince Philip has died at the age of 99. Writing in 2015, Harry Mount reflected on the Duke of Edinburgh's personable style and sense of public service.I’ve just been on the receiving end of a Prince Philip gaffe, of sorts, and I loved it. It was at a lunch last week at the Cavalry and Guards Club for the Gallipoli Association — the charity that commemorates victims and veterans of that tragic, doomed campaign. For 40 years, the Duke of Edinburgh has been the association’s patron. And so, in Gallipoli’s centenary year, he came to the association’s lunch. Before lunch, he roamed at will around the cavernous drawing room, chatting to association members.

Melanie McDonagh

Who isn’t genderfluid?

Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female.’ Which makes this not just the oldest but the most socially progressive tree in Britain, the Caitlyn Jenner of topiary. Or perhaps it was just one transgressive branch making a bid for attention, having been trapped in the wrong trunk all this time. You can’t go far this year without encountering someone in the process of transitioning between genders or who has already arrived at their gender of choice.

Damian Thompson

Pope vs church

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/civilwarinthecatholicchurch/media.mp3" title="Damian Thompson and Fraser Nelson on civil war in the Catholic church" startat=30] Listen [/audioplayer]Last Sunday, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica carried an article by Eugenio Scalfari, one of the country’s most celebrated journalists, in which he claimed that Pope Francis had just told him that ‘at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who ask [to receive Holy Communion] will be admitted’. Catholic opinion was stunned. The Pope had just presided over a three-week synod of bishops at the Vatican that was sharply divided over whether to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacrament. In the end, it voted to say nothing much.

Peter Hitchens

The Church of England’s shameful betrayal of bishop George Bell

The Church of England has produced a lot of good men and women, but very few great ones. It is in its modest, cautious nature that it should be so. Greatness requires a lonely, single-minded strength that does not sit easily with Anglicanism’s gentle compromise. And I suspect the Church has always been hesitant and embarrassed about the one undeniably great figure it produced in the 20th century. To this day, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, is an uncomfortable, disturbing person, like a grim obelisk set in a bleak landscape. Many British people still disapprove of his lonely public denunciation of Winston Churchill’s deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes.

Con Coughlin

Britain’s armed forces no longer have the resources for a major war

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/civilwarinthecatholicchurch/media.mp3" title="Con Coughlin and Tom Tugendhat debate the state of Britain's armed forces" startat=1561] Listen [/audioplayer]This Sunday, David Cameron will lay a wreath at the Cenotaph to commemorate those who made the ultimate sacrifice during two ruinous world wars. People will say ‘Never Again’ and Cameron will agree. But then, thanks to the drastic cuts he has made to the strength of our armed forces, the Prime Minister need not worry himself unduly about Britain’s involvements in any future conflicts.

Max Pemberton

We could end HIV

You have probably never heard of Truvada, but it is a pharmacological breakthrough that has the potential to consign Aids to the history books. The drug effectively makes its users immune to the HIV virus. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada for use over three years ago. Truvada is even covered by insurance companies. It formed the backbone of New York’s HIV strategy, published this summer, which aims to halt the spread of the infection and reduce new HIV infections to near-zero by 2020. Yet in this country, a conspiracy of silence surrounds Truvada, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), as it is termed. The NHS claims that it is waiting on the results of its own studies to decide whether Truvada should be introduced.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Forty is a feminist issue

If Emily Hill is right in her cover piece for the magazine last week headlined ‘The end of feminism’, then women like me are in a whole world of trouble. And by women like me, I mean women over 40. The nub of Ms Hill’s argument was that all the big battles are won. She quoted the sparkling achievements of ‘women in their twenties’ and also ‘the under-40s’, who are out-earning men. What happens to women after they have broken through the glass ceiling is a question for an older, more cynical female writer. At your service.