Features

Thursday

John Steinbeck

‘With Your Wings’

He knew most of all that he wanted to go home — that there was something at home he had to get, and he didn’t even know what it was. During the long, hard training, there had not been time to think of himself nor to want anything. The ceremony at the end was unreal. He stood with sixteen others — all of them rigid as cypress logs, and the silver wings were pinned to his blouse over his heart. There was a speech by the Colonel, and half of his mind heard it… the other half was going home. He walked to his Model-A Ford, got in, and slammed the door. From the corners of his eyes, he could see the gold bars on his shoulders. The silver wings were heavy over his heart.

William Astor

Peer review

When I took my seat in the Lords as a very nervous 21-year-old, Manny Shinwell, the redoubtable Labour peer, welcomed me with the words ‘I knew your grandmother Nancy. She was a rebel like me. Enjoy yourself. You won’t be here long before they chuck you out.’ Forty-two years later I am still here — perhaps past my sell-by date. The House of Lords is bursting at the seams. The numbers must come down. And yet David Cameron must appoint more peers in the forthcoming honours list. Every Prime Minister in history, from Harold Wilson with his ‘lavender list’ to Tony Blair with his cronies, has caused controversy when creating peerages.

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

The spies we left in the cold

When a terrorist group is active in the UK — as Islamist extremists and dissident republicans are at the moment — there is no more essential figure in the prevention of carnage than an agent working for the security services. Reliable intelligence is what defuses bombs, intercepts arms caches, and apprehends suspects. Its acquisition can involve unimaginable personal risks, in circumstances of nerve-shredding tension. We should all be grateful, but most of us never get to know what to say thank you for, or to whom. An agent’s success manifests itself in nothing happening. Its continued value depends on secrecy. Is MI5 grateful on our behalf? Well, it seems that gratitude for intelligence sources may come with an expiry date.

Elliot Wilson

Exit the dragon

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Elliot Wilson and Andrew Sentance discuss China's economic slump"] Listen [/audioplayer]I stood alongside the chairman of the board of a state-owned enterprise in eastern China. The factory floor, partially open to the elements, stretched out far in front of us, littered with towers and blades designed for some of the world’s largest wind turbines. It was an impressive sight, one to which regular visitors to mainland factories are accustomed: China as the workshop of the world. But something was missing: workers. ‘They’ve been given the day off,’ the chairman said with a slight cough, as we stared out over the vast compound.

Kim Sengupta

Who’s running Libya?

When I covered Libya’s revolution in 2011, I had a driver named Mashallah. Mashallah was a decent and stoical man with an interesting propensity for malapropisms. He was regarded with fondness by us journalists — so when I decided to return to Libya recently, I sent him an email: did he want to work for me again? Unfortunately, replied Mashallah, he was in Paris. This seemed strange. How would he have got a French visa? I emailed again suggesting another week and received another profound apology. That week he was going on to Ankara and Istanbul. A quick look online solved the mystery.

Simon Barnes

Best of enemies

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England's victory against Australia" startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope.

Mark Mason

Old boys’ network

Are you a man? Those of you who don’t fall into the category of ‘adult male’ will clearly answer no — but even those who do might not say yes. Do you apply the label ‘man’ to yourself? Are you happy using the phrase ‘I’m as [insert quality] as the next man’? You’re not? Me neither. At 43 I’ve spent a quarter of a century as a man in the eyes of the law, but still the word feels too grown-up for me to use it about myself. Several friends have admitted the same thing. Winston Churchill was a man. Floyd Mayweather is a man. We, on the other hand, are… well, what? Talking to a woman in her mid-twenties recently, I referred to one of her contemporaries as ‘a great girl’.

Roger Scruton

Flashmob rule

What should be the response of politicians to mass emailings and Twitter storms? The question is an urgent one, especially for Conservative MPs, given the general truth that mass petitions, in which complex issues are simplified to ‘for or against’ and emotion given a head start over reasoned argument, tend to come from the left. I was astonished to learn that a Tory MP decided his vote on the proposed Hunting Bill would depend on opinion polls in his local newspaper. In the event the Bill was withdrawn, largely, if Nicola Sturgeon is to be believed, as a result of online petitioning. Progressive causes such as the campaign against hunting have a familiar profile: the powerless against the powerful, victims against oppressors, the clean utopia against the murky reality.

Robert Philpot

Labour’s losing instinct

It appeared the ultimate summer ‘silly season’ story: that Labour would choose an unrepentant, self-consciously unspun bearded leftie as its leader. But, as ballot papers for the leadership election are dispatched, the story is threatening to close with a nightmare final chapter for the party. This week the pollsters YouGov had Corbyn 20 points ahead of Andy Burnham, his closest rival, and in a position to win the contest in its first round. Labour thus faces the prospect of a defeat in 2020 that could make Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 landslide look small-scale. But while Corbyn’s rise may not have been predicted, it was eminently predictable.

Thursday

Paul Collier

A real rescue plan

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/howtofixtherefugeecrisis/media.mp3" title="Paul Collier and Douglas Murray discuss how to fix the migrant crisis" startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]For all its difficulties, Europe is prosperous and safe: one of the best places on Earth. Many other societies have yet to achieve this happy state: some are murderous and poor. Two of the most troubled zones in the world are near Europe: the Middle East, and the Sahelian belt which spans northern Africa. Unsurprisingly, many of the people who live in these societies would rather live in Europe. Impeded by immigration controls, a small minority of this group are taking matters into their own hands, trying to enter Europe illegally by boat across the Mediterranean.

Dan Hitchens

Students against abortion

In November 2013, the campaign group Abortion Rights announced their first-ever student conference. It was, they explained, in response to ‘many student unions reporting increased anti-choice activity on campuses’. Societies such as Oxford Students for Life, which I’ve been part of for the last couple of years, don’t tend to think of themselves as ‘anti-choice’, but it’s true there are more of us around. The number of young people who are opposed to abortion, or at least worried about it, is growing — this despite the usual hostility from student unions. Just look at the results of a ComRes survey conducted in April.

Owen Matthews

Putin and the polygamists

Homosexuality may not be tolerated in today’s Russia, nor political dissent. Polygamy, though, is a different matter. Ever since news broke this summer of a 57-year-old police chief in Chechnya bullying a 17-year-old local girl into becoming his second wife, Russian nationalists and Islamic leaders alike have been lining up to call for a man’s right to take more than one wife. Most vocal has been Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant 38-year-old president of Chechnya (part of the Russian Federation), who advocates polygamy as part of ‘traditional Muslim culture’. Veteran ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky has long held that polygamy is the solution for ‘Russia’s 10 million unmarried women’.

Alex Clark

Man of many worlds

By the kind of uncanny coincidence that would tickle his psychogeographically minded friends Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock’s publishers have recently moved offices to the same corner of London occupied by his latest novel, The Whispering Swarm; and just as their rather swanky embankment premises are called Carmelite House, so does the religious order provide Moorcock with one of his key characters. It is a Carmelite monk who leads the book’s teenage protagonist, one ‘Michael Moorcock’, from an ABC teashop to a mysterious enclave just off post-Blitz Fleet Street.

J. Meirion

The GPs’ revenge

On 31 March, I walked out of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London for the last time, after 28 years as a consultant cancer surgeon. At the age of almost 69, I had given six months’ notice of my wish to resign my contract by Easter, but to remain on staff in order to complete a research project on malignant melanoma. That request was initially considered favourably, then withdrawn after I wrote a series of articles in The Spectator and the Daily Mail about what I thought was wrong with the NHS. One, in which I said that ‘GPs are part of the NHS’s problem, not the solution’, triggered a particularly vitriolic response. Doctors demanded that I be punished and attacked me on social media. The Marsden caved.

Mark Palmer

The ugly game

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel bad about this because I love football.

Thursday

Paul Wood

‘The smugglers don’t care’

 Lesbos A young woman in a headscarf stumbled over some rocks and onto the beach. She stood there, rigid, stunned, then burst into tears. A grandmotherly German tourist hugged her. ‘It’s over now, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘You’re in Europe.’ A Burmese man from the same boat looked around anxiously and asked: ‘Will the police here beat us?’ It was after dawn on the Greek island of Lesbos, the sun glinting off the turquoise sea, an idyllic holiday-brochure landscape of hills with whitewashed houses. But the Turkish coast is so close that you can see it, and so this tiny island has become the front line in Europe’s migration crisis. Hundreds of people arrive here every day in rubber dinghies.

Douglas Murray

Despair springs eternal

The literary emissions of the left are hardly ever enjoyable, but they can be instructive. Last year Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century became one of the biggest-selling political books of the year. Like a thousand-page Soviet report on tractor production, it hardly seemed intended to be read. The point of its success was that it could be said to ‘prove’ the left’s argument. They could then hit their opponents over the head with it and move to the next stage. Last year they questioned some premises of capitalism and now Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 News (and Spectator diarist), is here to say that capitalism is in fact over.

Ross Clark

Osborne rules

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theosbornesupremacy/media.mp3" title="Isabel Hardman and George Parker discus how George Osborne rules Westminster" startat=38] Listen [/audioplayer]Against the heavy artillery fire of the Labour leadership battle, the struggle of the Conservative leadership contest goes almost undetected outside Westminster. It is no less intense, even though the Conservatives will not elect a new leader for at least three years. After a week of the parliamentary recess, there is no question about who is winning. This week, for the first time, George Osborne overtook Boris Johnson as William Hill’s favourite. Not so long ago, Osborne was a mere limpet on David Cameron’s wetsuit, clinging on thanks to the patronage of his boss.

Tim Stanley

The Trump slump

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theosbornesupremacy/media.mp3" title="Freddy Gray and Sebastian Payne discuss the rise of Donald Trump" startat=1607] Listen [/audioplayer]Lunatics with money are never ‘mad’, only eccentric. In America, they are also Republican presidential candidates. So Donald Trump, a barmy billionaire with a mouth bigger than his bank balance is leading the race to be the party’s next nominee. It’s a sad indictment of the American political process. And it is a distraction from how strong American conservatism could be. More than a dozen major Republicans are standing.

Melissa Kite

Asking too much

Jack Nicholson’s moving portrayal of a lonely old man in About Schmidt convinced me that I should sponsor a child. You may remember the scene at the end: he gets a letter from a nun in the Tanzanian village where a little boy has been receiving his largesse and realises that his life has not been meaningless. He has made a difference to somebody. I wept buckets as the credits rolled and not long afterwards signed up to a sponsorship programme with a leading charity in the hope that I too could make life better for one person. And maybe I did. I was allocated a child in Armenia. I pledged an embarrassingly low sum of money, really, when you consider how needy half the world is, and how much we in the West lavish on luxuries and incidentals.