Features

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

It takes a village (or six): the battle for rural churches

Some of the longest job descriptions belong to rural Church of England clergy. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m the Rector of Aldwincle, Clopton, Pilton, Stoke Doyle, Thorpe Achurch, Titchmarsh and Wadenhoe.’ Every one of these place names evokes an ancient Pevsner-worthy church, smelling of candlewax, damp hymn books and brass polish. Though many villages no longer have a shop or a pub, most do still have a parish church used for regular services — even if only on the first and third Sunday of the month. You push open the creaky door, and last Sunday’s hymns are still up on the hymn board.

Mark Mason

Attack of the personal space invaders

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Viewfrom22-19Feb2015.mp3" title="Mark Mason and Lara Prendergast discuss the personal space invaders" startat=1422] Listen [/audioplayer]It’s the shoulders you have to watch out for. If he’s pressing them back as his hand comes out to shake yours, then beware: you’re about to meet a Space Invader. It’s tricky, being an alpha male in polite 21st-century society. Gone are the days when you could expect other men to gather round, worshipping your medallion as it glistened on a bed of luxuriant chest hair. Now you have to subvert the genre. You have to go to them. You have to get in their face, literally.

Harry Mount

When did the advertising industry get so obsessed with swearing and innuendo?

When did the advertising industry decide that swearing sells? Look around you, and you’ll start to see rude, unfunny double entendres everywhere. The latest company to jump on the bandwagon is Toyota — currently flogging cars with the catchphrase, ‘Go Fun Yourself’. Try not to split your sides laughing. I blame French Connection. In 1991, the once respectable clothes shop started referring to itself as fcuk. The company began knocking out T-shirts, saying nasty things like ‘Too busy to fcuk’ and ‘fcuk fashion’. The campaign was such a hit that, God help us, Conservative Future — formerly the Young Conservatives — called itself ‘cfuk’ for a while, until French Connection threatened legal action.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

I wouldn’t want to be a girl in the age of Tinder

My foray into the world of online dating was short-lived. Within a few hours of my profile going live, a deluge of young men in their early twenties began to bombard me with messages. I was shocked and somewhat delighted. At my age, I had expected mostly sad widowers and maybe the odd divorced equine veterinarian, encouraged by the pictures of me on my horses. To attract a clamour of Ashton Kutchers was beyond my wildest dreams because, although I was now undoubtedly in the cougar age group, I really hadn’t seen myself as a Demi Moore. When I opened the messages, however, any notion that these handsome young men were about to whisk me on a romantic dinner date, then marry me on a windswept beach, evaporated.

Peter Oborne

Ed Miliband’s critics hate him for his success

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_12_Feb_2015_v4.mp3" title="Peter Oborne and Dan Hodges discuss Ed Miliband" startat=1343] Listen [/audioplayer]Most political commentators consider Ed Miliband a useless leader. In a narrow sense they are right. He is not very good at getting a positive press or eliciting the support of important outside voices in the media and the business community. Even small stories of no consequence have the potential to turn into minor nightmares for Mr Miliband. The latest of these is his education spokesman Tristram Hunt’s innocuous remark about nuns, transformed by a voracious press into a minor scandal. Mr Miliband’s bacon sandwich is a far more damaging example of the same phenomenon.

Miles Goslett

The trouble with Kids Company

In 2006, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, he made an infamous speech that is remembered as an exhortation to hug a hoodie. Feral youth, he said, should be helped rather than demonised. He was reaching towards what he hoped would be a new, ‘compassionate’ conservatism inspired in part by the charismatic social activist Camila Batmanghelidjh. She was the perfect lodestar for the young Tory leader. She began her drop-in centre — the Kids Company — in 1996 and within a few years, was helping thousands of disadvantaged inner-city children. She’s colourful, powerful but also a former Sherborne girl with whom Cameron and other members of the establishment felt at ease. Cameron told his shadow ministers that Camila embodied the Big Society.

Andrew Brown

Paganism is alive and well – but you won’t find it at a Goddess Temple

The first pagan temple to be built in Iceland for a thousand years has just been granted planning permission, a wonderful bureaucratic detail that shows up just how much this revival is polite make-believe. Ragnar Hairybreeks or Harald Bluetooth would not seek planning permission before building a place of sacrifice. At Gamla Uppsala, the Viking temple site in Sweden, horses were hanged to please the gods in groups of nine from trees, along with cattle, sheep, and human beings. In Reykjavik today’s pagans still eat sacred horsemeat at their feasts, but they buy it in from caterers. Respectable modern paganism is not only made up, as its leading ideologues cheerfully admit, but made up within a very limited compass of the modern Anglo-American imagination.

Sinclair McKay

EastEnders wanted to show Thatcher’s Britain. These days it would make Maggie proud

Albert Square full of Thatcherites? You ’avin a larf? No, it’s true. EastEnders, conceived 30 years ago partly as a means of enraging the Conservative party, has blossomed into a Tory commercial. Iain Duncan-Smith could watch all the wealth-creating activity in Albert Square with a syrupy smile; George Osborne could visit Phil Mitchell’s garage in a hi-vis jacket and look perfectly at home (Boris Johnson has already had a cameo pint at the Queen Vic). EastEnders portrays small businesses built up through hard work; it implies that turning to the state won’t get you anywhere; they even sent swotty teenager Libby Fox to Oxford. Never mind the affairs and addictions, the murders and rape, Walford is rammed full of aspirational, hard-working families.

Tom Hollander

My moment of mortification with Saint Joan Collins

I did a film with Dame Joan Collins once. No no, not The Stud. It wasn’t as good as that. It was called The Clandestine Marriage. And although it wasn’t that fun to watch, it was really fun to make. We filmed it one autumn in someone’s stately home. I had a lovely fling with a woman in the art department, who, in order to hide the fling from friends of her faraway boyfriend, came up with the brilliant ruse of pretending to have a fling with the third assistant director to confuse everyone. At least that’s what she told me she was doing. I was definitely confused, but I believed her. It was years later that someone explained to me that she really was having a fling with the third assistant director. But I never minded. She was so nice.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Worry about the eurozone crisis if you like. But profit, too

If you want something to worry about, you need only cast your eye across the channel to find yourself spoilt for choice. There is the background noise of massive unrepayable sovereign debt levels. There’s huge youth unemployment. There are angry minority political parties — note the rise of Spain’s anti-austerity party Podemos. There is the battle between those who think the eurozone can survive as just a monetary union and those who know that it will only survive if it gives into political union. There is the threat of deflation (nice when you aren’t in debt, crippling when you are).

Ross Clark

As oil prices plunge, I want to profit from the next spike. Here’s how

Buy jerry cans and fill them while you can. You won’t want to be caught out by the great oil shortage of 2016. Maybe that is exaggerating a little, but when you start hearing people talking about the world being ‘awash’ with oil, and read of oil companies slashing exploration and towing rigs to be laid up in the Moray Firth, you have to wonder if an oil crunch can be far behind. Someone is going to make a fortune when the balance between supply and demand flips and prices rocket again. It is easy to fancy that it could be you. But being a contrarian doesn’t always work out. Only misery awaited those who thought that when bank shares halved at the end of 2007 it must be a great buying opportunity. I would love to say I wasn’t one of them.

Ian Cowie

Five questions to help you take control of your pension

If you want something done properly, it often pays to do it yourself. So it must be good news that as of 6 April, when George Osborne’s pension reforms take effect, it will be easier than ever to run your own pension fund, because you won’t be forced to retire as an investor when you cease to work for a living. Instead, everyone — not just the rich — will be allowed to retain ownership of their life savings and try to live off them by means of what is known in the jargon as ‘income drawdown’. But is a DIY pension right for you? Institutional funds are buying government bonds with both hands — despite prices hitting record highs and yields falling to historic lows.

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

An A-to-Z guide to the new PC

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3" title="Brendan O'Neill and Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell debate the new political correctness" startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad ideas from the late 1980s and 1990s, should think again. When even someone as gay-friendly and Guardian-hued as Benedict Cumberbatch can be hounded for incorrectness, you know no one’s safe. So what can you say? Here’s an A-to-Z guide to the new PC. A is for America.

Damian Thompson

The march of the new political correctness

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3" title="Brendan O'Neill and Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell debate the new political correctness" startat=33] Listen [/audioplayer]I wonder how many of you know that you’re cis. Not very many, I’m guessing. So let me break this gently. You are almost certainly cis. It is short for ‘cisgendered’, which means that you ‘identify’ with the gender you were assigned at birth. To put it in everyday language, you were born male and are still male, or were born female and are still female. Roughly 99.7 per cent of human beings — including gays, lesbians and bisexuals — are cisgender.

Theo Hobson

Why calling for an ‘Islamic Reformation’ is lazy and historically illiterate

It’s been said for years now: Islam needs its reformation. Some centuries ago, Christianity ditched its theocratic impulse and affirmed modern political values — let Islam do likewise! Let its Luther, who is presumably sulking in the corner of some madrassa, come forward! Islam hath need of him! This sounds briskly no-nonsense, in its willingness to say that Islam has a problem that needs fixing, and open-minded about religion, in its assumption that religions can change and be compatible with secularism. But it’s actually lazy and historically illiterate. It involves a misreading of how Christianity relates to modernity. It implies that, once upon a time, Christianity was in conflict with healthy political values, but it learned to change its ways.

Melissa Kite

The Tooting poisoner and the relentless rise of the urban fox

Cowering in the corner of a pet shop, I edged towards the door to try to escape as a stranger yelled at me. The man’s face was so puckered up and puce with anger that I feared I was moments away from being beaten to death with a ball-thrower or ham bone. I had only popped in to buy some dog food for the spaniel and now the spaniel was hiding behind me as a fellow customer shouted abuse. The lady who owned the pet shop was trying to appease the shouting man, who had his own dog with him, a scrappy little terrier who looked as terrified as the rest of us as his owner went tonto. And what, I hear you ask, was the issue that had set the man off on his barking mad rant? Well, it was all to do with the strange case of the Tooting fox poisoner. I say fox poisoner.

Jane Kelly

Under this government, our prison system is falling apart

It used to be sewing mail bags, picking oakum and working the treadmill, now the government has come up with a wheeze to get convicts busy with sandbags, fence posts and kit for the armed forces. The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, says the ten-year deal will teach convicts ‘the value of a hard day’s work’. This has been tried for six months with Coldingley prison in Surrey and Grayling reports savings of nearly £500,000. Although that figure must be offset by the £72,000 of taxpayers’ money he has just spent trying to overturn a court ruling against his ban on inmates receiving books from visitors. He is also planning major reforms on rehabilitation of offenders.

Peter Robins

The most expensive typing error ever?

In Paul Gallico’s 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, the hero’s journey is set in motion by a comma. Hiram is a copy-reader on a New York morning paper, and the comma — ‘eventually known as the $500,000 comma’ — is one he inserts into a contentious article that saves his employer in a libel case. The publisher rewards him with a $1,000 bonus and a month’s paid vacation, and he sails for Europe, where he fights Nazis and rescues a princess. In real life, sadly, publicity comes not to the Hirams of the world but to the anti-Hirams. Another one had his day in the stocks last week, when the High Court gave its judgment on what may eventually be known as the £8.8 million ‘s’.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Europe’s crisis is Cameron’s opportunity

Napoleon notoriously preferred his generals to be lucky — and on that score at least, he would have approved of David Cameron. The triumph of the Syriza party in Greece presents him with a glorious opportunity to solve the European question that has bedevilled the Tories for so long. Europe’s difficulty is Cameron’s opportunity. The European elite has been shaken by the scale of Syriza’s victory. Just a few weeks ago, Cameron was arguing in private that Greek voters, who remain overwhelmingly pro-EU, would ultimately not back a party that was intent on a confrontation with the eurozone authorities.

Nick Cohen

As a republican, I used to look forward to Charles III. Now I’m scared

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would be worth reading if the professor had never been the victim of a royal vendetta.