Features

Thursday

Matthew Bell

Guns, gays and the Queen – a former bishop reminisces

The bishopric of Bath and Wells comes with more bear-traps than most. For one thing, there’s the baby-eating. Ever since Blackadder told Baldrick he was being chased for a debt by the ‘baby--eating Bishop of Bath and Wells’, the image has stuck. When the last incumbent, Peter Price, made his first visit to the House of Lords, accompanied by his five-week-old granddaughter, the Bishop of Southwark remarked: ‘I see the bishop has brought his own lunch.’ The present incumbent, who was elected in March, and will be formally enthroned in June, has suffered a worse indignity. Peter Hancock is to become the first appointee not to live in the Bishop’s Palace, home to each of his predecessors since Jocelin of Wells laid the first stone in 1206.

Fraser Nelson

Why Beyoncé is a conservative icon

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_1_May_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Freddy Gray whether Beyoncé is a conservative icon" startat=1050] Listen [/audioplayer]When Time pictured an underwear-clad pop star on its cover, hailing her as one of the world’s most influential people, it looked like a crass sales ploy. But in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, they had more of a point than they seemed to realise. Time had asked Sheryl Sandberg, the head of Facebook, to praise the singer for joining various do-gooding campaigns — but this is the least of her achievements. Beyoncé’s real potency lies in her status as a poster girl for a new conservative counter-revolution taking place among the young.

Tom Leonard

How to shop for the apocalypse

 New York City An architect friend who usually designs Manhattan skyscrapers was recently asked to pitch for a far more interesting project. The client, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, wanted him to design a family house in upstate New York with a difference. It wouldn’t just be completely ‘off the grid’, with its own power and water supplies, but — and there isn’t yet an architectural term for this — it would be post-apocalypse. The conventional house would be mirrored below ground with pretty much identical living quarters that would be completely secure and so self-contained that there would be facilities to hydroponically grow plants and vegetables without soil.

Thursday

Dan Hodges

Meet Team Miliband

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Dan Hodges and Marcus Roberts debate the state of Milibandism" startat=47] Listen [/audioplayer]If the opinion polls and bookmakers are to be  believed, some time during the morning of Friday 8 May next year a small group of men and women will appear out of the of the Derby Gate entrance of the old Scotland Yard building on Whitehall, stride purposefully across the road, and assemble at the gates of Downing Street. After having their names checked by the officer on duty they will continue their journey up the famous street, enter via the equally famous and rather imposing black front door, and get to work. That work will involve running the United Kingdom for the rest of the decade.

Fraser Nelson

Old Labour, New Danger

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Dan Hodges and Marcus Roberts debate the state of Milibandism" startat=47] Listen [/audioplayer]A cruel new joke is doing the rounds about Ed Miliband: that the Labour leader is like a plastic bag stuck in a tree. No one is sure how he got up there, but no one can be bothered to take him down. It’s one of many unfair gags, made on the premise that he is a laughing stock and, ergo, doomed in next year’s general election. Many a Tory comforts himself with the idea that Miliband is just too implausible, too weak, too trivial a figure to make it to 10 Downing Street. Yet anyone wishing to dismiss him has to face some uncomfortable questions.

Julie Burchill

A Protestant country is a free country

For the past decade, I have lived — literally — between a church and a synagogue; as metaphors go, I would get laughed out of town if I stuck it in a novel. I left my church (not the one next door) when a ten-year-old child (not just a random passer-by, but a regular attendant) identified the cross as ‘a space rocket’ and everyone laughed indulgently. And then I left my synagogue (again, not the nearby one) when the liberal rabbi’s insistence that all religions were equally worthy of respect began to sound increasingly hollow in the face of the increasing intolerance and bigotry of Islamism. Now I exist in suspension between the two faiths.

Mark Mason

Subterranea is sexy

‘Sometimes when I’m down here,’ says Harry, ‘I get them to stop the train in the middle of a tunnel. Just for a minute or two, so I can savour the peace.’ Harry Huskisson is press officer for the British Postal Museum and Archive. He’s showing me the ‘Mail Rail’, the GPO’s underground train system, which until 2003 carried letters across London. The museum plans to reopen it as a tourist attraction. Subject to funding, by 2016 you could be mooching around the train depot underneath Mount Pleasant sorting office, and later on maybe even riding one of the mini-trains which defeated the capital’s traffic jams by whisking letters and parcels from Whitechapel to Paddington via Oxford Street.

John R. MacArthur

Clinton vs Bush — again

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="John Rick MacArthur and Freddy Gray discuss Clinton vs Bush" startat=929] Listen [/audioplayer]America is much less threatened by right-wing extremists than by the oligarchic rule of the two major political parties. The mainstream right, however, is wedded to the absurd notion that the Democrats are a party of the ‘left’ that is in authentic ideological competition with ‘conservative’ Republicans. Meanwhile, the orthodox left clings to the equally absurd belief that Barack Obama really means to reform the United States and redeem it from the sins of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, and God knows what other crimes against humankind and nature.

Aita Ighodaro

Investment special: Boom time in Africa

It’s easy to see why until recently Africa has been a hard sell. It is still regarded as a place for charity rather than investment. But that view is out of date: much of the continent is booming now and investors are wising up. The economy of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow by 6 per cent this year. Compare this with the eurozone’s paltry 1 per cent, and you start to see why smart money is moving from the old continent to the dark one. ‘Economists have had to rip up their numbers for how rich African households are — they were too low,’ says Charles Robertson, author of The Fastest Billion, a book about Africa’s economic revolution. ‘And this is just part of a much improved story.

Ian Cowie

Investment special: How to come out top in the pensions revolution

Three years after The Spectator called on the Chancellor to ‘stop treating pensioners like babies’, his Budget this year gave everyone greater choice about how we enjoy our life savings. While more column inches have been expended on the outside chance that some pensioners might blow the lot on a Lamborghini, less has been said about our exciting freedom to retain control of the biggest fund most of us will ever acquire and to remain active investors after we retire. Contrary to what some commentators seem to imagine, George Osborne did not abolish the legal compulsion to spend most of our pension savings on an annuity or guaranteed income for life last month.

Ross Clark

Investment special: Sell your Ferraris

Here is a paradox. Study the photographs of the flats and houses being sold in London’s prime property boom and you see one minimalist interior after another. The huge, empty sweeps of marble and limestone, broken only by a solitary painting, might give you the impression that it is fashionable to declutter your life. One can imagine one of those H.M. Bateman cartoons portraying the shock and horror generated by the man who placed an ornament on his mantelpiece. Why, then, if we are so keen to get rid of all the clutter, has the price of luxury goods mushroomed over the past decade? Chinese ceramics, the collectable sort, that is — are up 83 per cent, jewellery up 146 per cent, art up 183 per cent.

Wednesday

Christopher Booker

The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no other in the history of art.

Theo Hobson

The return of God: atheism’s crisis of faith

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God" startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]Like any movement or religion, atheism has ambitions. Over the years it has grown and developed until it has become about far more than just not believing in God: today atheism aspires to a moral system too. It comes with an idea of how to behave that’s really very close to traditional secular humanism, and offers a sense of community and values. Atheism has crept so close to religion these days that it’s de rigueur for political atheists like Ed Miliband to boast about a dual identity: a secular allegiance to a religions tradition, in his case Judaism.

Douglas Murray

Would human life be sacred in an atheist world?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray and Freddy Gray discuss the return of God" startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]What was your reaction recently when it emerged that thousands of unborn foetuses had been burnt by NHS trusts? And that some had been put into ‘waste-to-energy’ incinerators and so used to heat hospitals? Revulsion, I would imagine. But why? I would hazard that it is either because you are religious or because your customs and beliefs are still downstream from faith, even if you reject it. Because if you grant that an unborn foetus is not a life and that once aborted it could have no further use, there is at least an argument that these bodies might as well be put to use.

James Delingpole

Don’t call him an oligarch – meeting Dmitry Firtash

Who is Dmitry Firtash? Can he solve Ukraine’s troubles? And why is he currently under effective house arrest in Vienna, awaiting extradition on corruption charges to the US, with his bail set at a whopping €125 million? None of these questions has a simple answer — and when I fly to Austria to meet him it’s not even clear if I’m going to ask him. Firtash appears to be up for it, as far as can be ascertained via his barrage of minders, advisers, security and hangers-on. But his expensive American lawyers most definitely aren’t. It might jeopardise his case, they’re saying. Firtash mustn’t say a word about anything. ‘Who do they fucking think they are?’ says one of Firtash’s PRs.

Max Pemberton

As a doctor, I’d rather have HIV than diabetes

'There is now a deadly virus, which anyone can catch from sex with an infected person. If we’re not careful, the people who’ve died so far, will be just the tip of the iceberg… If you ignore Aids, it could be the death of you.’ It has been hailed as one of the most memorable health campaigns ever created. The message couldn’t have been clearer and people were petrified. For anyone over the age of 30, the ‘Iceberg’ and ‘Tombstone’ adverts — as they came to be known — with John Hurt’s menacing voice-over, still bring back a sense of crushing dread.

Thursday

Chris Deerin

Scots and English are the same people, with different accents. Why pretend otherwise?

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Angus Robertson debate Scottish independence" startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]Sometimes it is easy to understand why countries break up. Some founder on the rocks of their internal contradictions. Others are historical conveniences that have simply run their course. Czechoslovakia was an artificial construct, a country with two languages and cultures, which split soon after the Iron Curtain fell. The division of Cyprus in 1974 marked the end of the fraternity between the island’s Turks and Greeks. The partition of India was driven by trouble between its Hindus and Muslims.

Daniel Hannan

Shakespeare invented Britain. Now he can save it

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson and Angus Robertson debate the shared values of the English and Scots" startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘What country, friends, is this?’ We’ve been wrestling with Viola’s question almost from the moment she asked it. It was barely a year after Shakespeare had scribbled out those words, in the first Act of Twelfth Night, that James VI of Scotland inherited England’s throne, beginning a 400-year confusion over national identity that has led to the present referendum on partition. The new monarch wanted to amalgamate his two realms.

Clare Oxford

Why can’t country views be protected from wind turbines?

‘Surprisingly’, writes Geoffrey Lean (Daily Telegraph, 4 April), ‘two thirds of the country support onshore wind turbines’. It should not surprise him: those would be the two thirds who live in towns and cities, the people whose distinctive, familiar skylines are on the whole safe. When proposed city structures reach the height of St Paul’s they are the subject of deliberation and careful design. Not so in the country. I live in the East Mendips, a soft target for onshore wind turbines as it has little protection from developers: this is because its hills were sacrificed to quarrying after the war and it therefore does not qualify as an area of outstanding natural beauty. And yet it is outstandingly beautiful.

James Kirchick

How fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda?

 Kiev Ihor Miroshnychenko, a parliamentarian from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, is an ‘emotional’ man. That is the word that he and his colleagues use to describe his raiding the headquarters of the country’s state television broadcaster last month. Accompanied by five other Svoboda bully boys, Miroshnyschenko berated and beat the station director before forcing him to sign a resignation letter. So proud were they of this deed that one of the Svoboda members videotaped the whole confrontation and posted it on YouTube. The proximate cause of Miroshnychenko’s anger was the station’s transmission of a Russian news channel broadcast of a victory concert in Red Square celebrating Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.