Features

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

François Hollande – all the president’s women

Obviously, the whole Hollande business is utterly compelling from a prurient point of view, though journalists did brilliantly in coming up with spurious public interest reasons for talking about it (Corsican mafia! Presidential security! Lying!). The most riveting aspect, for me, is the heroic restraint of his former partner Ségolène Royale when she was asked about it on telly — given that she was ditched by Mr Hollande after 30 years of respectable concubinage and four children in favour of the woman now being humiliated by this affair. ‘Time to turn the page,’ she said. Each woman is younger than her predecessor — naturally. But what’s more interesting is the widespread assumption that this is a situation that has to be clarified.

Isabel Hardman

The fight for compassionate Conservatism

‘Has the Secretary of State, like me, managed to watch programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits & Proud? If so, has he, like me, been struck by the number who complain about welfare reform while able to afford copious amounts of cigarettes, have lots of tattoos, and watch Sky TV on the obligatory widescreen television?’ This question, from the Tory backbencher Philip Davies in Parliament this week, was not one Iain Duncan Smith would have welcomed. The Work and Pensions Secretary is desperate to avoid any language that casts the poor as the indolent authors of their own misfortune. But as he knows, not all of his Tory colleagues see welfare reform that way.

Fraser Nelson

Benefits Street exposes Britain’s dirty secret – how welfare imprisons the poor

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='Fraser Nelson and Frank Field MP discuss Benefits Street'] Listen [/audioplayer]No scandal has been more successfully covered up than the appalling truth about what happens to Britain’s poorest people. We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to stay there in economic exile. We give them welfare for the foreseeable future, and wish them luck in their drug-addled welfare ghettos. This is our country’s dirty little secret, which has just been exposed by a devastating Channel 4 documentary. And the left are furious.

Alan Rusbridger

Ten reasons why conservatives should take Edward Snowden seriously

Towards the end of last year Tom Stoppard gave a rather brilliant PEN/Pinter lecture on freedom of expression which was, in part, a kind of love letter to the place which has been his home since 1946: ‘There is no country in the world I would rather be living in, no country where I would feel safer.’ Later in the same lecture he listed his own ‘obsequies over the England we have mislaid’. The list began: ‘Surveillance, mis-selling pensions and insurance. Phone hacking. Celebrity culture. Premiership football. Dodgy dossier. Health and Safety. MPs’ expenses…’ And so on, before underlining his own personal mantra on human rights: ‘A free press makes all the other freedoms possible.

Stephen Robinson

Harry Shearer on bringing out Richard Nixon’s feminine side

Hollywood tends to treat Richard Nixon as an oafish B-movie villain, so it is ambitious and original of Harry Shearer to try to convince a British audience of the very feminine side of the 37th American president. As a veteran comedy actor and the ‘voice’ of several of the Simpsons cartoon characters — including Mr Burns, Smithers, and Ned Flanders — Shearer has the vocal range to get almost anyone right if he puts his mind to it. But voice work was not the main challenge in the forthcoming Sky Arts drama. Shearer is more intrigued by the physical aspects of the central role in Nixon’s the One, which he insists is not an impersonation, but a characterisation.

Thursday

Lucinda Lambton

A girl, a train and a miniature pistol: how I met the Everly Brothers

I was drifting in and out of sleep last week, listening to the news, when suddenly eight words — at first sounding no different from the general run — slammed into my senses. ‘Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers is dead.’ For the first time I knew how it felt when ‘the earth stood still’. One of the two brightest flames of my youth had been extinguished. I was friends with both Phil and Don Everly for some 45 years and it was, to be sure, a dazzling friendship. Beat this for its beginnings: it was 1960 and we met at midnight, boarding the Flying Scotsman at King’s Cross, surrounded by the thickly hissing steam from that great green engine. The sleeping car attendant, as neat as a pin in his starched white bum-freezer jacket, was standing by.

Theodore Dalrymple

Don’t tax sugar – it doesn’t make you fat. Gluttony does

If there is one characteristic that accounts for the deep unattractiveness of the modern British, it is their lack of self-control. It is not merely that they lack such self-control as they scream their obscenities in the street, eat everywhere they go, and leave litter behind them: it is that they are actively opposed to self-control on grounds of health and safety. They are convinced that self-control is the enemy of self-expression, without which their existences would be poisoned as if by an unopened abscess. Therefore the notion, increasingly propounded in the press and elsewhere, that sugar is an addictive substance will be music to their ears — or rather junk food to their stomachs. Not only is self-control bad for you, it has been proved (by science) to be impossible.

Mark Steyn

Global warming’s glorious ship of fools

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

William Astor

William Astor: My father, his swimming pool and the Profumo scandal

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="Richard Davenport-Hines discusses the Profumo affair's enduring appeal"] Listen [/audioplayer]Christine Keeler and Jack Profumo might never have met in the swimming pool at Cliveden if it had not been for a filly called Ambiguity. As children, growing up at Cliveden, we all swam in the Thames. In the summer, the river was cold, dark and full of sludge, but my grandmother Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, thought it good for us. Then Ambiguity, my father’s filly, won the Oaks and with the prize money a heated swimming pool was built — and the rest, as they say, is history.

Luke Coppen

Sorry — but Pope Francis is no liberal

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='Luke Coppen and Freddy Gray discuss Pope Francis'] Listen [/audioplayer]On the last day of 2013, one of the weirdest religious stories for ages appeared on the news wires. The Vatican had officially denied that Pope Francis intended to abolish sin. It sounded like a spoof, but wasn’t. Who had goaded the Vatican into commenting on something so improbable? It turned out to be one of Italy’s most distinguished journalists: Eugenio Scalfari, co-founder of the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica, who had published an article entitled ‘Francis’s Revolution: he has abolished sin’.

Boris Johnson

‘I laughed until I cried, then retched’: Boris Johnson on the wit of Simon Hoggart

I really can’t remember exactly how I came to appoint Simon Hoggart the wine correspondent of this magazine, but I have a feeling that it must have been in the aftermath of one of those long lunches at which it was then — and I hope and believe still is — the privilege of the staff to get sozzled at the expense of the wonderful and benevolent proprietors. It might have been a parliamentary awards judging lunch. Perhaps it was just a lunch. At any rate Simon was there, and he started doing impressions of some of his favourite House of Commons characters. I am pretty sure Sir Peter Tapsell cropped up.

Friday

Kate Eshelby

Islands fit for Ingmar Bergman

Who would have thought of staying in a factory? My view is of a grey industrial building, a gravel pile and a crane  standing like a metal giraffe at the end of the pier. It’s not your usual picture-postcard hotel vista, but it’s oddly beautiful. Instead of following the masses to the Mediterranean, we had headed north to the Baltic islands off Sweden’s coast. Gotland is Sweden’s biggest island, and it’s here that the Fabriken Furillen hotel sits, on a remote peninsula in the far northeast of the island. This hotel is the brainchild of photographer Johan Hellstöm. It takes an unusual man to see that an abandoned limestone quarry could be a hotel.

Jonathan Ray

Havana – a party girl of a city

I have always longed to get on a plane and command, ‘Take me to Cuba!’ Well, the other week I did just that. Sadly, it fell a little flat, the stewardess’s wintry smile telling me that she got a lot of that on the Gatwick-Havana flight. Still, it kept me chuckling for the next eight and a half hours between movies, meals and snoozes in Virgin Upper Class. Havana was humid and sticky and it was as stifling inside my elderly rust-bucket of a taxi as it was outside. ‘Air-con on half?’ grinned the driver, winding down his window halfway, ‘or on full?’, winding it down as far as it would go. We agreed on full and set off, swerving between potholes, stray dogs and broken-down cars.

Cosmo Landesman

It’s a stupid lie to say we’re all bisexual

It was lust at first sight and love after the third martini. Over a get-to-know-you-dinner I discovered all I needed to know: I had found the Perfect Woman. All the boxes were ticked and the taxi was winding its way to my bedroom when she said: ‘You should know that I’m bisexual.’ She must have seen the frown on my face because she quickly added, ‘But everyone is bisexual.’ ‘No. I’m not,’ I said gently. ‘Yes you are,’ she insisted. ‘No, I’m a heterosexual,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘No, we’re all bisexual,’ she said with muffled exasperation. There followed an infantile exchange of Yes you are!/No I’m not!

Sybil Kapoor

A cook’s tour of China without the crispy caterpillars

As I pick my way around the debris in Zhongyi market in Lijiang, our guide points out the yak section. Windpipes, cleaned intestines and huge wobbly magenta livers are neatly laid out on the filthy floor, while the more expensive cuts are arranged on trestles. My eyes are drawn to a row of small boys enthusiastically slurping up noodles swimming in a dark beefy-looking broth. ‘Would you like to see the dog section?’ our guide asks politely. ‘Umm, no, that won’t be necessary,’ we say quickly, then head out to the bustling, willow-lined streets. It’s October and National Holiday Week and the stone-paved streets of Lijiang (a Unesco world heritage site) are filled with Chinese tourists enjoying themselves.

Alex Massie

High tea in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country

In the bar of the Hotel Suisse, perched above the lake in Kandy (pictured), high up in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, a driver touting for business smiles to reassure me that the British ‘left us many good things’. Trains, roads, the English language. And cricket, I remind him, ‘Oh yes, sir, cricket.’ I wonder what he says to French or Australian tourists. The Hotel Suisse was used as Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in the second world war; these days it has something of the feel of an old-fashioned and slightly eccentric English prep school. If the Hill Country is not quite the last redoubt of Sri Lanka’s British past, it remains the district in which it is most palpable.

Roger Scruton

Stand up for the real meaning of freedom

When pressed for a statement of their beliefs, conservatives give ironical or evasive answers: beliefs are what the others have, the ones who have confounded politics with religion, as socialists and anarchists do. This is unfortunate, because conservatism is a genuine, if unsystematic, philosophy, and it deserves to be stated, especially at a time like the present, when the future of our nation is in doubt. Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life.

Michael Ware

The great recycling myth

My frail elderly mother has recently moved in with us in Epsom and in so doing has joined the 15 million people worldwide who spend their days sorting through rubbish. Mum, however, does not get paid $1 a day. She does it for nothing. This is because we now have five separate bins and every morning she and the other 10,000-plus members of Surrey’s army of housewives sort through their rubbish to make sure it all goes into the right one. I am of course describing the phenomenon known as kerbside recycling, and Epsom Council would like you to think that it is good for the environment. But my day job is raising money for environmental projects, including waste plants, and I know that kerbside recycling is all a big con to save the public sector money.

Jane Kelly

A dying estate agent helped me see the light

I recently decided to move house. It started with a resentful yearning to own two bedrooms, but I quickly discovered that to afford a spare room, I must leave my seedy area of west London for a worse one, or leave London altogether. Not easy after 30 years. Since I made up my mind to move, my normal life has disappeared. In the ceaseless hunt for houses I have no time for blogging, writing, painting, exhibitions or sociable lunches: the things that used to give life its shape. As there are not enough affordable houses, there is intense competition involved, which has changed me into something like the unpleasant yuppie I was 30 years ago: anxious, resentful, greedy and tense. I put in offers while looking elsewhere, bidding against others when I know I’m not really interested.

Mary Dejevsky

Why doesn’t Russia have a Yad Vashem for the gulag?

Yad Vashem, Israel’s vast Holocaust memorial complex, dominates a hillside above Jerusalem, surrounded by bare rock and pines. Vast though it is, it manages to be both harrowing and restrained; both rooted in the times it commemorates and thoroughly modern — not just in style, but in the way it harnesses the most advanced technology to its cause. As an enterprise, let alone a monument, it is impressive: a testament to the commitment of Israel and the survivors of Europe’s Jewry to ensure that what happened is never forgotten. But it aspires to more: to convey a sense of the communities that were destroyed and to memorialise, so far as possible, every last individual.