Features

Thursday

James Kirchick

Sochi Olympics: Why picking on gays has backfired so horribly for Vladimir Putin

After all the fuss, the billions spent, the calls for boycotts and so on, the Sochi Winter Olympics will begin next week. Given the incredibly low expectations, the Russian Games may even be judged a success — as long as the weather stays cold and no terrorist attack takes place. But Vladimir Putin should not be too smug, because his broader campaign against homosexuality has backfired spectacularly. The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time.

Charles Alexander

Will Test cricket survive the Age of India?

For the past three months the cricket press has concentrated on the destruction of the England cricket team at the hands of Australia. It now emerges that correspondents were missing a bigger story. While Mitchell Johnson was carving up the England batting order, the England, Australia and India cricket authorities were doing the same to international cricket. In a carefully planned ‘bear-hug style’ take-over bid, tabled in Dubai this week, India, England and Australia have seized effective control of world cricket. South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, the West Indies and Sri Lanka, not to mention minnows like Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, have been reduced to second-class citizenship.

Sam Kiley

Israel’s other A-bomb

 Jerusalem Some day soon, the foreign minister of a major ally may decide to drop an A-bomb on Israel. William Hague and John Kerry have each pointedly left the option open. And Jimmy Carter, of course, has already done it. This A-bomb isn’t a literal bomb, cooked up beneath the deserts of Iran, but it could be almost as great a threat to the longevity of the Jewish state. This A-bomb is the word apartheid . Hague is the one who’s sounded the loudest warnings. He has repeatedly insisted that if there isn’t a deal this year that establishes an independent Palestinian state, then Israel’s own future as a both a Jewish state and a democracy is in doubt.

Harry Mount

The case against London cabbies

I lost my misguided faith in black cabs last week, on the corner of Royal College Street in north London. It was the tiniest trip — 2.4 miles from Bloomsbury to my Camden flat at 11.30 in the evening. Hard to mess up, too: empty roads, good weather and the easiest of routes — practically a straight line to my flat. To my horror, the cabbie dodged the obvious, straight route and embarked on an extended loop through the traffic-choked hub of Camden Town tube station and Camden Market. I pointed him in the right direction and he reluctantly did a U-turn and headed up Royal College Street. Not a word of apology — and still a £11.20 fare for a ten-minute journey. No tip, needless to say. I can’t know whether he was ripping me off or merely clueless.

Alec Marsh

Britain’s accidental one-child policy

[audioplayer src='http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_January_2014_v4.mp3' title='Alec Marsh discuss the death of the big middle class family'] Listen [/audioplayer]The future Mrs Marsh and I wait outside a small Victorian terraced house for an estate agent. It’s a familiar Saturday scene, especially in W7 — the last London postcode before you reach Middlesex and an area I formerly classified as the dark side of the moon. Hanwell is where estate agents are fanning the flames of a house-buying firestorm, like therapists prescribing amphetamines to hyperactive children. Here, as on the edges of so many British cities, middle-class buyers driven from even more expensive districts converge in a desperate bid to find a home.

Tim Ecott

Why we should let Faroe islanders hunt whales

In Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, I met a man who first helped his father kill a whale with a sharp knife when he was eight years old. The spouting blood soaked his hair and covered his face like warpaint.  He remembered the warmth on his skin, a contrast to the cold North Atlantic in which they stood. These days we assume that people who kill whales and dolphins must be bad. Flipper and his cousins are our friends, and notwithstanding that unfortunate business with Moby-Dick, those who pursue whales for their flesh must be terrible human beings. We know now, as Herman Melville did not, that cetaceans are exceptional mammals, highly intelligent with elaborate social networks and close family relationships.

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies

I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s programming since I was little. These young recyclers are from a show called Green Balloon Club, which is ostensibly a wildlife programme, but the song had more in common with one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea. It wasn’t education, it was propaganda. The purpose of children’s stories has always been to educate as well as entertain. I was brought up on the Railway Stories by Revd W.

Florence King

America’s war on sleep

 Fredericksburg, Virginia Ask an American to name the author of the line ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, and he will promptly reply ‘Shakespeare’. It’s pure guesswork but we always credit the Bard with anything that sounds like a literary quotation, so he inadvertently gets it right. But if you recite the rest of the passage and ask what it means you will draw a blank. The American mind will not spark until it hears ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep’, which sets off a cascading display of audience-identification fireworks, and visions of a new American production in which Macbeth is renamed Big Thane and cast as the hero of the play. Americans are so afraid of sleep that we see nothing wrong in murdering it.

Daron Acemoglu

Why foreign aid fails – and how to really help Africa

David Cameron speaks compellingly about international aid. Eradicating poverty, he says, means certain institutional changes: rights for women and minorities, a free media and integrity in government. It means the freedom to participate in society and have a say over how your country is run. We wholeheartedly agree and were flattered to see the Prime Minister tell this magazine that he is ‘obsessed’ by our book on the subject, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. But diagnosing a problem is one thing; fixing it another. And we don’t yet see the political will — in Britain or elsewhere — that could turn this analysis into a practical agenda. The British government is strikingly generous in foreign aid donations. It spent £8.

Alex Wickham

MPs grope men too

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="Alex Wickham discuss Westminster's wandering hands with Miranda Green" startat=790] Listen [/audioplayer]As I walked out of the bar, I noticed a Conservative MP following me. It had been an evening for young political activists, mostly teenage boys, and it was drawing to an end. I pretended to be engrossed in my phone, but the MP — well-liked, universally respected — lurched towards me, placing his arm around my waist and leaning in close. I could smell the whisky and cigars on his breath. ‘I’m just going to the toilet,’ he slurred, winking and gesturing at the gents.

Douglas Murray

Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East’s 30 year war

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="Douglas Murray discuss Islam's 30 year war with former solider Thomas Tugendhat"] Listen [/audioplayer]Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain themes are emerging. Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear? The answer was striking and precise: ‘That the region will clarify.

Thursday

Rian Malan

What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day.  Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ‘microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976. Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson of literary properties, known to exist but not seen since it passed into the hands of the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1977.

Vernon Bogdanor

The Spectator book review that brought down Macmillan’s government

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="Vernon Bogdanor discuss Iain Macleod's 'What Happened' article" startat=1460] Listen [/audioplayer]Fifty years ago this week, a cover story in The Spectator helped to bring down a Conservative government. It was called ‘The Tory Leadership’ and was written by the editor, Iain Macleod, who had been a senior minister in Harold Macmillan’s government. Purporting to be the review of a book by Randolph Churchill on how Lord Home had ‘emerged’ in October 1963 as Macmillan’s successor, it claimed that Macmillan had fixed the succession so as to scupper the chances of the natural candidate, R.A. Butler, who had been deputy prime minister in all but name.

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.