Features

Thursday

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.

Daniel Hannan

Watch out Eurocrats, here come the Pirates!

I once shared a car to the airport with a French MEP, a member of the Front National (FN). He spoke that very correct French which, across the Channel, serves in place of accent as a social signifier. He casually mentioned that the Holocaust couldn’t have happened, at least not on the scale claimed: the volume of the ovens, he creepily explained, was insufficient. The European Parliament has always had its fair share of extremists, eccentrics and outright, drooling loons. With the FN then polling at 6 per cent, there seemed no need to treat any of its MEPs seriously, so I took to avoiding that one. Now his party is set to win the next European election. But it’s not just madmen on the rise.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron on tax, coalition, ‘green crap’ and Team Nigella

It’s 9.30 a.m. on a Friday and David Cameron is about to head for his Oxfordshire constituency and work from home. This is precisely the habit that his Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is trying to beat out of the civil service, but the Prime Minister has a reasonable claim to some downtime. In the past five days he has met 150 businessmen and toured four Chinese cities. This morning, he has paid a visit to Tech City, London’s answer to Silicon Valley, and travelled to South Africa House to pass on his condolences following Nelson Mandela’s death. His last appointment, which will last for as long as it takes to drive to Beaconsfield service station, is an interview with The Spectator.

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov: How Putin’s poker game makes fools of the West

In chess you see everything. Every piece of information you need is available on the board, so what is being tested during a game is your ability to process all that information. In politics things are different: we never have all the information. People often compare politics to chess, but in fact politics is more like a game of cards, poker perhaps, in which winning means relying on guts, instincts and strength. Which is why, in the terrible international game being played over Syria, Vladimir Putin is currently the master. Although — as I will explain — his winning streak may not last, at least for the time being he has outplayed all his opponents, largely because President Obama and other western leaders have left the game wide open for him.

Martin Gayford

Friends, soulmates, rivals: the double life of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are likely to go down together in art history. If the link had not already been set in cement, it certainly became so at Christie’s New York last month, when Bacon’s ‘Three Studies of Lucian Freud’ (1969), a three-part portrait of his friend and colleague, went for $142.4 million or a whisker less than £90 million, thus becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. Perhaps that was a freakish figure — I suspect Lucian would have thought so — but it remains dizzying fact that a figurative painting, done in London within the past 45 years, and born out of a friendship forged in raffish Soho bars and clubs, should have attained such a value.

Harry Mount

‘The pure pleasure of annoying people’ – Peregrine Worsthorne at 90

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne isn’t much looking forward to his 90th birthday on 22 December. ‘It’s awful,’ he cries. ‘It makes me so angry Diana Athill writing about the joys of old age. My eyes, teeth, heart — everything starts to go. Keeping alive becomes a full-time job. I’m so lucky to have a much younger wife. If I was on my own, I’d crumble. But as they say, it’s better than the alternative.’ Worsthorne is speaking in the high Gothic drawing room of the old rectory in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where he lives with his second wife, the architectural writer Lucy Lambton. Over lunch, he says to Lucy, ‘My brain isn’t working!

Michael Nazir-Ali

Act now to save the Middle East’s Christians

It is hard to believe that at one time nearly the whole of the Middle East and much of north Africa were predominantly Christian. Think of the great Christian cities such as Alexandria, Damascus, Edessa, Constantinople and Carthage. Monasticism, the great civilising force, in both east and west, took its rise to the dusty end of the Mediterranean and some of the church’s greatest theologians came from there. What changed the picture? In a word, Islam. The arrival of the newly Muslim Arabs disrupted the flow of history in the Middle East and beyond. The Christian cities capitulated one by one. Some communities were destroyed in the conflict, others were dispersed.

Norman Tebbit

Norman Tebbit: My recipe for a contented Christmas dinner

As the principal cook in our household, I take the view that the Christmas Day cook should not be left isolated in the kitchen slaving over the hot stove whilst everyone else is making merry in the sitting room. The true purpose of Christmas can be served at Midnight Mass the night before, and the old pagan midwinter feast can be celebrated on Christmas Day, cooks and diners all together. So to hell with the messy business of basting turkeys or draining fat off geese. Go for a casserole which can be prepared and part-cooked earlier in the day and returned to finish cooking for the last 30 minutes.