Features

Thursday

Norman Stone

Norman Stone: From Syria to Iraq, the mess of the first world war is with us still

The European statesmen who went to war in 1914 were extremely well-educated men. Churchill staggered Roosevelt as he could quote reams of quite obscure poetry; the secretary of state for war translated German philosophy; the French president’s brother was a revered mathematician; General von Hindenburg read Faust on campaign (even Corporal Hitler had his Schopenhauer). The only exceptions were probably the aristocrats of the Vienna cabinet, whose definition of scholarship was that it was what one Jew copied down from another. But that world gave us 1914, and a whole set of amazingly bad judgments. No war in modern times has been launched with such a vast failure of cognition.

Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid: The five things that must go right for Afghanistan to prosper

 Lahore   From Washington to Kabul and in every capital in between, governments, armies, intelligence agencies and the media are asking what will happen in Afghanistan next year when the US and Nato finally leave after 12 years fighting a war they did not win. Despite the enormous amount of intelligence available, the truth is that nobody knows, not even the Afghans. The best predictions can only be based on knowing what is going right, what is going wrong and what can be done to minimise the dangers of things getting worse. For more than a year we have been deluged with the so-called success story of the military transition — the handing over of security to the 350,000-strong Afghan army and police — as western forces pull out.

Emma Cowing

Five years ago, I was pronounced dead in Afghanistan. This is what I’ve learned since

Just over five years ago, I was pronounced dead on the front line in Afghanistan. I had collapsed with acute heatstroke in temperatures of 52°C during a military foot patrol. I am a reporter not a soldier, but for four minutes, as a medic attempted to restart my stopped heart, I was a category A. That’s Army speak for ‘goner’. Six days later, as much to my own surprise as to that of the incredible soldiers who saved my life, I walked out of Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham on my father’s arm and into the cool of an English late summer’s evening. It was starting to rain. Cars were beeping on a nearby dual carriageway. The smell of cut grass mingled with that of an overflowing bin on which a seagull was solemnly picking at a kebab.

Quentin Letts

Quentin Letts: Why hymns are the true voice of England

When all seems too gloomy to endure, I take myself up to the British Camp in the Malverns, there among the windblown tufts and Iron Age ditches. With the rain lashing and my trousers flap-flapping like two Spithead flags, I lean on the gale and claim my birthright: to hum hymns of England and think of our forefathers. The Camp, by legend the fort of gallant Caractacus, is this kingdom’s greatest hill. At 1,110 feet it is not the tallest. It is not the broadest, sharpest, steepest or most remote. But from that ridged summit (a wedding cake, say some, though from boyhood I’ve thought of it as an enormous nipple) you can see far into the three-choir counties: Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford. Hymnshire. At Christmas we go all gooey over carols.

Pd James

P.D. James: Who killed the golden age of crime?

In 1934, in her preface to an anthology of short detective stories, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, ‘Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.’ And, to judge by the worldwide popularity of this essentially innocent genre, it is not only the Anglo-Saxon race who are addicted to murder and mystery. It was in the so-called Golden Age between the two world wars that the genre flourished so imaginatively and successfully that it seemed that everyone who could put together a coherent narrative was tempted to join this fascinating and lucrative game. The Oxford academics in particular seemed to be writing mainly to amuse themselves and each other.

Thursday

Virginia Blackburn

The ‘friends’ of others: how Facebook makes stalkers of us all

It’s become a given: we are all stalkers now. Thanks to Google, Twitter, Facebook and the fact that absolutely nobody seems to have the faintest idea about privacy settings, it is easier to keep track of people on the other side of the world than ever it was to snoop on a village neighbour from behind the safety of a lace curtain. But a strange and sinister new phenomenon has begun to emerge. Call it secondary stalking. Even the stalkers are being stalked now. This was brought home to me the other night when I was having dinner with one of my closest friends, who I will call Andrew (gay, as it happens, so no romantic implications in what follows).

Jamie Bartlett

iSPY: How the internet buys and sells your secrets

You probably have no idea how much of yourself you have given away on the internet, or how much it’s worth. Never mind Big Brother, the all-seeing state; the real menace online is the Little Brothers — the companies who suck up your personal data, repackage it, then sell it to the highest bidder. The Little Brothers are answerable to no one, and they are every-where. What may seem innocuous, even worthless information — shopping, musical preferences, holiday destinations — is seized on by the digital scavengers who sift through cyberspace looking for information they can sell: a mobile phone number, a private email address. The more respectable data-accumulating companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon — already have all that.

Peter Robins

Notes on … Christmas markets

Question: what do you call several dozen pop-up shops, all freshly popped up together at the one time of year when they might actually be useful? Answer: a Christmas market. Once upon a time Christmas markets, like many English Christmas traditions, were something we borrowed from Germany but did a little less well. And if you enjoy Glühwein and sugared pretzels, there are plenty of those ones still around, often run by borrowed Germans. (I have fond memories of the one in Old Market Square, Nottingham, and there’s a nice London specimen on the South Bank by the Royal Festival Hall.) If you’re in search of imaginative gifts, however, there’s a new breed of market that may prove rather more helpful.

Freddy Gray

The Frogs of war

What happened to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Just over a decade ago, the French, having refused to join the allied adventure in Iraq, were the butt of every hawkish joke. (Remember ‘Freedom fries’? Oh how we laughed.) Now, as America and Britain are beating a retreat from the world stage, France has turned into the West’s most reliable interventionist. Its President, the disaster-prone François Hollande, rattles his sabre at any despot or war criminal who dares to stand in the way of liberté, egalité, or fraternité. American neoconservatives — the War Party in Washington — have turned Francophile as a result. ‘Vive la France!

Mary Dejevsky

Super-heads are a super-huge mistake

Another month, so it seems, another super-head rolls. Not that many would have noticed the latest. Greg Wallace’s resignation as executive head teacher of five schools in the east London borough of Hackney was drowned out by the hubbub surrounding the Revd Paul Flowers. Yet the departure of Wallace — much lamented by pupils and their parents, according to tributes in the local newspaper — deserves a closer look. For Wallace was not just any top teacher.

Andrew Watts

Shalom, I’m Santa — how to be Father Christmas in diverse North London 

Twenty of us are gathered in the management suite of a shopping centre to learn about benchmarking grotto deliverables, exceeding customer expectations and, inevitably, Elf-and-Safety. Most are tiny teenage girls; they will be the elves. I gravitate to the only other middle-aged man. ‘Santa?’ he asks, nodding in the direction of my stomach. I nod back towards his. It’s 1 November. It couldn’t have been any earlier, as some of the elves have been engaged as scary monsters until Hallowe’en. Not all of them — department store ghouls don’t drive sales quite like Father Christmas — although my fellow Santa had been a Cannibal Killer at a farm shop. He’s been a Santa for 15 years.

Keith Carter

How our company was nearly bullied to death by a desperate RBS

‘So RBS say we are in breach of our loan agreement?’ asks the chairman, looking at me over his glasses in that way he has. We have arrived at that moment when we cease to be ignorant of the finely crafted double-speak involved in dealing with RBS. How, in skilled hands, a loan agreement can become a loan removal agreement; how an ‘arrangement fee’ can become an ex-gratia donation to the bank as things are disarranged; and don’t get me going on the ‘commitment fee’. We paid all these costs and thought them worthwhile for a seven-year €40 million facility from a reputable lender, and it was cheaper than equity — much cheaper. Or so we thought at the time, in our ignorance.

The Spectator

The 2013 Michael Heath Award for cartooning

The winner of the first ever Michael Heath award for cartooning is Len Hawkins. One of his drawings appears below. He receives an original drawing by Michael Heath, a bottle of Spectator gin, a year-long contract with The Spectator and a pair of handmade shoes from John Lobb, who kindly sponsored the competition.

Ross Clark

Power struggle

It is ‘immoral’, asserted Michael Fallon at this week’s Spectator energy conference, to force basic-rate taxpayers to subsidise wealthy landowners’ wind turbines and the solar panels of well-off homeowners. It is hard to remember the last time a minister was so frank about something which had been government policy until a few hours earlier. As a result of changes announced by the government this week, consumers will save £50 a year compared with what their bills would have been. The cost of supporting energy bills for the poor will be shifted from energy bills to general taxation, and the obligation on energy companies to subsidise home insulation will be watered down.

Thursday

Gerald Warner

David Cameron is betraying Scotland’s Unionists

With trademark grandiosity, Alex Salmond unveiled his white paper on independence this week as if he had retrieved it from the top of Mount Sinai. ‘This is the most comprehensive blueprint for an independent country ever published,’ proclaimed the First Minister. It was yet another reminder of an inexorable law of politics: the larger the document, the weaker the content. The American declaration of independence managed to fit on a page. The SNP’s plan for a separate Scotland is so bald that it needs to conceal its nothingness with 650 pages of flannel. You can look in vain in its pages for any sign of any policy that will make Scotland a better place. There will be more welfare, universal childcare, milk and honey. And income tax will not rise.

The Spectator

The 2013 Michael Heath Award for cartooning — shortlist (part 2)

Nine cartoonists are shortlisted for the first ever Michael Heath Award for cartooning. The theme of the contest, sponsored by John Lobb, is ‘Man in Motion’. Work by four of the artists was printed in last week’s issue; four more are below. The winner will be published next week. Thanks to all who entered — and congratulations to those shortlisted.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: The truths you can’t tell in today’s Britain

My memory gets addled sometimes, so maybe I’m wrong about this. But didn’t it used to be the case that when politicians were caught out lying, they made some sort of shame-faced apology to the nation and begged for our forgiveness? I’m sure that was it, you know. So if I’m right, to judge by the case of our Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, things have turned precisely 180 degrees. Mr Grieve has just offered a full and unqualified apology for having told the truth. I thought that politicians were meant to do that — tell the truth? And what an apology. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Mr Grieve said the following: ‘We have minority communities in this country which come from backgrounds where corruption is endemic.

Andrew J.

The Iran deal just shows how badly Obama has failed

‘Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can!’ With these exuberant assurances, the young candidate, buoyed by an unexpectedly strong showing in the Iowa caucuses, vowed to carry on his crusade. One year later, in January 2009, the candidate became president and set out to make good on his promises. That Barack Obama possessed the ability to heal the nation and repair the world seemed in many quarters all but self-evident. As he donned the mantle of the ‘most powerful man in the world’, the expectations that had lifted him into the Oval Office qualified as nothing short of messianic. A dark and depressing interval of American history, symbolised by place names such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, was ending.

Michael Henderson

Don’t flog a dead parrot – leave Monty Python in the past

You can’t go home again, as the Americans say. It’s worth running that adage, taken from Thomas Wolfe’s unfinished novel of 1938, past those zealots who snapped up 20,000 tickets for Monty Python’s reunion at the O2 Arena in 43 seconds when they went on sale this week. Four more dates were immediately inked in, with more to follow, one feels certain, as Python fever covers the globe. What a horrible prospect. The Python team are not horrible. Goodness gracious, no. In four BBC series between 1969 and 1974 they were often outstandingly funny, in a way that nobody had been funny before.

Digby Warde-Aldam

Stuck for Christmas presents? Hit the museums

The plan to do last year’s Christmas shop at Peter Jones on 23 December was doomed from its sorry inception. I was soaked by the time I got there, my plimsolls waterlogged, kept going only by my expectation of a quiet and civilised department store, rammed to the skylights with perfect presents. Instead, I found myself spearing a path through the seething, teeming, hostile masses with my sodden umbrella, and, worse — finding its  stock all but decimated. The claustrophobia that ripped through me was so violent that I was forced to run to the toilets to hide — and even then I had to queue. I shivered in the stairwell and contemplated defeat. What do you do about all those uncles? In-laws?