Features

Thursday

Merryn Somerset-Webb

How to make money from the Scottish referendum

The best time to buy an asset is when no one else can stomach it. Great fortunes are made in uncertainty. The self-made rich aren’t the ones who hung around on the edge of an iffy situation thinking about the possible disasters. They’re the ones who calculated the odds and bought before anyone else was sure of the answers. So where is there uncertainty in the UK today? Most English people are utterly uninterested in the prospect of Scottish independence — or in Scotland generally. But if they were actually to look up north they’d see pretty serious turmoil. It is less than a year until every resident of Scotland gets to vote on whether they want to live with the devil they know or the devil they don’t.

Thursday

Nick Cohen

They used to catch crooks – now they trawl Twitter. Are our police turning into spies?

Just before the hacking scandal broke, the Sun sent a young and by all accounts decent reporter to meet a woman who said she had a story — a ‘walk-in’ as we call them in the trade. The walk-in produced a phone and said the Sun would want to take a look. One picture on it showed the face of a much-loved TV presenter. The rest of the celeb’s body was more lustful than lovable, however, as he was exposing his member in triumphant fashion. Accompanying the picture was a lot of explicit sex talk. The phone looked as if it belonged to the star’s mistress, and the very famous and very married presenter had been sending her pornographic ‘selfies’ and sex texts to remind her of the joys that awaited her when they next met. The reporter took the phone.

Johnnie Kerr

Notes on… Skiing in Austria

I have spent a week of every winter of my life with my family in Zürs, a small village in Arlberg, Austria. It isn’t at all the most famous resort in the region — with fewer slopes than Lech and a quieter nightlife than St. Anton — nevertheless, it possesses a quality that brings most who go there back, season after season. Part of the place’s attraction must be that it couldn’t exist at all without skiing, from which it derives practically its entire economy, and consequently great pride. Except for a few cattle it is entirely uninhabited during the non-season (rather like that hotel in The Shining), which effectively makes it one of the most wholesome ski resorts imaginable.

Lloyd Evans

Zoë Wanamaker: We need more giants like Obama

It’s all true about Zoë Wanamaker. She’s like a wood-nymph from the Tolkien franchise. Pixie features, nut-brown eyes, a mischievous tight-lipped smile and a warm cackling laugh. Next week she makes a guest appearance at the Hampstead Arts Festival to discuss her acting career. Had she heeded the advice of her parents — Sam Wanamaker and the Canadian actress Charlotte Holland — she might never have followed them on to the stage. ‘You don’t want to go into that. It’s full of disappointment and rejection,’ they told her. ‘Do something else. Get a proper job.’ Wanamaker’s idea of a proper job was to become a painter. ‘I went to art college for a year to learn to develop my painting technique.

Christopher Booker

Botswana is persecuting its Kalahari bushmen — and we had a role in it

For 17 years I have been reporting on one of the most haunting tragedies of our modern world — the ruthless persecution of the last survivors of the original inhabitants of southern Africa, the bushmen, by a policy seemingly designed to wipe them from the earth. Those responsible are not wicked white colonialists but the government of Botswana, which, thanks to its vast diamond reserves, is per capita the richest country in Africa. We in Britain, however, should take a special interest in this story because through most of that time our Foreign Office has given full support to the policy which created this tragedy, in breach of a solemn pledge we gave to the bushmen in the 1960s. And now there has been yet another disgraceful twist to the story.

Michael Hanlon

There’s a global morality gap — and it’s getting wider

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On the one side are those who buy into the whole post-Enlightenment human rights revolution.

Arthur Laffer

Arthur Laffer: cuts succeeded where stimulus failed

 Nashville, TN All the drama coming out of Washington in the last few weeks has obscured some seriously good news: federal government spending is falling. And not at a trickle: think the White Cliffs of Dover. Not since the economic boom following 1945 have Americans seen such a rapid decline in the government’s claim on the nation’s resources — falling by a welcome $94 billion over two years. You need to go back to the end of the Korean war to find a time when US government spending has actually declined over two years. If Republicans in the House stick to the sequester and future caps already built into current budget law, federal spending will stay at this low level for years to come.

Michael Henderson

The Morrissey myth

Drinking in Corbières, a dingy basement bar just off St Ann’s Square, 30 years ago, you could bump into any number of groovy young Mancunians clustered round the jukebox, talking about the bands they were going to form. One night, as the jukey played ‘The Cutter’ by Echo & the Bunnymen, all evening long it seemed, there was talk of an odd duck from Stretford called Steven Morrissey. Nobody knew him but his name was in the wind. Soon he had formed The Smiths with a guitar player, Johnny Marr, whose sweet pop sound complemented, or supplemented, his partner’s predominantly sour words. For three years the collaboration worked, so long as you felt, as many teenagers have always felt, that the world was jolly unfair, and your place in it uncertain.

Thursday

Ann Carlton

I was Ralph Miliband’s research assistant, and this is what he was like

‘You can work as research assistant to Ralph Miliband.’ Thus my tutor at the London School of Economics gave me the news that he had found a way for me to finance my first year of study for an intended PhD on the Labour party’s housing policy between the world wars. The idea was that for twelve months between 1964 and 1965 I would help analyse the changing occupational structure of the British workforce by comparing statistics contained in the 1851 census with those in the 1951 census. As a first step, my new boss took me for a drink in the coffee bar next door to the main entrance of the LSE. Our discussion about the intended project went well. We were both enthusiasts for demographic statistical analysis.

Matt Ridley

Why climate change is good for the world

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth. At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of climate change.

Martin Vander Weyer

Notes on … Skiing in Switzerland

There’s a myth in the Spectator office, which I’ve never discouraged, that I’m Yorkshire’s answer to Franz Klammer — a veteran ski ace who likes nothing better than to have himself helicoptered to remote peaks in search of deep, virgin powder. But myth it is, I’m afraid: your business columnist is fat, 58 and was never fast on skis or any other form of self-propulsion, even in his youth. So you might think I’m the wrong man to be telling you about my favourite Swiss winter-sports station, which is the picture-book village of Wengen in the Bernese Oberland. This, after all, is the place where ski-racing was invented by British sportsmen in the 1920s, and is still home to the muscular Downhill Only Club.

Douglas Murray

Tommy Robinson: Double standards, not fear of diversity, provoked the EDL

The first time I met Tommy Robinson I told him to fuck off. The English Defence League (EDL) had just formed and Robinson came up to me after a public interview I was doing in London. Without knowing anything much about them, I am afraid I assumed (white, working-class, Cross of St George at demos) that the EDL were a British National Party front. Which was why I ended up advising him of the procreative way in which to travel. He took it very politely, said he understood that I didn’t know their views and then said, ‘We’re not racists — we’re just working-class guys who are losing our country and can’t bear it.’ Last week, four-and-a-half-years on, we met again.

Nigel Farndale

Don’t hug me! (Even though sometimes it’s rather nice)

When, in 1957, Harold Macmillan accepted the Queen’s invitation to become prime minister, following the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden, he returned from the Palace, marched up Downing Street to where Eden was waiting for him, and gave his old rival a man-hug, right there in front of the Pathé news cameras. No, of course he didn’t. But we have come a long way since then. Indeed, at the party conferences they were all at it: MPs, ministers, party activists, hug, hug, hug — and not a hoodie in sight. After the Mayor of London delivered his speech he was rewarded with a bear-hug from the Prime Minister, no less. At least it was away from the cameras this time, unlike last year at the Olympics, when Boris and Dave had a manly embrace in full view.

Brendan O’Neill

The latest anti-Semitic cry: ban circumcision

There are lots of weird campaign groups around today, but none so weird as a band of unmerry men called ‘the intactivists’. If you’ve never heard of the intactivists and you’re a bit squeamish, or you are reading this while lunching on a sausage roll, then you might want to turn the page now. Intactivists are men who were circumcised at birth and who, as their name suggests, long to become ‘intact’ again. In a nutshell, they want to recover their foreskins. And they’ll do almost anything to achieve this, including undergoing skin grafts and even attaching weights to the little bits of foreskin that their possibly careless circumciser might have left behind. Hey, look, I told you to turn the page.

Leah McLaren

Alice Munro won’t let her Nobel go to her head — that’s why she’s a true Canadian writer

Canadians, like the English, are known for our tendency to apologise. The difference is, we actually mean it. Our modesty is not false. Our inferiority complex is not a polite, self-deprecating joke. We really do feel inferior. And we really are sorry. Sorry for taking up so much space for so few people. Sorry for being so dull and functional compared with our glitzy neighbour to the south. Sorry about Celine Dion. And above all, sorry for failing to produce much of anything great apart from Niagara Falls and the Rockies, which we can’t take credit for anyway.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Spies spy – get over it

In the whole panoply of human idiocy is there anything so ridiculous as the outrage that occurs whenever people are reminded that spies spy? There was just such an outburst recently when Edward Snowden left his job as a contractor to the CIA and NSA, repelled, he said, by the discovery that surveillance programmes carry out surveillance. Snowden discovered that American and British intelligence agencies were involved in data trawling and was so horrified that he found it necessary to flee — first to the freedom-loving People’s Republic of China and then, to seek asylum, to Moscow. On the left of the political spectrum he is the new Julian Assange — though without the sex-crime charges.

Max Pemberton

Obesity is not a disease

‘Well, what diets have you tried so far?’ asked the GP, flicking through the patient’s notes. I was an innocent trainee doctor on my general practice placement at the time and watched the interaction carefully, sensing a row was about to ensue. ‘Look, I don’t want to go on a diet, I want you to prescribe me these,’ snapped the patient, bringing out a neatly folded page she had torn out of a magazine. The GP, rolling his eyes at me, took the paper but didn’t read it. I suspected he’d read it before. This was yet another example of what’s becoming a very British epidemic: obesity being self-diagnosed as disease. The doctor attempted to explain that tablets really aren’t suitable in her case.

Camilla Swift

Going off-piste in Val D’Isere

First things first. Yes, Val d’Isère does have a reputation for being expensive — and it is, especially if you’re planning on eating out and embracing the après ski every night. But no matter what anyone says, you can’t argue with the fact that the skiing is fantastic. Combined with its neighbour, Tignes, there’s a total of 330km of piste to explore, with plenty of steep red and blue runs that are perfect for intermediate and advanced skiers. One of the most frequent complaints about skiing in Val is getting home at the end of the day. Almost every route down to the main town is a challenge, even if you are fairly competent at descending mountains with a couple of planks strapped to your feet.

Jenny McCartney

Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about the Irish

Malcolm Gladwell, the curly-haired, counter-intuitive guru of modern thought who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink, certainly has a readable style, and often a striking way of turning received notions on their head. His latest book, David and Goliath — about the inspiring advantages of perceived disadvantage — is accompanied by a much-hyped speaking tour, the blurb for which describes him as a ‘global phenomenon’. In it, among other topics, he plunges into the origin of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but the location wasn’t his first choice.

Daniel McCarthy

Obamacare? Not in the least

   Washington, DC On or around 17 October, the United States will stop paying its bills. The US Treasury will reach the limit of the debt it can legally issue — the ‘debt ceiling’ — and unless Barack Obama and Republicans in the House of Representatives come to an agreement, the US will stand on the brink of default. How did Obama get us into this mess? More importantly, can he get us out before the country (if not the world) plummets into crisis? The answer to the first question might surprise you: Obama is not an adroit politician. Good at winning votes, yes — not only better than the Republicans he faced in 2008 and last year, but better than Bill Clinton and either of the Bushes.