Features

Thursday

Carol Sarler

The need for seed

It’s a fair bet that most wives, asked to list the things they feel are jointly owned with their husbands, would tick them off in a trice: the house, the car, the furniture, the wedding gifts, Fido and Puss and that ghastly etching they both hate but it’s worth a few bob. There’s a woman in Surrey, however, who wishes to add a little extra to her list of what she calls her ‘marital assets’: her husband’s sperm. Not just the bit she wants to use for her own procreation, either. All of it. Every last tiny tadpole. The thrust of her case is roughly this. During a period when — at least according to her — her husband was going through a bonkers patch, he took himself off to a fertility clinic wherein he donated some sperm without telling her.

Pippa Cuckson

DUPED! The great hydro-electric con trick

Which is the best, most eco-friendly form of renewable energy? Most of us would probably guess hydroelectric. Unlike wind it doesn’t blight views, chop up birds or drive neighbours mad with humming; unlike solar, hydro installations do not appear so dependent on massive public subsidy. Plus, of course, we live in a land of rivers and rain so it makes sense to harness all that free, carbon-neutral energy. The Environment Agency certainly thinks so. Out of 26,000 possible in--river sites around the country, it has listed 4,000 as ideally suited to hydro power development, and is licensing up to three a week. Already, around 17 per cent of the world’s electricity and 90 per cent of renewable power comes from hydro.

Thursday

Andro Linklater

Notes on…Walking in the Auvergne

The homicidal sheepdog that launched itself at me from behind a grassy hillock, had the look of a demented hearth rug but the fangs of a leopard. No self-respecting Border collie would have taken such a creature as a serious competitor in the herding business. But French sheep are different, at least those in the unfenced wilderness of the Aubrac plateau in the Massif Central are. More goat than sheep, they evidently regarded the ferocious dog as a minder that allowed them to graze full-time while it saw off wolves, bears and other predators, including a pink-faced randonneur trying to decide whether the map had put a volcano in the wrong place or he was indeed lost. I leapt backwards, apparently far enough to satisfy the rug that I was no longer a threat.

Mark Mason

In defence of binge drinking

Such an ugly word, ‘binge’. Why can’t we talk about ‘spree drinking’ or ‘frolic drinking’ or ‘extravaganza drinking’? But no, it has to be ‘binge drinking’, a term loaded (pre-loaded?) with connotations. Well you can stick your connotations: it’s binge drinking for me every time. Or rather not every time. That’s the whole point: you don’t binge as a matter of habit, otherwise it’s not a binge. But the other thing you don’t do as a habit — and this is really what I’m getting at — is sit at home with a nicely acceptable Chilean merlot every night, tooting most of the bottle and patting yourself on the Boden-clad back for being totally in control.

Melanie McDonagh

Why G.K. Chesterton shouldn’t be made a saint

The bad news for fans of G.K. Chesterton is that there are moves afoot to make him a saint. The Catholic bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, is reportedly looking for a priest to promote his canonisation. Pope Francis is an admirer, too; he supported a Chesterton conference in Buenos Aires and was on the honorary committee of the Chesterton Society. So why is this a bad idea? Chesterton was, among other things, probably the most engaging apologist for Catholicism, long before he became a Catholic. His little book Orthodoxy is the best personal account of the faith you’ll come across — unabashedly subjective, wildly romantic, fundamentally right. His Napoleon of Notting Hill is a riotous magnificat of the small things which are great things.

Douglas Murray

Who cares if Wagner’s 200? The plague of the anniversary

Back in the 1960s, the producers of the Tonight programme had a running joke for linking the show’s segments. They would use lines like: ‘And that item commemorated the 23rd anniversary of….’ Or: ‘On Tuesday Mr Jones would have been 73.’ There is something about anniversaries, however audaciously crowbarred in, that always gives the illusion of order amid the chaos and relevance among the accidental. But today anniversary-itis has not only stopped being a gag. It has become a bore. What are, after all, merely accidents of the calendar have in some places become the dominant factors in our national life. Sometimes it is anniversaries of major world events, at others a coincidence of an individual birth, marriage or death.

Katharine Quarmby

Meet the Gypsy entrepreneurs

Ask anyone from the settled community (known as ‘gorgias’ to Romani Gypsies and as ‘country people’ to Irish Travellers) what Gypsies do for money and the list would be short: tarmacking, roofing, scrap-metal dealing, hawking or maybe horse dealing. This picture, of course, has a germ of truth in it. Many Gypsies still work as skilled labourers — but what’s remarkable is just how entrepreneurial they are, too. These are trading peoples, with a global attitude towards seeking work that would impress even Iain Duncan Smith. I’ve been astonished to discover that many English and Scottish Romani Gypsies are enthusiastic Freemasons.

John Simpson

Roll up for the Bo Xilai show

In a stuffy courtroom in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, a major political triumph is being celebrated. Bo Xilai, the Communist princeling, challenged the system and lost, and the system is having its revenge. Under Marxism-Leninism a trial isn’t an exploration of truth, it’s a balletic demonstration of the rightness of the political system. Accused, witnesses, judges all join in the choreographed display, to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that justice, Chinese-style, is objectively correct. Until recently, the onlookers were expected to burst into delighted applause.

Ross Clark

As high speed rail is being dropped in California and France, it’s time for Britain to take the hint

In June last year I predicted in these pages that the government would allow High Speed 2 to die a quiet death. Although the government has since reaffirmed its commitment to the proposed railway line, I am sticking to my prediction. Indeed, if the line is ever built I will book a ticket on the first train out of Euston and consume my hat in the dining car. How can I be so sure? Because the projected costs of the project are now so ridiculous that it cannot possibly go ahead. Even before George Osborne, in his spending review in June, added another £8 billion to the estimate cost of HS2, the project had a feeble and a deeply flawed benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.4:1.

Nick Cohen

Richard Dawkins attacks Muslim bigots, not just Christian ones. If only his enemies were as brave

It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write? What to do? Your empty mind brings you nothing but torment, until a thought strikes you, ‘I know, I’ll do Richard Dawkins.’ Dawkins is the sluggish pundit’s dream. It does not matter which paper you work for. Editors of all political persuasions and none will take an attack on Darwin’s representative on earth. With the predictability of the speaking clock, Owen Jones, the Peter Hitchens of the left, thinks the same as Craig Brown, Private Eye’s high Tory satirist. Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s science blogger, says the same as Andrew Brown, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent. The BBC refuses to run contrary views.

Ed West

The strange death of the British middle class

To Voltaire, the British class system could be summed up in a sentence. The people of these islands, he said, ‘are like their own beer; froth on top, dregs at bottom, the middle excellent’. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but one that might still have some truth  in it today. Yes, we have horrible poverty in our council estates and toffery on our country estates. But Britain is a country that has always taken pride in what we think of as middle-class virtues — hard work, honesty, thrift and self-help. Today, however, we are witnessing the strange death of the middle class. In Britain, as in the United States, it isn’t just being squeezed — it is actually shrinking and sinking.

Thursday

Leanda De-Lisle

Anne Boleyn’s last secret

With his wife, Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, poring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone among all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the traditional axe. The question that has, until now, remained unanswered is — why? Historians have suggested that Henry chose the sword because Anne had spent time in France, where the nobility were executed this way, or because it offered a more dignified end. But Henry did not care about Anne’s feelings. Anne was told she was to be beheaded on the morning of 18 May, and then kept waiting until noon before being told she was to die the next day.

Prue Leith

How new food rules could ruin restaurants

The coalition said they would tame health and safety, which would be great for those of us in the food -business. But they, like the public, like to blame Brussels, and the problem is not with Europe, or not often. EU law is basically Napoleonic, and sensible. It places the onus on the operators to ensure safety, and to be able to prove that what they do is safe. If it turns out not to be, then they will be prosecuted and likely clapped in jail. Fair enough if you have maimed or poisoned someone. Our law is basically Roman and we like to stipulate every tiny detail in statues.

Owen Matthews

Putin’s own Cold War

Whose side is Vladimir Putin on? It’s a question worth asking, because of late the Kremlin has come closer and closer to the tipping point between obstreperousness and outright hostility towards the West. Last week Barack Obama cancelled a September summit with Putin after Russia offered asylum to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But in truth the Snowden affair is only the latest and most trivial of a long and growing list of issues where Russia and the US are on radically opposite sides. Syria probably tops the list — at least in terms of urgency and human cost. Russia has offered diplomatic support to the Assad regime by using its veto on the UN Security Council to block sanctions and intervention.

Brendan O’Neill

Why interns don’t deserve pay

In the modern political firmament, is there any creature more ridiculous than the agitating intern? Interns are rising up. These one-time coffee-makers have reimagined themselves as history-makers, fancying that they are latter-day Wilberforces striking a blow against the ‘internship slave trade’. They’re demanding back pay, retrospective remuneration for all that hard graft in air-conditioned offices with nothing but a usually paid-for Pret sandwich to sustain them. Groups such as Intern Aware, Internocracy and Interns Anonymous are rebelling against the ‘tyranny’ of unpaid or expenses-only internships. It’s naked exploitation to be asked to work for nowt, they claim.

Michael Hanlon

Gibraltar isn’t the world’s weirdest border

Borders are fascinating places. The subtle changes in scenery and atmosphere as you near the limits of one territory and enter the orbit of the other; the way fencing gets higher and fiercer. Then there’s the shuffling of papers and passports, the opening of suitcases, car boots and, sometimes, wallets. The nervous sweat in no-man’s-land as men who reek of tobacco and bad coffee judge your suitability to enter or, worse, leave. In nearly all ways the (more or less) borderless new Europe is a wonderful thing, but something has been lost along the way.

Camilla Swift

Notes on….Walking in the Scottish Highlands

The simplest and best way to get straight to the heart of the Highlands from London is by sleeper. Board in Euston, have a plate of haggis and tatties (and perhaps a nip of whisky to knock you out) and before you know it, you’ll wake up the next morning as the train crosses Rannoch Moor. Don’t think about the fact that the train line is effectively floating on a bed of earth and tree roots, since the peat soil was too soft to support its weight. Admire the view — and keep your eyes peeled for the red deer who congregate along the line. Stepping off at Fort William, you’d be forgiven for being unimpressed by your choice of destination: you emerge into a Morrisons car park.

J. Meirion

The wrong way to fix the NHS

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, is a decent and well-meaning man. He’s genuinely excited about the new, radical reforms planned for the NHS which he announced last weekend. I have been told that Hunt and his old friend David Cameron see this restructuring of the NHS as the next great step, as significant and successful as Gove’s education reform; something the Prime Minister will be remembered for gratefully in 100 years’ time. I’m afraid they’re wrong. If implemented as announced, these plans will be both expensive and ineffective. The main trouble is that Hunt’s NHS revamp will rely on a vast, integrated and enormously complicated IT system.

Thursday

Sinclair McKay

Why Doctor Who is secretly Tony Benn

Who inspired Who? Leave aside for one moment the hyperventilating BBC enthronement of Peter Capaldi, though we shall return to him later. I mean way back at the beginning, 50 years ago. The Doctor was invented by a committee of middle-ranking BBC executives — but who was the role-model for this anti-establishment, vaguely dotty but distinguished figure? Come on! With hindsight, the inspiration must surely have been Tony Benn — and I’ll prove it to you. Having inherited the title Viscount Stansgate, Benn used an act of parliament in 1963 to disclaim his place in the House of Lords; in 1963, the Doctor, for his own part, disclaimed his place among the Time Lords.

Nicholas Farrell

Attack of the nudist lawyers

Carla, my Italian wife, has a small house in a little town on the Adriatic near Ravenna called Lido di Dante, right next to one of the last unspoilt beaches in Italy. But we cannot go to this spectacular beach because even though it is una spiaggia libera (open to all and free) and therefore di tutti (everyone’s) it is infested with nudists and their related sub-species: guardoni (voyeurs), scambisti (wife-swappers), group-sex freaks, transsexuals, bisexuals — plus several other creatures yet to be classified by scientists. Needless to say Dante’s Beach, which is named after the poet who died in Ravenna in 1321, has got a bit of a reputation and is very popular with a certain type of German and Swiss.