Features

Thursday

John Osullivan

Why zig-zagging Obama can’t be taken seriously on Syria

President Obama’s decision to seek  the endorsement of Congress for an attack on Syria fits into one or more definite patterns of behaviour, if not strategy. His preference, much praised by the media until recently, for ‘leading from behind’ suggests at least some aversion to risk and responsibility. It also fits into the general zigzag of his Middle Eastern policy since his Cairo speech reaching out to Islam. Intended to undercut the appeal of radical Islamism, the speech looked appeasing and so encouraged it.

Mary Wakefield

Notes on…Sicily

It could be, in Sicily, there comes a time when you’ve had your fill of seaside calamari and cheap white wine. The sheer thrill of lying on a beach without goose-bumps never really fades, but by day four you may need a break from all the nakedness: Italians blackening in rows like sausages, or Brits, more lumpen, clumped in ones and twos, turning pink. If you can bring yourself to turn your back on the Med, it’s well worth it. From Palermo, take the coastal road, then turn right, inland on the A19 towards Catania. Or drive south on the world’s most surprising motorway, which leaps right over Monreale and lands on the cliffs above. Head south-east and soon the countryside will flatten into hills and plains of durum wheat baked yellow, waiting for harvest.

Peter Lilley

Parliament has finally woken up – because voters are keeping their MPs in line

They should have seen it coming. A government defeat on an issue of war may be unprecedented, but defeat on the Syria vote did not come out of the blue. You can certainly blame poor party management, failure to prepare the ground, underestimating the poisonous legacy of Iraq — but such failings are common enough. The biggest single factor is one that ministers, the media and MPs themselves have failed to understand: Parliament has changed. The consensus has long been that Parliament no longer matters. It is assumed to be the docile creature of the government, full of spineless or ambitious MPs who are the slaves of the party whips. In fact, unnoticed and under our noses, that has been becoming progressively less and less true throughout my 30 years in Parliament.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Notes on…Rome

Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors? You can barely walk ten feet without coming across something that might change your life: obelisks, piazzas, churches, gardens and statues. All that antiquity makes Roman Catholicism seem distinctly modern. And there’s the hotels. I spent a Friday night in Rocco Forte’s Hotel de Russie on the Via del Babuino, near the Spanish steps, slap-bang in the best part of town. The room was more of a suite, or what a London estate agent would call a spacious nine-bedroom apartment.

Nigel Farndale

The views that inspire writers

Unimaginatively, I usually take the same route for a morning walk when on holiday in Cornwall, over the dunes to Brea Hill, inspiration for Betjeman’s poem ‘Back From Australia’. I know the scenery so well I no longer see it. But for a change the other day I walked along the other side of the estuary and it was like seeing an entirely new landscape: the gently scalloped sandbanks, the clarity and blueness of the water, the breadth of the sky where it met Pentire Point. There were no clouds, which emphasised the white of the sails, the seagulls, the cabbage butterflies. Imagine having this as the view from your study, I thought. How inspired you would feel.

Ross Clark

Welcome to Ryanair Britain

Which businessman is the most influential in the making of government policy? The answer came to me when I received a letter fining me £80 for forgetting to renew my car insurance by the correct date. But it could also have come to me had I forgotten to fill out of council tax enquiry form (fine £70), missed getting in my tax return by one day (£100), or got caught in a box junction in the King’s Road which has two sets of traffic lights in quick succession (£130). It is, I have come to believe, Michael O’Leary.

Mark Greaves

The charity that could make you love social workers

Is any public service more reviled than social work? Policemen, when not drinking with journalists, chase down baddies; firefighters save babies, and doctors cure diseases. Social workers, on the other hand, take away people’s children. They miss catastrophic abuse. In no news story are they ever -heroic. The perception of social work is unremittingly grim. It’s badly paid, box-ticking, mired in bureaucracy. Only go into it if you like being a martyr. Josh MacAlister, the chief executive of Frontline, wants people to imagine things differently. In a decade he thinks social work will be one of the main options for top graduates. At an Oxford careers fair, he suggests, students will be queueing up at the social work stand. Entry will be fiercely competitive.

Robin Harris

Whoever wins in Syria, its Christians will lose

David Cameron will almost certainly get his Syrian war. Who will fight it, let alone who will win it, remains unclear. But who will lose it is already known — the Christians. The relentless persecution of Christ’s followers is foretold in the Gospels. Suffering is portrayed as the pathway to triumph. The global position today conforms quite closely to that picture. Three quarters of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians — the expanding part — now live outside the largely tolerant West. At the same time, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that Christians suffer more persecution than any other religious group. Within the Middle East, however, the story is not of expansion accompanied by persecution but of persecution leading to elimination.

Douglas Murray

David Cameron’s wars: How the PM learned to love precision bombing

What is the one consolation for an MP who has beaten all their colleagues to the top job? It can hardly be the luxury of having your life, circle and income open to alternate snorts of envy and derision. Nor can it be the quagmire into which nearly all attempts to solve the nation’s domestic problems now fall.  Only one thing allows prime ministers of a country such as Britain to feel they have power. That is exercising it. And nothing exercises power more than deciding which wars to fight. In opposition, David Cameron did not much like the idea of war, and derided his colleagues for their admiration of Tony Blair. Yet in office — as Syria is revealing — he is treading a very similar path.

Clarissa Tan

Faulty towers

Ever since the Arab Spring sprang its bright new dawn, the old regimes of the Middle East — along with their economies — have fallen like dominoes. But one authoritarian regime, at least, stands taller than ever: Saudi Arabia. Its shimmery skyline, its modern minarets, all testify to the infallibility of petroleum-rich power. Yet there’s one enormous sign that Saudi may be headed for the skids. This year, the Saudis started construction of the Kingdom Tower, a 200-floor skyscraper which is due to be completed in 2017. This citadel has the backing of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and will be built by the Bin Laden family (the late Osama was a relation, though they disavowed him years ago). The building will have 59 lifts, luxury apartments, offices and a Four Seasons hotel.

Philip Delves-Broughton

The future made Thiel

Turn right along the American political spectrum and you find all kinds of curious species. First there are country club Republicans bemoaning the loss of their party to extremists. Then come Evangelical Christians, trying to reconcile themselves to voting for a Mormon. Further along, you find the Tea Party, crowing over their improbable rise and Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Theodore Dalrymple

Why borders matter

There is no better way of discrediting an opinion than by attributing it to a psychological quirk or peculiarity. The task is then not to refute it, but to explain it away by reference to its murky psychic origins. For a number of years, doubt about the wisdom of a European project (whose end can only be seen as through a glass, darkly) was attributed by its enthusiasts to precisely such a quirk: one that combined some of the features of mental debility, arachnophobia and borderline personality disorder. One would not be altogether surprised to learn that the European Union had sent lobbyists to Washington to have Euroscepticism included in the forthcoming revised version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as a new diagnostic category.

Jenny Honey

A lesson in humility

When I went into teaching, 15 years ago, I came at it from various angles. One was the love of my subject. Genuinely. I definitely believed that I could make people love reading and writing, and make the world a better place. I was old enough not to be so naïve, but still… The other was a sartorial issue. I did an ill-advised massive spend on tweed. Mostly pink. Should have known better there, too. I did not go into teaching because ‘I loved kids’. How can you love ‘kids’ any more than you can love octogenarians, or Poles, or pole-dancers, or any other group of people? I left a good university with a good degree and no one suggested that I should go into teaching. In the 1980s, teachers were thought of as second-rate citizens.

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.