Features

Thursday

Peter Oborne

A man of his Times: Lord Danny Finkelstein

Thomas Barnes, who edited the Times from 1817 to 1841, declared that the ‘newspaper is not an organ through which government can influence people, but through which people can influence the government.’ There have been periods when principle guided the Times — for instance when the great war correspondent W.H. Russell exposed government incompetence in the Crimean War. At other times the newspaper has a tendency to become the organ of official opinion, impartially supporting any political party (just so long as it happens to be the one in power). Ten years ago its political pages resembled a New Labour noticeboard.

Matilda Bathurst

Notes on…The house museums of Paris

It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich that it could never be squeezed into its great public buildings. The city has instead developed its own breed of ‘house museum’ — ready-made monuments to its distinguished inhabitants. It’s not just regular tourist stops like the Maison de Victor Hugo, either. In Montparnasse, the studios of artists Ossip Zadkine and Antoine Bourdelle display sublime sculpted figures in shaded gardens, and across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower you will find Balzac’s former village home, cramped among the Belle Époque curves and 1970s luxury towers of the 16ème.

Toby Young

Unite the right! Email Toby Young at conukip@gmail.com

The most common objection to a Tory-Ukip pact is that neither David Cameron nor Nigel Farage will touch it. So why waste time discussing it? But a pact doesn’t need to be endorsed by the leaders of either party to work. What I have in mind is something bottom-up rather than top-down. A unite-the-right website set up by members of both parties that tells people who they should vote for in their constituency to keep out Labour and the Lib Dems. Take Eastleigh, for instance, a seat currently held by the Lib Dems. Ukip came second at the by-election last year, so the advice would be to vote for Diane James in Eastleigh because she’s the candidate best placed to defeat the incumbent. Sceptics will say this example is misleading.

James Forsyth

Ukip, the gateway drug — how Cameron can exploit Nigel Farage

David Cameron heads to the Tory conference in Manchester in a far better position than he would have dared hope a year ago. Labour’s opinion poll lead is shrinking, the economy is finally recovering and Ed Miliband is running out of time to persuade the country that he’s a potential Prime Minister. Ordinarily, the Tory tribe would be in high spirits — but there is a spectre haunting this conference, which almost no one dares name: Ukip. Nigel Farage’s insurgent party is fast becoming an existential threat to the Tory party. The right in Britain is fractured — and fractured movements don’t win elections. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher romped to victory against a left that was split between Labour and the SDP.

Michael Ware

Electric cars – the ultimate subsidy for the rich

This morning, Nick Clegg promised to take £500 million from taxpayers, and use it to subsidise electric cars. Last year, the Spectator's annual Matt Ridley Prize was won by an essay exposing the idiocy of the scheme - and the menacing social implications of subsidingof the rich.  My wife’s friend Charlotte earns £17,000 a year working as a teaching assistant, lives in a housing association flat and is having sleepless nights about paying her recent £124.78 electricity bill. My friend Toby earns £425,000 a year as a media lawyer, lives in a big house in Putney and every day the no doubt well-meaning but somewhat misguided people of Westminster City Council give him hours and hours of free electricity.

James Forsyth

Chris Grayling: ‘I want to see our Supreme Court supreme again’

When I meet Chris Grayling in his departmental office, I do a double take. The Justice Secretary is not wearing a suit or even his Lord Chancellor’s robes but a pair of pale chinos and a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt. Noticing my surprise, Grayling reveals that this is his definition of ‘smart casual’: he’s off to a Tory away day straight after the interview. Grayling is 6ft 5 and his height makes his mood pretty obvious. Straight after the last election, his shoulders were hunched and his head was down. As he now admits, ‘I didn’t want us to go into coalition.’ Compounding his misery, he had missed out on a cabinet post despite having been shadow home secretary. But Grayling is now in cabinet and standing tall.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Tristram Hunt: Ed Miliband would be ‘radical’ in office – if he gets there

Tristram Hunt has the easy charm, quick wits and good looks that you would expect of a TV historian. His blond hair has the hint of a curl to it and the only surprise about his appearance is that there isn’t a college scarf wrapped round his neck. His Commons office, where we meet, resembles a don’s study, with books piled high on the coffee table, old maps on the wall and a selection of tea-sets on display. Three years ago, Hunt made the transition from academia to politics. Despite having voted for David Miliband in the leadership contest, he has emerged as an intellectual outrider for Ed Miliband and is, according to the Westminster grapevine, in line for a big promotion in the coming reshuffle.

James Forsyth

Laugh now, but Ed Miliband and Ed Balls could soon be running the country

A Tory MP bobbed up at Prime Minister’s Questions recently to ask David Cameron whether he was ‘aware that 4 per cent of people believe that Elvis is still alive? That is double the number, we hear today, who think that Edward Miliband is a natural leader?’ The Tory benches tittered, Labour MPs slumped into their seats as if this was a depressingly fair point,  and the Labour leader himself tried not to look too hurt. The exchange reflected a Westminster consensus that the idea of Miliband as prime minister is risible. His aestas horribilis has reinforced the view among many in the political class that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to be leader.

Carola Binney

Haunted by Facebook, students can’t now reinvent themselves at university

My mum had a friend at university who had been called ‘Pudding’ at school. They’d sometimes be walking down the street, and someone who had known the now-svelte adult as a chubby 13-year-old would say ‘Hello, Pudding’. As I get ready to start at university myself in October, it’s in the knowledge that my schoolgirl self will be even harder to escape. Reinventing yourself at the end of sixth form was once a time-honoured rite of passage, hindered only by a few easily avoided old acquaintances.

Marcus Berkmann

My 50 weddings

A couple of weekends ago, I went to my 50th wedding. Everyone I have mentioned this to has pulled a rather strange face, as though to say, ‘You count the weddings you go to? What unhinged variety of cross-eyed lunatic does that?’ But like so much of lasting value in life, this began with a conversation in a pub. Back in 1997, I was moaning to my old friend Terence about how many weddings I was having to go to. People I knew simply wouldn’t stop getting married. So how many in all? asked Terence. I don’t know, said I. It could, and probably should, have ended there.

Gunnar Beck

Merkel will win – because my fellow Germans dare not speak of national self interest

When Germany goes to the polls this weekend the question is not ‘Who will win?’ but ‘With whom will Chancellor Merkel govern?’ There may be another CDU-FDP coalition; there may be another Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats. But there is no doubt who will emerge triumphant. All this may baffle Brits: Angela Merkel has spent years sending German taxpayers’ money to bail out various spendthrift European countries and has seemed more concerned about being a good European than a good German. And she’ll be rewarded with another four years in power, reaffirming her role as the most formidable political leader in Europe. How has she managed it?

Michael Crick

I exposed the ‘Plebgate’ stitch-up last year. So why are the police still investigating?

Andrew Mitchell actually had big doubts about becoming chief whip. True, he had often spoken to friends of being ‘a whip at heart’, and how he’d loved the army-like camaraderie, discipline and intrigue of serving in the whips’ team under John Major. But his regular trips overseas as Secretary of State for International Development meant he didn’t know many of the Tory MPs elected in 2010. And he so enjoyed being Development Secretary, too, and making a visible impact in one of the few ministries not afflicted by cuts. But Mitchell’s appointment as chief whip this time last year suddenly thrust him from the margins of Westminster to the heart of government, advising Cameron on other promotions.

Florence King

Notes on …Vodka

James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I go back too far. Our association began when I was nine or ten in that brief interlude after the second world war when Russia was still ‘our noble ally’. Vodka was simply one more new thing, marketed when pizza was still called ‘pizza pie’ and the strict law pushed for years by the butter interests was dropped, permitting margarine to be sold coloured instead of white. Putting margarine ‘on the table’, once unforgiveable, quickly became common practice, but vodka’s image problems were harder to shake. The USA is a whiskey country. Whiskey has to be aged, while vodka, like gin, does not.

Gyles Brandreth

Britain’s best one-liners, from Oxford’s 2013 edition

Modest about our national pride — and inordinately proud of our national modesty. —Ian Hislop I always invest in companies an idiot could run, because one day one will. —Warren Buffett I find it easy to portray businessmen. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me. —John Cleese I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific. —Lily Tomlin I don’t work that way .... The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find completely amazing. —Anne, Princess Royal A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. —Garrison Keillor On nudity The part never calls for it.

Thursday

Iain Martin

Braveheart banking: the fall of RBS

When Fred Goodwin was looking for a marketing slogan in the boom years, he alighted on a simple phrase which encapsulated the ‘can-do’ philosophy of the bank he ran. RBS would, promised the adverts, ‘Make It Happen’. Goodwin and his colleagues made it happen, though not quite in the way they intended. They turned RBS into a financial monster, the world’s biggest bank, with assets of £1.9 trillion. By 2008 it had become so large and so exposed that if boom ever turned to bust the bank (and the rest of us) would be buggered. And so it proved. Five years ago this week, Lehman Brothers went out of business. That earthquake triggered a financial tsunami which went on to flatten RBS, which had to be rescued by taxpayers at the cost of £45.2 billion.

Ross Clark

End of the party – how British political leaders ran out of followers

If Cyril Northcote Parkinson was still around he would devise a law for party political conferences: that the significance of what is discussed in the conference centre is inversely proportional to the difficulty of getting in. Time was, when politicians stayed in shabby hotels in Blackpool and wandered along the seafront to the Winter Gardens to debate with constituency members, that conferences meant something. Over the next three weeks anyone visiting Glasgow, Manchester or Brighton, even if not involved in a party conference, will be inconvenienced by a security buffer which resembles the former green zone in Baghdad. But will anyone care what goes on inside? Party conferences have become a misnomer.

Peter Jones

Notes on…Classic cruising

We arrive at the tiny Greek island of Sikinos on a blustery day, making landing rather difficult. Is there transport to take us to the extraordinary, now deconsecrated, perhaps 6th-century church of Episkopi inside a 3rd century AD Roman mausoleum/temple? The mayor appears: yes, we can use the island’s one bus, and off we go to the magnificent site miles from nowhere. A bonus too: the tiny 14th-century monastery next door is being restored, wall paintings and all. Back to the harbour via a vineyard to taste the local wine — the mayor has his chums — and by now a storm has set in. At the third attempt the gulet gets a line ashore, and as the boat heaves up and down we time our leaps one by one up on to the gangway into the boat, and off we go.

Douglas Murray

Richard Dawkins interview: ‘I have a certain love for the Anglican tradition’

‘You owe me an apology,’ Richard Dawkins informs me. It is a bright Oxford morning and we are sitting in his home. His wife has just made me coffee and I have met their new puppies. I am here to discuss a new book of his, but he is smarting from a disobliging reference to him in a recent one of mine. That, and an earlier encounter I wrote about here, have clearly rankled. I try a very limited apology. But it does strike me that Dawkins is more easily bruised than one might have imagined. I wonder if it has anything to do with the deluge of criticism he attracts, provokes and possibly unwisely takes notice of on social media. ‘Do you feel beleaguered?’ I ask. ‘Do you?’ he fires straight back.

Michael Karam

When Syria sneezes, Lebanon catches a cold

  Beirut News that the Syrian regime has agreed to hand in its arsenal of chemical weapons is a great relief to Lebanon. For the past few weeks we have been wandering around like inmates on death row, fearing that a US-led strike would ignite a potentially apocalyptic conflict between Hezbollah and Israel or at the very least provoke a prolonged internal Shia-Sunni terror campaign. This was no idle fear. The salvos fired at the end of August brought back memories of the darkest days of the civil war. But Lebanon is still not in the clear, especially as a framework for handing over the chemical weapons still needs to be thrashed out.

Anne Applebaum

Time for our leaders to stop talking about ‘justice’ in Syria if we can’t or won’t enforce it

‘It’s about chemical weapons. Their use is wrong and the world shouldn’t stand idly by.’ — David Cameron, 27 August ‘The chemical massacre in Damascus cannot and must not go unpunished.’ — François Hollande, 30 August ‘We lead with the belief that right makes might, not the other way around.’ — Barack Obama, 31 August In their speech, in their manner and in their choice of language, the American President, the French President and the British Prime Minister have been impeccably clear about their motivations for military intervention in Syria. They don’t want to use force for economic gain. They aren’t in this for national interest.