Features

Thursday

Stephen Glover

Why does the BBC so love lefty journalists?

My response to the appointment of Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian, to the editorship of BBC2’s Newsnight has been one of disbelief and amusement. Of course there’s nothing new in the Beeb hiring a paid-up Guardian-ista. It’s what we have come to expect. But one might have expected its new director-general, Tony Hall, to tread a little more carefully. Newsnight has a long history of Tory-bashing, and it disgraced itself last November with an orgy of false accusations against Alistair McAlpine, claiming without any evidence that he was a paedophile. Can one doubt that the programme threw caution to the wind at least in part because Lord McAlpine was once a friend and champion of Margaret Thatcher, and a hated Tory?

Merryn Somerset-Webb

George Osborne’s property bubble will lead to disaster

Imagine, if you can bear it, that you are a first-time buyer in the UK. You go to look at a 500-square-foot box masquerading as a two-bedroom flat in an average sort of area masquerading as an up-and-coming part of London. It’s a new build — one you can just about imagine downgrading your lifestyle expectations enough to live in. The problem is that you can’t quite afford it. The good news is that your Chancellor is behind you on this one. With you all the way. George Osborne really wants you to be able to buy a house. So here’s the question. Would you like him to help you do that by interfering with the market to ensure that you are offered a long-term loan you wouldn’t normally have been able to get?

James Kirchick

When the bloke in the bar turns out to be a paedophile

To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police arrested him, chances are that you would have seen, if not heard, the Pied Piper of Prague holding court at the end of the bar. ‘He liked his drugs, his drinks and his rent boys,’ one mutual friend, a young man I’ll name Thomas, recalls of Willem.

Sebastian Payne

Hunting the home counties for Conservatives’ ‘swivel-eyed loons’

Oxfordshire The Westminster pundits have all been obsessing over Andrew Feldman’s alleged ‘swivel-eyed loons’ comment about the Tory party’s grass roots. But what about the ‘loons’ themselves? Few in SW1 bothered to ask, so I spent a day in David Cameron’s back yard, hunting them down to find out what they really think of the Prime Minister and Ukip and whether they believe their party chairman’s denials. First up was Keith Mitchell, a Conservative councillor of 24 years. Despite his long history of public service, Keith has never felt greatly appreciated by his party. We chatted about his career over a midday pint at Marco Pierre White’s trendy pub in Milton.

Leah McLaren

Congratulations, Rob Ford: you’ve finally made me despise you

The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and his excessive girth spreads well beyond the frame. The overall effect is of a bloated albino lab rat on the wrong side of a thyroid drug trial. I always felt a bit sorry for him looking at it. Not any more. Last week details of a video emerged that features the mayor, shirt unbuttoned, apparently smoking crack cocaine.

Melanie McDonagh

Dan Brown’s latest conspiracy theory – and the powerful people who believe it

You know Inferno, the new Dan Brown novel, the one that’s had such fabulously bad reviews? Well, it’s not really about Dante’s Inferno at all. What it’s really about — spoiler alert — is that old bogey: global population explosion. For the baddie, a genetic scientist called Bertrand Zobrist, the big threat to humanity is the inexorable increase in the world population to nine billion by 2050. ‘By any biological gauge’, he tells the head of the World Health Organisation, Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, whom he has lured into a darkened lecture room, ‘our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers… Under the stress of overpopulation, those who have never considered stealing will kill to provide for their young.

Andrew Craig

Revealed: Harvard University’s failsafe investment strategy

With the Dow Jones scaling new heights, and other markets not far behind, investors face a dilemma. Is this a time to buy? Or, for those who have suddenly found themselves sitting on a profit for the first time in a decade, is it time to sell? This is the question that faces most investors in good times and bad, but in 2013 the anxiety seems particularly acute. Many have been burned so badly in recent years that they have given up, preferring to keep their cash in bank accounts. But in the era of negative real interest rates, even this is dangerous. In 1981 the investment analyst Harry Browne introduced the world to his ‘Permanent Portfolio’. His idea was very simple: if you own well-distributed assets, you should always have something that performs.

Simon Nixon

What’s keeping the banks buoyant?

‘The central bankers have won,’ a senior City stockbroker said to me this week with an air of resignation. ‘There’s no point fighting them. Investors are doing as they’re told.’ And, wow, how they’re doing as they’re told. Thanks to central bank money-printing, cash is sloshing around the global financial system in desperate search of a decent return. There may still be little sign of a real economic recovery: China has slowed, to add to the misery in the eurozone. Yet the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of US stocks is at an all-time high and the FTSE 100 is within a whisker of breaking above its 14-year peak.

Jonathan Ruffer

When cautious-looking investments are the riskiest option

When can a famine taste pretty good? The answer is when you are eating the cattle which have just died of thirst. And that’s where we are today in the investment market. The famine is a lack of income — cash held in a completely safe bank, or in short-term government securities, earns almost nothing. Where’s the feast? The answer is in yield-bearing investments, into which savings are pouring — they produce a modicum of yield, to be sure — but that is dwarfed by the capital gains which have accompanied them. Those who have already made this switch are understandably rather pleased, and often rather pleased with themselves.

Stuart Wheeler

Stuart Wheeler – the secret to making money from spread betting

Well, there are two ways. You can own a chunk of a successful spread-betting firm or you can be a spread-better and get things right. Miraculously, I have managed to do both. I shall come back to that. First, let me tell you how it works. How many runs will England make in the first innings of their next Test match? The bookmaker — all spread-betting firms are bookies, whatever gravitas they may attempt to assume — might quote 260–270. You think they will make more than 270. So you ‘buy’ at 270, staking £10 a run. England make 350 runs. So you are right by 80 runs and, at £10 a run, you make £800 profit. The quote at 260–270 might just as well have been a share price, in pence. It makes no difference.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Nadine Dorries interview: why I want to run as a UKIP-Tory joint candidate

It’s not often you see Tory MPs celebrating anything, but on Monday a bunch of them were packed into an office high in Portcullis House to toast the rehabilitation of Nadine Dorries. Last autumn the Mid-Bedfordshire MP was suspended from the party after appearing on the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! For six months she has been in limbo, unable to call herself a Tory. Last week, she was allowed back into the club. We met in the House of Commons after her bustling ‘Return of the Prodigal Daughter’ reception. Her fellow Tories, she says, are pleased she’s returned. Every day, she’s accosted by MPs and staffers keen to welcome her back into the fold.

James Forsyth

The secret of David Cameron’s Europe strategy: he doesn’t have one

Shortly before the Conservative party conference last year, the head of the Fresh Start Group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs went in to see the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The group had heard that David Cameron might make his big Europe speech at the gathering and its head, Andrea Leadsom, wanted to set out what to ask for in any renegotiation. When Leadsom returned from the meeting, her colleagues were desperate to know what the PM had said: which powers did he most want returned from the EU? What would be the centrepiece of his great diplomatic effort? All Leadsom could do was repeat what Cameron had told her: ‘I don’t like shopping lists.’ This sums up Cameron’s attitude towards this renegotiation: announcing it is enough for the time being.

Fraser Nelson

Britain’s Eurovision problem

Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army of talent from countries who have studied the art of winning and take it very seriously indeed. Electro Velvet (more on them here) can at least reassure themselves that they will not be Britain’s worst-ever entry. That honour goes to Jemini, a Liverpudlian duo who in 2003 made history by being given nul points by tout le monde.

Freddy Gray

Boris’s Paris match: an interview with Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet

It’s Monday lunchtime, downstairs in the Spectator office, and Boris Johnson is trying to flog a bus to a Frenchwoman. ‘What about the new Routemaster? It’s absolutely great, yup, fantastic, yup. Hey, they could be really good for Paris,’ he says. She smiles and says nothing. ‘Well what about bendy-buses then?’ he carries on. ‘We’ve got a few of those you can have…’ ‘Come on, please’ she interrupts, kindly but firmly, in excellent English. ‘Stop your recycling with me.’ Has Boris met his match? Her name is Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, she’s just turned 40, and she’s running to be the next mayor of Paris. Boris calls her ‘terrific’, and it’s easy to see what he means.

Andrew Green

Arm Syria’s rebels? That would be pouring petrol on a fire

Syria is sliding rapidly into chaos.  The supply of weapons to the opposition could only make matters worse, yet the Prime Minister seems to be -contemplating it. We have misjudged the situation from the start. From the early days of the crisis, two years ago, we rode to the rescue with our rhetoric. We were all for the forces of democracy and for the downfall of a ruthless dictator. Syria was another green shoot of the Arab Spring. A Syrian National Council was to be formed, on the pattern of the Libyan version, to be the vehicle for our democratic ambitions. We were to be, in that agonising cliché, ‘on the right side of history’. The problem was that this was largely hot air.

Jane Kelly

It’s time to admit it: the NHS is unable to look after our elderly

I decided to become a hospital visitor last year, after being a patient and finding myself in something more like a factory than an old-fashioned ward. A terror of infection in 2011 (there were 2,053 deaths involving Clostridium difficile) has ended the cosy world of side tables covered in flowers and cards. Concerns about data protection have put paid to WRVS ladies pushing trolleys, and vicars walking around offering solace. There aren’t even many nurses about, and even if there were, you wouldn’t want to bother them for tea and a chat. It’s OK if you have family or friends nearby, but if you don’t, being a patient in today’s NHS is a bleak experience.

Clarissa Tan

What Michael Gove should know about going to school in Singapore

I like to tease my friend Wei about being a tiger mother. She once told me of an incident where her daughter Shu was making an artwork for a friend as a birthday present. Shu doodled for a few minutes, then showed her mother a sketch of a funny face. ‘I told her to knuckle down, spend more time, and come back with a far better drawing,’ said Wei. ‘It just wasn’t good enough.’ I said that was a bit harsh on her eight-year-old, especially since it was not schoolwork but part of Shu’s leisure time. Wei snorted. ‘It was a gift for her best mate, yet she hadn’t put any thought into it,’ she said. ‘She needs to know that you must make an effort for the things you really care about.

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Life among South Africa’s nouveaux riches

Not long ago Cyril Ramaphosa, probably South Africa’s future president and ANC leader, attempted to buy a buffalo. It was at an auction for hunters and game ranchers. He bid £1.3 million and, incredibly, lost out to another tycoon. At the same event he still managed to spend another million pounds on game species for his ranch — but later he apologised in light of the fact that South Africa is a ‘sea of poverty’. One South African who is unapologetic about his bling and conspicuous spending is Kenny Kunene, who famously held a birthday party at his ZAR nightclub in Johannesburg at which guests ate sushi off the body of a young model wearing nothing but lingerie. The bar bill came to £47,000 — for champagne and Chivas Regal, mostly.

Toby Young

Julie Burchill interview: ‘I don’t want to be normal’

Seeing Julie Burchill sitting at the back of the restaurant near Victoria Station, I feel a surge of affection. Chin up, sunglasses on, lips fixed in a pout, she is presenting her usual defiant face to the world. In the past, I’ve always thought of her as being like a screen goddess from Hollywood’s golden age — Marlene Dietrich, for instance. Now, she seems more like a fading Broadway diva and I half expect her to break into a rendition of ‘I’m Still Here’ by Stephen Sondheim. The one-time enfant terrible of Fleet Street is now 53 and lives in Brighton, but she is very much still here.

Peter Lilley

Britain can’t afford to surrender to the greens on shale gas

The scandal of official reluctance to develop Britain’s shale gas potential is at last beginning to surface. It may prove to be the dress rehearsal for the ultimate drama — the inexorable collapse of our whole energy strategy. Most of us have by now heard about the US shale gas revolution. In little more than six years, shale gas has reduced America’s gas prices to a third of what they are in Europe, increased huge tax revenues, rebalanced the economy, created tens of thousands of jobs, brought industry and manufacturing back to the country’s heartlands, and given rise to a real prospect of American energy self-sufficiency by 2030. Britain may well have comparable shale resources.