Features

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Is it my imagination or does Pimm’s get weaker every year?

Call me a terrible lightweight, but I’m a little wary of drinking cocktails when the sun is out. A summer drink should be like a good soak in the pool, but the sort of cocktails I love — martinis, manhattans etc — are all about a sharp injection of alcohol into the system, a sharp injection which can quickly turn to drowsiness or even irritability on a hot day. The fact that most cocktails need to be drunk quickly, so that they don’t warm up or become dilute, compounds the problem. Therefore what is needed during the summer is a drink that can take a little dilution from the ice melting and won’t get you drunk too quickly. Consider, for example, the negroni. I was introduced to this drink by my late Uncle Peter.

Ross Clark

Wasted! How ‘Austerity Osborne’ is still squandering billions

When the Chancellor stands up to present his spending review next Wednesday it will be with the reputation of a crazed axeman. Much of the country, whether it thinks it a good thing or not, subscribes to the belief that George Osborne is shrinking the state year-on-year, slicing here, chopping there. In a recent poll 58 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that Osborne’s ‘austerity drive’ is ‘harming the economy’. Twenty per cent agreed that it was the ‘correct medicine’. Yet it was a trick question based on a faulty premise: that there has been an austerity drive. The truth is that public spending has risen under this government — and in real terms, too.

Peter Jones

It’s vital that children translate English to Latin at GCSE

One of the most rewarding exercises a Latinist can attempt is to turn a piece of English prose into Latin. The reason is quite simple: it means getting under the surface of the English meaning — to ‘get beyond the word to the thought behind it’ (Gilbert Murray) — and transferring it into a form most closely corresponding to a Roman way of thinking and writing. It takes one to the very heart of how Romans made sense of their world. Only someone with a supreme understanding of the Latin language and its culture can do that effectively. That master prose-composer Colin Leach was once asked in an exam to translate ‘The hour brought forth the man’ into Latin. He came up with vir quantus, di boni, quanto in rei publicae discrimine!

Brendan O’Neill

In defence of individualism

It’s the funniest scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A parable-seeking mob gathers outside Brian’s home. They think he’s the messiah and will dispense some wisdom they might live their lives by. Instead he tells them to think for themselves, because ‘You are all individuals’. ‘We are all individuals,’ the mob intones, robotically. ‘I’m not,’ pipes up a lone, individualist voice, only to be shushed by the unthinking crowd. Observing the current political debate about individualism, I often feel like that dissenting bloke in Life of Brian.

Owen Matthews

China: the Middle East’s new power broker

It’s exactly ten years since Iranian dissidents first blew the cover of a secret uranium-enrichment facility under a mountain at Natanz, in a bleak stretch of desert near Isfahan. Ever since, relations between Israel and Iran have headed inexorably towards war. Israeli leaders have insisted that they are ready to launch a military strike — unilaterally if necessary — against Iran if the uranium enrichment continues. Iranian leaders, liberals and hardliners alike, have been equally adamant that the centrifuges will continue to spin. For Israeli hawks like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the question has been not whether to strike Iran, but when.

Molly Guinness

Daniel Radcliffe: why are the leaders of our political parties so uninspiring?

Daniel Radcliffe is wearing the standard rehearsal outfit of T-shirt, black jeans and trainers. ‘Ah, this is for The Spectator. I probably shouldn’t have worn my fake Che Guevara T-shirt.’ It’s the classic Guevara image with a cartoon smiley face substituted. ‘I bought it because I’m so sick of people using him as a fashion icon.’ Radcliffe is 5ft 5in and his head looks slightly big on his body. But it’s the big pale blue eyes that you notice. Under dark, chaotic eyebrows, they give him an air of innocent frankness before he’s said anything. Being cast as Harry Potter aged 11 and spending his teenage years as the lead in the highest-grossing film franchise of all time could have turned his head, but Radcliffe is modest.

Michael Karam

First Syria, then Lebanon

  Beirut On New Year’s Eve 2011, I asked a senior Swedish diplomat, who had just crossed over from Damascus and was ready to see in the New Year Beirut-style, how long he gave Bashar al-Assad as Syrian president. ‘Longer than we think, but not as long as he thinks,’ he said with a wink. That was still in the days of what we naively called the Arab Awakening; we Lebanese assumed we could sit back and wait for Syria’s hated system to fall. But the weeks have turned to years, and not only is Assad still in place, he might just be prevailing. Lebanon, meanwhile, is falling apart.

Thursday

Claire Berlinski

Turkey’s agony – how Erdogan turned a peaceful protest into a violent nightmare

  Istanbul By now, everyone has heard of the brutal suppression of protests all over Turkey, which began with a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul to protect a hapless apology for a park from demolition. Right by the city’s unofficial centre, Taksim Square, Gezi Park had been slated to become yet another one of the ruling AKP’s signature Ottoman-cum-Disneyland construction projects. It was hardly much of a park, by London standards, but it was one of the last remaining places in the area with a few trees and a bit of room to stroll around. The protesters found the idea of losing that tiny refuge from Istanbul’s urban chaos unbearable.

Fraser Nelson

To transform schools, sack bad teachers and hire great ones. It’ll transform education – and the economy

The Labour years can, in retrospect, be seen as a massive experiment into the link between cash and education. Gordon Brown almost doubled spending per pupil over the past decade, the biggest money injection in the history of state schooling. But as he did so, England hurtled down the international league tables. It now languishes in 18th place, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The plan didn’t work. Only now is the full cost of that failure becoming clear. In an age when ‘work’ is increasingly something done with the head rather than the hands, education standards determine the wealth of nations. There is now enough data to draw a direct relationship between the two and put a price on it. Smarter nations are richer nations.

Toby Young

Why Michael Gove is the best leader Labour never had

Michael Gove received a surprising amount of support from the opposition benches when he unveiled his GCSE reforms in the Commons on Monday. Among those Labour MPs saying they welcomed his proposals were David Blunkett, Barry Sheerman and, most unexpectedly, Diane Abbott, who said that they would particularly benefit working-class and black minority ethnic children. ‘Mr Speaker, I’m in love,’ said the Secretary of State for Education. ‘The honourable lady is absolutely right. If I had been a member of the Labour party, I would have voted for her as leader.’ Listening to this exchange, I couldn’t help but turn this hypothetical on its head: if Michael Gove had been a member of the Labour party, would Diane Abbott have voted for him as leader?

Toby Young

America’s Pacific Coast is no match for Cornwall

The first time my wife and I decided to rent a cottage in Cornwall in the summer holidays, the idea was to save money. Not that summer rentals are particularly cheap in Cornwall, but when you’ve got four children the cost of flying anywhere is prohibitive. There’s also the additional cost of renting a car to factor in — or rather a mini-van, because no car is big enough. If you live in London, as we do, one of the great advantages of Cornwall is that you can drive there in about four-and-a-half hours. I won’t pretend it was love at first sight. Cornwall is England’s poorest county and some parts of it are pretty run-down.

Mark Greaves

Recycled graves – coming soon to a cemetery near you

Two marble graves are side by side. One is grey and encrusted, with moss growing over the top. The other is smooth and shiny white. It looks new but, in fact, like the grave next to it, it’s more than 100 years old. It’s not just been cleaned — its top layer has been shaved off completely. On its front are potted plants, hydrangeas and a can of Guinness. These are tributes to its new resident. Its old resident, Robert John, died in 1894. His inscription is still there, on the back of the headstone. His remains are there, too, if they haven’t disappeared into the soil. John’s grave is among 700 or so that have been re-used, or ‘shared’, in the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium in east London. They are all at least 75 years old.

Martin Vander Weyer

Energy special: It’s decision time on shale gas

‘UK shale Eldorado just off the M62’, declared the Financial Times, reporting a huge gas find below Cheshire. Shale gas is natural gas trapped in beds of underground shale; it can be released by hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which means pumping water, sand and chemicals into the shale under high pressure. That much we know for sure — but we also know that Eldorado, the city of gold lost in South America’s rainforests, turned out to be one of the world’s great myths. Had the FT forgotten, or was it issuing a coded warning? Either way, it provided a reminder that the scale, viability and dangers of the ‘shale gas revolution’ are still surrounded by forests of myth and counter-myth.

Matthew Sinclair

Energy special: The green jobs myth

Tim Yeo MP called his proposal for yet another draconian target to decarbonise Britain’s power sector the ‘green jobs amendment’. It was defeated last week by 290 votes to 267. One sweeping new regulation was apparently enough for the day as the Commons settled for casually renationalising the energy sector by passing the government’s bill. The amendment’s defeat is a setback for environmentalists, who had campaigned for it aggressively, but not for Britain’s two and a half million unemployed. ‘Green jobs’ are an utter farce. More expensive sources of energy will destroy more employment than they create. That is not to say that no one has a green job.

Charles C.

Energy special: Get ready for the ‘fire ice’ revolution

On Saturday, 8 June, the research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 7 left the port of Joetsu, in western Japan, to begin a three-year survey of the Sea of Japan — the latest step in a little-known research programme that in a decade or less could profoundly change the international balance of power. Kaiyo Maru, a 499-ton trawler, is hunting for beds of methane hydrate, a cold, white, sherbet-like substance found off coastlines in Japan and much of the rest of the world. The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 2.8 trillion cubic metres of this mixture of frozen water and natural gas may exist. Although only part of this vast deposit is accessible, methane hydrate — ‘ice that burns’ — may be the Earth’s single biggest fossil-fuel source.

Thursday

Christopher Howse

Notes on…London’s secondhand bookshops

After seeing the Dalai Lama receive an award at St Paul’s Cathedral, I thought I’d look in at some secondhand bookshops around the British Museum on my walk home. They had all gone. Gone the neat shop in Museum Street where I bought David Knowles’s Great Historical Enterprises; gone the untidy shop in Coptic Street where I first bought a Cresset Press edition of Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Gone the smart end of the market, Frew Mackenzie (next to Cornelissen the artists’ colourmen) where two big folios of the beastly Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 1723, 1734, chipped at spine ends, was the equivalent of the bargain box.

Norman Stone

What’s eating Turkey

  Ankara ‘Islam, politics, economics — choose two’ is a great line, said by one of my Turkish students, and it would make a good exam question. Tayyip (the name means ‘very clean’ in Arabic — cf. ritual washing) Erdogan (meaning ‘strong hawk’, a Turkish nationalist reference) came to power in 2002 with a very good press. This was to be what the world wanted — a Muslim version of German or Italian Christian Democracy — and for years he gave it that. The rival parties destroyed themselves in silly bickering and corruption, and Erdogan’s party was very successful, with reforms in health and housing that improved the lives of ordinary Turks no end.

Harry Mount

Take it from a former barrister: Chris Grayling is right to reform legal aid

Shakespeare took it a little far in Henry IV, Part II, when Dick the Butcher said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Chris Grayling hasn’t made the same proposal but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, listening to the howls of anguish and indignation coming from the Inns of Court. Grayling, the first non-lawyer to be made Lord Chancellor since the 17th century, has simply said he wants to make some savings in the legal aid bill. To the lawyers, unaccustomed to having their privileges and subsidies challenged by anyone, this means war. Already, 90 millionaire QCs — poor, impoverished Cherie Blair among them — have written a letter to the Telegraph attacking legal aid cuts for judicial review cases.

Johan Norberg

Why Sweden has riots

  Stockholm  ‘All of them should have been very happy,’ Robert A. Heinlein begins his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon. The material problem has been solved on this future earth, poverty and disease have been eradicated, work is optional. And yet parts of the citizenry are not enthusiastic. Some are bored, others are preparing a revolt. Why should that be, in such a utopian world? A similar puzzlement has been the dominant reaction from commentators after riots broke out and cars and buildings were burned in heavily immigrant-populated suburbs of Stockholm in late May. Sweden?