Features

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

The kibbutz goes capitalist

Galilee: The last time I was here, the kibbutz was filled with sunburnt, muscular, sweaty Israelis covered in dark curly hair, driving Jeeps, so handsome I’d spill my Jaffa orange juice down my white cheesecloth culottes when they spoke to me. Then, Kfar Hanassi, in northern Galilee, a grenade’s throw from the Golan Heights, had 600 or so members, and cleaved to the lofty-lefty ideals of the collective: everyone gave what they could, in the words of the kibbutz movement, and got what they needed. No one owned a house, everyone ate the same thing together in the dining room (yoghurt, hummus, eggs, more yoghurt, more hummus). After dinner, everyone attended plenary meetings to discuss the security fence, or dance to an Irish-Israeli fiddle band.

Clarissa Tan

East vs East – Asia’s new arms race

It is, by now, clear that Kim Jong-un is madder than his father. He’s blasted off North Korea’s third nuclear test and plans to restart its nuclear reactor, as his people continue to starve. Last weekend his government declared that the ‘time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle’ with South Korea. He has instructed his troops to ‘break the waists of the crazy enemies’ and also ‘cut their windpipes’. For good measure he described Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, as a ‘venomous swish of skirt’ and has severed all military hotlines with Seoul, like a petulant teenager refusing to answer the phone. It would be funny, if only his nukes weren’t real.

Freddy Gray

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Am I anti-Catholic?

Does being gay make you a better historian? ‘Immensely, immensely,’ says Diarmaid MacCulloch. ‘From a young age, four or five onwards, I began to realise that the world was not as it pretends to be, there are lots of other things there. You learn how to listen to what is being half-said or implied, and that’s a transferable skill.’ MacCulloch knows what he’s talking about. He’s Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and one of Britain’s most distinguished living historians. In academic terms, he’s on a par with David Starkey, who also happens to be gay. Like Starkey, MacCulloch is a Tudor specialist who has branched into other areas and television work.

J. Meirion

How NHS health tourism is costing us billions: a surgeon’s story

When David Cameron proposed toughening the rules that govern foreign nationals being treated for free by the National Health Service, he faced — as one might expect — a barrage of criticism. The Prime Minister was accused of tilting at windmills. The threat exists only in the minds of xenophobes, said his critics. The actual levels of abuse are minimal, so why is he scaremongering? A few weeks earlier, I had written a piece for The Spectator from a different perspective; that of an cancer specialist who has spent his career in the NHS. I wrote for one reason only: that I cherish the NHS, and wish to stop its abuse. My piece focused on the actual nature of the abuse, how it is carried out and why so little of it is detected.

John Simpson

Why is Nelson Mandela’s health a state secret?

When President Jacob Zuma reassures a journalist, as he did last week, that Nelson Mandela’s condition is improving slightly, the entire world sighs with relief. Yet it has become hard to get trustworthy information about the man the world most admires. Mandela’s wife Graça doesn’t seem to be so involved in the key decisions about him any more. Instead, the occasional morsels of information which the world eagerly seizes on come largely from politicians. More strangely still, the South African government hasn’t let anyone know which hospital is treating him.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Why I fear for my daughter

To listen to many disability pressure groups, adult social care for people with learning disabilities is being slashed by a heartless government. What few of them want to tell you, however, is that the government is spending far more than it needs to on looking after adults with learning difficulties, as well as exposing many to cruelty and exploitation, thanks to an ideological obsession with placing them in ordinary housing rather than the communities in which many have lived for decades. I have an interest to declare: I have a daughter with learning difficulties who in two years’ time will qualify for adult social care.

Paul Mason

What’s kicking off in Cyprus

Downtown Nicosia has been closed, on and off, for more than a week. On the terraces of the upmarket coffee shops, the torches flicker and the disco music babbles. When the Cypriot government shut the banks, many retailers decided to close as well, so the mannequins stare each other out across semi-deserted streets. As the president tries to negotiate the final bailout in Brussels, I hunch over a cappuccino with a senior MP, who lists the country’s future options. They are limited: tourism, gas, financial services — though without a banking sector, that’s going to take some doing. As we talk, I realise the MP is also quizzing me: I am a veteran of four bailouts. The Cypriot government has had four weeks in office.

Louise Cooper

Forget Cyprus, the real savings robbery is in Britain

There are many reasons that the fate of Cyprus is being followed so closely in Britain. One is sympathy for those who are about to pay the price for the sins of a banking sector that was at one point seven times the size of the island’s economy. Another is shock at how the island, to which Britain granted independence just 53 years ago, now finds itself caught between Berlin, Moscow and Brussels. But the real lesson of Cyprus can be applied closer to home: when governments run out of money, they come after other people’s. Everyone is looking at Cyprus and asking: how safe are my savings? In Cyprus, at least, when the government decides to help itself to people’s savings, it’s called theft. In Britain, it’s called ‘quantitative easing’.

Jonathan Ruffer

Beauty, philanthropy and Auckland Castle

Three years ago, on an Ignatian retreat in Wales, two of the staff were taken ill — a priest and a kitchen maid, Maria. At Eucharist, we were given regular updates on the progress of the priest, but radio silence when it came to Maria. Inwardly furious, I raged at the inequality: ‘Who will look after the little guy?’ I thought. A rhetorical question to God is apt to bring about a practical answer, and I determined to change the course of my life, from working in finance to striving for regeneration in the deprived areas of the north-east of England. But to my great surprise I find myself occupied with bringing the Bishop’s Palace at Auckland Castle back to life.

Harry Mount

The Russian desecration of London

Now that his old arch-enemy, Boris Berezovsky, has bitten the dust, Roman Abramovich can devote his full attention to another bête noire — London’s terraced houses. In his £10 million plan to knock together three houses, worth £100 million, in Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, the oligarch is raising the roof, ripping out internal floors and walls, and burrowing two floors down into the courtyard. He is also ripping out two staircases. Russian expats may hanker after the steppes but they don’t like British stairs. The cement mixers will whirr for three years in one of London’s loveliest streets.

Roger Scruton

Celebrity fun vs scared joy

Easter is the season of rebirth and renewal. It is hard to renew ourselves, not because we are weak and tempted only, but because our pleasure-seeking culture pours scorn on all the old ways of sacrifice, and conceives fulfilment as fun. ‘Have fun’ has replaced ‘Fare well’ as the good wish of parting, and everything on which our happiness depends has been veiled by a mask of instant pleasure. You don’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian to recognise that pleasure and happiness are not the same. There are wicked pleasures, destructive pleasures, addictive pleasures, despicable pleasures: but there is no such thing as wicked, destructive, addictive or despicable happiness.

Mark Forsyth

Why do people talk nonsense in public

There’s something about the word located that makes me want to slit throats. Not that I’m a naturally furious chap, not a bit of it. But located makes me want to shoot a puppy. The safety instructions are ‘located’ at the end of the carriage. The life-jackets are ‘located’ under the seats. They needn’t be located. They just are. The life-jackets are under the seats. The information desk is on the ground floor. I want to take a huge red pen to the world and start deleting. The curious thing is that everybody — even health-and-safety officers — can talk properly in a pub. By properly I don’t mean that they’ll necessarily use the subjunctive perfectly or distinguish between disinterested and uninterested.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why The Spectator won’t sign the Royal Charter

Whatever else is said about David Cameron’s hand-ling of press regulation, there can be no doubt that the deal he struck on Monday demonstrated masterful sleight of hand. Just days earlier, his differences with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg had seemed irreconcilable and the Prime Minister was heading for defeat in the Commons. But then, overnight, everyone united around a compromise: a state regulator which insisted it was no such thing. It was the political equivalent of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’; Britain’s first piece of legislative surrealism. The Royal Charter’s ornate, 17th-century language is part of the obfuscation. It begins: ‘To all to whom these presents shall come, greeting!

Piers Paul-Read

Satan is back

It used to be said by Catholic priests back in the 1950s that the Devil was delighted when human beings decided that he did not exist. In those days it seemed unlikely that he would disappear altogether from human consciousness because he was so well known — as Baal or Beelzebub in the Old Testament, the Prince of Lies in the New, as Lucifer in the King James Bible, as Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and as Mephistopheles in the legend of Faust; but it has turned out that a subtle move from scripture into myth, folklore and finally literature has been an effective way of becoming unreal. Today we hear his name more frequently in lectures on English literature than in seminars on theology.

Sophia Martelli

Travel: Dublin, comeback city

The boom and bust have left their mark on Dublin. Cruising through the outskirts past the (industrial) estate of Sandyford — flimsy-looking buildings, each as nastily designed as the last but in wildly different styles — I double-take at a gigantic half-built multi-storey car park. There are ‘To Let’ signs everywhere and it’s all a bit reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell song. But the shiny new Luas tram which links this monument to property development greed to the centre of the city is quiet, efficient and fast — and Dublin is, thank heavens, still the ‘fair city’ of the song, the Liffey meandering unruffled and majestic through the middle of it.

Melanie McDonagh

Travel: Ireland’s wild west

The problem with writing about the Burren is that there’s no consensus about where it is. Different people have different ideas. On my first trip there, I plaintively asked a girl in a café in Kilfenora, whose heyday was probably the 11th century (Kilfenora, that is, not the café) where the Burren was and she jerked her thumb towards the door. ‘Out there,’ she said. And so I made my way down the road to the nearest field to contemplate the celebrated flora. With beginner’s luck, I saw, for the first and last time, a curious little red frog. A few minutes later I came across the wild orchids for which the place is famous — as luck would have it, I was there in June, the best time for flowers.

Julie Bindel

From Cockney to Jafaican

My mother always had a keen ear for slang and lazy pronunciation when I was growing up. Because my siblings and I were working class and attended an absolutely dreadful school in the North-east in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents made sure we were as educated as we possibly could be in manners. My father, a proud northerner, has always taken umbrage at what he calls ‘Cockney’ (in reality just phrases popular among Londoners such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘basically’ and ‘strike a light’.

Rosie Millard

Gary Kemp on David Bowie, Margaret Thatcher, and joining the establishment

There was a funny gaffe on Radio 4 the other day, when the newsreader announced that Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer had been banged up in ‘Spandau Ballet’. Cue a lot of laughter across middle England. Gary Kemp, the founder of Spandau Ballet, the 1980s pop band (not the Berlin prison) was also rather amused, even if he’d heard it before. ‘When we first started,’ he recalls, ‘the inky press thought our name meant we were a new fascist movement in music, which was obviously nonsense.’ The real inspiration behind the Spandau name was David Bowie. ‘We were obsessed with Berlin, which had been validated by Bowie. We all went to the Blitz club and bought synthesisers.

Thursday

Sherard Cowpercoles

Afghanistan withdrawal: Sherard Cowper-Coles on what the Soviets did right

History doesn’t show us only mistakes to avoid. It also gives us examples of success to be emulated. We would do well to study the way in which the Soviet Union left Afghanistan. Like Barack Obama in 2009, in 1985 the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev was faced with the challenge of how most elegantly to extract his country from Afghanistan. Unlike Obama, Gorbachev was being told by his military advisers — who had mostly been doubtful about the whole campaign from the start — that the war was unwinnable. Unlike Obama, he decided that the right course was to follow the playbook for countering insurgencies. The first task was to ensure that an essentially tactical military campaign was enfolded in a coherent political strategy.

Con Coughlin

Bribe, Cut and Run: Britain’s retreat from Afghanistan

Retreating from Afghanistan has never been a task at which the British military has excelled. Our first incursion in 1839 resulted in the wholesale massacre of an entire division, save for an army doctor by the name of Dr William Brydon, who was spared only so he could tell the tale. Troops fighting the Second Afghan War of the early 1880s only avoided a similar fate through the exertions of General Frederick ‘Bob’ Roberts, who rescued a British force on the outskirts of Kandahar as it was on the point of being overrun. Now we are about to attempt this tricky business for a third time.