Features

Thursday

Neil Clark

Where did all the sweet people go?

To say someone was ‘sweet’ used to be quite common in Britain. We didn’t just use the word to describe our mothers and grandmothers, but a wide range of people, including public figures. But not any more. Public acts of sweetness, such as gently warning people that their shoelaces were untied, are now rare. Sweetness seems to be in terminal decline. Having just celebrated Valentine’s Day, now seems an appropriate time to ask why. Sweetness is not just about niceness, or good manners, though both help. Sir Cliff Richard may be nice and well-mannered, but is he sweet? He’s a little too self-regarding — and self-regard and sweetness don’t go together.

Thursday

Ross Clark

Sickness in the health service

A former editor of this magazine, Nigel Lawson, once described the NHS as ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood’. He meant to imply that blind faith tends to take over from observation. But there are other likenesses: bickering cardinals, grandiose PFI cathedrals that suck money from the pockets of believers — and now, finally exposed after being covered up for years, a shocking scandal of abuse. Hospital managers like to commission paintings of the premises to hang in their corridors. In the case of Mid Staffordshire Hospitals Trust, William Hogarth would have been a suitable choice of artist.

Bruce Anderson

Cameron’s wrong course

Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept. The Tories have formidable advantages. Even in the miseries of an economic crisis, they are only seven points behind in the polls and are almost holding on to their general election percentage. If Margaret Thatcher had been doing this well in mid-parliament, she would have wondered what she was doing wrong. Ed Miliband lacks Michael Foot’s eloquence, Neil Kinnock’s occasional flashes of electability and David Miliband’s political weight. Ed Balls combines intellectual incoherence with the charm of a pit bull terrier. Apropos charm, Yvette Cooper and Harriet Harman overflow with warmth, generosity of spirit and appeal to the aspirational classes.

Nick Cohen

‘Murdoch betrays everyone in the end’

My guard goes up when people in power say that they believe in investigative journalism. Everybody says they do, of course. Then everyone says they have a sense of humour, most especially when they don’t. Just as I doubt the merriment of someone who needs to announce, ‘I enjoy a joke as much as the next man,’ so I worry about politicians and bureaucrats who make perfunctory commitments to serious journalism. Look around and you will see that their deeds belie their words. Almost without anyone noticing, a great silence is falling over the British state. Civil servants, police and prison officers are shutting up as they realise the dangers of talking to journalists are too perilous to risk.

Emily Bearn

Lord Bramall’s last stand

Retreat to your bunkers. Repeat: this is not a drill. Field Marshal Lord Bramall, former chief of the defence staff and veteran of the Normandy landings, has delivered a parting shot. Last week, as he stood from the House of Lords, he opened fire from the crossbenches, blasting the government’s plans to replace Trident and calling for a ‘better-balanced, more relevant defence programme’ in which nuclear weapons would play little or no part. The campaign continues next week, when Bramall will be ‘taking questions’ at the Travellers Club in Piccadilly. This is not the first time he has made known his views that Britain should phase out its nuclear weaponry. But with the new fleet due in 2016 the tension is ratcheting.

Douglas Murray

Atheists vs Dawkins

Sometimes a perfectly good argument can be stretched too far. I heard the resulting snapping noise last week in Cambridge during a debate with Richard Dawkins. We were meant to be on the same side at the Union. But over some months the motion hardened and eventually became ‘This House believes religion should have no place in the 21st century.’ While an atheist myself, it seems to me that claiming that religion should disappear is not just an overstatement but a seismic mistake. So I joined Rowan Williams and my close enemy Tariq Ramadan in trying to explain to Dawkins and co where they might have gone wrong. The Union was packed, with screens relaying the debate live around the building.

Rosa Monckton

“The twins I saw will spend their lives staring at ceilings”: Bulgaria’s abandoned children

It was something about the twins that got to me; after seeing so many baby institutions and children’s homes, I had almost grown used to abandoned children in ranks of cots, staring at the ceiling. The twins — a boy and a girl of six — were set apart; pale, twisted, both with cerebral palsy. Their mother left them in the institution on the day their father had kicked her out for ‘only being able to have crippled children’. I reached into the girl’s cot to hold her hand, and her steady gaze held mine. I bent over to hold her brother’s foot, and felt like a lightning rod between them. But the missing link is their mother.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Cold comfort | 31 January 2013

  An emergency shelter funded by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has been opened to offer a lifeline to rough sleepers in the capital whenever three consecutive nights of freezing temperature are predicted. Mr Johnson said: ‘This shelter will offer a vital lifeline when temperatures tumble to sub-zero levels and rough sleepers risk losing their lives in the cold.’ Just how and why Dave and his mother, Nancy, came to be sleeping outside, in the corner of a car park, is too complicated and surreal a story to explain. But what you need to know is that there’s no easy solution to their problem, and sleeping rough in itself isn’t alarming or even unusual for them.

Melissa Kite

Does the RSPCA think it’s the FBI?

Imagine what would happen if J. Edgar Hoover, founder of the FBI, were running the RSPCA. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But suspend your disbelief for a second, and suppose that a crusading individual convinced of his destiny to conduct a campaign against wrong-doing had turned the nation’s favourite animal charity into a quasi-official investigations unit, targeting those people and institutions he personally disapproved of. He might then seek to publicise the most dramatic or controversial cases of animal neglect and cruelty in order to generate headlines.

Patrick Marnham

Hollande runs into the sand

Will President François Hollande’s decision to send French troops into battle against the insurgent fundamentalists in Mali prove a turning point for his faltering presidency? Not for the first time, a nice little war may serve to rescue a failing political reputation. Hollande’s approval rating jumped from 40 to 44 per cent in the days after the Mali conflict began. Suddenly the man known as ‘Flanby’ — after the French wobbly pudding — looked tough. Pierre Méhaignerie, a former minister under François Mitterrand, applauded Hollande for ‘showing decisiveness, something he has not shown on other issues’. On Monday, the French-led forces reoccupied Timbuktu, and the rebels were reported to be in retreat.

Mark Greaves

Two months as a monk

Kieran Viljoen’s life sounds like a parable. Not long ago, back in South Africa, he spent his days in the depths of the ocean searching for diamonds. But for the past two months he has been living the life of a Benedictine monk. He is one of two interns at Quarr Abbey, a monastery on the Isle of Wight. The internship scheme, the first of its kind, is billed as an abridged gap-year experience: two months of living, praying and working alongside the monks. When I arrive, the scheme has just finished. Kieran, 23, and Michael Edwards, 26, from Liverpool, are leaving the next day. That evening the monks are treating them to a farewell dinner. ‘It could range from fancy dress to a hardcore dance party,’ jokes Kieran.

Julie Bindel

Why even Amsterdam doesn’t want legal brothels

Do you remember the rather brilliant comedy sketch featuring Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in which they played laid-back police officers in Amsterdam, bragging that they no longer have to deal with the crime of murder in the Netherlands since the Dutch legalised it? Don’t laugh too hard. In 2000 the Dutch government decided to make it even easier for pimps, traffickers and punters by legalising the already massive and highly visible brothel trade. Their logic was as simple as it was deceptive: to make things safer for everyone. Make it a job like any other. Once the women were liberated from the underworld, the crooks, drug dealers and people traffickers would drift away. Twelve years on, and we can now see the results of this experiment.

Thursday

Danielle Wall

Adventure on the menu

I think of myself as an adventurous eater. I’ve had kangaroo in Australia, crocodile in Cambodia, deep-fried Mars bar in Scotland… but not much could have prepared me for my trip to China. In the narrow, brightly lit streets of Beijing, street vendors start early, preparing the day’s delights: steamed buns filled with pork, prawns or vegetables (known as baozi); spicy lamb kebabs (chuan’r) cooked on roadside barbecues; and tanghulu, ‘fresh’ fruit on bamboo skewers covered in sugary syrup. The tanghulu sellers cycle their wares around the city, the fruit becoming steadily less fresh in the heavily polluted air, until by nightfall it’s best not to look too closely. Wangfujing and Donghuamen night market is where you will find the more exotic menus.

Chris Miller

Playing tag

The frustrating thing about tagging, or electronic monitoring (EM) is that it could so easily be effective — if only we did it properly. As a former police officer, I can vouch that Theodore Dalrymple is right when he says that it’s a relatively small number of prolific offenders who commit the majority of recorded crime. So if we used the right technology — if these criminals knew that any repeat offence would be almost certain to result in detection and punishment — then reoffending rates would fall. But although there’s a lot of potential in EM, I’m afraid the potential has been unrealised in this country. Ever since 1989, when we first started deploying EM as an alternative to prison and an aid to rehabilitation, we’ve got it wrong.

Theodore Dalrymple

The rehabilitation game

‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,’ said the Soviet worker in the good old days; the British criminal could nowadays say with equal reason, ‘They pretend to punish us and we pretend to reform.’ Recent statistics show that two thirds of young criminals ordered to wear electronic tags break their court orders almost with impunity. Nothing could better reveal the hall of mirrors that the British criminal justice system long ago became than the response of Keith Vaz, the chairman of the House of Commons all-party Home Affairs Committee, to very similar news last year. ‘The public,’ he said, ‘must be convinced that community sentences are an effective form of punishment.

Emma Hughes

Celebrity flatmate

A few years ago, I answered an advertisement on a flat-sharing website and ended up living with a fledgling pop star — I’ll call him Sam. He was not long out of adolescence, and was gnawed at by his need for recognition. For years, he and his bandmates had been plastering the internet with tracks, hoping to attract attention, but without much luck. When I moved in, I was dimly aware that my new flatmate sang, but I didn’t own a TV, so what little coverage they’d received had passed me by. I imagined them performing in dismal, carpeted pubs on the North Circular and getting the bus home. Then, one Saturday afternoon not long after I moved in, I went to get my hair cut.

Aidan Hartley

What Africa needs now

Kenya: The Prime Minister has committed Britain to a struggle against the ‘existential threat’ of terrorism in Africa that he says will take ‘years, even decades’ of patience, intelligence and toughness. Well, there’s some truth in what he says, but not in the implication that this is a new threat to Africa — nor that our response should be a military one. In a way this same struggle was happening when the young Winston Churchill was covering Kitchener’s war against fanatical Muslim, Mahdist forces in the Sudan in 1898. ‘Year after year, we see the figures of the odd and bizarre potentates… It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane,’ wrote the young Winston in his memoir of the battle for Omdurman.

Patrick Allitt

Revenge of the Clintons

Republicans turn pale with horror at the idea that Hillary Clinton might be the next president. She is the screeching harridan of their nightmares, made worse by her penchant for centre-left social policies. But they had better face up to the fact that no woman has ever been better placed to take the top job. Sixty-five now, she will be no older in 2016 than Ronald Reagan was when he moved into the White House. In the next week or so, Hillary will stand down as Secretary of State. She tells interviewers that she’s looking forward a break from public life. But nobody who knows anything about her believes it. Before her concussion late last year, she completed a farewell tour constructed to remind everyone that she is the logical next leader of the free world.

James Forsyth

Interview with Sajid Javid, the bus driver’s son who may end up leading the Tories

Sajid Javid seems the very model of a rising young Tory: student politics, then investment banking, then a junior Treasury minister in his first parliament; well-cut suit trousers, crisp white shirt, pastel-blue tie. But what sets him apart, and so excites some of his colleagues, is his background. His father arrived in Britain from a Pakistani village in 1961, with £5 to his name. It is from his father that Javid got his politics; specifically, from watching the Nine O’Clock News with him during the winter of discontent.

Martin Vander Weyer

Travel: Timeless island

‘Hong Kong is the most Chinese city on earth,’ says my old friend Jo McBride, who has lived there for more than 30 years. That may come as a surprise to those who knew the place as a resolutely British enclave of colonial officers, traders and bankers — of whom, long ago, I was one — and to more recent visitors reassured by the hands-off regime of Beijing’s stooges in the 15 years since they took over from our last governor, Lord Patten. So hands-off, indeed, that most tourists still think of China as one destination and Hong Kong as another: a stateless stopover and giant shopping mall that constantly reinvents itself to the whims of global demand.