Features

Thursday

Rachel Ward

Pining for the Brecon Beacons

Pommies, in Australia, are famous for what the Aussies call ‘whinging’. Whether this is born of character or homesickness is debatable but, in the past, I have gone out of my way to resist the affliction. Returning to England this winter, however, my resolve was undone and I’ve been ‘whinging’ for Britain ever since. My stepfather advised, ‘Never marry out of your class, it will lead to great unhappiness’, but, at the age of 24 and ornery, I promptly married both out of my class and country. Thirty years later I can confirm that he was wrong. Marrying outside my social class (I was upstairs, he was downstairs) has not led to ‘great unhappiness’.

Bruce Anderson

Laws, laws everywhere and not a drop of common sense

It might sound like an Ealing comedy. But it is not funny. It illustrates the fact that law-making in Britain has lost all contact with common sense. The town of Deal in Kent has a heraldic crest. Some local vigilante has pointed out that since the grant of arms was made, the local government boundaries have altered, so it is no longer technically legal for the town to use its current arms. But a replacement would cost the ratepayers tens of thousands of pounds. Deal football club would also be stuck with a five-figure bill. From the outset, this government has preached two sermons. First, that as the country is broke, it is intolerable that agencies of government should waste money.

William Cook

The Good Life – how a 70s sitcom became a Conservative lodestar

When the writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey came up with the idea for The Good Life, they were looking for a vehicle for Richard Briers, who’d just turned 40. He was well established but not quite famous — the other three actors even less so. Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith were cast on the strength of their performances in an Ayckbourn play. Paul Eddington was a ‘first eleven light-comedy actor’ (as Briers put it) but he was hardly a household name. In the opening credits, Briers’s name was above the title, the other three were below it. Briers’s Tom Good was the lead; Kendal was ensured a decent role as his wife, Barbara, but Jerry and Margo Leadbetter were initially conceived as supporting characters.

J. Meirion

Free riding foreigners: the next NHS scandal

A fundamental and enduring principle of the NHS is that it is ‘free at the point of use’. All major political parties subscribe to this mantra and none dare challenge it. Herein lies the problem. The consequence of such altruism — all at the UK taxpayer’s expense — is health tourism and abuse of the NHS by ineligible patients. The general public seem unaware of this deception despite being rightly exercised about other examples of similar abuse, such as benefit fraud. How is this any different? The rules and regulations laid down by the Department of Health governing eligibility for free NHS care are so porous, ineffective and difficult to enforce that they can be easily breached by would-be patients motivated enough to try.

Ian Cowie

Investment: Will bonds crash as shares rise?

Tim Price: In a normal market, maybe. But not in this one UK base rate squats at 0.5 per cent, its lowest level in history — or since the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, which is much the same thing. With sporadic signs of inflation and patchy evidence of recovery, plus a new broom at the Bank of England who is expected to be boldly interventionist, the financial chatterati are transfixed by the prospect of the ‘Great Rotation’. This much-anticipated shift out of UK government gilts, and bonds more generally, back into equities reflects expectations that bond prices are due for a fall because interest rates must inevitably rise, while shares are overdue for an upswing. There’s only one problem with this thesis. It’s nonsense.

Tessa Codrington

Travel: Notes from a boom town

Why hasn’t Morocco had an Arab Spring? On the one hand, history; on the other, the vision of the present king, Mohammed VI. Throughout the colonial era, when France and Spain each had a slice of the country, Morocco retained its identity, its cities, its culture and its monarchy — which stretches back for centuries, unlike the artificial monarchies created in the Middle East by the Europeans. It was never officially a colony of either France or Spain, but a protectorate. France did exile Mohammed V, the present king’s grandfather; but in 1956 the people successfully demanded his restoration, and full independence followed in 1957. So Morocco is the only country whose people successfully campaigned for a ruler who pre-dated colonialism to return.

Victoria Lane

‘Morocco is a diabetic’s nightmare’

Fleeing streets of slush, we touch down in a north African spring, where we are driven through the desert scrub outside Marrakech, passing dusty ochre expanses filled with old plastic containers and half-built hotels and the odd donkey before turning down a track which runs alongside a walled garden. Tantalising green fronds poke above the wall. The gates open (someone is posted to look through a gap in the wall to time it right) and reveal a lush complex of grass, palms, roses, figs and orange trees around a T-shaped pool. This hotel is one of a handful to have popped up a short way away from the clamour of the city. It’s peaceful — there is a view of the Atlas mountains in the distance — but you can get to the souk whenever you want.

Thursday

Stephen Glover

Farewell, Independent on Sunday

On Tuesday the Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced to a breathless world the latest development in the Leveson saga. The government wants a royal charter to oversee a new press watchdog. I say ‘the government’, but the Liberal Democrats are only half on board. Like Labour, they seem still to hanker after some sort of statute to set Leveson in stone. As for Hacked Off, the celebrity-backed pressure group that has campaigned for greater press regulation, it will settle for nothing less than a statute, and wants every recommendation made by Lord Justice Leveson to be implemented without delay. On the day Mrs Miller did her little turn in the Commons, a once successful Sunday newspaper was closed. Almost no one noticed.

Piers Paul-Read

Benedict XVI in perspective

In March 2005, when it became clear that Pope John Paul II would soon die, Boris Johnson asked me to write a piece for The Spectator predicting who would be chosen as the next pope. With no special insight into the minds of the cardinals, I ran through the possibilities that had been mentioned in the press — an African such as the Nigerian Cardinal Arinze, a South American such as Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a Frenchman such as Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris — but concluded that the best candidate would be the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger. At the time it seemed unlikely that he would be chosen.

John Osullivan

Benedict’s reformation

Shock is probably the predominant emotion evoked by the decision of Pope Benedict XVI to resign at the end of February. Given that the last papal resignation took place 600 years ago, it’s understandable that the world has got used to the idea that being pope is a life sentence. Indeed, previous popes seem to have got used to it as well. Some of them, including Benedict’s immediate predecessor, were martyrs to the job, and not entirely metaphorically. Suspicion is another reaction, less common perhaps but rife in high places. Mr Piers Morgan, himself a Catholic (who knew?), tweeted his suspicion that there was more to Benedict’s resignation than met the eye.

Simon Nixon

Reshoring: how jobs came flooding back to America

It is 20 years since the US presidential candidate Ross Perot railed against globalisation, warning of a ‘giant sucking sound’ as millions of jobs left America and went to foreign factories. The presidential hopeful warned that a new economic curse — offshoring — would shut steel mills and factories without government protection. But listen closely and a different sucking sound can now be heard: jobs coming back to America. A country once panicked about ‘offshoring’ has a new buzzword: ‘re-shoring’. The US recovery is weak and unemployment remains high. But quietly, manufacturing has been making a strong recovery, adding 500,000 jobs since the end of the recession.

Clarissa Tan

Why do Brits seek Eastern spirituality when they have so much of their own?

I used to hang around a group of friends who worked for a British events company. Their boss was a keen follower of Buddhism and all things Oriental and, since the course of business never does run smooth, regularly consulted a feng shui practitioner. The practitioner, who wanted to be called Jampa, gave advice on everything from the setting up of a branch office to the placement of a goldfish bowl. He charged £500 a visit, with the viewing of two floors in an office counting as two visits. Jampa’s real name was something like Trevor Stevens, and in the days before he started donning the saffron robes of an eastern monk he was more often spotted in the crimson cloth of a Liverpool FC supporter.

Douglas Murray

Lars Hedegaard interview: ‘I may be killed if I write this’

The assassin came to his home dressed as a postman. When the historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard opened his front door, the man — whom Lars describes as ‘looking like a typical Muslim immigrant’ in his mid-twenties — fired straight at his head. Though Hedegaard was a yard away, the bullet narrowly missed. The mild-mannered scholar (70 years old) then punched his assailant in the head. The man dropped the gun, picked it up and fired again. The gun jammed and the man ran off. More than a week later, he has yet to be found. Hedegaard has had to leave his home and is under police protection at an undisclosed location. A week after the attempt to murder him we manage to speak by phone. ‘We have had quite a few attempts to silence people here.

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.