Features

Thursday

Neil O'Brien

The great divide | 29 November 2012

My career in politics nearly ended the day it began, when I was almost run over by a gang of Nazis in a Mini-Metro. Not a very butch car to be hit by, I know, and a rather pathetic substitute for a Panzer tank. But it was the early 1990s, and supporters of fascist government in Britain had seen their resources dwindle a bit over the decades. I was 14, and attending my first political demonstration, an Anti-Nazi League protest against the BNP in Halifax. I became separated from the crowd. There were some hooligans from the other side screeching around in a car yelling abuse and doing handbrake turns and, as I ran down a street away from them, they drove the car up onto the pavement behind me.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

The Turner prize is boring

Inside Tate Britain on Monday night, a fashionable London audience will applaud the award of the £25,000 Turner prize to whatever is judged the best thing a British artist under the age of 50 can come up with. Standing outside will be a group of Stuckists protesting against the overlord who for nearly a quarter of a century has ruled this process. Sir Nicholas Serota chaired the prize until 2007, yet still retains his grip. It is he who has made figures such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin so famous and rich. Yet this year, for the first time, there are finally signs that the Serotan winter is beginning to thaw.

Giles Coren

Not graphic and not novel

As someone who once spent a whole summer refusing to leave the house in anything except his Superman costume (to be fair, I was only 23 at the time), I was tickled to death by the announcement last week of a Costa Book Awards shortlist that included not one but two ‘graphic novels’, and the subsequent declaration by the chairman of next year’s Man Booker judges that he would be open to the idea of such things being submitted for that as well. Oh dear Lord above, the laughable, lumbering, creaky old juggernaut that is the British literary establishment. What, now you decide to accept comics as a literary form? Seventy years after they were last truly popular? Forty years since they were the genuine expression of the tortured poetic underground?

Christopher Andrew

The edge of destruction

The world came closer to thermonuclear warfare during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 than ever before or since. Most Americans now aged between their late fifties and late sixties remember ‘duck and cover’ drills during the crisis which taught them to hide under school desks and adopt the brace position in case of nuclear attack. One man who at the time was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Buffalo, New York, told me how on the day after a drill, ‘I was sitting on the big yellow school bus thinking: Will I get home today? Am I going to die? Is this it? Just looking out the window at the world passing by and wondering...’.

Mark Mason

A lifesaver’s lament

It was about as English as you can get. I saved a man from drowning, and ended up annoyed that he didn’t say thank you. The setting was a disused railway walk near the meadows of my local market town in Suffolk. I was out with my dog, enjoying one of autumn’s last sunny days. The walk is heavily lined on both sides with trees, and shielded from view of what few houses there are nearby. From the left, where a river runs alongside the track (again, shielded by the trees) came cries of ‘Help! Help me! PLEASE help!’ At first I assumed some kids were messing about. But after a couple more shouts it was clear this was genuine. Pushing my way through the trees and bushes I reached the river, which at that point is about 80 ft wide.

Thursday

Stephen Glover

Save our speech

In 1644 John Milton appealed to parliament in the Areopagitica to rescind its order to bring publishing under government control by creating official censors. I wonder what he would make of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, due to be published next week, which is expected to re-introduce statutory control of the press into English law after a lapse of centuries. The wonder is that it has happened. Thirteen months ago, as the Leveson inquiry was gearing up, the Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge, made a moving and passionate speech defending the independence of the press.

Douglas Murray

Israel under siege

The dictators have fallen one by one. Several more look likely to fall soon, and few will miss them. But as popular revolutions approach their demise, something else has come along. In one country after another, the Muslim Brotherhood — the fundamentalist revolutionary Islamic party founded in 1920s Egypt — and other Islamist parties have used the ballot box for their own ends. After decades of repression and opposition, they have finally come to power. The era of the Islamists has begun, and as recent events in the Middle East have demonstrated, the world they create will not only look very different but be far more dangerous for Israel and beyond.

James Forsyth

Backbench driver

The burdens of office can wear a man down. When Nick Herbert was the minister for policing and criminal justice, he looked exhausted; as if he was carrying the troubles of two departments on his shoulders. But having quit the government in the September reshuffle, he is relishing his newfound freedom. He says he can fit in an interview on Monday morning, between the bishop and his bank manager. Happy to come between God and Mammon, I stroll along to his office, which is still on the House of -Commons’s ministerial corridor. No longer limited by collective responsibility, he has much to say. Herbert’s first major intervention as an ex-minister will be on the European Court of Human Rights.

Aidan Hartley

Cooking for freedom

A few days before I met Ahmed Jama in Mogadishu, three Islamist gunmen from Al Shabaab — al-Qa’eda’s Somali branch — burst into his new restaurant wearing suicide bomb jackets. They sprayed the place with bullets and then detonated themselves. One bomber set himself off in the dining room itself, killing 20 of Ahmed’s customers. Standing in that room, watching Ahmed’s workmen clean up, I realised what the term ‘pink mist’ really means. The bomber’s solid body had expanded outwards into an aerosol cloud of human particles that now covered every square inch of ceiling, walls and floor. The workmen were using trowels and shovels to clean up. ‘They’re scrubbing it, to get rid of the blood and human remains.

Sebastian Payne

The great British wind scam

Almost everybody agrees that wind turbines are ugly and inefficient. But you’d think that the government, if it must persist in subsidising renewable energy, would do everything it could to incentivise wind power producers to create as much energy as possible while keeping the aesthetic damage to a minimum. Astonishingly, it is doing the opposite. Inquiries by The Spectator have revealed a scam known as ‘de-rating’. Green businesses are modifying large turbines to make them less productive, because perverse government subsidies reward machines that produce less energy at nearly double the rate of more efficient ones. It’s extraordinarily profitable for a few beneficiaries, even if it clutters the countryside and does little to save the planet.

The Spectator

House of stars

The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards were held at the Savoy Hotel on Wednesday. Here are the winners: Newcomer of the year Andrea Leadsom (Con). For her work grilling bankers on the Treasury select committee and setting up the Fresh Start Group. Backbencher of the year Alistair Darling (Lab). His campaign for the Union has made Westminster more relevant in Scotland than at any time since -devolution. Campaigner of the year Andy Burnham (Lab). Our former ‘Minister to Watch’ did more than any other MP to press for the Hillsborough report, which gave parliament one of its most extraordinary moments. Inquisitor of the year Margaret Hodge (Lab).

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Going overboard

What is it about islands that appeals to little men with big ideas? It’s Corfu I’m thinking about, primarily. Napoleon was obsessed with the place. Kaiser Wilhelm owned a summer palace here, the neoclassical Achilleion, where he installed a huge and hideous statue of Achilles. Can I add George Osborne to the list? Perhaps I’d better not. There’s a far better figure to complete the triumvirate, if that’s the phrase: the sly, off-kilter and phenomenally litigious founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Last month, the Daily Telegraph ran an obituary of one John Forte, a former officer in the British Army, who had two claims to fame when it came to Corfu.

Thursday

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

The fall of Petraeus

In the middle of a breaking news story, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell sounded like she was about to cry. Something had happened to the CIA director David Petraeus — but what? Andrea ticked off his accomplishments one by one, the phrase ‘personal tragedy’ echoing ominously over the airwaves. For the love of Mike, was he in a coma? Dead? It took a few more painful moments of this boilerplate obituary and Mitchell’s palpable grief for it to sink in: ‘King David’ had done something bad — an extramarital affair! — for which he apparently took responsibility, and so he had immediately resigned his post. Over the next days, the scandal spread. General John Allen was at it too, allegedly, sending ‘potentially inappropriate’ emails.

Fraser Nelson

The coming showdown

Angela Merkel is running out of nice things to say about David Cameron and the Tory rebels who are dictating his European policy. Der Spiegel magazine recently compared the British to ‘at best spectators in the gallery like Statler and Waldorf, the two old men on The Muppet Show’. This was apparently after a briefing from Merkel’s office. If she thinks the Tories are bad, the public are much worse. Over the summer, the European Commission asked 32,000 people across the continent what they thought about the EU. The Poles are still enthusiastic, the austerity-stricken Irish less so. The Italians are smarting from having lost their prime minister and the Greeks are a bit raw over the sado-austerity. But the most hostile EU member state, by a clear margin, is Britain.

Christopher Caldwell

Merkel’s sovereign remedy

‘Europe is speaking German now,’ said Volker Kauder, parliamentary chairman of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, about a year ago. He was urging Britain to back Merkel’s plans for saving Europe’s rickety banks and state budgets. Last week, the Chancellor herself arrived in London to dine with David Cameron and deliver the message in person. Cameron is in a tricky spot. The summit to determine the EU budget for the next seven years will be held on 22 November. A coalition of opportunistic Labour MPs and dug-in Tory rebels has just passed a non-binding amendment in parliament urging that the government accept nothing less than a cut in real EU spending. Cameron has tried to win himself a bit of wiggle room.

Michael Henderson

In praise of Bryan Ferry

Francis Lee, the barrel-chested footballer who banged in goals for Bolton Wanderers and Manchester City, was my first idol. Billy Wilder, Johnny Mercer and Philip Larkin rank among the heroes of my maturity, though nobody will ever displace Chekhov and Schubert at the head of the table. But the vicar’s son who went up to public school in 1972, hoping to find a pop group he could call his own, stumbled upon the man who lit up his adolescence 40 years ago this month: Bryan Ferry. On the first day of November that year, during the half-term break, I walked into Rare Records in Manchester and handed over £1.75 for the first LP by Roxy Music. I hadn’t heard a note, yet it seemed the right thing to do.

John Simpson

End of the Party?

The 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party had begun, and President Hu Jintao was droning his way through his last big speech before stepping down for good. Irritatingly, he raised his voice to a low shout every time he reached the end of a significant sentence. That was when the assembled delegates were expected to applaud, and of course they did. They’d all been issued with copies of his speech telling them precisely where to start clapping. I’d had as much of this as I could take, so I walked out of the grand theatre in the Great Hall of the People into the equally grand lobby outside. It was about the size of a Buckingham Palace reception room. I sat down on the marble staircase and starting writing my report.

Harry De

Bringing obituaries to life

I used to be a foreign correspondent. Sometimes I thought it was a pretty glamorous job. At dinner parties I might occasionally drop hints about the dangerous sorts of places I had been to. But the only people who cared were other foreign correspondents, and then only because they were eager to dwarf my boasts with their own tales of derring-do. To my youthful indignation, nobody else gave a hoot. Now I am the obituaries editor at the Telegraph. Quite a career shift, I’m prepared to admit. These days if people ask what I do I tend to mumble something about being a journalist. But this, I’m afraid to say, is not because I am now wiser and less vain.

Camilla Swift

Seven things to do if you’re not skiing

These days, a winter holiday isn’t just about skiing. The majority of larger resorts offer a range of activities from dog-sledding to five-star spa facilities, while adrenalin-fuelled sports such as snow polo and skeleton bobsleighing are becoming increasingly popular. If you fancy doing something a bit different this year, here are some ideas: 1 If you’re a Cameron-style huskie-hugger, then dog-sledding will be right up your street. By day or by moonlight, you can’t beat the feeling of tucking yourself into your sled, and setting off into the snowy wilderness with your pack of canines. Mush! 2 Sledging is always popular with children and the young-at-heart, and most resorts offer toboggan rental, with specially designed toboggan runs on or near the main skiing pistes.

Mark Palmer

Downhill for generations

My 22-year-old daughter is feeling a little low. Me, too, actually. I’ve just told her there aren’t enough pennies in the coffers to go skiing this season — just as there weren’t last season. I suggested she should get together a group of friends and do it on the cheap but we all know that doing skiing on the cheap means pretending you’re flying down the mountain while parked in your local Costa with a hot -chocolate. ‘We’ll go next year,’ I said. And we will. In fact, I’ve already been in touch with those nice people at -Powder White and I am about to sign up for a 12-berth chalet in Courchevel 1650 that has an open fire, a hot tub on the roof and the promise of freshly baked cake every evening when we get down from the mountain.