Features

Thursday

Kelvin MacKenzie

Hillsborough and me

In a few weeks’ time, a couple I have been friends with for the best part of 20 years will be holding a bat mitzvah for their daughter. Anyone who knows even a little about Judaism will know the importance of the event: a celebration for a girl reaching 12, and a great excuse for a great party for friends and families. I would love to have gone but I won’t be there. You see: it’s in Liverpool. And I knew from the emails over the past 23 years and from the anonymous keyboard warriors of Twitter that were I to be seen in the city I would literally be in mortal danger. I am not exaggerating.

Robert Guest

What India does for Britain

Was it the sumptuous leather armchairs? Or the perfect teacups? Or the toothsome selection of custard creams and ginger nuts? I have never sat in a more quintessentially English workplace than the London office of Tata, India’s largest conglomerate. Travellers to India often remark that many Indians love British culture more than Brits do. Where else do airport bookshops offer tottering towers of P.G. Wodehouse novels? Where else is cricket a multi-billion-pound industry? What few people realise is that cultural bonds have economic consequences. Tata not only has executives who sip tea like English gentlemen. It also owns Tetley tea.

Rvaidya Nathan

A passage to India

When my parents emigrated from India in the 1960s, they sought what might be called the ‘-British dream’: stability, opportunity and the chance of a better life in the world’s third-largest economy. So when I told my parents that I was moving to India for the same sort of reasons, they were shocked. India may be going up in the world, but what about the corruption, bureaucracy, pollution and overcrowding? Would I really earn enough money and live in a nice house? It made no sense at all to them that, aged 32, their daughter had chosen to go east — and join a steady exodus which is passing almost entirely unnoticed.

Andrew Petrie

24 hours in Tulsa

Oklahoma will always be a red state on the political map, but the colour goes deeper than that. Everything here was red: red earth, red brick, red dust, red rust. At Little Sahara State Park, 1,600 geologically anomalous acres of iron-rich sand dunes were pinky-orange, the colour of thousand-island dressing. The sitcom Friends had a storyline in which a character accidentally went to Oklahoma, the implication being that that’s the only reason anyone would go there. The state’s position as an unfashionable backwater became a running joke over eight episodes, after which the Friend headed back to civilisation. It was not always thus. So-called ‘wildcatters’ were poking around in the red dirt for black gold at the beginning of the last century.

Liz Anderson

Millionaires’ playground

‘If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.’ Well, Mark Twain, I waited a couple of days and I liked the weather a lot: bright blue skies, warm sun and a cooling breeze off the Atlantic during a September weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. Two days is not long to explore the delights of the town, so here’s my advice for a -whistle-stop tour. Walk up and down the streets, past the variously coloured clapboard houses (some old — dating from the 17th century — some new) that would make Farrow & Ball devotees swoon in admiration. Pause for a while at Trinity Church, built in 1726 by Richard Munday, who based his design on Christopher Wren’s London churches.

Stuart Reid

City that never pales

Ooh, sir! Do you? At your age, sir? Well, yes. Revolting though it may seem, I still love New York. Every time I go there — as I did earlier this month — I fear I am not going to like it, but every time I fall in love all over again. I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that when we are young we are Americans, but when we grow up we become Frenchmen. There is some truth in that. Although I cannot claim to have grown up, I do find as I hurtle towards my seventies that I have more in common with cheese-eating surrender monkeys than with Twinkie-scoffing war-losers. Not that I have anything against Twinkies, mind, and, in truth, I remain -rather fond of Americans, among whom I count a wife and a son. So.

Mark Palmer

Holidays from hell

Everyone thinks travel writing is a doddle. You soak up the sun for a couple of weeks and when you get home the words pour forth, dazzling the reader with wish-I-was-there images. Then you sit back and wait for the cheque to drop through the letterbox while planning your next safari or walk in the rainforest or flop on an Indian ocean beach, encouraged by bubbly travel PRs who tell you that the ‘views are breathtaking’, the food ‘to die for’ and the whole experience ‘the stuff of dreams’. But there’s the problem. The vocabulary sucks. No form of writing is so riddled with clichés or lends itself so easily to the trite and outright banal as travel journalism. And forget a writer’s CV.

Andrew Smith

Banking like it’s 1999

Ten years ago next week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange hit its lowest point ever, as the dotcom crash shuddered to an excruciating conclusion. With Facebook shares now approaching half their May offer price and debate raging over the role of banks in society, this is a good time to ask what we learnt from that enigmatic earlier shock — the answer being not enough. Even by the standard of bubble-induced collapses, the dotcom crash was thorough. The Nasdaq Composite index, which had peaked in March 2000 at over 5,000 points and halved by that year’s end, hit a low of 1,114 in October 2002. By then, almost nothing was left of this pioneering sector, save a trail of eery ‘ghost sites’ on the Web — whose first version, 1.0, was essentially demolished.

James Forsyth

Labour’s lady in waiting

Harriet Harman’s office reflects her status as the grande dame of British politics. Ensconced in a corner of Portcullis House, she enjoys two of the finest views in London, over both the Palace of Westminster itself and Parliament Square. As she ushers me in, the imposing effect is only spoiled by the fact that the windows are in dire need of cleaning. As deputy leader, Harman is, officially, the second most important person in the Labour party after Ed Miliband. She has been an MP for 30 years and is married to a unionist-turned-parliamentarian, Jack Dromey. She knows the party like few others on the Labour front bench. Several of her colleagues, including Miliband, have worked as her advisers.

Jonathan Fenby

Très difficile

François Hollande is nothing if not a traditionalist. French governments of the left usually come to office promising to reject austerity and pursue a holy grail of growth, only to hit the buffers of economic reality on election. In 1936, the Popular Front sought to overturn the orthodoxy of its predecessors after the Great Slump and in 1981 François Mitterrand pledged to escape from Giscard d’Estaing’s rigorous policies in reaction to the first oil shock. After being appointed as the country’s latest finance minister this summer, Pierre Moscovici duly declared that ‘austerity’ was a word he did not like.

John R. MacArthur

The friends Rushdie forgot

One hundred pages into his absorbing new memoir, written entirely in the third person, Salman Rushdie declares that ‘Friendship had always been of great importance to him,’ since so much of his life had been spent separated, physically and emotionally, from his own family. ‘Friends,’ writes Rushdie, ‘were the family one chose.’ The conceit of third person remove can be annoying, but I understand why the author chose it for Joseph Anton, the title of the book and Rushdie’s assumed name during his long period in hiding after the Ayatollah -Khomeini sentenced him to death.

Wednesday

Con Coughlin

Black flags in Timbuktu

The drawback to waging a global counter-terrorism campaign is that, just when you think you have one bunch of Islamist militants on the run, another one pops up to take its place. For all the breakthroughs chalked up by those prosecuting the war against al-Qa’eda, the movement has re-emerged in new guises in Somalia and Yemen. The murderous riots in Libya last week, ostensibly triggered by a homemade American video, were being quickly traced back to what may be the latest and safest home for al-Qa’eda: northern Mali. Those who hoped the war on terror was about to end in Afghanistan have not wanted to think about Mali. But it is growing harder to ignore the fact that al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb now runs a chunk of territory three times larger than Britain.

James Forsyth

In this together

Jeremy Browne looks more like a young subaltern preparing to go to India in 1860 than a typical Lib Dem. He stands ramrod straight, his reddish hair has an officer-class cut. He is always impeccably dressed. Whitehall gossip has it that when he was first appointed to the Foreign Office, the officials couldn’t believe that he was the Lib Dem. He is also, unlike many in his party, comfortable with being in power. ‘I don’t want Liberal Democrats to think we are having to endure these five years of government before we can breathe a sigh of relief, let our hair down and return to the relative comfort of opposition,’ he tells me. When we meet in a drab Westminster interview room, Browne is in robust form.

James Forsyth

The passion of Nick Clegg

In the days before conference, a party leader is usually up to his ears in drafts of his speech, worrying how best to please the crowd. But last Monday, Nick Clegg wasn’t slaving away at his speech. He was at Chequers with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, discussing, according to one participant, a new set of coalition commitments on the economy, education, welfare, childcare and social mobility. It will not please Clegg’s people to hear this. Lib Dems don’t like Tories or mansions, and that their leader was making policy with Dave and George on the brink of conference will cause anxiety.

Anonymous

Dumped by Dave

Divorce is something I have yet to experience personally but Dave’s reshuffle has set me up nicely for any future threat to my own nuptial bliss. Out of the blue comes the call. It’s Dave’s office. ‘We need to talk — can you come over?’ And better I come round the back way to 10 Downing St, apparently, because there’s workmen all over the place at the front. And thus the bell tolls: on reshuffle day, winners are invited through the front door to smile for the cameras. The victims are roughed up around the back. Tentatively, I turn up at Dave’s office. His flunkies, who usually don’t give you the time of day on your rare visits to the No. 10 bunker, are eerily fawning.

Douglas Murray

Free speech betrayed

In Benghazi the ‘spontaneous protestors’ arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and killed the US ambassador. In Kabul the crowds chanted ‘Death to America’. American flags were torched from London to Sydney. But in Washington the Obama administration showed that they weren’t taking any of this personally. It wasn’t about them, but about an excerpt from an amateur film on Youtube called Innocence of Muslims. As they say, keep telling yourself that. If there is one thing people ought to have learnt from a decade of groundhog jihad, it is that there is always a film, novel or cartoon — always an excuse to riot and loot and burn. The odd thing is not that there are people who seize these excuses, but that Western leaders keep supplying them.

Molly Guinness

Applying myself

The harvest is in, the smell of dried leaves is in the air, Parliament’s back in session, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds will start ringing: the university admissions deadline is approaching and someone will need to write their personal statements for them. Everyone who wants to go to university is required to fill in a Ucas form. It’s an administrative task until you get to the dreaded personal statement section, and then you have to call for back-up. The Ucas website encourages students to commit their personality to paper. In no more than 4,000 characters, they should outline key skills and hobbies and explain what’s drawn them to their chosen subject.

Andrew Watts

The new Establishment

The Establishment Club reopens in Soho this week, and it is easy to see why. Peter Cook started the original club in 1961, when there was an unpopular Conservative government, led by a cabal of Old Etonians, presiding over a recession; and the Establishment Club’s Soho premises were at the centre of the satire boom that mocked the Tories and led to their losing the 1964 election. Aside from the satire on the stage, Private Eye briefly had its offices in the club; upstairs there was the studio where Lewis Morley took the photograph of Christine Keeler naked astride a chair which illustrates every article about the Profumo affair. This is the reason for the club’s legend: for the first and only time in English history, it seemed that satire worked.

Matt Ridley

Where there’s smoke

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published 50 years ago this month, effectively marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. ‘Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history,’ wrote Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. Mr Gore reprised this theme on his website earlier this year, proudly comparing Carson’s call to arms over pesticides to his own campaigning on the issue of climate change. He frequently compares the resistance he meets, and Carson met, to that which impeded the battle to establish the link between cancer and cigarette smoking.

Thursday

John Simpson

Rebel island

Hong Kong isn’t what it was. Under British rule it was meek and mild, careful not to rock the boat, forever nervous about its future under China. The rich bought property in Chelsea and Vancouver, put their children into good schools and universities in Britain and America, and did whatever it took to get another passport. Nowadays Hong Kong fizzes with political radicalism. Last week mass student protests obliged the Chief Executive, C.Y. Leung, to cancel the introduction of mandatory ‘patriotism’ classes in schools — that is, lessons for children about the superior nature of Chinese Communism. And the following day, at the Legislative Council elections, the democratic groups won enough seats to make life a lot harder for poor old C.Y.