Features

Thursday

Philip Delves-Broughton

Hope? Yes. Change? No

What a long and nasty campaign that was. It is hard to imagine that a political race of such magnitude could be so intellectually and emotionally bunged-up. But it’s over, and we can now ask ourselves what the point was of President Obama clubbing his way to another four years of access to the White House gym. What now? Because even after so many months of campaigning, it’s not entirely clear. Certainly not the way it was in 2008, when voters swooned over his promise of hope and change. Then, Obama promised light after the darkness of the Bush-Cheney years. He would bring peace and harmony, end wars and reconcile the partisans of Washington. This time, his promises were more grounded: competence, experience and more of his statist approach to managing the economy.

John Osullivan

Obama’s new majority

‘I’ve come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your vote,’ said President Obama at an emotional ‘last ever’ campaign meeting. ‘Because this is where our movement for change began, right here. Right here.’ And his eyes briefly moistened. The nostalgia was doubtless sincere, and the address correct, but it was misleading to describe his 2012 election campaign as a continuation of his earlier ‘movement for change’. In reality, it has been a smoothly ruthless operation to distract attention from a record that has been disappointingly bereft of change. He triumphed over himself as much as over the hapless Mitt Romney.

Andrew Watts

What the butler did

What has happened to butlers? They used to be the epitome of discretion and loyalty: but last week the Pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, began an 18-month prison sentence for passing documents from his employer’s desk on to a journalist. The trial of Paoletto, or ‘Little Paul’, as the Pope fondly called him, follows the trial of another butler nicknamed ‘Small Paul’, Paul Burrell, who was also found to have concealed his employers’ property in his home. (The main difference was that, despite hints that a Papal pardon might be forthcoming, Gabriele was not rescued from jail by the intercession of an 80-year-old head of state.

James Forsyth

Won’t get fooled again

Few have been more influential in the process of Tory modernisation than Nick Boles. He founded Policy Exchange, the think tank that came up with most of its ideas, and has been a tireless, tieless advocate for the cause. But when we meet in the Palace of Westminster, he is in reflective mood. The first phase of his career is complete (he was elevated to the government in the recent reshuffle) and he wants to talk about what he and his fellow modernisers got right and what they got wrong. Boles is 6ft 6in, but he’s a friendly chap and he smiles a lot so you don’t feel talked down to. After we take our seats, he needs a moment to unfurl his limbs, but he’s soon talking animatedly, keen to discuss whether the financial crash affected the Tory modernisation project.

Roger Scruton

Prayers in stone

No institution is more vividly expressive of the English genius for creative muddle than the Anglican Church. A Protestant church whose liturgy declares it to be Catholic; a national church with a worldwide congregation; a repository of holy sacraments, which is regulated by a secular parliament; an apostolic communion whose authority descends from St Peter, but whose head is the English monarch: looked at from close up it is all nonsense, fragments left over from forgotten conflicts, about as coherent as the heap of broken crockery that remains after a lifetime of marital -quarrels. But English institutions should not be seen from too close. They are best observed from a distance and through an autumnal haze.

Douglas Murray

Beyond a joke

This week the National Theatre opened another new play — its seventh — by Alan Bennett. For those who know only his earlier work, Bennett remains the Queen Mother of British literature, a national treasure adored by all for his cosy charm and twinkly-eyed naughtiness. But anyone who holds this view has clearly not seen, or is blind to the failings of, his recent work. For me, sitting through new Alan Bennett plays has increasingly become like discovering that in old age the Queen Mother developed a sideline as a flasher. Of course, the quality of all writers’ work varies. But few have fallen off so steeply or horribly as Bennett. At one point this original member of the Beyond the Fringe quartet appeared to have real creative longevity.

James Pinkerton

America’s carbon clash

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? In US energy issues today, the irresistible force is broad public support for more energy consumption; the immovable object, on the other hand, is elite opposition to that energy consumption, specifically hydrocarbons. Four-fifths of American energy comes from fossil fuels, and so that accounts for a huge force of folks accustomed to driving their cars, heating their homes, and powering their workplaces by burning oil, natural gas or coal. Yet all that energy consumption — and the 5.2 billion or so metric tons of CO2 that it emits annually — is generating immovable opposition among green-influenced elites. US public opinion is clear enough — it wants more energy, and more consumption.

Dieter Helm

New paths to power

The energy debate is stuck in a rut: all politicians seem to be able to talk about is a narrow set of existing technologies — coal, gas and nuclear power stations, supplemented by wind farms and rooftop solar. Each of these technologies has its own lobby, and they fight each other for subsidies. Should we, like Germany, build more coal power stations, or go for a big nuclear programme, embark on another dash for gas, or build lots more wind farms on- and offshore? In one sense this is not surprising. The abiding feature of the electricity industry over the past century has been its lack of technical progress. Coal power stations are 19th century.

Thursday

Kirsty Walker

What the papers won’t say | 1 November 2012

The chilling effects of Lord Leveson are already being felt in every newsroom in the country — and it is the rich, powerful and influential who are reaping the benefits. I know this because after 17 years working in national newspapers, the last seven of which I spent on the Daily Mail, I have just walked away from a job I loved. The decision — one of the hardest of my life — was driven partly by a desire to spend more time with my young family. But a major factor was the menacing post-Leveson culture in which journalists are already forced to operate. Few journalists will talk about it, but the rules of the game have changed. If you inquire about certain establishment figures or MPs, they make use of the tools they possess to intimidate you.

Nick Cohen

Whose freedom? Whose press?

A love for freedom of the press inspired Milton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, Mill and Orwell. Ringing declarations of the right of citizens to read and write what they choose have run through constitutions and charters of liberties. Modern Britain being the way it is, however, the lofty rhetoric of the past has sunk to debates about celebs and breasts. Specifically, the breasts on page three of The Sun, and the tits who publish them. Evan Harris, tribune of the Hacked Off campaign, makes a plausible argument that an effective press regulator could ban page three girls. After Lord Justice Leveson hears all the evidence of mass wrongdoing by journalists, he is likely to recommend a media authority that would treat journalists as if they were professionals akin to doctors or lawyers.

Sam Tanenhaus

Sandy in the suburbs

We live in the age of managed expectations — of projected outcomes and likely damage. It will be some days before the actual effects of the tropical storm absurdly named Sandy are computer-assessed, news-reported and blog- and Twitter-dissected. And debated too, one suspects. Already some wonder whether Sandy is this year’s ‘October surprise’, meaning, in crassest terms, a question of which of the presidential candidates will profit from it, perhaps even receive a ‘bounce’ in the insta-polls released between now and election day (next Tuesday).

Timothy Gowers

Should Alice marry Bob?

Two problems: 1. You are in an airport and are walking from the main departure lounge to a rather distant gate. On the way there are several moving walkways. There is a small stone in your shoe, which is annoying enough that you decide that you must remove it. If you want to get to the gate as quickly as possible, and if there is no danger of your annoying other passengers, is it better to remove the stone while on a moving walkway or while on stationary ground, or does it make no difference? 2. You want to give £1,000 to somebody as a 21st birthday present. The person in question is just about to turn 16. A savings scheme offers a guaranteed interest rate of 3 per cent for the next five years, provided you save the same amount at the beginning of each year.

Matt Ridley

Losing the ashes

I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of hope in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are not clones — uniformly vulnerable to the pathogen. But it’s only a glimmer: tree parasites, from chestnut blight to pine beauty moth, have a habit of sweeping through species pretty rampantly, because trees are so long-lived they cannot evolve resistance in time. The Forestry Commission’s apologists are pleading ‘cuts’ as an excuse for its failure to do anything more timely to get ahead of the threat, but as a woodland owner I am not convinced.

Hugh Grant

What I’m fighting for

I’m often asked why I keep banging on about the press. Am I a lefty? I’m not. I’m not a righty either. I drift. (And in terms of impartiality, by the way, the same goes for Hacked Off – as a campaign group we are determinedly hermaphrodite.) Am I a muzzler? I really don’t think so. I recoil from the dead hand of the state. I grind my teeth when they swipe my passport at UK immigration. Do I want to be a moral arbiter? Hardly. Rupert Murdoch recently called me a scumbag. Harsh, but I see where he’s coming from. So am I a whingeing celeb? No, in that it really isn’t all about getting caught with my trousers down in 1995. That was a matter of public record, so how could it not be reported?

Miles Goslett

Leveson and Jimmy Savile

Last December I received a telephone call concerning Jimmy Savile’s apparent sexual abuse of underage girls in the 1970s. The details I heard were pretty chilling, but the negative reaction when I tried (unsuccessfully) to report the claims in the national press was equally troubling. There is every indication that the Leveson inquiry into press standards was to blame. My source said that a Newsnight investigation into Savile’s activities had been shelved by the BBC in mysterious circumstances and encouraged me to find out more. I learnt that Newsnight had heard that Savile and two other celebrities, both still alive, had abused many different girls on BBC premises and in the Surrey countryside, when Savile visited an all-girls approved school called Duncroft.

Alex Brummer

Turning toxic again

Five years after the run on Northern Rock, four years after the epoch-making crash of Lehman Brothers, the clouds over Britain’s banking sector remain as dark as ever. We may have been the first country to recapitalise our banks when the crisis struck, but as the years have unfurled the sheer scale of the legacy of the ‘nice decade’ (1997-2007, ‘nice’ being the Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King’s acronym for non-inflationary consistent expansion) has been revealed, and regulators have begun to wonder out loud whether further injections of capital may be needed before the repair job is completed. It is often forgotten just how big a role the wider financial sector plays in Britain’s economy.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Reform at last

A decade ago I wrote here about the way financial advisers are paid. I told you how, instead of giving you a bill, your adviser is allowed to sell you investment products in exchange for a commission from the product provider plus a cut of your assets every year for as long as you continue to hold those products. So if you buy an investment fund from an independent financial adviser (IFA), he will receive a payment up front and then another payment every year,  whether you ever have the good fortune to come across him again or not. All these payments will come out of your money — you just won’t know much about it.

Jonathan Davis

Markets love lame ducks

Next week’s too-close-to-call US presidential election must make a big difference to the way stock and bond markets perform over the next few years — or so you might think. Yet experience suggests that investors should probably stifle a yawn rather than place too much significance on whether Obama or Romney comes out ahead. In practice, markets rarely assign as much importance to the outcome as politicians and their supporters think they should. For this there are some sound historical reasons. One is that hardly any politician ever succeeds in implementing everything he or she has promised in order to get elected.

The Spectator

All together now | 1 November 2012

Fraser Nelson British politicians have long dreamt of regulating the press, but have always been hampered by the basic point that the press isn’t theirs to regulate. Only now, with the industry on its knees, do the enemies of press freedom feel able to strike. Their hope is to appoint a press watchdog who would stand well back at first, but be able to tighten the screws if need be. The less scrupulous MPs believe that from that moment on, power will shift. They will be able to speak softly to journalists, while carrying a very big stick. I had a taste of this last month when a senior MP telephoned me asking me to discipline a Spectator writer who had displeased him on Twitter.

Thursday

John Simpson

What should happen now?

If you work for the BBC, you dislike seeing the outfit’s name in the headlines. It usually means the BBC is in trouble. No good complaining that much of the British press (to the bewilderment of people outside the country) have it in for the BBC, big time. Nor is it any good pointing out that there are a few politicians with an intense longing to dismantle the BBC altogether. These are facts of corporation life, and always have been. Its top executives have to ensure it doesn’t provide its existential critics, tiny in number but always noisy and weirdly angry, with ammunition. This time the BBC has handed them a veritable ammunition dump.