Features

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Bullets over the Beeb

Ring, ring, goes the telephone, every hour that God sends. And it’s always some producer from the BBC, ringing me up to ask me on to some programme to stick the boot in to the BBC. Newsnight, The World at One, This Week, BBC Good Morning Biddulph, BBC Top o’The Mornin’ Paddy. It is not enough that they should, like nematode worms which stab themselves to death with their own penises, -simply attack the BBC themselves; they want multitudes of other people to do it, too. ‘Tell me, just how useless is the BBC, and in particular its senior executives? Could they be more useless if they tried?’ This is evidence, if the BBC’s senior managers are to be believed, of the corporation’s honest and open approach to its own affairs.

John Laughland

Travel: Shop like a Roman

When I am in Rome, I do as the Romans — I engage in rampant materialism. The eternal city may be — via the Church which has its headquarters there — the way to heaven; its population, however, is more interested in this world than the next. The city is full of superb shops, as the Italians’ gift for manufacture, and their seemingly effortless creation of beauty, remain undimmed by the advance of modernity. Rome is therefore a perfect destination for Christmas shopping because by visiting it, you can combine limitless consumerism with a warm glow of spiritual self-satisfaction. Isn’t that what Christmas is all about? Taxis and buses are plentiful in Rome but most tourists walk.

Christina Lamb

Is Obama stalking you?

At a wine-tasting-cum-briefing of volunteers at the Democratic Women’s Club headquarters in Washington last month, Obama campaign adviser Mindy Burrell stood up in a flowery dress. ‘Get people to visualise election day,’ she told the women about to knock on doors in the key swing state of Virginia. ‘How will they go and vote? What time will they go — after work? After dropping the kids off at school? What route will they take?’ If people said they planned to vote for President Barack Obama, the women were to ask them to sign a pledge card explaining why, which would be posted back to them just before election day on 6 November. The volunteers, mostly lawyers or wealthy housewives, looked dubious.

Mary Wakefield

‘Die slowly, Christian dog’

There is one main road stretching north-south along the Bekaa valley between Lebanon and Syria. It runs in a beeline from the prosperous little city of Zhaleh, on through a series of villages each with its own religious bent — some Sunni, some Christian — to the border town of al-Qaa, then on into Homs and the bloody mess of the Syrian war. We’re just short of the border when what has been an uninspiring landscape, a wafting sea of plastic bags caught on desert shrubs, springs suddenly to life. Out of nowhere: orchards, vineyards, fig trees; aubergines fat and fallen on the grass. The air is sweet with the smell of apples.

Alisdair Palmer

Repeat offenders

The Prime Minister gave a stirring speech last week in which he outlined the government’s new policy on law and order. The key, he insisted, was to be ‘tough and intelligent’ — which naturally suggested that previous policy had been soft and stupid. The truth, however, is that there is much more continuity between the old policy and the new than David Cameron suggested. One of the ‘new’ policies is ‘two strikes and you’re out’: if you commit two serious violent or sexual offences, you will get an automatic life sentence. Similar regimes have been promised before. Previous Labour governments introduced ‘indeterminate sentences for public protection’ for serious offences.

Charles Moore

Lost in Europe

As you read this, the Conservatives seem to be edging towards some promise, to be contested at the next general election, of a referendum in the next parliament over Britain’s membership of the EU. You can see how far opinion has moved by the fact that government ministers — Michael Gove only last week — can now say that we should contemplate getting out of Europe without the heavens falling in on them. If Mrs Thatcher had said anything like Mr Gove did, she would have been ejected from office at once. Now of course we should welcome all genuine attempts to give our own citizens a fuller say in their constitutional future. At some point, there will have to be a referendum.

Emily Rhodes

Girls’ own

Everyone was so busy celebrating Hilary Mantel’s second Booker Prize victory last week that it was easy to overlook the announcement that another of our literary prizes has been saved from extinction. The Orange Prize had lost its sponsor — but has been rescued by a group of women sponsors, including Cherie Blair. It ought to be a matter of rejoicing — but the notion of a women-only prize is still deeply contentious. The usual complaint is that a prize for literature by women is patronising, outdated, and isn’t fair to men. Despite the fact that pretty much every prize discriminates against something in its entry requirements — be that nationality, age or genre — none seems to generate quite as much fuss as this one.

Prue Leith

A brother’s suffering

My brother David died recently in the care of the NHS. His death was not their fault: no one can do anything about bone cancer except alleviate the pain. Which is what they spectacularly failed to do. Bone cancer does not kill you. It just hurts like hell and your bones become so fragile that coughing breaks ribs. You have to wait for the disease to spread to an organ, the failing of which will kill you. Or you can hope for pneumonia, ‘the old man’s friend’, to finish you off. Either way, you should not have to endure months of pain and die in agony. Pain relief is possible, and many hospices and a few hospitals (notably the Royal Marsden) manage a patient’s dying days with compassion and palliative drugs (notably morphine) tailored to the patient’s pain.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Even if he wins, Obama will be diminished

If a US presidential election has the potential to wear down foreign observers, let alone the American public, imagine what it must do to the candidates. The challenger must spend years campaigning for the endorsement of their own party — fighting rebellions and pandering to diehards — while the incumbent has to work equally hard just to keep in play, while also keeping up the presidential day-job. Perhaps the effects this can have only really sunk in for the President’s supporters as they watched the first debate. His friends have for a while recounted tales of a Commander-in-Chief increasingly disengaged, mooching around the White House as the limitations of the world’s most powerful office sink in.

Harold Evans

Obama’s nightmare

The 2012 US presidential election will long be remembered for the encounters between a sleepwalker and a ghost intent on breaking into the White House. Even now, after one vice-presidential debate and two presidential debates, it is by no means clear which will win. Millions of astonished Americans watched the first televised encounter, which took place in Denver, Colorado on 4 October. Democratic supporters were apoplectic: their supercool and eloquent President, Barack Obama, was transformed into an unresisting somnambulist by a mysterious intruder. The intruder was identified as Willard Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger. But it was hard to be sure, because he assumed so many moderate shapes and positions which the real Romney on the campaign trail had denounced as heresy.

Tim Montgomerie

Which way is right: Tories should seek truth, not comfort

The below is a response to a piece by Spectator columnist Matthew Parris ‘If you look for truth,’ counselled C.S. Lewis, ‘you may find comfort in the end.’ If, however, you look for comfort ‘you will not get either comfort or truth’. A patriotic politician should reflect on Lewis’s wisdom. In good times almost anyone can succeed in politics but in tough times voters expect more. Voters don’t look to elect politicians, but statesmen, and they can usually smell the difference between the two. Statesmen don’t begin every day wondering how they can win power; they begin by thinking about how they can serve their country.

Matthew Parris

Which way is right: the centre holds

Few put a political argument better than Tim Montgomerie, the editor of ConservativeHome, and his latest column in the Times is no exception. Policies portrayed as priorities of the Tory right, he said, are also shared by the majority of the public. Some 70 per cent of Britons want a referendum on Europe and 80 per cent support a tougher approach to crime. He reprised Sir Keith Joseph’s argument about the ‘common ground’ which politicians ought to share with the public. You really can be Eurosceptic and cherish the NHS. It’s possible to favour less immigration and a more generous state pension.

Theodore Dalrymple

Visiting rites

The slowest and most expensive museum refurbishment in world history must be that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is taking longer and costing more than it took and cost to build it in the first place. Let us hope that the result will be magnificent, with all the interactive features that any modern child could desire. For those who cannot wait for the re-opening, however, there is always the branch Rijksmuseum at Schipol Airport. This was an inspired idea, a tranquil space in the middle of the busy airport where the Rijksmuseum displays a changing selection of minor works from the Golden Age. At Schipol recently with a few hours to kill, I visited the branch museum.

Melanie McDonagh

Can you trust a Christian?

For some time we have known about the tension between George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over welfare reform. The Chancellor wanted more welfare cuts, and the Work and Pensions Secretary resisted: real reform, he said, would cost money. So far, so understandable. But a new biography of the Chancellor by Janan Ganesh reveals another element behind the struggle. Ganesh writes that Osborne ‘questioned the analytical rigour of the Christian Conservatives who hovered behind the project’. A Treasury source is quoted making it clearer still: ‘He thinks the people pushing this are such total advocates and evangelicals that they blind themselves to any downsides.’ To put it another way, the Christianity of Mr Duncan Smith and his associates makes them suspect.

Michael Karam

Leaving Lebanon

Beirut is usually a party town, capital of the Middle East’s most glamorous country where people from all over the region come to kick back — but this year’s been a little different. Kidnappings, bank robberies, roadblocks and gun battles — no wonder the free-spending and normally blasé Gulf Arabs have stayed at home, leaving us Lebanese to consider not only a decimated economy, but also the very real prospect of a descent into another civil conflict. Which is why finally, after 20 years, I’m leaving. My Lebanese adventure, during which I married, had children, lived through three wars, a popular revolution and an attempted coup, has come to an end.

Clarissa Tan

I am not my cancer

In the evenings the kidneys came. The helicopter, a bright yellow, would land on the grey cement disc, its blades chopping slower, slower, slow — stop. People in blue scurried from an opening in the building and ran towards the aircraft, hauling from it boxes and bags. These containers held hearts, lungs, livers. The organs were brought into the body of the main building then dispatched in all directions. I could see all this from the high window of my room in Siena. I also saw spectacular Tuscan sunsets, and if it weren’t for the chunky, rounded plastic furniture in the room and the drips in my arms, I would have thought I was in a smart hotel.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Till faith do us part

A girlfriend who was about to get married was telling me about her wedding plans recently when she said, almost as an aside: ‘Oh, and I’ve converted to Islam.’ Her fiancé was a Muslim but she thought it no more than a minor detail — like ordering the corsages, or finalising the table plan — to arrange a private ceremony before the big day in which she took on his faith. I think she expected me to say ‘How lovely. And have you decided on the centre-pieces?’ But instead I blurted out: ‘You’ve done what?’ ‘It’s fine. I really don’t mind,’ she continued, whilst puffing on a Marlboro Light. ‘It was easy. I just had to say a few words and it was done.

Carol Sarler

Not in front of the children

Nobody this side of the indecently callous would wish to rain upon the parade in Machynlleth on Sunday. As it slowly wound its way through the streets towards the local church, we turned away, then watched, then turned away again from the raw faces of people who had spent six days in search and hope that dwindled to despondency and despair. So here we are once again, expecting forthwith to learn more than we would ever want to know, while understanding none of it. I don’t get it and good money says you don’t get it, either. But here’s the thing. If we — reading, reasoning, thinking grown-ups — cannot make a shred of sense of these nightmares, what on earth do we imagine a child to make of them?

Tanya Gold

A tale of three cities

Conference Season: for people watching it on telly, it is noise coming from Huw Edwards’s face, with pictures of people waving. For the rest of us, the devil has blown into town. First come the Lib Dems, in Brighton — the only party sentimental enough to think of candy floss and helter skelters and then of politics. Lib Dems are damp, think damp, love damply: they haven’t been happy since 2010, when power fell on them like a book. Power disorientates them; they have the bewildered look of sheep forced to do algebra. They hate the Tories in their damp way, and only really sit up for Palestine, suddenly aggressive herbivores. There is a party: the Lib Dem Glee Club, in a cavernous room in a hotel, with pink light that makes everyone look like pink zombies, but knitted.

Peter Hitchens

High society | 11 October 2012

How thrilling it is when someone finally stages a demonstration against you. All right, it was a very small protest (one person), and it was in Southampton on a wet Sunday morning. But it was all mine. Stretched by the roadside was a dank bedsheet bearing the words ‘Peter Hitchens is a hypocritical racist alcoholic. Spread your bile elsewhere. No one cares what you have to say.’ I don’t accept this as entirely accurate, but, under the circumstances, why quibble? Also, it made me think. Standing beside it, smirking, was a person in a woolly hat and sunglasses. He had a striking pallor, the sort you might get from spending many months in a basement with a computer, converting sugary drinks into lard.