Features

Thursday

Peter Robins

Early edition

If you were to ask the editor of one of our quality newspapers whether he had thought about how to adapt to the internet, he would look at you as if you had been locked in a basement for 20 years, and then tell you that he thinks of little else. And it would be true, sort of. The Kindle, the iPad, new business models for the website: that’s where the clever ideas are. But the printed paper is also affected by the web, and in that realm the conventional wisdom is curiously out of date. You can learn more about the unique advantages of print in the age of the internet from one page of a 1950s newspaper than from a whole edition of one of today’s broadsheets. As it happens, I have a specific page in mind: page six of the Times for 2 June 1953.

Harry Mount

Rural idol

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran. ‘The old farm work was terribly hard on people — there was terrible rural poverty,’ says Blythe. ‘A lot of the people think of depressions in terms of manufacturing and the cities.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Grounds for optimism

Before the summer, the occupants of Downing Street were being worn down by coalition, battered by bad news and demoralised by dire economic data. One No.  10 source says: ‘We were all so depressed we wanted to slit our wrists. But now we’ve got our confidence back.’ This is just as well, for the electoral mountain they have to climb is now considerably steeper. With the boundary review went one of the central planks of the Tory plan for a majority, and Ed Miliband’s conference speech suggested that there’s more political life in him than many had appreciated. But the Cameroons have justified reasons for optimism. First, the coalition is functioning again.

Fraser Nelson

Dave’s going down

By now, it will be clear even to David Cameron that he is on course to lose the next general election. The British electoral system always was rigged against the Conservatives, and his hopes for changing that were dashed by Nick Clegg before the summer holidays, when he scuppered Tory plans for boundary reform. All parties are returning to a new reality: the economic recovery has evaporated, and with it the Tories’ chances of winning next time. An unprepared Labour Party is cruising towards power, under a leader who has just held a surprisingly successful party conference. Every bookmaker now agrees: Cameron is heading for a crash. The Tory party conference, which starts in Birmingham this weekend, ought to be a crisis meeting. How did things get to this stage?

Ross Clark

Up in the air

Like the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 18th-century Anglo-Spanish relations, Heathrow is becoming something of a totem in the fight for the soul of the Conservative party. Whether you prefer your new runways to the east or west of London positions you on the other great issue of the day: who should be leader. If you’re an MP with a constituency anywhere near west London, you’ll probably be in the Cameron camp, shifting uncomfortably in your brogues, wondering how best to perform the Yeo flip and support a third runway at Heathrow. The alternative is of course the Boris camp, whose members think the PM’s plan pathetic. Brave, confident countries build big airports in anticipation of big planes.

James Forsyth

Doctor Hunt

‘I would like to be the person who safeguards Andrew Lansley’s legacy,’ says Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, as he sits in his new office. Hunt is touchingly eager to praise his predecessor. He predicts that Lansley ‘will be seen as the architect of the modern NHS’ and stresses that he is in regular touch ‘to make sure that I learn as much as I can from him, because I don’t think there is anyone who knows more about the NHS than Andrew’. But if Lansley was such a paragon, why was he moved? Hunt replies defensively: ‘You’d have to ask David Cameron about that.

Freddy Gray

The professorial President

Is Barack Obama really as clever as he looks? Ever since he first appeared in the public eye, it’s been taken as read that he’s a major intellectual. Liberals say, in fact, that brilliance is his greatest flaw. He’s too academic, too nuanced; too eager to understand both sides to be an effective leader. The right, meanwhile, regards him as a professorial Marxist, a tenured radical in the White House. Like or hate him, it seems, Barry got brains. But does he? On Wednesday Obama faced Mitt Romney in the first of the three 2012 presidential election debates. The expectation was that the president, the celebrated rhetorician, would come out on top. Romney is hardly the sharpest tool.

Ben Reed

Was Lennon really a genius?

It was 50 years ago today... well, this week, that the Beatles released their first hit single, ‘Love Me Do’, on 5 October 1962. Within 12 months, John Lennon and the other three Beatles were household names throughout the world, and in the years since then Lennon’s reputation has expanded with each new wave of listeners. He even has an airport (Liverpool John Lennon Airport: ‘Above us only sky’). Have we now placed him among the greatest English composers and musicians of all time — say, Dunstable, Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Handel, Elgar and Britten? Will history’s verdict be that Lennon truly deserves to rub shoulders with these geniuses, or was he an accomplished craftsman with a pretty face?

Tom Hollander

Strangers on a train

If I subtracted from my life all the time spent either thinking about sex, or engaging in behaviour calculated to achieve it (by which I mean most of my social life and career choices); or dealing with the consequences of having achieved it (by which I mean all of my romantic life), well, I don’t know how much of my life I’d actually have left. Childhood. The useful bit. Fifteen years ago, in August, I boarded a train in New Orleans bound for New York.The journey time was 29 hours. What to do? Write postcards? Read a book? Try to have sex with someone? It was a sultry afternoon: Spanish moss dangled in a sensuous manner, the edges of things were blurry in the heat. And we passengers would be packed together for a really long time going in and out of tunnels.

S Guru

Tweet revenge

First rule of Twitter: if you don’t use it, you can’t understand it. Nor should you try to: it is a kind of digital crack cocaine for a tiny minority addicted to gossip. In the old days, political gossip had to be exchanged in bars, corridors and (famously) urinals of the Commons. Twitter delivers these fixes straight to the addicts’ mobile telephones. The good news is that anyone can open a Twitter account under an assumed name, and have a little fun with our elected representatives — if you know, or can guess, how their minds work. Last year, I had a go, and became, for a while, a Westminster phenomenon. By then, certain political types were taking advantage of Twitter’s immediacy, reach and power.

Tim Price

Return-free risk

Voltaire said it best: ‘Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.’ Investors seeking certainty — safety, in other words — are in for a shock: there is no longer any such thing. How did we get into such a terrific mess? Rather than rehash the causes of the financial crisis and the current depression, there is a two-word answer: central banks. There was once a more innocent age when central banks performed a sole function: they acted as lenders of last resort to the banking system. To avert a banking panic, central banks would lend to solvent institutions, backed by solid collateral, in times of need. Note those key phrases: solvent institutions, solid collateral. They no longer really exist either.

Alex Brummer

Danger in the mines

The London Stock Exchange recently unveiled a glossy new guide to best practice in corporate governance for companies quoted on its platforms. This must be regarded as a timely exercise, given the increasing domination of the FTSE100 by natural resources groups with operations in the most exotic corners of the world. In its desire to be the world’s IPO capital, the City through the ages has offered a haven to overseas miners. There has been a tendency, however, to overlook their governance, environmental and social failings. In general, mining firms based in the great Anglo-Saxon democracies of the United States, Canada and Australia offer their workers a decent wage and reasonable housing, and adhere to environmental and safety standards.

Jonathan Davis

Profit among the ruins

The place to look for investment bargains, said the fund manager Sir John Templeton, is not where the news is good, but where it is really bad. Today that means looking for advantage amid the volatility and extreme valuations which the crisis in the embattled eurozone has brought in its wake. The strikes and riots that are spreading across southern Europe are exactly the kind of scary scenario in which investors with ice-cold blood in their veins, as one admirer once described Templeton, have historically been able to profit. Since June, the broad European stock market index has risen by 11 per cent, reversing the losses of the previous three months.

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.