Features

Saturday

Leah McLaren

Natural born cheaters

Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a ­straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my GP. After sitting close to three hours in a waiting room filled with sweaty pregnant women who looked as if they might kill each other for a sandwich, I was shown into an office by a large 60-something woman in a blue smock holding a clipboard with my notes on it. She wore a name tag but did not introduce herself.

Ross Clark

The Tory delusion

Many a Conservative MP will spend the summer dreaming happily about what the party should do in office once it has freed itself from the shackles of coalition. Few even consider the painful truth — that the coalition party most likely to survive the next election is not the Conservatives but the Lib Dems. Imagine the misery of watching Nick Clegg disappear through the door of No. 10 to begin his second term as deputy PM — this time under Ed Miliband. But it could be worse: it could be Vince Cable, who seems to have decided (in spite of declaring himself too old at 64 to stand for the Lib Dem leadership in 2007) that he fancies a crack at the job in his early seventies.

Daniel Hannan

The pain in Spain

Spain was always going to be where the doom of the euro would be determined. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus amount, together, to less than 5 per cent of the EU’s economy. They can be rescued without emptying the bailout fund. Alternatively, their defaults can be managed as controlled explosions. Spain is in a different category. Europe’s banks are massively exposed there: an explosion could blast the continent’s financial system to splinters. On the other hand, the sheer scale of a rescue package might finally exhaust the patience of the northern European taxpayers. Spain’s agonies were caused directly by the euro. We can’t, as we can in Greece, blame irresponsible local politicians or poor tax collection.

Alasdair Palmer

Mad money

Daniel Kahneman is a very modest man — amazingly so for someone who has won the Nobel prize in economics. When I met him in the lobby of a London hotel, he never used his very great intelligence in the way that some very distinguished economists do, to bully or to intimidate. ‘But then I am not an economist,’ he says with a mischievous smile. ‘I am a psychologist.’ Prof. Kahneman smiles a great deal. His eyes sparkle behind his large spectacles. His cheeriness is infectious, but it is also disconcerting, given that he is not optimistic about humankind. He thinks, for instance, that it will be ‘miraculous’ if we manage to do anything to stop global warming.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Big is beautiful

Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a non­descript dark suit, and, though he has no entourage, is accompanied by a publicist from his publisher; he starts to steal not-so-subtle glances at his watch almost as soon as we have started talking. But Leahy’s awkwardness shouldn’t obscure the truths he has to deliver. He has a bracing analysis of the situation that Britain is in.

Quentin Letts

Easing made easy

Ghastly moment, isn’t it, when at a supper party (worse, at editorial conference or in a meeting with clients) some drawling know-all asks ‘so what do you think about QE?’ Everyone at the table swivels in your direction. Your mental turbines stall, your eyeballs sweat. QE? Is that a conference centre? Cruise liner? A fashionable disease? Anyone who has been through this experience may find useful the following bull-point presentation. With the emphasis on bull. ● On hearing ‘QE’ do not say: ‘You mean that game show fronted by Stephen Fry?’ People may think you are being serious (which in fact you are, but let’s keep that quiet).

Nicholas Farrell

Berlusconi bounces back

As I for one predicted, the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi last November in a palace coup orchestrated by Europe’s bores has made no difference. Italy may well be governed by a dour former economics professor, Eurocrat and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, Mario Monti, but Italy is still in a total mess. So I greeted the news that Silvio il Magnifico, as I call him, will stand for the fourth time as Premier in the next general election by trying to high-five my Italian wife Carla in the kitchen. ‘Dammi un cinque!’ I shouted. Bravo Silvio! Che uomo! Yes, Il Cavaliere (the Knight) is a bit long in the tooth.

Harry Mount

This sheltered isle

This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested by some scientists, that the jet stream had slipped south, pushed downwards by warming polar temperatures.  But then the sun came out, and reason — and cynicism — returned. This summer’s weather is unusual, but it isn’t freakish. If anything, our extreme reaction to not-so-extreme rainfall shows how limited the capacities of the British climate are.

Douglas Murray

Is there any way to stop the infantilisation of Britain

As the world turns to London it may still imagine us a serious, taciturn people. If so, the world is in for a shock. For Britain has become a land all but denuded of grown-ups. We are in the grip of a full-scale, double-dip regression. We were not surprised that our Prime Minister should be addicted to a video game called Fruit Ninja. His predecessor, then in his late fifties, claimed to enjoy listening to teenage pop bands and had a wife who held ‘slumber parties’ for other women in their forties. Stand in any British high street and you’ll see the people to whom these politicians hope to appeal. Most middle-aged British men and women dress as if auditioning for a prequel to High School Musical. Their tastes are indistinguishable from those of adolescents.

Jacob Heilbrunn

The unmaking of the President

When an earthquake hit Washington DC last August, it seemed a freakish event. But in retrospect the damage caused to national symbols such as the Washington Monument seems to have been a portent of the literal collapse of America. The monument will be enshrouded in scaffolding until at least 2014. Even if the cenotaph were in pristine condition, however, tourists might find it rather difficult to see. Washington’s subway system, formerly one of the glories of American public transport, is experiencing breakdowns and deadly derailments as its ageing tracks buckle. Such episodes are not limited to the capital: dismal scenes are being replicated across the country, as bridges collapse and bankrupt states such as California close universities, prisons, hospitals, and libraries.

Saturday

Andrew Gilligan

A matter of taste

With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the overwhelming impression of being run by people with no taste, no imagination, and no idea how to have fun.  I still remember Beijing 2008. I was lucky enough to go. The Bird’s Nest stadium stood there, more random and more beautiful than any mere camera lens could show, its outer tendrils waving in white against a blood-red interior.

Ian Birrell

Africa’s Afghanistan

For centuries, the people of Timbuktu have sought guidance from their Sufi saints. They took pride in the mausoleums of these medieval Muslim holy men, who spread their faith around the world from a city built on the profits of gold, salt and slaves. When I visited six years ago, a teenager showed me around, pointing out the shrines. As we stood by a monument to peace built in 1995 to mark the end of the last Tuareg uprising, with guns embedded in its concrete, I handed him a few coins. He gave them to children standing nearby. ‘My religion says we should share,’ he said. Today, the mood is different. Islamic extremists, who hold the shrines and tombs to be idolatrous, are tearing them apart with pickaxes, iron bars and shovels.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

A good run

I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course as well as anyone and keep the bulls in a herd. This is good, because when fighting bulls are on their own they become the beast of solitary splendour and ferocity you may see in bullrings across Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico and much of Latin America. However, every second week in July, during the festival of Saint Fermín, they are run together as a herd from the corrals to the bullring.

W James-Antle-Iii

America’s third way

For Americans who can’t stand Barack Obama but don’t want to vote for Mitt Romney, November’s presidential elections look bleak. There are other candidates, however, none more obvious than Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico and the Libertarian party nominee. A greying triathlete who once climbed Mount Everest, he may not have a realistic chance of reaching the White House. But he is a politician to be reckoned with, especially since so many Americans are grumbling about the Washington status quo.  As a Libertarian, Johnson favours essentially open immigration. He also wants lower taxes and less state spending than even the vast majority of Republicans.

Michael Henderson

What Federer isn’t

This summer, like so many others in the past decade, belongs to Roger Federer. By reclaiming the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, after giving Andy Murray a set start, the peerless Swiss revealed what true greatness looks like in sporting togs. Seven times a Wimbledon champion, 17 times a winner of Grand Slam events: his record compels not so much admiration as awe, and it will surprise nobody if, next month, he retains the Olympic title he won four years ago. He is, by general assent, the greatest of all tennis players, standing a cubit taller than Rod Laver, the Australian champion of the Sixties, who was at centre court to witness Federer’s latest achievement.

Niall Ferguson

Friedman’s century

Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month. As well as being one of the great economists, if not the greatest economist, of the 20th century, he was also what the Americans call a public intellectual. He was a regular on PBS, the American equivalent of the BBC, writing and presenting Free To Choose, a ten-part series that aired in the late 1970s. He also wrote a column for Newsweek for an astonishing 18 years. Among today’s public intellectuals, it is extremely fashionable today to say that the financial crisis has proved Friedman wrong. You can read that on an almost weekly basis in the New York Times or the Guardian: that deregulation was the problem. But it is extremely hazardous to say in public that anything has proved Milton Friedman wrong.

Nick Cohen

Censorship Olympics

The guards would not let me walk round the Olympic park. ‘We’re in lockdown because of a security alert,’ one explained. The rain fell. The overbearing policing intimidated. ‘London is going to host the Paralympics and the paramilitary Olympics,’ I muttered with unpatriotic grumpiness, as I retreated to the bright lights and piped music of Stratford’s new Westfield centre, only to find another lockdown in progress. David Cameron said the Olympics should be a ‘showcase of national enterprise and innovation’. As far as the enterprising shopkeepers and restaurant managers at Westfield were concerned, the games might as well not be happening.

Saturday

Jrh Mcewen

Joining the conspiracy

You just can’t win with a ­conspiracy theorist. For him or her, the long-established association of conspiracy theory with paranoia goes to show that there is a secret plot to conceal the truth and discredit truth-tellers. However, as Joseph Heller put it, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ And, in any case, perhaps the sanest response to the prevailing conditions is paranoia. Look at the news. There’s the bankers, of course, conniving to rip us off. But even doctors are at it too. GlaxoSmithKline has just been fined $3 billion for convincing them to prescribe inappropriate medicine. Yes, these are indeed high days for conspiracy theories.

Anthony Horowitz

Kindles for kids

‘How do we get children reading?’ the minister asked me, just a week after Michael Gove had got them reciting poetry, more or less by making it illegal for them not to. This was his number two, Nick Gibb, who had invited me to the Ministry of Education for a 40-minute chat. I’m not sure how impressed he was with my thoughts as I’ve heard nothing since, so it seems fair enough to share them with Spectator readers. Who knows? Maybe Mr Gibb is one of them. Politicians have a way of paying lip service to the subject of illiteracy because it is one of those issues that couldn’t be simpler. We want children to read because it’s good for them… right?

John Simpson

Dear boss…

Dear Director General Many congratulations on getting the best job in world broadcasting. Enjoy it as much as you can, while you can; in my 46 years at the Beeb, few directors-general have left as they would have chosen. Several were forced out before their time was up — usually as the result of bad behaviour by governments, Conservative and Labour. Mark Thompson made it through to the end, but I imagine he’s glad to go. His last two years have been overshadowed by a licence-fee agreement which has turned out to be harsher than anything the BBC has ever previously experienced. The shock of it all has become a part of the lives of every one of us. Making good programmes costs money; cut the money, and the quality visibly suffers.