Features

Thursday

Michael Henderson

Roy of the reader: swapping novels with my friend Roy Hodgson

The last time I met Roy Hodgson, at Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh’s restaurant in Bayswater, I drew a king from the pack. I presented Roy — the West Bromwich Albion and now England manager — with Colm Tóibín’s wonderful novel The Master. Roy smiled as he laid down an ace: ‘Is this the one about Henry James? I’m afraid I’ve read it.’ Make that one-all. At a previous lunch I had given him Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece, Beware of Pity, a novel so close to my Habsburg heart that I wanted him to love it, too. It is the sort of book that defines character, never mind literary taste. ‘Magnificent,’ he told me a few weeks later.

Claire Fox

Freedom also comes in pink

Women of the world unite: a sinister patriarchal plot is out to get us. Evil tobacco companies are conspiring to seduce us by wrapping up ‘our poison’ in shades of ‘pale or pastel colours’. There is concern in public health circles that the dark arts of design, armed with images denoting ‘femininity, style, sophistication and attractiveness’, will result in us losing our pretty little heads. Or so says Cancer Research UK, keen to save us from our womenly weakness, with their latest research report published yesterday. Cancer Research UK are outraged that ‘research shows’ Big Tobacco is packaging brands of cigarettes specifically to appeal to women. I am not sure which part of this argument is most insulting.

Peter Jones

Digging deeper

With the life and literature of the whole ancient world spread before us for our pleasure, we ­classicists can be said to lead lives of unparalleled hedonism. But the secret is leaking out. The whole world seems to want a taste, and we cannot blame it in the slightest. History has its Schama, maths its Du Sautoy and ­environmental studies the grand-daddy of them all, the great David Attenborough. So who will risk themselves and their reputation in the hands of the producers with the 42-inch mentality to satisfy this growing appetite?

Judi Bevan

Investment Special: Tough times for shopkeepers

The high street’s double-dip winners and losers As austerity bites, competition in the high street grows ever more ferocious. Only the nimble and well-financed can thrive. While January and February showed some improvement and sunshine helped boost sales in March, the trend looks likely to be lower again in April. ‘The situation remains fragile,’ said Judith McKenna from Asda, chair of the CBI retail survey panel. ‘Consumers are still holding off from buying bigger ticket items, and opting to spend on smaller “treat” purchases that give them a lift without breaking the budget.’ According to Asda’s Income Tracker, the average UK family has only £144 of weekly disposable income to spend, a fall of 6.5 per cent from a year ago.

Alex Brummer

Investment Special: Patently profitable

Here is something you may have missed if your eyes have been focused on the gyrations in bond and equity markets as euroland crises have come, gone and come again. The S&P 500 telecoms and IT index, the bellwether of digital stocks, has climbed 120 per cent from its 2009 low. All of us who lived through the exuberance of the tech bubble of 2000, when all you has to do was add ‘.com’ to a company name and watch the fireworks, have a right to be sceptical about this latter-day boom. The rise and rise of Apple to become the most valuable firm in the world, with a market capitalisation of more than $600 billion, has led some analysts to quote the S&P minus Apple to get a better perspective.

Tim Price

Investment Special: On the defensive

These are dark days for investors. Interest rates squat at historic all-time lows in order that the Bank of England can continue to bail out our errant banks and government. Western economies toil under a monumental burden of public and private-sector debt, to which austerity is merely the latest desperate political response. Securities and currency markets are all being manipulated by extraordinary and highly inflationary monetary stimulus. Safe havens, anyone? The situation is doubly challenging for anyone in or approaching retirement. By artificially suppressing the yields available on UK government bonds or gilts, and therefore annuities, through its absurd policy of quantitative easing (a.k.a.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

It has to be Boris

The government’s failings have hampered his campaign but he must prevail A few weeks ago, Mich­ael Gove addressed a crowd of Tory activists in the basement of a London hotel. He wanted to disabuse them of what he regarded as a dangerous notion. The London mayoral election, he said, was not about Boris Johnson vs Ken Livingstone; the stakes were far higher than one man for one city. They had nationwide implications. This is a critical moment in the lifetime of parliament, he said, which will set the trajectory for the next few years — for good or for ill. The London election was one of these very rare ‘watershed binary moments’ for British politics as a whole. The Education Secretary spelled out the two alternatives.

Tanya Gold

Handshake fatigue

On the campaign trail with London’s would-be mayors The mayoral election is, to my eyes, two pantomime dames bickering about who gets to eat the scenery. I join it at the church hustings, St James’s Piccadilly. Boris Johnson enters, hands deep in hair, five points ahead in the polls. He sits down and gives the audience that swift, forensic look. Ken is at the other end of the table — he is tanned in a tan suit, a man who might walk into a desert and be lost. Brian Paddick and Jenny Jones separate them; it’s safer that way. The chair, George Pitcher, is a Richard Curtis-themed vicar, with glowing cheeks and the swollen remains of a once fine profile.

Ian Osborne

Election night with the Sarkozys

Election night in Paris is a very different affair from our own, rather sober ritual, for which the nation looks to a reassuring David Dimbleby. To begin with, the night is over when the exit polls are published the moment the polls close at 8p.m. All the major candidates compete to address the live television audiences immediately, and before any actual results have been certified. ••• Meanwhile, the news networks appear not to have discovered the Skycopter™, so the journey from candidates’ residences to victory parties (or otherwise) is a bizarre ritual where young overexcited reporters perched on the back of motorbikes chase the motorcades, defying death with late-night chases, trying valiantly to penetrate blacked-out windows as they speed through Paris.

Tom Bower

Dangerous liaisons | 28 April 2012

Ever since Andy Coulson was forced to resign as Downing Street’s media supremo, Westminster’s malcontents have gossiped about the prospect of Rupert Murdoch wreaking revenge for Cameron’s impulsive creation of an inquiry into press ethics. More recently, cynics whispered that the Sunday Times exposure of Peter Cruddas, the Conservative treasurer offering access to the Camerons in exchange for donations, was the gypsy’s warning of horrors to come. And now we have the revelations about the Murdochs’ secret negotiations with the government to take full control of BSkyB. The Murdochs’ appearance this week at the Leveson inquiry fatally threatens the Cameron project and probably destroys Tory hopes of recovering their reputation for competence and honesty.

Mark Mason

Get a grip, chaps

There’s too much male blubbing in public life Last Sunday’s London Marathon had me in tears. Not as I battled agonisingly through the wall at 20 miles. No, I was at home on the sofa, with the digestives. And yet again — it happens every year — I blubbed softly at the inspirational tales, the people running in memory of friends who’d died, the sheer personal achievement of everyone involved. This year, though, another thought entered my reckoning. It was the memory of another male who confessed to crying at the television: Ed Balls. A couple of months ago he told how he often cries at the Antiques Roadshow, when someone says that a family heirloom means more to them than any amount of money. ‘Incredibly emotional,’ he called it.

John Arlidge

Cuba Notebook

Like all odd places, Cuba attracts odd people. When I first started visiting in 1993, straggle-bearded men boarded the Soviet-built Air Cubana jet from Stansted. Where to go first, comrade, they wondered? The tractor factory at Cienfuegos or the collective tobacco farm in Trinidad? Like the Cubana flights, the fellow-travellers have long departed. Still, it’s reassuring to find Cuba still attracts oddballs. Sitting next to me on the Virgin flight from Gatwick are two middle-aged Glaswegians. He’s a trainspotter, she’s a twitcher. They ignore the food, booze and movies and fill orange notebooks with lists of the diesel locomotives and warblers they want to tick off.

Tilly Ware

Travel Special – Dorset: The glories of the West

Tilly Ware explains why she’s still in love with the landscape of her childhood – and you should be, too My husband, three sons and I march single file along the grassy ridge, spotlit by the last of the low winter sun, the holly and hazel trees below already beginning to blacken. High up and alone on Eggardon hillfort in West Dorset, we have left the half-dozen other visitors steaming up their windscreens at the roadside viewpoint and slalomed up and down four sets of ramparts until we stand right on the outermost rim. There’s a good chance of spotting attacking Romans: my sons have their stick-daggers poised. But I’m not paying attention. The 20-mile view keeps dragging my eyes upwards and outwards.

Jeremy Clarke

Travel Special – Devon: Bleak beauty

I overheard the following inter-cubicle exchange in a mixed changing room recently. ‘So where do you live?’ ‘We live on Dartmoor.’ ‘Dartmoor! How lovely!’ ‘Well, yes, it is amazing. But we’ve had quite enough of it now and we’re moving back down to the coast. In the two years we’ve lived up there, we’ve had enough rain and fog to last us a lifetime.’ I smiled as I stuck my right leg through the wrong hole of my swimming shorts. Very wet, Dartmoor is. In fact sodden might be a better word. It rains for days on end. The 365sq mile plateau is the first port of call for rain blowing in off the Atlantic. Seventy inches of rainfall spread over 200 days of the year is not unusual. And she’s right about the fog, too.

Tremayne Carew-Pole

Travel Special – Cornwall: From Pasties to parmigiano

Back in the 1970s, pasties were what Cornwall was all about. I spent my childhood sitting in a howling gale on a Cornish beach eating a soggy pasty behind a striped wind break, retrieving Auntie K’s straw hat every few minutes when it flew like a drunken Frisbee towards the sea. The weather might not have changed much in the last 40 years, but the food and culture has. Cornwall, has morphed from a county of caravans and pies into a British Babylon. The renaissance happened in the 1990s when culture started to arrive in Cornwall. The Tate kicked it off — a glittering gallery reflecting the surf of St Ives; intellectuals and aesthetes paying homage to Alfred Wallace, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

French farce | 21 April 2012

The first round of the French presidential election is a national carnival that seldom disappoints. If Sunday’s vote follows the opinion polls, only President Nicolas Sarkozy with 28 per cent of the vote and his Socialist party opponent François Hollande (a predicted 27 per cent) will remain in the ring. The country will then be faced with the real choice of who is to run France for the next five years, but the elimination of the eight outsiders will have taken most of the high spirits out of the campaign. The first round is the roll call of true believers. Three of the current candidates are Trotskyists (or ex-Trotskyists) and four have never scored more than 1.5 per cent in the opinion polls.

Leo McKinstry

A mayor for Whitehall

Siobhan Benita’s sanctimonious and mystifying bid to run London Ken Livingstone wept last week at the launch of his election broadcast, but when it comes to narcissistic self-pity, he’s been outdone by Siobhan Benita. ­Benita’s the other candidate in the London mayoral contest, the one who isn’t Boris or Ken or Brian or that Green woman. A former civil servant now running as an independent, she’s spent the last month wailing about lack of coverage. She claims she is the victim of a media ‘blackout’ — excluded from televised debates and banished from the airwaves. So great is her fury that she has even demanded a meeting with BBC executives.

James Forsyth

Job scheme

Chris Grayling’s job is to make sure that British people can get jobs. But he faces a problem. Since the election, 90 per cent of the rise in employment is accounted for by foreign-born workers. As Employment Minister, Grayling is painfully aware that there is a very large difference between importing workers and creating jobs. When we meet in his sparsely decorated ministerial office, he is frank about the scale of the problem. ‘There is no doubt,’ he says, ‘that a young person coming out of school, college or university without the experience [of work] is at a disadvantage compared to someone coming into the UK from overseas.

Christopher Booker

Rings of steel

Last August I was intrigued to learn that the cash-strapped Cornwall county council was spending hundreds of pounds advertising for a ‘project officer’ at £400 a week to assist in ‘the successful delivery of the Olympic Torch Relay in May 2012’. The lucky applicant’s job would be ‘to raise awareness of this event throughout Cornwall’, while ‘stimulating excitement for the London 2012 Olympic Games’. My earliest memory of the Olympics is of getting up at 3 a.m. in 1948 to stand by a roadside in Chard, Somerset, to cheer a lone runner as he carried the Olympic flame past us in the darkness for that year’s yachting events in Torquay.

Florence King

To your health

Fredericksburg, Virginia The huge popularity of your TV show Doc Martin here in the US has nothing to do with the balmy Cornish setting. What really turns us on are the scenes in the Doc’s surgery, where no one ever pays a bill. Contrast that with the bedlam of an American doctor’s office. A panicky patient hunched over the front desk waving his insurance card at the frazzled nurse as she waits on hold for a claims adjuster in a distant state to rule on how many haemorrhoids are covered. When the adjuster finally comes on the line she can’t hear him because the panicky patient lobs a barrage of questions and instructions at her. ‘Tell him it’s not a co-pay because I just had one operation, not two.