Features

Saturday

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.

Tristram Hunt

Gove’s paradox

By any standards, the Education Secretary is good news for history. He knows the subject, he likes the subject, and his ‘English Baccalaureate’ is already producing a marked upturn in pupils studying the past. Sadly, Michael Gove is also a Conservative — and a deeply ideological one at that. He has a certain vision of history and, with it, a ‘drum and trumpet’ view of what should be taught in our schools. I would be happy for pupils to learn this aspect of our past. But the problem the Education Secretary faces is how to marry that passion for Whiggish British history with an equally strong determination to liberalise the education system.

Ian Thomson

The tide turned

A couple of years ago, a rescue operation was recorded at a lifeboat station in Poole, Dorset. ‘The boat was launched at 13.35p.m. following a call that a man and two children were stranded on rocks in the vicinity of Lulworth Cove. The wind was south-south-west force three. Visibility good. We reached the scene at 13.45p.m. The man and two children — one boy, one girl, both under five — were taken off the rocks and landed at an adjacent cove into the care of a local coastguard mobile unit.’ The report concluded: ‘The man’s name and address were not obtained.’ I can now reveal that the man was myself. At about noon that day, I had dug a pit in the sand for my children to muck about in, while I sat reading a book.

Saturday

Neil O'Brien

Another country | 14 April 2012

London’s separateness from the rest of Britain becomes more pronounced every year London has always been different from the rest of the country. But in recent decades the differences have widened to the point that, economically and socially, the capital now has little in common with the rest of Britain. The city may be hosting the Olympics in July, but none of those attending should kid themselves that they have visited Britain. London has effectively left the UK; it belongs instead to a loose international federation of global cities united by their economic dynamism and cosmopolitanism and the people who flit between them. This leads to a big problem: Londonitis.

Jonathan Fenby

Buried in China

Despite our government’s best efforts, we’ll probably never know why Neil Heywood died Dealing with China is never easy, as everybody from Margaret Thatcher (over Hong Kong) to Barack Obama (over everything from currency issues to who is going to be top dog in the Pacific) has discovered. Now David Cameron and William Hague find themselves embroiled in the biggest political earthquake in the People’s Republic since the protests that led to the killings in Beijing in 1989. At first, the death of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, in a hotel room in the city of Chongqing in western China last November did not seem to be an event of political importance.

Fraser Nelson

Sweden’s secret recipe

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result. Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right.

Peter Mckay

Plucking heartstrings

Why I’m proud to play the banjo The death last week of legendary banjo player Earl Scruggs was marked by generous obituaries. He fashioned a style of playing now copied worldwide. In 2004, his instrumental ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ — theme music for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde — was chosen by the US Library of Congress for the National Recording Registry. He died at 88. So, a good innings. No doubt he’s now playing elsewhere. As they say in Nashville, ‘The good Lord likes a little pickin’ too.’ A friend wonders how I ‘defend’ playing — or, more accurately trying to play — the banjo. As if it’s a type of discriminatory behaviour now forbidden.

Anne Wareham

Please shut the gates

Eighty-five years ago the National Gardens Scheme was created and blighted gardens in the UK forever. And in this anniversary year we will be bored silly by the praises sung of it. Starting as a scheme to let everyone, even the hoi polloi, into posh gardens for a donation to charity, it now dominates the garden world, tainting all it touches. Somehow the belief has grown that the gardens under the scheme are great, quality gardens. The reality of their predominant mediocrity can never be confronted because, my dear, it’s all for good causes. Good gardens, awful gardens, nonexistent gardens such as Antony Woodward’s rather vacant plot on an inaccessible Welsh hillside — all may come to the party and be bathed in a rosy glow of goodwill and piety.