Features

Saturday

Douglas Davis

Out of the east

If the test of the Arab Spring was its treatment of minorities, it has failed. Hopes that the region was poised to make the transition to liberal democracy have proved to be premature, trampled under the boots of the ethno-religious cleansers. The old-style corrupt despots have metastasised into even older-style Islamist xenophobes. The Arab world, already judenrein, now seems determined to slough off its Christian minority. A few weeks ago, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Amdullah, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, responded to a question posed by a visiting Kuwaiti delegation. Would sharia permit churches to exist in their emirate? The sheikh’s response was categorical.

Ed West

Iraq’s Christian exodus

The Arabs once had a saying about the British: ‘Better to be their enemy, for that way they will try to buy you; for if you are their friend, they will most certainly sell you.’ For Iraq’s Christians it has proved to be sage advice. It is a lesson learned by a 25-year-old engineering student Wissam Shamouy, an Assyrian Orthodox Christian from Bakhdida in Nineveh province, who fled after jihadis gave him a second warning: leave or die. Shamouy’s mother paid a Kurdish smuggler to take him to Turkey and from there he made his way to England because he spoke the language, and was told Britain helped with ‘humanity protection’. Instead, he was arrested for arriving with false documents and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for 122 days.

Ross Clark

Cameron’s tragic flaw

The PM’s problem is not poshness, but impoliteness Premierships do not end in failure, as Enoch Powell once asserted, but in tragedy. They start with a beaming figure disappearing behind the door of No. 10 — even Edward Heath, immortalised now as the Incredible Sulk, entered with a radiant grin. And they end with a haunted shadow of a politician creeping out to a waiting car, his every character flaw having been chiselled to destruction. Over the past week, the tragedy of David Cameron has become apparent. It may be a few years before he leaves office, but from here onwards the narrative is clear.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A hymn to the organist

Some people swoon over film stars. I swoon over organists. Good organists, that is, not bad organists. Bad organists I refer to as ‘dominant males’, because the only two chords they play are the tonic and the dominant. Good organists are upholders of some of the highest musical expertise in the land. When you hear the stops being pulled out for the voluntary on Easter Sunday (will it be Bach? Will it be Widor?), spot the organist, and see if you experience a frisson. Here are ten reasons for my partiality. The muscle at the far edge of the palm of each hand. (The one giving strength to the little finger.) It’s amazingly strong. I’m much more interested in this muscle in a man than in his abdominals or, worse still, his biceps.

Mary Wakefield

Is Dan the man?

I first heard the name ‘Dan Jarvis’ on a dance floor at a wedding in Bath. ‘Move like Jagger’ was thumping through the speakers, and most people had given up trying to chat, but I’d been collared by a cavalry officer who was damned if he was going to let disco get in the way of his politics. ‘Not enough soldiers in the Commons,’ he yelled at me, ‘and the ones who are there are a bit flawed. There is one chap though,’ he paused for effect: ‘Jarvis, he’s called Dan Jarvis. A Labour MP, but who cares? He’s a proper soldier. Just what the country needs. Should be prime minister. I’m telling you.’ The glitterball threw a veil of little lights over his military chin.

Andrew Gimson

Class system

When my wife said she thought we should educate our three children at comprehensive schools, it was with a degree of trepidation that I went along with her. I was thankful to save the several hundred thousand pounds it would probably have cost to send them to fee-paying schools, money which I at least showed scant sign of being able to earn. But I wondered whether the education would be good enough. Like many a middle-class parent, I was frightened of a system of which I had no personal experience. My parents had tightened their belts to pay for my schooling, and I feared I was failing to give my children the advantages I had myself enjoyed.

Mick Brown

Was Chris for real?

I still don’t know whether I’ve been had I have been wondering what to do about Chris…. Well, I call him Chris, but the truth is that I’ve only met him once and I’d hardly say our brief acquaintance qualifies as friendship. How does one get oneself into these quandaries? Four weeks ago, I was walking along Buckingham Palace Road, towards the coach station, when I noticed Chris. He was a couple of steps ahead of me, talking on the telephone, and in a state of agitation. He was talking to a friend. His father had died that afternoon, and he needed to borrow the fare — 30 quid — for the coach to Leeds. Could his friend help? I was alongside with him by then, and glanced over.

Leo McKinstry

Lack of appeal

Here we go again. Like a macabre version of Groundhog Day, mass murderer Jeremy Bamber is making yet another bid for freedom. This nasty legal saga has been dragging on for almost 26 years, ever since Bamber was first found guilty of the savage massacre at his family’s farmhouse in rural Essex. By a majority verdict, the jury at Chelmsford Crown Court decided that in the early hours of 7 August 1985, Bamber had shot dead his adoptive parents, Nevill and June, his sister Sheila Caffel, and her young twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas. No fewer than 25 rounds from an Anschutz .22 semi-automatic rifle had been fired at the victims, almost all from point-black range.

Saturday

Daniel Knowles

Battle of the generations

Are the young bearing the burden of the deficit? Should the older generation bail them out? Baby-boomers must pay up Daniel Knowles The baby-boomer generation is the most cosseted, untouchable, powerful generation in our history. To say so isn’t pensioner-bashing, but simply stating a fact. That is the lesson of the outcry over last week’s ‘granny tax’ in George Osborne’s Budget. Even as those in every other generation have seen their incomes fall, and had to consume less, the elderly have been completely protected from Osborne’s axe. Yet when the Chancellor decides to close a tax loophole which fewer than half of those eligible even use, it is denounced by the pensioner lobby as an ‘outrageous assault’.

John Simpson

A new Argy-bargy

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires is as exhilarating, as unpredictable, as stylish as ever. But the economic boom is over. Times are hard once again, more shops in Calle Florida are boarded up, the sales are pretty frantic. And so, as Jorge Luis Borges, the blind sage of Calle Maipu, just off the superb Plaza San Martin, once remarked: ‘When Argentina’s economy goes bad, you can be sure that nationalism will soon be beating its wings.’ Argentina’s President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, beautiful, combative and ruthless, was already pretty nationalistic when the economy was doing well.

Patrick Marnham

Sarkozy springs forward

There’s nothing like a crisis to rescue an ailing candidate Yes, he’s back. Just when the French Socialists thought that they were jogging into the Elysée Palace for the first time in 17 years, a discredited president has remounted his favourite war horse, a national security crisis, and with three weeks to go before the first round on 22 April, the left has a fight on its hands. Ten days ago, most commentators agreed that François Hollande merely had to keep his head and events would take their inevitable course. Nicolas Sarkozy, a deeply unpopular president, was about to disappear into the wastepaper basket of history.

Ollie Lewis

Little Pyongyang

There is perhaps one thing that unites radicals and revolutionaries from all countries, and most ages: London. At some point or another, most of the great political dissenters and activists, Voltaire, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Sun Yat-sen and even Ho Chi Minh have found themselves on the streets of our capital, plotting and writing in tiny back rooms. For 300 hundred years, it has been famous for its political tolerance in a temperamental and oppressive world. And as I’ve discovered, London is once again a home to revolutionaries; to defectors from the planet’s most oppressive regime. NovemberI am sitting in a small underground room lit by a dingy orange lamp. A small group of North Korean exiles sit around me.

Peter Lampl

Lessons in democracy

How to make our private schools open to all To look at David Cameron’s Cabinet is to see that Britain has a deep problem with social mobility. As in the Cabinet, the privately-educated are disproportionately represented in every sphere of British life, from politics to pop music. Almost three-quarters of high court judges, more than half of leading news journalists and a third of our MPs were educated at independent schools, which educated just 7 per cent of pupils. What is relatively new to Britain is that these elite independent schools should be the preserve of the rich. A sprinkling of bursaries and scholarships (not means tested) exist to these schools but they make very little difference.

Keith Ward

Lost faith

It is hard not to see the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury as a judgment on the Anglican Communion. Here was an intellectually formidable, spiritually profound, morally courageous leader whose job was made unbearable by gangs of intolerant, uncharitable, divisive and squabbling intellectual minnows. The event should give the Church of England, and those most responsible for its future, pause for thought. Is it really going to have to look for a leader who has the constitution of an ox and the hide of a rhinoceros as his chief qualifications? Is it going to have to admit that it is not looking for spiritual, moral or intellectual leadership, because that would cause controversy? There are some truths about the C of E that some people seem afraid to state.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Web exclusive debate report: ‘Immigration: Enough is Enough’

The Spectator recently held a debate at the Royal Geographic Society with the motion ‘Immigration: Enough is Enough’. Proposing it were Frank Field MP, Dominic Raab MP and Kiran Bali MBE JP. Opposing were Oliver Kamm, Jenni Russell and David Aaronovitch. Andrew Neil chaired. Here is Lloyd Evans' review: ‘I’m a coward,’ admitted Frank Field, the Birkenhead MP, proposing the motion. For years, his Labour party membership had prevented him from speaking out about immigration. ‘But when we had huge numbers coming in from eastern Europe, I knew it was safe to move.’ Primarily this is an English issue because, ‘for reasons I can’t fathom,’ migrants tend to shun Wales and Scotland.

Jonathan Fenby

Cracks in China

The downfall of Bo Xilai has been the closest thing the Chinese get to a proper public scandal. Here was the attention-seeking boss of the mega-municipality of Chongqing, a colourful rock star in the country’s monochrome politics, sacked in mysterious circumstances that gripped a gossip-hungry nation. China’s authorities this week even felt compelled to ban the word ‘coup’ from microblogging sites, amid wild speculation that an overthrow was in the offing. The choice of Bo’s successor, a trusted establishment figure, suggests that the authorities who ousted him have had enough of big personalities in politics — but the truth is more complex. For all its pride in its growth, the People’s Republic is wracked with uncertainty about its future.

Andrew Gilligan

The retirement of Rebus

No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforce Here is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now. But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan ­Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night. In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born.

Leo McKinstry

Give me strength

Carlsberg Special Brew is the beer of Churchill, Kingsley Amis – and me. They can’t ban it I have a confession to make: I am writing this article under the influence. As I tap away at my laptop, a can of lovely Carlsberg Special Brew sits on the table beside me, acting on my brain as oil acts on a car engine: lubricating the moving parts. Ever since I found that it could help to speed up my word output, strong Danish beer has been essential to my writing career, so it’s a great shock to discover that the government has Special Brew in its sights. Carlsberg Special is perhaps the most notorious of the super-strength lagers on sale in Britain today.

Clarissa Tan

Baby economics

How – and why – ten-year-olds are being taught to run a business There’s an excited buzz in the Year 6 class of Yeading Junior School, in outer London. The ten-year-olds recently set up a polytunnel in the school grounds, and now they’re deciding which vegetables to plant in the new polythene greenhouse. Their teacher, Mrs Taylor, is cheerful but firm: ‘When the vegetables are grown, we’ll sell them for profit. Let’s work out how much we should charge for different vegetables. What should we consider?’ Hands shoot up. Bespectacled Alan notes that the more seeds we sow, the more money we make. Mansoor points out we’ll have to calculate the price of each seed, as seeds are sold in packets of hundreds.

Douglas Murray

Apostle of doubt

One staple of our national comedy is that someone must always fill the role of ‘Barmy Bishop’. While at Durham David Jenkins occupied the position, as perhaps in recent years has Rowan Williams. Certainly Richard Holloway recalls the morning while Bishop of Edinburgh when he woke to discover he had become the incumbent. His liberal views on women priests and gay rights, as well as vocal doubts over the literal claims of Christianity (culminating in his 1999 book Godless Morality) caused derision in the press and eventually made his position as a Bishop and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church untenable. He stepped down in 2000 and now, approaching his eighties, has published an unsparing and moving memoir of his life to that date, Leaving Alexandria.