Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Flight of the black swan

Nassim Taleb is banging a glass against a table to demonstrate his notion of ‘anti-fragility’. ‘This glass is fragile,’ he says. ‘Vulnerable to nasty surprises.’ The glass survives his test. ‘Now, what’s the opposite of fragile? Not “robust”, because robust things don’t respond to any surprise, nasty or pleasant. To survive shocks and be adaptable means being “anti-fragile”.’ He believes that David Cameron should remake the British economy with this idea in mind. Economists come up with such theories and soundbites all the time, but with Taleb there is a crucial difference. When he speaks, the Prime Minister listens.

Bill Jamieson

King’s gambit

No one who knows Sir Mervyn King would describe him as a radical. The Bank of England governor looks every inch the owlish academic, yet he is midway through what is possibly the greatest gamble in Britain’s economic history. Under the frosted-glass term of ‘quantitative easing’, he may soon have the Bank artificially create £600 billion of credit to its own account, the bulk of which would be used to buy government debt. Other countries have attempted quantitative easing, but never on this scale. Sir Mervyn is boldly going where no central banker has gone before — yet with the minimum of debate over the policy’s costs, its consequences and its victims. The problem is clear enough.

Jonathan Freedland

Enemies within | 11 February 2012

The Americans have 1776, the French have 1789 and we have 1940. The date is not official for us the way it is for them; it marks no formal founding of a nation or republic. But the events of that year — specifically, Britain’s lonely stand against the Nazi menace — have acquired the status of a creation myth, the heroic and finest hour in which modern Britain was born. Our children study the second world war in school and when we vote for our Greatest Briton we choose the hero of 1940, Winston Churchill. When David Cameron deployed his quasi-veto in Brussels in December, the headline-writers and cartoonists instantly reached for 1940 and the image of the solitary Tommy: ‘Very well, alone.

John R. Bradley

Be careful who you depose

Is the Syrian regime hellbent on political suicide? There can be no doubt that he is determined to crush any resistance, but if President Bashar al-Assad had really started a massacre in the city of Homs (as was reported by most of the western media) it would have been an act of complete madness. And though he may be ruthless, Assad is no madman. So what’s really going on? Well, the truth about the situation in Syria is that, as in Libya, there is much more to it than the simple narrative we’re all fed: pro-democracy activists fighting a hated tyrant. The Russians, at least, understand that much.

Ursula Buchan

A churchwarden’s lament

When I take the dogs into the garden last thing at night, a dark shape looms up just beyond the garden wall. It is a 12th-century stone building, with a square tower, leaded and stone-tiled roofs, and large plain windows. It looms even larger in my imagination, since I am one of the two churchwardens (Bishop’s or People’s Warden, I never can remember which), so this building is in my charge. I feel as if I have a second home — with all the anxieties of owning an Umbrian farmhouse or Alpine chalet but none of the amenities — since I involve myself with the minutiae of its upkeep quite as much as I do with my own house. I worry all the time about the church’s fabric, graveyard and congregation, and the parish which supports it.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The race to Lambeth Palace

Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm university sinecure some time soon. The more cynical among you might not give a monkey’s and, indeed, suggest that jockeying for position to inherit Rowan’s mantle is akin to jockeying within the Romanov family to inherit Nicholas II’s mantle in about 1915. As with most artefacts of western civilisation — manufacturing, education, the armed forces, the press — the story is about managed decline.

Jonathan Wynne-Evans

Beware the bishops

At next week’s General Synod, the plotters-in-chief will be out in force, but this gossiping and manoeuvring is not just a sign of the archbishop’s demise. Throughout his time in office, Rowan Williams has been isolated and undermined  — not by the media, but by his own clergy. The case for him stepping down early was made privately by the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, to a few friends at last summer’s York Synod. This almost scandalous suggestion quickly spread across the bars on the university campus where the Church holds its parliament each year, and only after it had been much discussed did word reach the archbishop himself. That he was the last to know of his own putative resignation is pretty telling.

Brendan O’Neill

An acceptable hatred

The last politically correct form of prejudice is against football’s working-class supporters There is a brilliant irony to the campaign to ‘kick racism out of football’: its backers — the commentators and FA suits driving this petit-bourgeois push to clean up footie — think in a similar way and use very similar lingo to the football-terrace racists they claim to hate. Indeed, they have fully appropriated the racial thinking of those dumb blokes who used to hurl bananas at black football players. But they have turned it against white working-class football fans, whom they look upon as childish, inferior, tribal and ­monkey-like.

Theodore Dalrymple

Diamond Jubilee debate: Has Britain declined under Elizabeth II?

Yes Theodore Dalrymple Is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a cause for jubilation? Certainly her reign has been a personal triumph: her iron sense of duty, gracefully performed, has been exemplary, if not an example often followed. For 60 years she has exercised a self-control that most of us find difficult even for 60 minutes; her recent state visit to Ireland put all our public figures of the past decades in the shade. Not that that is very difficult, for there is no disguising that her reign has been an era of continuous and continuing decline. Of course, not even accelerating levels of British incompetence have been able to arrest the march of technical progress, and, in raw physical terms, life in these islands has improved greatly.

Lloyd Evans

From Dewsbury to the stars

What does superstardom look like? Well, nothing at all. Like anonymity personified. The seriously big celebs, the ones for whom walking down the street is either irksome or potentially hazardous, develop a knack for blending into the background. When Patrick Stewart arrives to meet me at the Young Vic, I scarcely notice him. The jacket and scarf are regulation winter­wear. His blue jeans are unexceptional, and his natty trilby is hoiked downwards to conceal his face. Only when he lifts the brim and reaches out to shake my hand does the sonorous magnitude of Sir Patrick coalesce, like magic, before me. He apologises for arriving 45 seconds late and sits down to sip coffee and eat a chocolate croissant. ‘Bingo,’ he begins. ‘Bingo is a lifelong obsession.

Clarissa Tan

My first snowfall – Clarissa Tan’s diary

To everything there is a season, says the Bible. And, as I have been discovering, to every season there are certain things. To autumn belongs the wet shiny streets, the brollies and the macs, the brightly coloured soups, the quiet squares where both trees and grass are emblazoned with gold leaves. Then, as autumn moves to winter, there are the fleecy collars and fluffy hats, the steamy breaths, the ferrous skies. Perhaps before the season is over, I’ll get to see windowpanes with actual snow on them, instead of cotton wool. ••• I have spent all my life, until now, in the tropics, where there are no seasons.

Saturday

Andrew Brown

Home boys

Meet the Dalis: men who are dependent – and loving it It sounds like a cushy life for a man. On weekdays he potters about at home, running a duster over the surfaces, tinkering with a short story he’s struggling to compose, painting, daydreaming, listening to a bit of Jeremy Vine; his wife, meanwhile, gets up in the dark, takes the 5.47 to Liverpool Street and toils away in a glass tower all day to bring home the bacon. He is dependent, and loving it: we could call him a Dali. There are a plenty of Dalis around these days. You probably know one or two. And the statistics show it clearly. More and more couples, especially if they have children, are choosing to swap the traditional roles.

Melissa Kite

Race card

Meet Kevin Jackson, the black Tea Party activist disgusted at the prejudices of Obama’s supporters Kevin Jackson talks a lot of sense. He also says things that make you wonder if your ears are playing up. As the newest star of the Tea Party circuit gives you his views on Obama, Palin and David Cameron, you repeatedly ask yourself, ‘Did he just say what I think he said?’ I am interviewing Jackson, a Republican blogger and author of The Big Black Lie, a critique of liberal America, because I heard him on US television saying that voting for Obama was racist. ‘They wanted the black president,’ he told Fox News. ‘Racists that they are, they voted for the man because he’s black, not because he’s qualified.

Rod Liddle

They are the masters now

I was on a plane once that malfunctioned as it was trying to take off from JFK Airport in New York. There was a horrible screeching noise and some smoke and the thing skidded to a halt with its nose poking out over Long Island sound. Trucks pulled up alongside us and sprayed stuff. I don’t think anyone had been particularly scared because the plane was still on the ground. The only thing that worries people about planes is when they fall out of the sky; if they blow up on the runway, that’s sort of OK. It was a scheduled KLM flight bound for London and the Dutch cabin crew told us we all had to stay where we were while somebody tried to sort the plane out. Presently, through my porthole, I saw an elderly man in dungarees hitting one of the engines with a spanner.

Interconnect

A traitor’s tale

Leaving the Labour party is uniquely traumatic, as Luke Bozier has just discovered – and I know all too well Even now, exactly 17 years later, I can still remember the sense of anxiety gripping me on that fateful morning. The storm was about to break. I had taken a step that would irrevocably change my life. It was a damp, drizzly Thursday in late January 1995 and the latest edition of The Spectator had just come out, carrying an explosive article by me in which I savaged Labour’s record in local government and warned that the same addiction to waste, bureaucracy and politically correct ideology would be followed at a national level if Tony Blair gained power at the next election. This was the first piece I had ever had published.

Laurance Reed

Free the Shetlands!

On Tuesday night in Lerwick, capital of the Shetland Islands, hundreds of men dressed as Vikings will parade through the centre of town, carrying torches to set fire to a wooden long ship in a festival known as Up Helly Aa. All will march to a repertoire of battle songs, with blood-curdling lyrics. ‘Our galley is the People’s Right, the dragon of the free’ runs the main hymn of the evening. ‘Sons of warriors and sages: when the fight for freedom rages, be bold and strong as they!’ And not even Alex Salmond would be bold enough to suggest that they are singing about Scotland. The people of Orkney and Shetland share little of Salmond’s enthusiasm for independence, as was reflected in the 1997 devolution referendum.

Lloyd Evans

Model employer

Miles Bullough of Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations on the pressure to move jobs abroad Shaun the Sheep is at the meeting too. I walk into the office of Miles Bullough, head of broadcast at Aardman Animations, and find him sitting opposite a four-foot model of the ovine superstar. I’m offered a seat, and an assistant comes in with refreshments. Tea for me, coffee for Bullough. Nothing for Shaun, whose sombre and kindly face is poised inquisitively over my tape-recorder. ‘Shaun was the star of A Close Shave,’ Bullough tells me, ‘which was Nick Park’s third film. [It was also the third film to feature perhaps Aardman’s most famous characters, Wallace and Gromit.] That was a breakthrough moment for Aardman as a studio.

Patience Wheatcroft

Mind your own business

Who will rescue capitalism? As the voices of its critics grow louder, those of us who would defend the moneymakers must not be cowed. But even the most ardent supporters of the profit motive would probably concede that capitalism has been veering in the wrong direction, providing sufficient ammunition for its detractors to raise doubts over the sustainability of the system itself. With public anger over bankers, in particular, and ‘fat cats’ in general, politicians — of all parties — have seen an opportunity to empathise with demonstrators’ banners and the shrieking from the media. Warm, even occasionally wise, words have flowed, defining how capitalism should be.

Jonathan Ruffer

Give – and you shall receive

Does the banker deserve his bonus? Of course he doesn’t, but the problem is that the wrong sort of people point it out. The envious and the angry combine at shaking their fists at the super-wealthy; the politicians rehearse the arguments more in sorrow than anger. The rich are impervious to criticism from the unlucky outsider: opprobrium doesn’t work and it hardens them, closing the fist around their wealth. What cannot be said effectively in anger can nevertheless be said in love. The great calling to mankind is that we love one another, and it is in giving that we find its clearest expression. It is more blessed to give than to receive — and the reason is that ‘where your treasure is, there is your heart also’.

John Laughland

Travel: The charms of le barroux 

If you are looking for an undiscovered part of Provence, then you can forget about Le Barroux. Apart from the fact that both Petrarch and Pope Clement V spent their summers nearby in the 14th century, the pretty hilltop village topped by its disproportionately large castle has been the holiday destination of members of the British social stratosphere for generations. The Anglo-French descendants of Axel Munthe, the Swedish author of the spectacularly successful Story of San Michele — perhaps the first example of escapist travel literature — have a very beautiful house in the village, as did Prince Charles’s godmother. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury is just down the hill. It is not difficult to see why.