Features

Saturday

Sam Leith

Blast through Boxing Day

Video games are an ideal gift – especially the violent ones Not long ago, Salman Rushdie took to Twitter to say, ‘Passed this billboard: “From the Makers of Doom… Rage!” What does it say about us that these are the names of games?’ The author of Fury had a point. Video games are now bigger business than movies, and the biggest business in video games is war: exploding aliens, terrorists being shot in the spine, guns, guns, guns. To those who don’t know their FPSs from their STDs, it looks like a bewildering miasma of regressive male adolescent nonsense. Which, of course, it is.

James Forsyth

A patient cure

Andrew Lansley stands on the concourse of Euston station cracking jokes with a gaggle of civil servants. Lansley, who must be at least 6ft3, towers over the group. He looks relaxed. The contrast with how he looked a few months ago could not be sharper. Then, the Health Secretary seemed to be carrying all the troubles of the coalition’s NHS reforms on his shoulders. He had developed a stoop and he would talk to you with his arms crossed. But now his controversial, much revised bill is almost through parliament. What he calls his period in ‘purgatory’ is nearly over. For a Cabinet minister, Lansley is surprisingly free from ego. As we get on the train, he expresses surprise that I don’t mind making a journey just for the sake of interviewing him.

Emily Maitlis

One false move

It’s never been easier for a single mistake to define a whole life Occasionally, as a television presenter, you come across stories that make your blood run cold. The last time it happened, I was live on air and I virtually stopped speaking. I wish I could say the story was about some appalling human rights abuse or a new threat of global recession. But no. It was about a Russian newsreader, Tatyana Limanova, who committed a spectacular act of career self-sabotage by apparently flipping her finger at the camera live on air, immediately after a reference to President Obama. She seemed to have survived, at first, but within days her moment was on YouTube and the world was watching.

Susan Hill

Winter Notebook

You don’t go to North Norfolk in winter for good weather, but we had it — vast blue skies, sunshine and a couple of wild gales. North Norfolk in summer, like the Cotswolds in which I live landlocked, mingles the horribly overcrowded with quiet spaces about which locals keep schtum. In late November it had been reclaimed by them and was half-empty. Staying in a peaceful converted barn, we were there to work but also to walk on near-deserted Holkham Beach, where Poppy the border terrier thought she had died and the sand and sea were heaven.

Tom Hollander

I can’t get out of bed

Life is about choices. You can explain your lot away as bad luck, but I face you with the possibility that your lifestyle is the result of choices you have made. Said the therapist I went to see last week. Before leaving I made another appointment to see him so that I wouldn’t appear to have the problem with commitment that he had identified. But I don’t think I’ll go. I went to see him because, with the combination of the end of a relationship and George Osborne’s well-named autumn statement, I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed. I went to see Ruby Wax’s excellent show about mental illness and in it she said that when the black dog descended she couldn’t get out of bed.

Ed Smith

He knew he was wrong — Daniel Kahneman interview

When I was 13, my school cricket team received a visit from a top professional cricket coach, an intoxicating visit from the big leagues. I tried to hear what the great man was saying as he watched us, how he advised our teacher. ‘Never praise kids — they only mess it up next time,’ I overheard him say. After pausing to berate me for a below-average cover drive, he whispered to the teacher, ‘It’s different with criticism — that really works.’ Like a typical cocky teenager, I longed for a clever riposte. Perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have the intellectual insight to deliver one.

Adam Werritty

Breaking the silence | 17 December 2011

When you hire a morning suit for a wedding, you count on being photographed a few times on the day — for photos that will be quickly buried in wedding albums. But by now, half the country will probably have seen pictures of me as Liam Fox’s best man at his wedding, six years ago. Had I known, I’d perhaps have hired a suit that fitted a little better. But I’d never have imagined that I’d end up in a Force 12 political storm. When this all began, some three months ago, I opted to keep a low profile, thinking that any other course of action would only fan the media flames. Instead, my silence just encouraged ever more lurid and absurd accusations. I have never spoken publicly about this surreal experience, until now.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Parliament shouldn’t pay

This year has seen a sombre centenary, which passed almost unnoticed. It was in August 1911 that Members of Parliament voted to pay themselves for the first time — an annual stipend of £400 a year. What was meant to open parliament to all ranks of society and allow men of low birth but high gifts to sit as MPs has proved a fine example of the law of unintended consequences. A seemingly modest innovation began the process which has culminated in what we now have: the professionalisation of politics and the creation of a new class of full-time but mediocre politicians. And instead of changing the House of Commons for the better, it has changed it in many ways very much for the worse.

Roger Scruton

The green and the blue

For as long as I can remember, the word ‘conservative’ has been used in intellectual circles as a term of abuse, while to call someone ‘right-wing’ has been the next thing to social ostracism. This habit has persisted throughout 50 years in which the Conservative party has had the largest overall share of the vote. But the habit is not new. It took root two centuries ago, when the French Revolution excited British intellectuals to think that they too might get the chance to cut off the heads that contained less brains than their own. John Stuart Mill, when a Liberal MP, spoke for the intellectual majority by denouncing the Tories as ‘the stupider party’.

Bruce Anderson

Projecting Thatcher

‘The Iron Lady’ and the Iron Lady I knew The Iron Lady is a cruel film: brutally unsparing in its depiction of the hazards of old age. I was ready to be angry and to believe that, like jackals, Hollywood lefties were closing in on an aged lioness, safe in the cowardice of assailing the vulnerable, overlooking in their sniggerings the obvious point. In her prime, one roar, and they would all have fled in terror. Those suspicions were unjustified, for this is cruelty in the pursuit of art. The outcome is cinematographic power. It is a work of force and pathos. For most of the time, I was enthralled; at moments, moved to the verge of tears. The principal actress is outstanding. Admittedly, Meryl Streep sometimes sounds like a parody of Margaret Thatcher.

Quentin Letts

What I really, really want

Dear Father Christmas, please fill my stocking with the following goodies:   A referendum on Britain’s future in Europe... Or, a Linguaphone course to brush up my German. A new shadow chancellor. The old one doesn’t really work any more. A straitjacket to stop George Alagiah waving his arms around so much when he is presenting the BBC News. During the Jubilee celebrations, a minute’s standing ovation, nationwide, for the Duke of Edinburgh. A protest march through Islington by striking taxpayers. An announcement from David Cameron that he is scrapping the Ministerial and Other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991, which granted pay-offs to Cabinet ministers. (The Act was also responsible for setting the Commons Speaker’s indecently generous pension. Double bingo!

Hugh Eakin

Here comes Qatar

Suddenly, the tiny Gulf emirate is the Middle East’s superpower In late October, Syrian state television aired a 17-minute documentary unmasking what it said was the real force behind the country’s seven-month-old revolt: the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. ‘The name of Qatar surfaces once a disaster or conflict breaks out in the Arab and Muslim world,’ the programme begins. ‘Qatar intervenes in major and minor issues, seeking to wield influence by backing rebel and extremist movements as well as armed Islamic groups.’ Along with sowing ‘sedition’ everywhere from Egypt and Tunisia to Sudan and Yemen, Qatar had been ‘financing and arming the rebel movements in eastern Libya.

Niall Ferguson

On being called a racist

My ‘literary spat’ with the London Review of Books Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings. It is indeed astonishing that, from the beginning of the 16th century until the third quarter of the 20th century, the West (Europe and its settler colonies) did much better than the rest of the world and came to rule over it. But that’s what happened. By the 1970s the average American was roughly 20 times richer than the average Chinese. The average Briton was at least 12 times richer than the average Indian. In the first half of the 20th century, westerners had life expectancy nearly twice that of non-westerners. Europeans and North Americans even grew taller than Asians.

Melanie McDonagh

Christmas for the ladies

At this time of year you’ve probably had it with festive planners, Christmas countdowns and those magazine features about what presents to buy — as if picking presents, rather than paying for them, were the problem. So when I say that the Christmas season is actually too short, and that we should round it off with a second, mini-Christmas, you may get a bit restive. But bear with me. Let’s get onto the second idea first, viz, the mini Christmas. In Ireland, that’s actually what it’s called, the Nollaig Beag or Nollaig na mBan — the Little Christmas, or the woman’s Christmas. That’s the name for the Epiphany in the west of Ireland and the gist of it, as you’ll have gathered, is that it was a day for the women.

Neil Tennant

Out of tune

Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The musical has become divorced from popular musical culture. Theatre critics seem to have no value system for judging the music in musical theatre.

Luke Coppen

Thinking space

Martin Rees is sitting in the Master’s Lodge of Trinity College, Cambridge, with a laptop balanced on his knee. ‘I want to show you this,’ he says, tapping the keys with long, neat fingernails. Two red swirls appear on either side of the screen, gliding towards each other. When they meet it’s messy, like two ripe tomatoes smashing together in mid-air. We are watching one of the most violent events in the universe. ‘That’s two galaxies colliding,’ he explains. In five billion years our own galaxy may be one of the exploding fruit. That’s when the Milky Way is predicted to crash into Andromeda, creating an intergalactic splatter known as ‘Milkomeda’. But like many things in our universe, it’s far from certain.

Paul Johnson

Season’s greetings

My recollections of Christmas Past are dominated by the fabrication of the family card. It was one of my father’s principles that Christmas was a family event and that any cards sent out should be created within the family. It was quite wrong to buy one. Happily he was an artist of the old-fashioned sort, skilled at all the various methods of reproduction — etching and drypoint, engraving, photogravure, lithography and various abstruse methods of printmaking. Indeed he taught them at his art school. Lithography was his favourite because it had a softness and fidelity to nature and avoided the harsh line of the other reproductive processes. We sent out around 150 cards each year, and by the end of November my father had drawn the master card on the stone.

Anthony Horowitz

The trail

A Christmas short story by Anthony Horowitz Illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy They were spending their first Christmas together in Antigua, Simon and Jane Maxwell, enjoying not just a holiday but a honeymoon after a courtship that had taken them both by surprise. It was his second marriage, her first — and perhaps it was because she had waited so long that she had jumped into it so readily. Of course, she was a modern woman with a perfectly successful career… in publishing, as it happened. She might be single but she would never have described herself as ‘on the shelf’. It wasn’t as if she kept cats or anything dreadful like that.

Saturday

James Forsyth

A new deal for Britain

It is becoming increasingly clear what the Conservative party expects of its Prime Minister. If he is going to agree to 17 eurozone countries pushing ahead with the Franco-German plan for fiscal union, he needs to secure a new deal for Britain in exchange. Just what this new deal should look like is a matter of intense debate in Conservative circles. If France and Germany turn the eurozone into a ‘fiscal union’, what does that mean for Britain’s standing in the European Union? At the weekend, Iain Duncan Smith suggested that the nature of the EU would change so much that a referendum would be necessary. No. 10 quickly ruled that out. Cameron confided to Cabinet colleagues on Monday that he feared another referendum would bring down the coalition.

Tim Montgomerie

The bomb in the living room

During the last parliament William Hague likened the issue of Europe to an unexploded bomb at the heart of the Conservative party — best leave it alone, or it might well detonate. But it still dominates British foreign policy. However far David Cameron has travelled in search of a different world — paying tribute to Nelson Mandela in South Africa or inspecting melting glaciers in Norway — he would always return to find this huge relic from a previous war sat in the middle of the Tory living room. Beneath the everyday hubbub of Westminster life that persistent ticking noise comes from this enduring issue of British politics. The mass of the Conservative party understands this, and wants the bomb defused.