Features

Saturday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Travel: Opened secret

Once, Avignon was hell to get to. Now it’s an easy train journey. Let Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who has known it for decades, show you around The interminable car journeys to Avignon of my childhood! Crammed into the back of the Mini with my sister. ‘Are we nearly there?’ when we were only at Dijon. Hard-boiled eggs and sausages in a polythene bag. The heart-sinking moment when my parents stopped the car for a few hours to have a ‘little sleep’. The bliss of a glace from the Elf petrol station. Not being nearly there even when you were going through the Lyon tunnel. Still at least two hours to go. Now, if you get the 07.17 Eurostar from St Pancras on a Saturday morning in summer, you can be having a late lunch in the square at Avignon at 2 p.m.

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Is this Labour’s next leader?

In Yvette Cooper’s home, an entire room is given over to memorabilia of her husband’s life in politics. Pictures of Ed Balls hang on the walls and the room is kitted out with phone lines and computers so it can function as a nerve-centre for the shadow chancellor while he is working from home. Cooper’s office is a snug under the stairs. Anyone visiting might imagine that this was the home of a great political genius, dutifully supported by a mother of three. There is no indication that this impish, unassuming woman is herself now the bookmakers’ favourite to lead Labour into the next election. With Ed Miliband’s ratings down to a level from which no opposition leader has ever recovered, even the trade unionists who voted him in are beginning to give up hope.

Nicholas Farrell

Ship of fools

Ah, those Italians. Let’s just blame the bloody Eyeties for the catastrophe of the Costa Concordia and have done with it, shall we? That way we don’t have to think too much about the perils of floating citadels in general. There was something peculiarly Italian about this disaster. The night his ship went down Francesco Schettino, the 52-year-old captain, was in the bar with a striking blonde on his arm who was not his wife.

Angela Huth

What colour is Wednesday?

If you are one of that small band of people who happen to see days of the week, months of the year, even single numbers and letters in colour, you are considered either very peculiar or very lucky. It also means you are a synaesthete. I am one of them. Synaesthesia is a rare condition: few people have heard of it. To put it simply, synaesthesia is a psychological and neurological state concerning the visual and auditory areas of the brain. For those who have never known a yellow Friday, or a red July, it’s hard to understand how this curious phenomenon works. Most people have five senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell. For synaesthetes, there is an overlapping of two or more senses. Aisthesis comes from the Greek word meaning sensation, while syn means together, or union.

Andrew Gimson

Fear and loathing in Baden-Wurttemberg

Stuttgart Everyone is frightened of the euro. So said the sweet old lady who runs the small hotel where I am staying. She and her husband are Germans who came to Stuttgart from Slovenia 50 years ago. They have worked ‘day and night’ to build up their modest fortune, and now they fear their savings will be destroyed.The old lady explained how people are trying to guard against losing everything: ‘Those who have money want to put it in property. We’d rather invest money in our own country than send it to Greece. We’re worried we’re going to have to pay for others. But what can the small man do? Other people don’t particularly like the Germans. They want the Germans to pay for everything. This currency splits people ever more.

Camilla Long

A yacht? Wouldn’t the Queen prefer a really nice soap?

Gove, a man so unsuited to the satanic machinations of high office that he looks like a permanently startled guppy, made a really strange boo this week by suggesting a collection of rich monarchists buy the Queen a £60 million yacht for her diamond Jubilee. Really? A yacht? Men just can’t buy presents, can they? Quite aside from the fact that a floating shagpad with a 12-person crew, a Jacuzzi, an indoor gym, and four on-board jetskis is the last thing anyone should spaff cash on right now, why did Gove think she actually wanted a yacht? That she wouldn’t prefer a really nice soap, or a charming footstool? A toy for the corgis, or a Learn How to Paint Watercolours step-by-step guide?

Paul Johnson

The age of achievement

Doctors say it’s all downhill from 45. History suggests otherwise A study in the British Medical Journal suggests that our brains begin to deteriorate from the age of 45. Examining the vocabulary, comprehension and memories of 7,000 45- to 70-year-olds, the researchers found a 3.6 per cent decline in the second half of their forties. This will come as a surprise to students of history. Men and women have achieved positions of power at all stages of life, but it is remarkable how many have lived in obscurity until their forties and gone on to do remarkable things. A good example was Oliver Cromwell, who only stepped into the public sphere in his late forties (he was born in 1599).

Nick Cohen

Web of tyrants

The internet can promote freedom and democracy – it’s a shame it also facilitates mob rule and witch-hunts Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant. To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of 150 of the world’s leading minds on the technological revolution.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Cameron’s follies

Was a political brickbat from the left ever more elegantly lobbed than J.K. Galbraith’s jibe that conservative governments create ‘private affluence and public squalor’? It came to sum up perfectly the feelings of many people towards Britain in the 1980s, when Londoners would step over the homeless as they made their way back to flashy new homes. It is not an accusation David Cameron cares to risk being levelled at his own Britain. But this (partly) Conservative government is suffering from an equally pernicious problem: pointless, gimmicky public spending. We may be deep in austerity measures, but they seem destined never to reach the sports stadiums, the high-speed rail lines or any other pet public projects.

William Astor

Signal failure

Rail privatisation by the Major government heralded the largest growth in passenger numbers in decades. This was down to improvements in service and a timetable to suit passengers, coupled with some attractive fare offers. But future growth of rail travel is unlikely to be at the same high rate and there we have the nub of the arguments around High Speed 2. The Department for Transport has been less successful in forecasting passenger growth than Gordon Brown was at forecasting economic growth — and that is saying something. Britain needs an integrated transport policy that includes road, rail and air, and it needs to address the so-called north-south divide. But Conservatives believe in choice, so users should be able to choose for themselves the most convenient way to travel.

Toby Young

Free the press!

The Leveson inquiry has put fear into the feral beasts of the tabloids – and that’s not in the public interest Listening to Kelvin MacKenzie give evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Monday, the most striking thing was not his admission that he’d never given much thought to journalistic ethics nor even his impersonation of John Major, good though it was. Rather, it was his claim that News International should have been fined for lying to the PCC about the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. ‘In the end newspapers are commercial animals,’ he said. ‘I would be in favour of fines — and heavy fines for newspapers that don’t disclose the truth to the Press Complaints Commission.

Rory Sutherland

Even dogs prefer democracy

Recent research has shown a robust and positive correlation between the amount of democracy we enjoy and how happy we are. This is true for the Swiss, at any rate, for it was among the cantons of Switzerland that the research was conducted. If you believe the Swiss are a peculiarly unrepresentative group, you may be interested to know that the same rule holds true not only for melted-cheese-­eating neutrality monkeys, but also for dogs. Dogs prefer democracy? How can we possibly know?

Charles Moore

The road from Damascus

Wafic Said is an exotic import, but a friend of Britain for 50 years. He has given roughly £100 million to philanthropic causes in this country, including founding and funding the Said Business School at Oxford. He also helped Britain secure with Saudi Arabia, Al-Yamamah, the biggest defence agreement in our history, which was signed in 1985. For this, he has repeatedly been called an arms dealer in the press. (As a result, he even got a letter from people who wanted to sell him a second-hand tank.) A reticent man, he said nothing at the time, but now regrets it. ‘I was promoting Britain. I should have challenged it when it came. If you don’t, it sticks,’ he says. Today, with his philanthropic projects here coming to fruition, he wants to talk.

Carol Sarler

Worse than hacks

OK, we get it. We’re scum. Lowest of the low. If nothing else comes from the Leveson inquiry, at least the British public may be assured that its views of the press were right all along: as poll after poll has shown, I and my comrades in ink enjoy a social standing somewhere south of traffic wardens, tax collectors and dumpers of cats into wheelie bins. We have lived with it for so long that, frankly, a few intercepted phone messages will not make much difference. So be it. Nevertheless, I would embrace my stigma a little more readily without the hypocrisy of that same British public, so widely in thrall to ‘the scoop’ that most of them will play dirtier than I ever have, simply to be part of it.

Freddy Gray

Time for his close-up

What’s the matter with Ralph Nathaniel Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes? In pictures, he looks so self-conscious and morose. Maybe it’s just his acting face. In the flesh, though, he’s different. He is friendly. Midway through what must be an exhausting press junket at the Soho Hotel, he remains remarkably enthusiastic, and eager to discuss Coriolanus, his new film, of which he is both director and leading man. ‘It’s Shakespeare at his bleakest,’ he says, excitedly. ‘He’s not offering us, as he does in the comedies and in some of the histories, a sense that the future is full of hope.

Alex Massie

A strong dose of Devo Max

Edinburgh Something astonishing is happening in Scotland. For the first time in a political generation the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party has an opportunity to become relevant to public life north of the Tweed. And it is all thanks to Alex Salmond, now the unlikely potential saviour of Scottish right-of-centre politics.The First Minister is a formidable politician who appreciates that politics is frequently pregnant with irony. This is one such occasion: the Conservatives, steadfast opponents of devolution, can be saved by a stronger dose of Home Rule. That is, Tories should insist on the third option which Salmond wants to offer voters in the referendum on independence. This would fall short of total independence, but increase financial powers for the Scottish parliament.

Saturday

Patrick Allitt

Elephant trap

The Republican voters of Iowa could not make up their minds. Months of flirting with different candidates preceded their decision to give Rick Santorum a moment in the sun. Hardly able to believe his own good luck, he could not help knowing, even in the euphoria of his virtual dead heat with Mitt Romney for first place, that he too would probably sink back into the obscurity from which he had only just emerged. He told his astonished supporters, gathered in a ballroom in Johnston, Iowa, ‘I’ve survived the challenges so far by the daily grace that comes from God.’ Romney remains the presumptive Republican candidate, having won in Iowa by eight votes, but suddenly Santorum looks like the principal alternative.

Tanya Gold

A dream of sorts

The Magic Kingdom, Disney World, Florida is such a violent battle between cynicism and innocence that a writer’s head may blow off. There are three Disney parks within screaming distance and beyond that, the wastelands of America. If it feels as though it sprouted out of the swamp fully formed, that is because it did. At the centre is Cinderella’s castle, modelled on Mad Ludwig of Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein, but madder. At the gate, a bag search. Your bag will be searched, even though you cannot fit a Kalashnikov inside a Goofy rucksack. Inside, a sign: ‘Meet the fairies. Wait time — 45 minutes’. Some days 100,000 people come here, and there are queues, fights, deaths.

Richard Dowden

After Mandela

It produced one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. It fought a violent race-based dictatorship and replaced it with the most liberal constitution the world has ever known. Its song, a poignant Christian hymn, became South Africa’s national anthem. Since it came to power in 1994, about two thirds of South Africans vote for it. Yet now, as it lavishly celebrates its 100th birthday this week, it has a reputation for corruption and incompetence. So whatever happened to South Africa’s African National Congress? The ANC was formed as the Native National Congress by urban middle-class Africans and chiefs to protect and promote African interests after the Boer War, when peace between Boers and the British came at the price of African rights to own property and vote.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Bankers or bust

Last year a single sector of British industry was responsible for generating 12 per cent of government tax receipts, with just 4 per cent of the workforce. You would think the government would be grateful to these hyper-productive worker bees, at a time when it needs every penny of tax. Solicitous even, as it is with ‘clean tech’ firms and Silicon Roundabout start-ups, which deliver nothing close to this kind of tax revenue. Not a chance. Because the sector is financial services, and three years after the financial world imploded — with Britain still plodding its way through the valley of economic death — banker bashing is still considered political gold.