Features

Saturday

Sophia Waugh

Losing my bottle

Why does Waitrose think I can’t be trusted with Chablis? I was refused alcohol in Waitrose the other day. Not because of my age, nor because I don’t look my age. Nor, I hasten to add, because I was drunk. I was buying supper in Waitrose — two chickens, two bottles of chablis, some green beans — and when the woman on the till reached the wine she shook her head, folded her arms, and told me she could not serve me. At first I thought it was some silly joke. My children laughed along merrily. ‘Ooh, mum, she thinks you’re 17.’ But the children were the problem. When you shop with small children they’re a nightmare because they’re asking for sweets and whining.

Ahmed Rashid

Al-Qa’eda’s new war

Lahore, Pakistan From a distance, the devastating attacks on Shia Muslims in three Afghan cities this week looked like the type of sectarian religious attacks which we got used to in Iraq. The faultline between Sunni and Shia is one of the greatest and most violent in the world, and now and again it divides countries. But in Afghanistan, nothing is ever this simple. For all its woes, it hasn’t seen a sectarian religious attack for ten years. And while the Taleban have had their history persecuting the Shia, it is highly unlikely they were responsible. The more likely ­explanation is less obvious — and even more sinister. These attacks were intended to kill as many as possible.

Andrew Gimson

The rival

Ken Livingstone’s attacks on Boris Johnson seem to conceal admiration How does Ken Livingstone think he is going to beat Boris Johnson in the election for Mayor of London to be held next May? When I put this question to Ken, he launched into an almost admiring denunciation of his opponent: ‘He’s Britain’s Berlusconi. He just gets away with things nobody else could. And like Berlusconi he doesn’t really do the day job either.’ At the risk of undermining my hard-won reputation for impartiality, I ventured to suggest that Boris works quite hard. But Ken accused Boris of not being a full-time mayor: ‘The fact he carried on the Telegraph column. The fact he took an awful long time off to write the book.

Matthew Dennison

Prince of progress

The tragedy of Prince Albert was not that he died at the age of forty-two 150 years ago this month, but that his quick-tempered and lusty Hanoverian wife loved him too well. Queen Victoria’s orgiastic response to widowhood — her determination through four decades of sorrowful singledom never again to be amused — kicked over the traces of the real Albert and replaced him with that earnest-looking paragon who stares cheerlessly at pigeons and commuters alike from some 20 or so heavyweight sculptures and monuments scattered across the British Isles. Victoria’s grief was elemental: ‘My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me!’ So absolute was her absorption in her suffering that it became her raison d’être.

George Monbiot

A question of faith | 10 December 2011

What would it take to convince you that Nils-Axel Mörner’s arguments on sea levels are not scientifically credible? If people are committed to an unscientific position, no evidence or argument will shake them out of it. Whether they subscribe to AIDS denial, excessive fear of radiation, vaccine scaremongering, homeopathy or creationism, they tend to demand impossible standards of proof from their opponents but to accept any old rubbish that supports their beliefs. So if you are among those who reject the vast weight of scientific evidence for manmade climate change, I don’t expect this article to persuade you. Ask yourself what it would take to change your mind.

Christopher Booker

Debate denied

The odd thing about the great debate on global warming is that there never really was a debate. As soon as the global warming scare exploded on the world in 1988, to its promoters there could be no argument about it. The scientists who that year set up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were already convinced beyond doubt that ‘human-induced climate change’ was a reality. Al Gore was soon already pronouncing ‘the science is settled’.

Saturday

Nils Axel-Morner

Rising credulity

The truth about sea levels? They’re always fluctuating It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming. No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads ‘an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

Fraser Nelson

The trick Osborne missed

The politically mobile American entrepreneur is a species which has no real equivalent in British politics. We tend to separate the moneymakers from the policy­makers at an early age. And that is what Steve Forbes, the publishing billionaire and former presidential candidate, thinks has gone wrong in Britain: our political class has lost its sense of enterprise, and has no ideas for economic recovery. We meet in Claridge’s hotel: he’s in London for a visit cut short by his attempt to avoid the worst strikes since the 1970s. To him, this is just the most visible sign that Britain is regaining the status it had when he was young: ‘the sick man of Europe’. ‘The journey has begun,’ he says.

Paul Wood

Revolution or civil war?

Homs, Syria Hassan the smuggler got on his motorbike and disappeared up a dirt track that led from Lebanon into Syria. He did not return and an hour or so after nightfall we heard long, echoing bursts of automatic fire. Hassan had been captured by a Syrian Army patrol, said one of the villagers. No, he had run away, said someone else. He had been killed, said a third person. He had escaped. He told us the story the next morning, grinning triumphantly. He had bolted when it became clear he could not bribe his way out and the patrol was going to hand him over to the secret police. Just before he ran, pursued by bullets, Hassan, a Sunni, told his captor, an Alawite officer: ‘My family and my tribe know where you live. If I die here tonight, they will slaughter your village.

Stoker Devonshire

A new chapter

 ‘Dear Heywood, I hear Mollie is leaving at the end of next week, in which case so am I. Yours ever, Nancy.’ So wrote my ever-direct aunt, Nancy Mitford, to her employer Heywood Hill, the founder of the famous Mayfair bookshop, on 17 May 1944. Whether or not Nancy’s threat had some effect, she continued to work at the shop for another year. Here I should declare a strong interest in the fate of independent bookshops. I am the proud owner of a modest chunk of Heywood Hill, which is currently celebrating its 75th year. Not a bad milestone for any business. But can bookshops really survive in a retail world overgrown by Amazon? (Perhaps Leylandii would be a more accurate name.

Tanya Gold

Waiting for Dr Nasty

David Starkey is no longer quite as eager to show off his bitchy side, but he can be persuaded …  ‘I don’t think I could have been Dr Fluffy,’ says David Starkey, poised behind a hake. ‘No. Absolutely not Dr Fluffy.’ He takes a sip of wine. He looks like an evil Professor Yaffle. I am here because I have long wanted to interview him, principally because once, when I was working for a newspaper gossip column, he gave me a line about Tories and sado-masochism too revolting to print. And he is always in trouble. On Jamie’s Dream School, a reality TV show where poor teenagers got celebrity teachers, Starkey, who has never been a member of Historians For Censorship, called a fat child ‘fat’.

Theodore Dalrymple

Rough treatment

If anyone needed persuading of the deep moral disarray of modern British society, the latest figures on assaults against National Health Service staff should be more than sufficient to convince him. It is not so much their overall number — though 57,830 in a year seems quite a lot to me — that is alarming, as the variation in the way with which they are dealt. The predominant response is, as you would expect, feeble, vacillating, lazy and cowardly: or, if you prefer, forgiving. I mean no criticism of NHS Protect, the horribly named agency that collected the figures, when I say that these figures raise far more questions than they answer.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

After spring, winter

Spring was a long time coming in the dictatorships of the Middle East and North Africa. But when it arrived it was unhesitatingly welcomed by western leaders. William Hague declared the Arab Spring more important than 9/11 and the financial crisis. Barack Obama delivered one of his most mellifluous speeches on the subject. Everyone hoped for the best. But hope, we were reminded, is not quite enough. The shooting of protestors in Tahrir Square by the Egyptian army is the latest sign of something the West seems in no mood to admit: the Arab Spring is giving way to an Arab winter. In the last year we saw uprisings topple regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. But it is far, far too early to celebrate.

Daniella Peled

Voices from Tahrir Square

Revolution is back on the streets of Cairo. Veterans of the last uprising (which unseated Hosni Mubarak) say that the police brutality is more intense than ever before, but the protestors are determined not to back down. ‘It’s like January but on crack,’ says Mohamed El Dahshan, an economist and blogger who spends his days in Tahrir Square. ‘The police are shooting rubber bullets directly in people’s faces. Many, many people have lost an eye, because aiming at the eyes is now deliberate police policy,’ he says. Some activists say that the police have also taken to shooting canisters of tear gas directly into the crowds.

Dot Wordsworth

Never trust a technocrat

 ‘Technocrats?’ said my husband, turning his face from the television and the latest news from Italy, looking at me for a change, and putting his whisky glass down in puzzlement. ‘Aren’t those the chaps who helped Franco out?’ ‘I don’t think they can be exactly the same people still, darling,’ I replied soothingly. But he had a point. It seems strange that we should think politicians more capable simply because they rejoice in the name technocrats, as the men put in to run Greece, Italy and are called. And a technocrat as a caretaker prime minister for Egypt seemed to be just the bone to throw the crowds in Tahrir Square.

Daniel W-Drezner

Republicans vs the world

During the 2008 US presidential election cycle, the respected journal Foreign Affairs invited the leading presidential candidates from both parties to outline their views of world politics. All of them responded with essays that, one presumes, they at least read if did not write. This year, ahead of next year’s elections, Foreign Affairs has proffered the same invitation to the leading Republican aspirants. To date, they have all refused or not responded. This parallels the trend of not talking about international affairs in their endless series of presidential debates: mentions of Afghanistan and Iraq are reported to be down 65 per cent from 2008.

Freddy Gray

Life of Brian

‘It must be so awfully boring being a fish,’ says Brian Sewell, as he looks out the window at his pond. ‘You can only have sex once a year on a prescribed day. The frogs are just the same.’ We are in his study. It is a large room full of books, mostly big art books. An old German Shepherd lies passed out on the floor. ‘Poor Winckelmann,’ says Sewell, peering down at the dog. ‘She is the love of my life. I can’t bear the thought of her departure. But I know she’s going.’ Sex and death are on Sewell’s mind. His memoirs, Outsider: Always Almost, Never Quite, have just been published, and the newspapers have taken a keen interest. ‘Everybody seems to have focused on the sex, which is rather boring,’ he says.

James Forsyth

Labour’s new golden girl

When I arrive to interview Stella Creasy in one of the cafés in parliament, she’s sitting in a meeting with two earnest, wonkish types, the coffee mugs having been cleared from the table. As time ticks by, her body language becomes urgent, but she’s too polite to wrap it up. I begin to see why her rather protective assistant insisted that this interview should be no more than 30 minutes. Creasy, though, has a lot to say and we speak for an hour before she goes off to write a speech on this summer’s riots. She’s a politician in demand. MPs enjoy few things more than posing as talent scouts. Within hours of a new intake arriving in parliament, the old hands start picking out the ones who they think will go far.

James Bartholomew

Vote for happiness

What makes you happy? If you did not think anybody cared, you could not be more wrong. Your happiness has become a major issue. It is being investigated by professors with regression analyses. It is being fussed over by politicians who want to show their human side. The British government has decided to measure your happiness. Over in Paris, the OECD has recently come out with a major report on well-being. There is a growing band of academics studying your happiness, including Professors Layard and Oswald in Britain and Professors Gui and Becchetti in Italy. One of this growing band of happiness professors is Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich. He is appropriately smiley and cheerful and has come upon an aspect of happiness which surely has considerable political meaning.

Saturday

The Spectator

Get it right, George!

Arthur Laffer Chairman, Laffer Associates Cut the 50p tax Reducing the burden which government places on the economy, through tax cuts, is the surest way to promote growth. I have never heard of a country that taxed itself into prosperity. Yet Britain last year raised the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. For more economic growth, and more tax revenue, this rate should be lowered immediately. This paradox — lower rates, but higher yield — has been demonstrated time and time again, the world over. Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut tax rates on every form of income, the highest, the lowest and all those in the middle. The result was that the rich paid more, even if their tax levels were reduced. Let’s take the top 1 per cent of earners.