Features

Saturday

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.

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’.