Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Europe’s hit squad

If you thought the EU couldn’t get any less democratic, meet the Frankfurt Group The Old Opera House in Frankfurt — once Germany’s most beautiful postwar ruin and now its most stunning recreation — has become a symbol of European rebirth. And it was here, last month, that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy met the EU’s bureaucratic elite in what would, in another era, be described as a putsch. They had grown tired of eurozone summits, with leaders flying here and there but getting nowhere. A smaller group needed to be formed, who would wield power firmly but informally. That evening, as they gathered to hear Claudio Abbado conduct the Mozart Orchestra of Bologna, a new EU hit squad was born.

Nicholas Farrell

Arrivederci il Magnifico

Berlusconi is the only person who could have sorted out Italy’s problems Where the monstrous regiment of judges, journalists and the other toxic derivatives of Italian communism failed, the Germans and the French, armed this time only with the euro, have triumphed. Silvio Berlusconi, or ‘Silvio il Magnifico’ as I am still not ashamed to call him, the 75-year-old media tycoon who has dominated politics in Italy since 1994, has lost his majority and has promised to resign as Prime Minister, and not to stand again. First the Germans and their French ‘caniche toy’ did for the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, riding roughshod over the Greek people.

Tanya Gold

Keeping up with Liz Jones

Liz Jones, the roving fashion editor of the Daily Mail, is a hate figure on Twitter and beyond. Recently, in one of her periodic confessional pieces, she wrote that she had stolen her boyfriend’s used condom and tried to impregnate herself with it. It was owed to her, she wrote, because she had bought him so many ready meals from Marks & Spencer but, as with many of Jones’s romantic misadventures, it failed — there will be no Baby Jones. Twitter, which has no sense of humour (mobs never do), read, retched, and excitably screamed for justice. The hypocrisy is enchanting. Twitter users may despise the Daily Mail but give them a really juicy article and they obediently become its most avid, if self-loathing, readers.

Carla Powell

The young pretender

Can Florence’s youthful mayor save Italy from herself? If ever a country’s politics needed a shot in the arm, it is Italy’s. As the economy wobbles on the brink of catastrophe, we Italians are desperate for a new face from outside the discredited political caste: an Italian Obama, if you like. But who could possibly step into the breach? Some eyes are turning towards Florence’s handsome young mayor Matteo Renzi, who at 36 makes David Cameron and even George Osborne look like grizzled veterans. To go from running the world’s most beautiful city to leading the world’s most ungovernable country would be a huge, and daunting, step. In Italy politicians are supposed to form an orderly queue and wait their turn for the top jobs.

Harry Mount

Remembering well

Extraordinary how potent cheap drama is. The latest season of Downton Abbey, which ended on Sunday, pulled off a rare double in its interpretation of the first world war — making you laugh one second at the wooden acting and the clunky script; the next second, making you cry at the suffering and tragedy. But Downton tears are comforting, almost pleasurable: the tears you cry for Brief Encounter or Love Story. They’re not the agonising tears cried by mourners in Royal Wootton Bassett, their bodies contorted with acute physical grief. There are different degrees of sadness over death in battle.

James Hughesonslow

The sunshine solution

The late unlamented premier of Queensland Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen had an easy way with journalists, most of whom he perceived to be rabid pinkos. ‘Don’t you worry about that, my friend,’ he would say, when confronted with a hostile question. ‘You just leave it to me.’ In fact, he bequeathed Queenslanders quite a lot to worry about and nearly ended up in jail on charges of bribery and corruption. But his greatest legacy was a brilliant piece of gerrymandering which is still with us today, having been widely adopted by other states in Australia. I believe it could be of some use to whoever, by the time you read this, is ruling Italy and Greece — saving Europe and making us all a lot happier in our latter years.

Saturday

Daniel Kalder

Mr Blair goes to Kazakhstan

Ah, Tony Blair — you can’t keep a good hustler down. One minute he’s singing the praises of formaldehyde at the opening of a methanol power plant in Azerbaijan (£90,000 for a 20-minute talk), the next he’s accepting a gig ‘consulting’ in Kazakhstan. For his advice on ‘issues connected with policy and the economy’, he could reportedly make as much as £8 million a year. In May, Blair and a gang of his associates were spotted at a meeting of the Foreign Investors’ Council in Kazakhstan.

Luke Coppen

Get well, Adele

In his last months as prime minister, Gordon Brown sat down and wrote a fan letter to a young British singer-songwriter. ‘With the troubles that the country’s in financially,’ he told her, ‘you are a light at the end of the tunnel.’ Last weekend that light officially went out: Adele has suffered a career-threatening vocal cord injury and will not sing again this year. OK, so it’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but you have to wonder if the curse of Gordon Brown has struck again. To understand what bad news this is, remember that it’s barely three months since the death of Amy Winehouse. Now Britain may be about to lose a second surreally gifted musician with big hair and pipe-cleaner-length eyelashes.

Ross Clark

Crossed wires

Chris Huhne wants to know why we don’t shop around more for our utilities. I’ll give him one reason. The liberalisation of utility markets has created an impression of bewildering choice, but when things go wrong you realise that there is no choice at all, just the same old creaking infrastructure, owned and operated by the legacy company of an old nationalised monopoly. In fact, in one sense, liberalisation has made things worse: with a multiplicity of companies involved, you are never quite sure who is responsible for your pipes or your wires. You can find yourself caught between two companies, each blaming the other for your problem, via the inevitable call centres in Bangalore. I am writing this while squatting on other people’s computers.

Peter Smith

Call me crazy

As a former mental patient, I find being asked to ‘embrace my diagnosis’ far more offensive than words like ‘bonkers’ Mentally ill people can be troublesome but at least the rest of the population does not have to think about them much. The system is effective in that respect. No one need know, for example, that 10 per cent of adults in Scotland are on antidepressants. The disturbed do not spread their disturbance. Whenever the subject of mental health surfaces in the media, progress is reported, unless there’s been a murder.

Dennis Sewell

The generation game

‘Intergenerational fairness’ is simply the latest cover for envy Towards the end of last month, a gang of youthful policy wonks started beating up the elderly. This is something we will have to get used to. The proposal from the Intergenerational Foundation to ease over-60s out of their three- or four-bedroomed houses to make way for younger families was just the first of a series of pernicious policies the think-tank is preparing as it opens up a new front in the politics of envy. ‘Intergenerational fairness’ is a seductive piece of branding. Who would declare themselves against fairness? In theory, it should have a particular appeal for conservatives.

Mark Mason

It’s so annoying

So why do people feel compelled to start every sentence with ‘so’? We live in the Age of So. Dot Wordsworth commented on it in these pages recently, though was lost for an explanation. The phenomenon was illustrated on Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme a while back, when Peter Allen interviewed Steve Robertson of BT OpenReach about the expansion of superfast broadband. Allen: ‘What will actually happen?’ Robertson: ‘So, what will happen is that we’re either going to be taking fibre to their home or to their business...’ Allen: ‘And how expensive is all this?’ Robertson: ‘So, we’ve already committed two and a half billion pounds...

Saturday

Camilla Stoddart

Morocco: Sugar and Spice

Is it still possible to love Moroccan cookery if you can’t stand fruit in savoury dishes? Yes, discovers Camilla Stoddart I love Morocco. Everything about it is exotic and visually pleasing — the landscape, the interiors, the souks, the carpets, the slippers — but there is a major hurdle lying between me and full Moroccophile status. This hurdle is fruit. Or more specifically fruit combined with meat. I don’t have many personal food rules but not mixing fruit with meat is one of them. And Moroccans don’t just flout this rule, they beat it to a pulp with a tenderising hammer and then scatter prunes, dates, apricots and pomegranate seeds on top of it.

Jeremy Clarke

Marrakesh: Moroccan style

Jeremy Clarke on lust, literature and luxury at one of Churchill’s favourite hotels A retired Egyptian army officer, comfortably married, two grown-up children, is relaxing with friends by the pool at his club in the smart Maadi district of Cairo. A lifelong heterosexual, Captain Ni’mat is surprised to find his idle gaze drawn for the first time in his life towards the youthful male bodies on display around him. That night he is assailed by a powerful homo­erotic dream, and the next day he finds himself casting lustful glances at his Nubian valet, Islam. During his daily massage, he asks Islam to also massage his buttocks. Islam does so, and it occurs to Captain Ni’mat that his buttocks, neglected for over 60 years, are being kneaded back to life.

Peter Hitchens

Hour of surrender

The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support. It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and arrived in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon in time for lunch. This was and remains confusing, though it offers disproof of the old cliché that you cannot put the clock back. Though I have been to North Korea and Bhutan, I still count it among the most startling journeys I have ever taken. It lasted about an hour.

James Forsyth

Politically, it’s cuckoo

As David Cameron recovers from the biggest-ever Tory rebellion over Europe, he should beware of another dramatic, self-inflicted injury. The government has stopped short of giving its official endorsement to Rebecca Harris’s bill to move Britain on to Central European Time. But nor has it quashed the idea, which it could have done. Instead, government whips have allowed the bill to move to its next stage — the so-called money resolution. When this happens, the proposal will be significantly closer to becoming law.

Peter Jones

Shelf hatred

On Newcastle University library’s horrible ‘makeover’ Though I retired early from Newcastle University in 1997, I have access to the university library as an associate member and use it fairly regularly. The staff and porters are excellent, and the classical section still serves my humble purposes well enough. But for how much longer? It was over Christmas 2007 that the culture began to change, and the library to go the way of the rest of the university. Management ‘rebranded’ it, and in January 2008 one walked in to find something called ‘YourSpace’, which offered students places where they could (i) work in comfort, (ii) work with friends, or (iii) chat.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Revving up

The C of E’s pioneer women priests are waiting anxiously for their first female bishop Diocese by diocese, the Church of England is voting in favour of women becoming bishops. Last week Truro, Norwich, Blackburn, Rochester, St Albans, Wakefield and Winchester gave their ‘yes’ vote to the draft legislation, bringing the total to 29 dioceses out of 44 in favour, well over the 50 per cent mark needed to allow it to go back to the General Synod for final approval next year. So far only two dioceses have voted against: Chichester and London. And even London (a notoriously prickly diocese on this issue) very nearly voted in favour. House of Bishops: two in favour (Kensington and Stepney), one against (Edmonton) and one abstention (the Bishop of London himself).

Michael Henderson

Let’s hear it for elitism

Last month, on the most glorious of autumnal days, the world of music paid its last respects to Robert Tear. St Martin in the Fields was packed and the singing, as you can imagine, was magnificent. Sir Thomas Allen gave us Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, Sir John Tomlinson contributed Sarastro’s aria from Zauberflöte, and Dame Janet Baker read a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was some send-off. Bob deserved no less. As well as being one of the finest tenors of the past half-century, he was a man of many accomplishments, not the least of which, as his agent Martin Campbell-White said in a splendid address, was being ‘effortlessly friendly’. A fellow of King’s, Cambridge, he was utterly without malice or pomposity.

Jonathan Mirsky

Mao’s girl and me

In 1997 in Hong Kong one of Mao Zedong’s numerous sexual partners — in this case an underage one — told me her life story. Mao the monster was already notorious: his lunatic policies had caused the world’s worst famine (1959–1961), in which 40 to 50 million Chinese starved to death; he inspired the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when a few million more died. And before he came to power in 1949, Mao often ordered the murder of those who ­challenged his ambitions within the Chinese Communist Party. But a paedophile? Yes indeed. Ms Chen, the young woman with whom Mao began sleeping in 1962, was 14. The Chairman was born in 1893.