Features

Saturday

Johnnie Kerr

A broad church

The protesters outside St Paul’s are united in polite disagreement It’s really not clear why the doors to St Paul’s had to be closed. Perhaps the church will have concocted a reasonable explanation by the time it’s all over, but after an afternoon walking around the protesters’ camp, it’s hard to imagine that they pose any sort of threat. Already the site has the peaceful air of a hippy festival. Groups sit in circles, talking and picking at the piles of crisps and chocolates donated by supporters of the cause. Others are gathered on the steps, listening quietly to a man giving a speech through a hastily assembled speaker system.

Anne Wareham

The emperor’s new weeds

Even a dreadful garden will receive warm praise if you open it to the public – as Sir Roy Strong has proved There is no garden in Britain so awful that someone won’t describe it as ‘lovely’. Especially if it is associated with a celebrity. I recently listened to Sir Roy Strong on the radio oozing complacency as he discussed his garden at the Laskett and why it should be saved for the nation. He made a virtue out of its disorder: ‘If a giant thistle seeds itself in the middle of the kitchen garden my head gardener just lets it grow there… and people love that.’ Oh no they don’t. If there is one thing most garden visitors can’t cope with, rightly or more possibly wrongly, it’s weeds and untidiness.

Saturday

Rian Malan

Algerian Notebook

• This is surely a mistake, I thought, stooping to kiss the hand of Algeria’s minister of culture. Madame la Ministre Toumi Khalida is throwing a party to mark the start of Algeria’s annual book fair, the Salon International du Livre. This year’s line-up includes a contingent of South Africans led by Breyten Breytenbach, the dashing poet and former revolutionary, now resident mostly in Paris. My inclusion is a complete mystery, given the event’s broadly anti-imperialist tenor. Clearly, Algerians do not read The Spectator. But one doesn’t turn down a busman’s, so here I am, helping myself to a drink off a passing tray.

Ross Clark

The free market in danger

Young people say capitalism has failed them. They’re right. We must change the system to save it It would be easy to attack the London spin-off of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which manifested itself in the form of a 300-tent encampment outside St Paul’s last weekend. Their political agenda? The same, meaningless, Dave Spartesque gobbledegook which has been a feature of anti-capitalist demos for the past decade and a half, such as the demand for ‘Structural change towards authentic global equality’ and ‘an end to the activities of those causing oppression’. Look for leadership and what do you see? The usual old suspects: Billy Bragg, Julian Assange and assorted vegans, unilateral disarmers and other hangers-on.

Theodore Dalrymple

A case in point

You can tell that the economy of East Anglia is more flourishing than that of the West Midlands because the fine for drunken vomiting in the back of the taxis of Peterborough is £50, whereas it is only £40 for doing so in the back of the taxis of Wolverhampton. The other difference between the taxis of the two cities (as I discovered on making the journey between them recently) is that the former are driven entirely by Muslims, the latter by Sikhs. How this arrangement came to pass — if, indeed, it is an arrangement — I do not know, but I am glad to report that both lots of drivers are extremely helpful and obliging, at least to their customers.

Robert Gorelangton

Playing Churchill

Where would gentleman actors be without Churchill? No prime minister has given as much work to the profession as Winston (though Blair comes a close second), patron saint of jowly thespians of a certain age. Churchill now features in a new stage play called Three Days in May, about the British war cabinet in May 1940. The great man is played by Warren Clarke, whose fleshy fizzog is well known to fans of the 12 series of the BBC’s Dalziel and Pascoe — he plays Detective Superintendent Dalziel. A splendidly robust actor, he has roughly the same baby-fed-on-whisky looks as Churchill. In this he doesn’t wear rompers, instead you get the Churchill outdoors look — spotty bowtie, homburg and cigar.

Dot Wordsworth

The case for cliché

If I had neglected to brush my hair, my grandmother would say that I looked like a birch-broom in a fit. Untidy clothing made me look as though I had been pulled through a hedge backwards. If I appeared unhappy she would say that I had a face like a wet week. These similes, exaggerated and invariable, were so familiar that their metaphoric images scarcely registered. You could call them clichés. If so, they were clichés that went with my grandmother’s character, like her powder-compact, rain-mate and the mothball smell of her fur coat. John Rentoul, the political journalist with the Independent on Sunday, has declared war on clichés in a little book called The Banned List (Elliott & Thompson, £8.99).

Ed Smith

Strauss rules

Andrew Strauss is arguably the most successful England captain of the modern era. He shares with Mike Brearley the distinction of having beaten Australia at home and away, and this year he became the first captain to take England to the top of the official world Test rankings. Yet, unlike Brearley, Strauss is not talked about with hushed awe. His achievements are acknowledged but not mythologised, and when we meet for lunch at a busy pub in the Chilterns, no one pesters him for an autograph. You sense that not becoming a superstar is one of Strauss’s ambitions and, as usual, he has got what he wanted. Strauss has never quite joined cricket’s aristocracy. Even this summer, as England closed in on the No.

Douglas Murray

Skeletons in the closet

Britain must publish the truth about Irish presidential candidate Martin McGuinness – before it’s too late Martin McGuinness is standing for the presidency of a cash-strapped Ireland. Soon after this paragraph is printed he may be among the world’s heads of state. If so he has promised to refuse the €250,000 salary and subsist on the minimum wage. It is ‘high time’, he has stated, that ‘those at the top shared the pain’. That McGuinness has had a lifelong interest in so doing is a point that should not need making. But, like his old colleague Gerry Adams, he is now trying to change history — not the future, but the past — by professing amnesia about his role in many murders over a 30-year period.

Robert Hardman

Yes, Ma’am

Less than four months away from her Diamond Jubilee — only the second in history — we still tend to forget that we have the oldest monarch (85) and oldest consort (90) in history. We see a monarch who is reassuringly unchanged — and unchanging — in an uncertain world. It is an integral part of her appeal, at home and overseas. In Australia right now, the republican tide is out. Invited to field a ‘royal’ phone-in on national Australian radio earlier this week, I was struck by the consistent level of affection for the Queen. In half an hour, I encountered only one and a half republicans. It could have been Radio Royal Berkshire. Yet what lies at the root of the Queen’s enduring popularity is not her small-c conservatism.

Saturday

Tim Price

Investment special: The zero era

The Bank of England’s latest announcement of quantitative easing, widely referred to as QE2, prompts as many questions as it does answers — particularly for investors and pension-holders. Under a QE regime, money printed out of thin air is used to purchase government bonds from banks and other private sector investors. The theory then has it that long-term interest rates will fall, and banks will have more money to lend to eager borrowers. There’s just one problem with this cunning plan: it doesn’t work. It did not work in Japan, the first country to flirt with QE. Richard Koo, chief economist of the Nomura Research Institute, calls QE ‘the 21st century’s greatest monetary non-event’.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: The kids can wait

The government wants you to save more. You might think that odd for two reasons. First, because if you are an average person you’re unlikely to have much extra to save; your mortgage payments may be lower than they were, but what the financial crisis has given you with one hand it is ripping away with the other. High inflation is destroying the purchasing power of your net income. Secondly, if you watch the news at all you will know about the paradox of thrift. If we all start saving at once our horribly ill-balanced, consumption-based economy won’t be able to cope: economic growth will continue to collapse and we will all end up worse off.

The Spectator

Your nominations for the Spectator Threadneedle parliamentarian awards

Voter apathy? Don’t you believe it. Ever since we asked our readers to nominate this year’s best parliamentarian, our digital post bag has been full to bursting. Nominations have come from as nearby as Westminster and as far away as Australia. They have spanned all three major political parties, and Ukip besides. And they have been by turns witty, insightful and impassioned. This really is democracy in action. One early frontrunner is the Conservative backbencher Philip Davies. Reader Steve Mullins praises him as someone who ‘defends us almost single-handed against the massed ranks of pressure groups and sanctimonious political busybodies who want to dictate what we can say, do and see’.

William Cash

Say no to wind farms: Selling our birthright

A few weeks ago, I attended a planning seminar at Ripley Castle in Yorkshire organised by the Historic Houses Association (HHA). It was a chilling presentation which contained a clear message: the current planning proposals — which close for consultation next week— pose a serious threat, not just to our countryside, but to our heritage. With the removal of Public Planning Statement 5 (PPS5) from the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), there are now few safeguards to prevent developers building 300ft-high industrial wind turbines right next to historic castles, new sprawling social housing next to the walls of stately homes or 12th-century village churches. No, no! I can already hear the government ministers’ response.

Matt Ridley

Say no to wind farms: Shale of the century

The arguments for wind farms just became obsolete. We’re entering an era when gas will be cheap, plentiful – and green Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air? The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5 megawatts (working at about 25 per cent capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50 per cent efficiency) in its first ten years. Difficult choice? Let’s make it easier. The gas well can be hidden in a hollow, behind a hedge.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Textbook error

If young people don’t want to learn languages, it might be because the teaching materials are so drearily trendy Tonight’s homework: learn ‘Bonjour’, ‘Je m’appelle,’ ‘Comment t’appelles-tu?’ ‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va bien’, ‘Pas mal’, and ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’. And the tired child, already sick to death of French, having been taught it since the age of three but never methodically, starts climbing the Everest of trying to master these horrible, spiky phrases, with their sudden apostrophes, their ­unexplained hyphens, and the dangly fives under some but not all of the ‘c’s.

Tom Hollander

Top gear | 15 October 2011

The exciting thing about showbiz is, you never quite know where you are. I thought of a good test some weeks ago. I phoned Denee, my agent’s assistant. ‘Can you ring Audi and see if they’ll give me a car. But for goodness sake be discreet.’ I know it sounds grasping, but I’d been forced to it. Orlando Bloom had a A4 3.0 TDI A4 when we did Pirates, which he let me drive up Regent Street because he was worried about his carbon footprint; Kate Winslet was in a Q7 last year in Cornwall when I got lost following her because I couldn’t understand her directions; and Michael Gambon has an R8, but he probably paid for that. He also has a Ferrari. Fair enough.

Christopher Booker

Private Eye’s private life

The first editor of the magazine turns a quizzical eye on 50 years of a ‘national institution’ Not long after the 50th birthday of what was once the most successful humorous magazine in Britain, one of the best-known writers of the day delivered a damning judgment. Whereas in its early days, Max Beerbohm wrote in 1899, Punch had made a reputation by its youthful irreverence, wittily lashing out in all directions, it had now become staid and respectable, ‘a national institution’. How strangely has this been echoed in the coverage being given to the 50th anniversary of Punch’s successor, similarly hailing Private Eye as a ‘national institution’.

James Forsyth

To catch a minister

Old hands in Westminster are confident that they know what lies behind the Liam Fox-Adam Werritty relationship. With a knowing glint in their eye, they lean forward and whisper: ‘He’s a lobbyist.’ They’ve seen it all before, they say. It explains why Werritty thought it was worth spending tens of thousands of pounds just to be in the same city as the Defence Secretary. ‘We all know the drill with these people,’ one senior Tory explains. ‘Their job is to get as close to you as possible and if it is easier to bump into you in Dubai or Washington than London, that’s where they’ll do it.’ Lobbyists for special interests are a cancer on the body politic.

Jonathan Davis

Investment special: Be very afraid

In The Fear Index, the latest thriller by Robert Harris, now heading for the Christmas bestseller lists, a brainbox hedge fund manager with little in the way of interpersonal skills discovers that his computer-driven trading system has flown out of control and threatens to send the world’s stock markets into a tailspin. Anyone familiar with Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein will recognise the genre of the oddball genius consumed by his own creation — populist fiction at its best. But is it fiction? Not so fast, reader. As Harris makes clear in a footnote near the end of his novel, the market meltdown which Dr Alex Hoffmann’s trading system appears to have prompted in The Fear Index is one that actually happened.