Features

Saturday

Alex Brummer

Investment special: Flying through storms

The financial crisis has unleashed a great debate about rebalancing Britain’s economy. The conventional wisdom is that our prosperity during the Nice decade (non-inflationary continuous expansion, that is) was over-dependent on finance and that we need to refocus our attention on high-quality manufacturing. Under New Labour, and the Tories before them, manufacturing was allowed to wither, declining from 18 per cent of GDP in 1996 to just 12 per cent now. The better news, however, is that what’s left behind is much better than what was lost. In certain sectors, including high-end engineering and aerospace, Britain has managed to retain a strong competitive edge.

Saturday

Faisal Islam

Bailout country

In a theatre in central Athens, over a thousand tax inspectors have gathered to shout crossly about the latest cuts to their pay and pensions. Eventually the argument, between the government-affiliated union leader and his members, spills out on to the street. The rank-and-file feel betrayed: they were persuaded to accept the first wave of pay cuts earlier this year, and now they are being asked to take even more. This does not feel to them as if they’re being bailed out by kindly neighbours. It feels to these tax inspectors, and to Greeks in general, like humiliation. They feel trapped in an inescapable relationship with sadistic Germany.

Sophie Heath

Be my baby

Like the original Madonna and child, the young woman on the Tube has her beloved draped around her, his head nestling on her shoulder. As he snoozes, she texts idly with one hand, while the other absentmindedly strokes his arm, ­soothingly, maternally. But this is no serene scene of mother and son — this is a couple. A couple of adults. If you are forced to use public transport, you see them all the time. Soppy young blokes in skinny jeans, hair ­artfully arranged to mimic a guinea pig in a hurricane, being mollycoddled by a domineering, post-Spice Girls vixen who, if figures released last week are correct, also earns more than him. Or perhaps he’s stroking her, as though she were a cuddly toy or a security blanket.

Leo McKinstry

In praise of the police

Outside London, at least, there are still officers who have their priorities right – as I discovered when my home was burgled The moment we stepped through the front door we knew that something was wrong. There was a bitter coldness in the hallway, accompanied by a faint sighing of the wind. On walking into the dining room, my wife and I found the cause of the chill. The main back window had been broken and opened, and shattered glass left across the floor. Immediately, we made a quick search of the rest of the house, which only confirmed our fears: we had been burgled. Almost every room showed signs of the break-in. Drawers and cupboards lay open, clothes and other possessions had been flung to the ground.

Mary Wakefield

How to fix orphanages

Kigali, Rwanda Madame B has dressed up for our visit. She’s sitting on a bench with her back to the orphanage wall, talking about just how much she loves each child, but it’s her get-up that’s most impressive: black silk dress, hair done, make-up just so; finger and toenails painted hot pink, each with an elegant white scalloped edge. Everything else here, at the Mpore Pefa home for children, is muted: grey walls, grey kids, blurred by dirt. Those toes are an anomaly. ‘My husband and I started this home after the war,’ Madame B is saying. ‘Since he died, it is so difficult.’ Her eyes slide from left to right, checking our reaction.

Victoria Lane

A life in letters

Diana Athill, now nearly 94, lives in what must be the nicest retirement home in London, a large red brick house at the top of Highgate village, run by a charitable trust and populated by former writers and doctors and psychiatrists. On this unseasonably warm day she has on a flowing Kenyan kaftan — the residents’ summer clothes get packed away in autumn to make space, and she is worried about what to wear if the heatwave continues. A strong, boxer’s face, direct blue eyes. She aims a hearing aid at her ear, it whistles briefly, and away we go. Her latest book (see review, p. 38) is a kind of epistolary memoir, called Instead of a Book: her first book was Instead of a Letter, and she thinks this will be her last.

Saturday

Kelvin MacKenzie

Hacked hack

As a former Sun editor, I didn’t see why voicemail hacking bothered celebrities – until it happened to me It was the kind of building George Smiley would have been happy to call home. Anonymous and bleak, it’s the home of Operation Weeting, where 60 officers flog themselves to death every day in the biggest Scotland Yard inquiry in anyone’s memory. I am here by appointment. A charming woman detective has called me a couple of times — when you are a former tabloid editor that’s worrying in itself  — and asked me to drop by ‘at my convenience’ to look at the fact that my name and mobile number had been found in the paperwork of the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. At reception I ask for the detective.

Janice Warman

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Blue remembered hills

On a nostalgic return journey, Janice Warman wonders why the Eastern Cape is not thronged with tourists… The Eastern Cape has a bloody past: it’s where the English were settled to defend the frontier against the Xhosas in the 1820s, and where the terrible forced removals of the apartheid years happened. It’s the birthplace of Nelson Mandela. And it gained lasting notoriety worldwide for the death of Steve Biko in custody, a death that led to the film Cry Freedom, which portrayed the friendship of Biko and the liberal newspaper editor Donald Woods. It’s an unlikely holiday destination. Most visitors opt for the Garden Route through Knysna and Plettenberg Bay.

Tremayne Carew-Pole

TRAVEL SPECIAL: Swimming With Sharks

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the best way to deal with a phobia is to tackle it head-on in the most extreme way possible. I countered my fear of heights by completing the world’s highest bungee jump and of snakes by trying to hunt down a mamba in Zambia. I’ve cage-dived with crocodiles, but this time, it was my shark phobia that I wanted to defeat. The centre of great white shark activity, I discovered, was the town of Gansbaai a couple of hours drive up the Eastern Cape from Cape Town. Gansbaai is a quiet, windswept place.

Taffeta Gray

TRAVEL SPECIAL:  Other animals

There’s more to South African wildlife than just the ‘big five’, says Taffeta Gray Anyone who has been on safari in South Africa will boast that there is nothing like seeing the ‘Big Five’. Even if you are in the bush yourself, thrilled at having just spotted one of the great beasts, you’re bound to find someone who insists they’ve seen better. The trick is not to compete with the naturalist know-alls, but to outsmart them. And the way to do that is to swot up on lesser-known creatures, and stalk them instead. Here’s my alternative five. Meerkats The adverts on TV make out that meerkats come from Russia and have names like Aleksandr and Sergei. That’s rubbish, obviously.

Toby Young

Plan B

On 9 May 2003 I was having dinner with Nigella Lawson, Charles Saatchi and Dominic Lawson at the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower Hotel when the subject of who would make a good leader of the Conservative party came up. Iain Duncan Smith was struggling and didn’t look as though he’d last the year. ‘I think Dominic would be perfect,’ said Charles. ‘I think I could do it,’ said Nigella. ‘I could get a seat and be leading the party within five years.’ I suggested Boris Johnson, at that time the editor of this magazine and the Conservative MP for Henley. I hadn’t meant it particularly seriously, but when Nigella dismissed the idea I felt an unexpected surge of loyalty.

James Forsyth

‘There are no exits’

William Hague always knew the euro would go up in flames. But now he’s focused on the rescue operation Politicians normally have to wait for history to vindicate them. For William Hague, vindication has come early. All his dire predictions about the dangers of the euro, so glibly mocked at the time, have come to pass. But as he makes clear when we meet in his study in the Foreign Office, he is not enjoying this moment. Rather, just days before the start of Tory conference, he is absorbed with trying to sort out the mess that others have created.

Peter Jay

George, you need a holiday

Why is it all going so wrong for George Osborne? Only 16 months ago, the poor guy entered the Treasury full of sound principles and good intentions. He would put in order the dodgy public finances inherited from Gordon Brown’s regime, stand back and let market forces do the rest. The Office for Budget Responsibility would certify that he had. Within a short period, the benign influence of sound finance would restore confidence in the private sector; and room for it to take up the running in promoting national economic growth would be created by reining back the bloated public sector.

Douglas Murray

Gay rites

Gay marriage will never jeopardise straight marriage. But it can provoke political divorce. In America a new generation of Republicans is challenging the traditional consensus of their party on gay marriage. They — as well as some of the GOP old guard like Dick Cheney — are coming out in favour. In Britain the subject is also back on the agenda with the coalition government, at the insistence of the Prime Minister apparently, planning a ‘public consultation’ on the matter. Though not exactly political leadership, this nevertheless constitutes a change — not least in stealing the mantle of gay equality from the left. For decades it was presumed that conservatives could only oppose such moves.

Evgeny Lebedev

A Press Lord’s Notebook

My day started with a bang — or rather, a right hook and a left-right jab combination. A friend in Moscow rang me excitedly, revealing my father had punched someone live on Russian television. I don’t condone violence, but I couldn’t help but find the video clip amusing. Eventually, I got through to my father. He explained that Sergei Polonsky, a corrupt property developer who has long associated with the yet more reprehensible former mayor of Moscow Sergei Luzhkov, was being rude about ordinary Russians and, also, threatening him. Russian people have a fondness for robust characters — hence Vladimir Putin’s occasional displays of manliness. So, rather than causing a scandal, my father instantly obtained cult hero status.

Saturday

Frances Weaver

The great euro swindle

Finally, the Eurosceptics have been vindicated. But will their dishonest opponents ever be held to account? Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse. Meanwhile the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted.

James Forsyth

The last Blairite

Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his early years ‘sleeping in a drawer’, he says, in a one-bedroom house containing four generations of his family. But there’s no self-pity or faux-nostalgia in his reminiscing. What defines Murphy and his politics is not his family’s poverty, but their determination. When his father lost his job, he simply got on a bus and travelled around the UK until he found another one.

Dominic Lawson

Ridley was right

‘It’s very easy to be wise with hindsight,’ Nick Clegg this week told a BBC interviewer who had tasked the Deputy Prime Minister with his long-held view that the euro is a wonderful currency which Britain was crazy not to join. A cross-sounding Clegg went on to argue that ‘no one’ had envisaged that the eurozone might be in the plight it is today. This we can only describe as being foolish with hindsight. Although it is true that no one forecast the exact circumstances of the crisis, one politician did set out with startling clarity the main reason why the currency was misconceived — and it cost him his job.

Peter Jones

Classic comeback

A new programme to revive Latin and Greek in our schools Some 15 years ago, at the behest of the then editor Charles Moore, I wrote a jovial 20-week QED: Learn Latin column for the Daily Telegraph. It attracted a huge following, and I still have four large box-files full of letters from users. The majority of them expressed one of three sentiments: ‘I learned Latin at school x years ago, loved it and am delighted to renew my acquaintance’; ‘I learned Latin at school, hated it, but now realise what I have missed’; and ‘I never learned Latin at school and have always regretted it’.

Carol Sarler

Institutionalised brutality

Lord Winston must have known he placed a puss among the pigeons when he aired his view, a couple of weeks ago, that nurses from Eastern Europe are putting NHS patients in danger. Citing Romanians in particular, he remarked upon their limited communication skills and told the House of Lords that they had been trained ‘in a completely different way’ from British nurses. Predictably, since then, there has been a flurry of concern about his first point; it is obviously troubling if medical professionals cannot speak adequate English, and it will continue to be troubling as long as the difference between a microgram and a milligram is a coffin.