Features

Saturday

James Forsyth

Who are the ‘undeserving rich’?

Westminster isn’t sure. But it’s suddenly obsessed with them Recently, one Tory cabinet member went for dinner at a top London hotel with some of the most famous members of the financial elite. Good food and better wine: it was the kind of occasion that, in days gone by, would have turned into an orgy of mutual self-congratulation. But the world has changed. The bankers spent the evening attacking the Conservative party for not doing enough to defend them. The cabinet member became steadily more irritated, and as soon as he left the hotel, turned to a friend and decried ‘the obscene arrogance of these people’. The contempt, it seems, is now mutual. Now is not a good time to be rich in Britain.

Dennis Sewell

Punish the rich, hurt everybody

The Bible tells us that the poor will always be with us, but there is no good reason, and certainly no scriptural authority, to support the widespread belief that the rich will be too. As capital has become more mobile, slipping across fiscal boundaries at the snap of an enter-key, so too have its owners, who are today only a Gulfstream ride away from somewhere where the climate is more agreeable, the taxman less importuning and the populace less hostile. In the past, we have indulged ourselves during downturns in the politics of envy, responded with tax and regulation — then watched as the globalised rich took flight. From bankers to the Rolling Stones, those who could work anywhere decided not to stay as ministers made their pips squeak.

Melanie McDonagh

Don’t wait for One Day

The correct response to the film One Day is, apparently, to cry your eyes out. Me, I couldn’t squeeze a single tear; in fact the sentiment I could barely suppress throughout was rising irritation. If ever two characters needed a slap it’s the hero and heroine of One Day. Let me explain. This is a film based on David Nicholls’s best-selling novel — and I don’t think I’m giving too much away here given the number of spoiler reviews — about a boy and a girl who never quite get it together for years and years, almost until it’s too late.

Lucy Morgan-Edwards

The road not taken

Abdul Haq and the ‘Afghan solution’ Just after September 11 2001, a piece appeared in the London Evening Standard under the headline: ‘Rebel chief begs: Don’t bomb now, Taleban will be gone in a month’. The accompanying photo showed a bearded man shaking hands with a beaming Margaret Thatcher. The man was Abdul Haq, perhaps the most famed Pashtun commander of the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad. Haq’s fabled exploits included blowing up the Soviet army’s seven-storey-underground munitions dump with two single rockets; an event that turned the war. This time, Abdul Haq had a plan for how to win another war — the one that America had vowed to wage on al-Qa’eda and their friends the Taleban in Afghanistan.

John Coldstream

Victim’s victory

On this Friday 50 years ago, at 1.30 p.m., the house lights at the Odeon Leicester Square dimmed for the first public screening of a British movie called Victim. It carried an ‘X’ certificate, which to the fans of its star, Dirk Bogarde, seemed decidedly odd. His reputation as the idol, not just of the Rank Organisation’s flagship cinema but of all the country’s Odeons, had been based largely on performances as Dr Simon Sparrow and Sydney Carton, and in other undemanding fare. The film’s release turned out to be a defining moment in the career of a great screen actor and a landmark in British cinema. For some, though, this efficient little black-and-white thriller helped to change the world.

Helen Schulman

New York Notebook

When the earth began to move, I was on lying on my bed with my cats in my lap. My son was in his room across the hall. The bed began to shake and I thought, inexplicably: is my little brother doing this? And then I thought, ‘Oh no, are we under attack again?’ (having 9/11 on the brain the way I and many other New Yorkers do). The cats lifted their heads at me looking for answers as the building swayed and the door to my bedroom opened and closed. When it was over, I called out to my son, asking if he’d felt anything, but he, an almost teenager, was oblivious. I went online to see the origins of the trembling I’d felt — the world is so nuts these days, was it al-Qa’eda, a bomb, my upstairs neighbours remodelling?

Anne Applebaum

Is Nato finished?

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed. The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in the end, and the most dire predictions have so far failed to come true.

Sarfraz Manzoor

Fifteen minutes later

Pauline Pearce did not know she was being filmed when she spoke out against the rioters running amok in her Hackney neighbourhood. Standing in the darkness, on a debris-strewn pavement in front of graffiti that read ‘Fuck Cameroon’, she seemed a lone voice of conscience amid the carnage. ‘Get real black people. Get real!’ she shouted, waving her walking stick. ‘You lot piss me the fuck off! I’m shamed to be a Hackney person. Because we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Foot Locker and thiefin’ shoes.

Saturday

Christopher Meyer

Show us the money

In 2002, a few months before the invasion of Iraq, I was invited to speak at the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas. I had a meeting with Baker, one of America’s best post-1945 secretaries of state, who served under his friend George H.W. Bush. Together, they drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. Jim Baker is an unsentimental politician from the realist school of American foreign policy. Like most of Bush Snr’s entourage, he clearly had doubts about invading Iraq. He recalled Douglas Hurd, then foreign secretary, complaining after the liberation of Kuwait that Britain was not getting a fair share of the reconstruction contracts. They had been hogged by American companies. I could bear witness to this.

Andrew Roberts

Obama’s fatal delay

The final collapse of the Gaddafi regime is being hailed by Democrats as a triumph for the slowly-but-surely approach of the Obama administration, whereas it is anything but. In fact, it is further indication that we are moving towards, as the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest book puts it, The Post-American World. The final collapse of the Gaddafi regime is being hailed by Democrats as a triumph for the slowly-but-surely approach of the Obama administration, whereas it is anything but. In fact, it is further indication that we are moving towards, as the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest book puts it, The Post-American World. It was on Friday 18 February – i.e.

Justin Marozzi

The post-Gaddafi future

The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants. For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs don’t do democracy. They are too tribal and fractious for such enlightened politics. For western leaders, it has been a case of better the devil you know, and hang the consequences for the Arabs.

Michael Mcmahon

Blots on the landscape

On a walking holiday in France a couple of weeks ago, I was making my way along the ridge that forms the very edge of the plateau of the Vercors when I heard a whooshing, rushing sound behind me that made me jump. When I turned, I jumped again, for there, less than 100 yards away and level with me, was a glider sailing through the sky, so close that I could see the pilot’s face as he gracefully rode the thermals that rose from the valley bottom, a thousand feet below. As the plane flew away, some words flew into my head: ‘Then off, off forth on swing,/ As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding/ Rebuffed the big wind.

Frank M-Ahearn

The truth behind hacking? It’s a global business – and journalists are the least of it

‘Hi, this is Mr Pretext from mobile phone activations. Our systems are down and I need you to bring up a customer’s mobile account for me please.’ I must have repeated this lie thousands of times in the past 20 years. It helped me gain access to information — criminal records, social security numbers, phone logs — that I would then hand on to all sorts of clients: journalists, insurers, cuckolded husbands and even policemen. As an American who spent many years in this underground industry, I can tell you that the British phone-hacking scandal has exposed only a tiny part of a vast criminal network. In the old days, private investigators would peer through letterboxes or ransack the bins of their targets.

Interconnect

Meeting Marine Le Pen

The Front National leader is keen to sound off on the EU, immigration and capitalism – but not on her party’s Vichy links There’s no mistaking the Front National’s headquarters in the western Parisian suburb of Nanterre. Outside the entrance stands a martial statue of a Joan of Arc in full body armour. Inside there is a garish, gigantic plastic coq gaulois. Further inside sits the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, a handsome 42-year-old blonde in heels, tailored jeans, frilly blouse and no make-up. Bob Tyrrell, editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, and I have been granted what is (for foreign media) a rare audience with the most forceful new character in French politics. It is impossible to dismiss Le Pen or her party as a fringe force in French politics.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely

Mind the gap | 27 August 2011

It’s time to stop separating psychiatry and neurology In 1987, I went to work as a trainee psychiatrist at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen’s Square in London. One of my jobs was to see a group of patients who were not popular with the neurologists who ran the place. The patients had symptoms that might have had a neurological explanation — muscle pain, inability to walk, being unable to think clearly, feeling exhausted after the most minimal physical or mental exertion — yet the neurologists thought that they were at best suffering from depression or at worst swinging the lead. They found it irritating that the patients insisted they had an illness called ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis).

Jesse Norman

Borneo Notebook

••• After a week in the jungle, it is perfectly clear to me that in any contest for creepy-crawly capital of the world, Borneo would be right up there with no questions asked. They tell you about the mosquitoes. What they don’t tell you about are the leeches, which are everywhere. The ordinary brown kind lie in wait on the path, rearing up like two-inch mini-Godzillas full of gangster attitude and the will to win. Used to chomping through boar and mouse-deer hide, they made short work of my hiking socks. They pump up from matchstick to chipolata size in a few minutes if you don’t catch them quickly, and inject an anticoagulant so you end up bleeding for hours after the bite.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Fight or flight

David Cameron now has the chance to be the Prime Minister he always wanted to be. Up to now, his premiership has, to his frustration, been dominated by the economic crisis that the country is facing. His cherished social reform agenda has not been the government’s animating mission but a rhetorical extra. But after last week’s riots, this has all changed. Broke Britain is now being forced to share its space at the top of the national agenda with Cameron’s specialist subject, Broken Britain. This crisis may have deprived Cameron of his summer holiday but it has given him back his political mission. Those present at the meeting in Downing Street before Cameron addressed parliament last Thursday say the mood was remarkably upbeat.

Fraser Nelson

Gang war

There’s a social crisis coming, says Iain Duncan Smith, and we must act now to avert it Most politicians who hang pictures of battle scenes in their office do so from a sense of nostalgia. For Iain Duncan Smith, it is about militaristic feng shui. Since becoming Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the former soldier has approached his job as he would a battle. The abstract pictures he inherited from his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, have been replaced with scenes of the Duke of Malborough’s victories. When a group of officials came to visit him just after he changed the decor, they told him it felt like the Ministry of Defence. ‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘I want you to know that from now on, this is the war room.

Michael Henderson

One day at Headingley

The cyclist sipping wine on the terrace of a Thames-side pub may not look much like an English hero, but anybody who loves cricket knows that he ranks only slightly lower than the angels. Thirty years ago Bob Willis bowled England to the most astonishing victory in the history of Test cricket, taking eight for 43 on a mad Monday in Leeds that held the nation entranced. Three decades later, not even the superb performances of the current England players, who are facing India at the Oval this week as the No. 1 team in the world, can efface the memories of ’81.‘Botham’s Ashes’, they call that series, with reason.

Tom Wright

Keep the faith

How the Church of England can – and will – endure Though with a scornful wonder Men see her sore opprest, By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distrest, Yet Saints their watch are keeping, Their cry goes up, ‘How long?’ And soon the night of weeping Shall be the morn of song. Samuel Stone’s hymn, replete with already archaic spelling, expresses the Victorian hand-wringing over the supposedly dangerous heresies of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal from 1853 to 1883. The first Lambeth Conference was called in 1867 to address the problem. Stone’s hymn, written a year earlier, sums up the mood of many. Everything is going wrong, the godless mock, and all we can do is hold out for ‘the consummation of peace for evermore’.