Features

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Breivik and the right

Must all conservatives answer for the actions of a psychopath? Anders Behring Breivik believed himself a Knight Templar and awarded himself various military ranks accordingly. He also believed that he and other self-described racists had common cause with jihadis and that the USA has a Jewish problem. So even before he planted a car bomb in a civilian area and gunned down scores of young people, it would have been clear to anyone who bothered to question him that Breivik was insane. But in the coverage since his atrocities first broke on to the world, two troubling tendencies have converged. The first is the search for reason in a mind that was clearly a stranger to it.

Camilla Long

Amy Winehouse became more helpless with every photograph

Amy Winehouse was found dead at home at 3.54 p.m. last Saturday afternoon. A day earlier, a Norwegian gunman had let off a bomb in central Oslo, shooting youth workers and teens in a national horror-show that was still ongoing. For a couple of hours, editors deliberated who they should ‘go with’ as the top story. In the ‘hierarchy of death’, as one commentator grimly put it, was Anders Behring Breivik bigger than the sadly predictable demise of the dark star of British pop? Not for the tabloids, who hungrily ‘went’ with the 27-year-old singer.

John Laughland

Vive les vacances!

‘Vous partez?’ ‘Vous partez un petit peu?’ ‘Quand est-ce que vous partez?’ Since early June, Parisians have been asking and answering these questions remorselessly, their minds fixed on holidays and nothing else. Since early July, the capital has been emptying out dramatically: the markets are deserted, shops are boarded up, food supplies even run down. Children vanish as mothers take them to the country or send them on Scout camp, leaving the fathers to join the family when the office permits. The city will slow down even further in August, so much so that it does not even charge for street parking during that languid month.

Andrew Gilligan

A gold medal for idiocy

The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of it Would you like to compete for Britain at the 2012 Olympics? No, seriously, compete in the real Olympics, march in the athletes’ parade, wear our national colours? Vacancies are still available. Complete beginners most welcome — no experience necessary. You don’t even have to be, well, British. I promise I am not making this up. Among the many inventive ways which London 2012 has devised to waste public money, Team GB Handball is my personal favourite. Three million pounds is being spent to create, from scratch, a British Olympic squad in a sport which virtually nobody in Britain has ever played.

Tim Montgomerie

Afraid of being right

The coalition risks withering because Cameron won’t listen to the wisdom of ordinary Conservatives It’s the Mary Poppins principle of successful government: a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. A government does the necessary things to keep the nation healthy while dispensing regular sweeteners to sustain the patient’s consent for the treatment. Across the country the vast majority of Conservatives are agreed about the tough remedies necessary to restore Britain’s sick economy back to health. They’re also united on the treats that will sugar the pill. The problem is the coalition government.

Allister Heath

Wake up, Osborne!

He has been desperately trying to persuade us that things could be worse, but the truth is that this week’s news is a bitter blow for George Osborne. He has been desperately trying to persuade us that things could be worse, but the truth is that this week’s news is a bitter blow for George Osborne. Our economy only grew by 0.2 per cent this quarter, at a time when he desperately needs stronger growth to generate the tax required to finance public spending and reduce his awful budget deficit. Our chancellor may seem nonchalant but, as he knows, this pitiful growth means less money for the exchequer, and the prospect that Britain will be stuck in a permanent state of semi-stagnation. The coalition government has seemed weirdly insulated from the bleak reality.

Saturday

Anthony Browne

Plan overboard!

The euro crisis has prompted national parliaments across the continent to dump their Euro-federalist baggage It was the political equivalent of Mother Teresa announcing that she had converted to agnosticism. Bart De Wever, the leader of Belgium’s largest political party, was such a Euro-federalist zealot that a year ago he declared he wanted his country to ‘evaporate’ into the beloved EU. But that was so 2010. A few weeks ago he shared a platform with the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, Europe’s most Eurosceptic head of state, and declared: ‘I am a Eurorealist.’ To walk the walk, De Wever’s party, the N-VA, rejected a Brussels proposal for a new Euro-tax, an act as out of character for Belgian politicians as refusing a Trappist ale.

Paul Wood

Can they take Tripoli?

Into battle with Libya’s middle-class rebel army Nafusa mountains, Libya ‘My people, did you forget what you got from this tyrant Gaddafi? Only pain, death and humiliation!’ The commander of the Tripoli Brigade was rallying his men at a rebel base not far from the frontline in the western mountains. ‘Stand up, in his face, and say in one voice: No more!’ The Tripoli Brigade is a ‘special unit’ being prepared to storm the capital. Most of its members still have family in Tripoli, so had covered their faces with masks. If I hadn’t known that they were an army of teachers, engineers and accountants, many holding a gun for the first time, I might have thought them a bit sinister.

Victoria Lane

Give Charlie a break

The boy’s gone to jail. Isn’t that enough? I was watching the news on the evening of 10 December, some follow-up reports about the student protest the day before, and saw a clip of a young man wielding a mannequin’s leg — shod in a lady’s wedge-heeled boot — as he declared that he and the other protestors were ‘very angry’. He didn’t look that angry; actually he looked extremely placid and was obviously in a chemically altered state. My first thought was: Charlie! And then: you haven’t hidden that leg very well. Charlie Gilmour is now in prison for his activities at the protest. But when he was two, I had just left school and had a gap-year job as his childminder.

Rod Liddle

A pie in the face for the police from the dark side of public opinion

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. It is possible that it was not a person at all, but a phantasm, a creature from the dark side spontaneously brought into being by the national outpouring of hysteria and hyperbole, much as the chupacabras, or goat-sucker, will manifest himself in the peasant villages of South America when the locals are gripped by a grave but irrational fear of something.

Anne Applebaum

High noon

The American left is revelling in Rupert Murdoch’s British troubles – and it’s America that has the power to really hurt him Washington DC Let’s start, first, with the bare facts: a British newspaper has been found to have broken British law. The proprietor has closed the paper and apologised profusely. Some British policemen have resigned. Some British journalists have been arrested. While all of this is happening, wars are being fought in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. The baseball season is progressing. Goldman Sachs has reported a disappointing $1 billion profit. The US Congress is wrangling over the national debt and, as a result, the American government may be about to default.

Angela Huth

Duvets or blankets?

Some issues are ‘life-dividers’ – no compromise will ever work Sheets and blankets: I have loved them always. The now ubiquitous duvet, current winner in the affections of sleepers, is to me the enemy. There is so much against it: its habit of preferring the other sleeper, and twisting over to his side. The draughts that sneak in from all directions. The inability to be either hot enough or cool enough, thus ensuring broken, bad-tempered nights. Sixty years ago a duvet was only found in a chalet hotel in Austria. The novelty was possibly enjoyed for a week. For us bedding traditionalists there is no enjoyment in duvets. They can never compare with the bliss of laundered sheets, and a choice of blankets, with which to perfect the night.

Peter Paterson

Freedom in Wales

Peter Paterson, who died last week, was a political columnist for this magazine in 1970, and later a frequent contributor. This extract, from a piece published in The Spectator in 1983, describes his evacuation, in 1944, from Spurgeon’s Orphan Home, south London, to Cwmllynfell, South Wales: Our trainload of orphans had arrived in 1944 in Port Talbot, fugitives from the German V-2 rockets, our minders having been promised that we should all be kept together in some Welsh version of the institution from which we had been evacuated. But no one had told the local worthies who met the train of any such arrangement, and we were scattered by a fleet of cars to destinations all over the South Wales coalfield.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Ed against the empire

Rupert Murdoch’s hold on British politics has finally been broken. The politicians who competed to court him are now scrapping to see who can distance themselves fastest. As the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, says when we meet in his Commons office on Tuesday afternoon, ‘The spell has been broken this week and clearly it will never be the same again.’ Miliband and his staff have just heard that the government will support their motion calling for Murdoch to withdraw his bid for BSkyB. They are trying to contain their excitement, but their grins give them away. The press secretary, normally a nervous-looking soul, is beaming from ear to ear. Their strategy, hatched late on Monday night, seems to have worked.

William Shawcross

You’ll miss him when he’s gone

Ed Miliband was beaming when I saw him talking to Rupert Murdoch at the media magnate’s summer party at the Orangery, Kensington Palace, just three weeks ago. Ed Miliband was beaming when I saw him talking to Rupert Murdoch at the media magnate’s summer party at the Orangery, Kensington Palace, just three weeks ago. The Labour leader has since admitted that he did not raise the matter of phone hacking that evening. Of course not! He was trying to charm. But that is so last month. Now, Miliband is happily playing Pied Piper to the lynch mob against the lord of the evil empire whom the Labour party courted so long and so successfully. Mobs should never be trusted, let alone joined.

John R. Bradley

Summer of hate

For the past half a century, the Tunisian film director Nadia El Fani would have had no problem showing her new documentary, Neither God Nor Master, which explores her atheism and disdain for radical Islam. But before the Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia was the most socially liberal country in the Muslim world. Its Islamist extremists were where they belonged: in prison. A few weeks ago, however, during the film’s premiere, hundreds of bearded zealots smashed through the glass doors of the capital’s CinemAfricArt cinema, attacked the audience, and threatened ‘a massacre’ if the screening continued.

Andrew M Brown

Written in the scars

What do you do if you want to upset your parents these days? Properly rebel, I mean. You certainly don’t get a tattoo. Tattoos won’t bother anybody — they’ve become a fashion accessory, adopted as widely as bangles and bracelets. Shrewd money is investing in the sector, because it’s going through a growth spurt: tattoo parlours are up 5.6 per cent since 2008. But this isn’t merely a fad: it reflects a deep underlying secular obsession with living for ever and, especially, staying permanently young. Young women are driving the boom in fashionable tattooing. My friend Alice, for instance, is 23, super-cool, and works in high fashion. She has several tattoos, including a shooting star on the delicate underside of her wrist.

Rod Liddle

MPs and bankers didn’t clean up their acts. Nor will the hacks

I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I mean, next in line for the national outpouring of bile and contumely. My closest friend is an art therapist and his smugness is beginning to get my goat, especially coming from someone who wanders around loony bins at my expense with a bag of crayons and a head full of post-Freudian idiocies. So, 2012, remember, let’s take it out on the art therapists. I’ll start the Twitter campaign in November, you ring the Guardian. For the moment, though, it’s journalists, and fair enough I suppose.

Max Hastings

Never trust an editor

Long before the phone-hacking scandal attained volcanic proportions, I scarcely knew a journalist in London unastonished to hear that last Christmas, the prime minister dined at the Oxfordshire home of Rebekah Brooks. Even were she Mother Teresa, which some evidence suggests she is not, it was plainly a lapse of judgment for David Cameron to be seen to accept Brooks’s hospitality, as he regularly did. This was on four counts: 1) The immensely sensitive issue of BSkyB’s future ownership was on the government’s plate, and Brooks is a senior executive of News International. 2) The News of the World phone-hacking scandal was ongoing, and Brooks was a deeply involved party. 3) Brooks’s access to Cameron was bound to feed jealousies elsewhere in the media.

Mark Mason

Watch your step

Why can’t we have traffic laws for pedestrians? Imagine you’re driving down Piccadilly one day. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, you brake to a halt, causing the car behind to smash into you. Or you change lanes without indicating, right into the path of someone who’s overtaking. Or you change direction completely, executing a perfect one-eighty into the oncoming traffic. What sort of punishment would you expect? Forget points on your licence, you’d be scratching the days on your cell wall. Yet repeat these crimes in their two-footed versions on Piccadilly’s pavement and no one will say a thing. Not to your face, that is. Inside it’s different. Inside they’re dreaming of attaching you to the nearest lamppost à la Mussolini.