Features

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Philip Roth is a genius

Carmen Callil isn’t ‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up’. That, most sensible people will agree, is a proper response to the world’s follies. But when a gong is struck for outstanding work over a lifetime then there can be merit in it, which is why we should give three resounding cheers to the judges who last week awarded the Man International Booker Prize to Philip Roth. Those bent on mischief might go further, and offer an additional cheer to those judges who, by nominating Roth, outraged their fellow arbiter Carmen Callil.

Anonymous

Target men

I am a long-serving officer in the Metropolitan Police and my passion for the job is matched only by my frustration and anger at what I see going on around me. The Met is capable of, and frequently achieves, great things. But this happens in spite of the way it is run, not because of it. For years, I have watched as the service has been disfigured by the need to satisfy targets dictated from above, fundamentally changing the way police do their job. What follows is my attempt to bring to light what is happening inside the Met, and doubtless in constabularies throughout the land. The Metropolitan Police Service is now dominated by figures. Every facet of the organisation has targets and quotas on which everything else is measured, assessed and planned.

Saturday

Carrie Fox

Welcome to the jungle

Shortly after I began my working life, on the edge of the Westminster jungle, I landed a job with a political ‘big beast’; an alpha male, in very much the same mould as Dominique Strauss-Kahn: silver-haired, heavy-set, charismatic. For a few months, he ignored me as I busied away researching stats. Then, during what should have been a routine working lunch, the searchlight of his wandering eye settled on me and out of the blue he declared passionate love: ‘Say you love me too. I just can’t live without you.’ This was both flattering and confusing. Why now? Why me? This famous man had a devoted wife and a small daughter and at the time that shocked me too. Well, I was young. In the months that followed, I grew up.

Con Coughlin

Obama’s war

One of the first things David Cameron will tell Barack Obama when they meet during the American President’s state visit to Britain next week is that hundreds of British soldiers are going to be withdrawn from Afghanistan this summer. Of the 10,000 British troops currently based in southern Afghanistan, around 450 are to be brought home, with the promise of more to follow, as Mr Cameron cashes in the peace dividend he believes will accrue following the welcome demise of the world’s most infamous terrorist. Huzzah, I hear you cry. And about time too. Never understood what we were doing there in the first place.

Mary Kenny

IRELAND NOTEBOOK

You could not mistake the atmosphere in Dublin this week: the state visit of the Queen and Prince Philip has had the full panoply of a historic occasion. It was obvious that the Irish state was wholeheartedly committed to its success, with the most formal protocols in place. Both David Cameron and William Hague have accompanied the Queen for part of the trip, which is highly unusual. The Queen agreed to visit locations associated with those who rose against the Crown — the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square — and showed a graceful sense of respect. It has been impressive and even moving. Yet it was also sad — at least in Dublin. Because there is a small but extremely violent minority of dissenters, Dublin city was eerily empty of people.

Rod Liddle

Hell hath no fury like a public-spirited ex-wife

I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is not motivated by revenge in writing a book about her ex-husband and dobbing him in to the police. I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is not motivated by revenge in writing a book about her ex-husband and dobbing him in to the police. If the book was motivated by spite and revenge because Chris had recently dumped her for a strange mannish woman who ever-so-slightly resembles the late TV comedian Jack Douglas, I think we’d all feel a little unclean reading it.

Matt Ridley

A green dark age

The government’s new emissions target will despoil the countryside, rob the poor – and enrich landowners like me ‘Greener food and greener fuel’ is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe’s largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside last year, and has now shut it down for lack of profitable customers. This is actually the second shut-down at the plant — which takes subsidies and turns them into motor fuel — the first being a three-week refit to try to stop the stench bothering the neighbours. Welcome to the neo-medieval world of Britain’s energy policy.

Christian House

Our friend in the north

The last surviving leader of Norway’s anti-Nazi resistance Oslo Even in the glare of a crisp spring day the execution ground at Akershus Fortress is a chilling place. Snow still fringes the old gun battery and the Oslofjord clinks with ice. Sitting above this small patch of ground, in Norway’s Resistance Museum, I’m reminded of the risks taken by the man sitting next to me. Seventy years ago, Gunnar Sønsteby, the most decorated man in the country and the last remaining leader of the resistance movement, spent five years fighting the Nazi occupation. Avoiding the firing squad in that courtyard was his highest priority. Sønsteby is a fine reed of a man; thin, poised and dignified, like a Nordic Giacometti.

Dennis Sewell

Who speaks for the world?

In the field of public diplomacy, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar has become a mouse that roars. According to Hillary Clinton, the Emir of Qatar’s television network, Al Jazeera, is knocking spots off the broadcasters of three superpowers in a global struggle for influence being played out across the airwaves. ‘We are in an information war and we are losing,’ Clinton warned the Senate foreign relations committee in March. Making only the briefest mention of the enormous expansion of international broadcasting funded by the Russian and Chinese governments in recent years, the US secretary of state went on to declare that ‘Al Jazeera is winning.

Peter Hoskin

Never-never land

Liverpool The payday loan shop in Breck Road erupts from its grey surroundings. Everything is painted yellow, black and red — colours that in the natural world mean ‘do not touch’ but that serve here as a lure. ‘Need cash now?’ ask the posters in the windows, in scarlet block capitals on a sunburst background. ‘We can help.’ The shop is well placed. Breck Road is where Everton meets Anfield — the centre of Liverpool’s football rivalry, but also of its destitution. Industrial decline has put the streets around here into a decades-long slump. One in three adults is out of work. There are plenty of people here who need cash now, and will take it from wherever it comes.

Saturday

Michael Thomas-Duffy

Web exclusive: the global free schools network

A dozen years ago the charter school movement found me when I volunteered my time as a member of the governing board of the MATCH Charter High School in Boston. American charter schools are taxpayer funded public schools that are independently managed, akin to the free schools that are taking root in England now. I'd been a civil rights activist, having headed the civil rights enforcement agency for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, when I became captivated by the promise that charter schools held to redress the achievement gap between black and white students. While in London recently to attend the 'Schools Revolution' conference sponsored by this magazine, I was struck by parallels between the travails that free schools face and those charter schools have endured.

Iain Martin

How to save the Union | 14 May 2011

Alex Salmond will be a formidable opponent – so David Cameron needs to fight on his own terms In Aberdeen this week, a new statue of Robert the Bruce was unveiled. Canny, daring and tenacious, he is a king revered for an audacious victory that altered the course of Scottish history and secured his country’s independence from England. It is easy to imagine Alex Salmond plotting where his own statue will be, how tall the plinth. He has the same ambition, to win Scotland’s independence, and his battle plan is not entirely dissimilar. In Bannockburn, a much larger English force was destroyed on the battlefield as a result of its recklessly complacent commanders. Almost 700 years later, the same fate may well befall the unionist parties if they’re not careful.

Fraser Nelson

Salmond’s treasure map

Since oil was struck in the North Sea in 1970, it has fuelled dreams of Scottish independence. ‘Rich Scots, or poor Britons?’ ran the Scottish Nationalist Party’s slogan two years later. Alex Salmond has refined this slogan into a formal plan for separation which — he says — would make Scottish independence financially viable. For a country which has Swedish levels of state spending, this is quite some claim. British waters are already separated from Norwegian waters, and so are the oil and gas underneath. Salmond’s proposed division, drawn up by the British civil servants he commands, would claim 91 per cent of British North Sea revenue. This would have raised £11.7 billion in 2008/09.

George Bridges

Too many toddlers

A new baby boom is reaching school age, and we’re not prepared Some time in the next week or so, all being well, my wife will have baby number three. That means more hours spent in Battersea Park’s playground, a flocking place for parents who inhabit that sliver of south-west London known as Nappy Valley. Go there any Saturday morning and you’ll see toddlers everywhere: squabbling on the swings, pushing each other off the pirate ship. Having lived in London for 20 years, I’m used to a crush of commuters. But toddler overcrowding strikes me as something new. There are now Nappy Valleys all over Britain — places feeling the blast of a population explosion that our political class seems determined to ignore.

Rod Liddle

If the slebs think the tabloids are bad, let them deal with the people who read them

Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy. Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy.

Freddy Gray

The chattering classes

Louise Stern on what the deaf really think of ‘hearing people’ I’m at my desk in London chatting to a deaf woman in Mexico. We are communing through the internet. At 17.57 GMT, an instant messenger bubble pops on to my computer screen: ‘Louise Stern: Hi Freddy, it’s Louise’ and the interview has begun. It’s miraculous, when you think about it. Louise Stern is the author of Chattering Stories, a recently published collection of short stories about adventurous deaf girls in the big noisy world. Louise has a very original writing voice, and critics say that she enables them to understand for the first time what it must be like to be deaf. She isn’t comfortable writing in instant messenger, however. ‘I tend to avoid it,’ she says.

Elliot Wilson

Breaking the bank

The vendetta against Bangladesh’s Nobel Peace Prize winner ‘It is all lies,’ says Muhammad Yunus, his voice quiet but firm. ‘The media in Bangladesh attacks me unceasingly and I cannot stop them, but the accusations are untrue.’ I believe him absolutely. Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has done perhaps more than any other living person to alleviate global poverty. Grameen Bank, the microfinance operation that he founded nearly 30 years ago, has (by lending to even the very poorest families) transformed the lives of millions of his fellow Bangladeshis and become a model emulated across the world. But he is now living in fear of his government, which seems bent on discrediting him. ‘My voice is not heard.

Ross Clark

Neighbourhood botch

‘Localisation’ is an expensive path to greater political corruption The last time the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas played a part in national debate was in the 17th century, when — recent studies suggest — locals carved a rude chalk parody of Oliver Cromwell into a hillside. It failed to unsettle Cromwell, but the village may yet be the nemesis of another Oliver: Oliver Letwin, architect of the government’s pet policy of localism. Cerne Abbas is one of 17 communities selected by the Department for Communities and Local Government to prepare a ‘neighbourhood plan’.

Patrick Marnham

CONGO NOTEBOOK

Kisangani, capital of the province of Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo, once Zaire, is the setting for A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul’s grim masterpiece, published in 1979, about post-colonial reality in central Africa. Naipaul’s plot describes a tribal war that threatens the city. This actually happened 20 years later, when Kisangani became a battlefield for the bandit armies of Uganda and Rwanda. The city is now controlled by General Jean-Claude Kifwa, commander of the 9th Military Region of the Armed Forces of the DRC. We arrive to find that the temperature has reached a seasonal 40 ºC. A thunderstorm lasting most of our first night reduces this to a more bearable level. The Congo River is why we are here, filming Snake Dance, a historical documentary.

Saturday

Gilead Ini

Web exclusive: A grim panorama

Tom Giles’ attempt – on The Spectator's Coffee House blog – to impugn CAMERA’s video documenting the BBC’s violations of its Editorial Guidelines is an example of the illogical and desperate flailing with which the BBC has consistently approached reasoned arguments about Panorama’s “A Walk in the Park”, a flagrantly biased documentary about Jerusalem.   Mr. Giles’s complaint relies in part on his assertion, with ominous undertones, that CAMERA’s brief video “re-edited” the Panorama documentary and shows only excerpts from the programme.