Features

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Failing the Test

County cricket ought to be important because it provides the players for Test cricket. You won’t find your budding Strausses, Cooks and Swanns playing on village greens or even in the estimable Lancashire and Yorkshire leagues. If they are really good they will be in a county side. The problem, however, is that when they are spotted by England they go off to become international players, and rarely seem to be anything other than special guest stars on the rare occasions they play for their counties. That is one reason why county cricket is so tedious now, and so little watched: you only ever see the also-rans, the wannabes, the has-beens and the never-weres.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

What the papers won’t say

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that BP threw an extravagant party, with oysters and expensive champagne. Let’s imagine that Britain’s most senior politicians were there — including the Prime Minister and his chief spin doctor. And now let’s imagine that BP was the subject of two separate police investigations, that key BP executives had already been arrested, that further such arrests were likely, and that the chief executive was heavily implicated. Let’s take this mental experiment a stage further: BP’s chief executive had refused to appear before a Commons enquiry, while MPs who sought to call the company to account were claiming to have been threatened.

Sinclair McKay

Middleton mania

Can I be frank? I can’t get enough of the Middletons. I am mad for them. Not just the Duchess of Cambridge, heroically staying awake throughout a cruelly protracted tour of Ottowa (you try it). Not just because of the fact that if you type the words ‘Pippa Middleton’ into Google, it offers you a remarkably narrow range of options from ‘underwear’ to ‘bottom’. Not just because of the Mail Online’s laudable efforts to get Prince Harry and Pippa paired off (before the advent of posh knicker-model ‘Flee’ Brudenell-Bruce). It is because the Middletons represent something we have not seen in proximity to the royal family since — well, perhaps ever.

Fraser Nelson

Pushing back at Brussels

The most striking thing about David Cameron is how well rested he looks. You wouldn’t guess that he was the father of a ten-month-old baby, let alone Prime Minister. He has no bags under his eyes — unlike his staff. He also seems relaxed. He jovially beckons us in to his Downing Street office and then flops down into one of the two high-backed chairs and urges one of us to take the other: ‘the Chancellor’s chair’, he calls it, with a chuckle. The last time we interviewed him, during the general election campaign, he was a different man, tired and tetchy. High office evidently suits him better than scrambling for votes. He seems to relish the variety of items on his agenda.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Degrees of optimism

The speeches given to new graduates at American universities are a distinct literary form – and a measure of national mood To understand what is going on in America’s head, it is worth tuning in to the early summer hum of commencement addresses. These secular sermons, delivered by politicians, businesspeople, entertainers and other assorted worthies to those graduating from university, are a unique literary form which provides an excellent measure of the national mood. They offer the latest riffs on America’s great national themes, on ambition, equality, perseverance and optimism. In good times, they are giddy; in bad times, sober.

Rod Liddle

My daughter’s end-of-term report confirms that she is being taught by alien reptiles

Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton, recently told me that he thought teacher training colleges tended to make people worse teachers rather than better. As the head of an independent school, Mr Little is allowed to appoint who he wants to his teaching staff, and regularly appoints those who have not been through the vacuous propaganda of the training colleges. The same leeway is not afforded to the heads of state schools; their staff must have been subjected to a statutory period of brainwashing before they are allowed into the classrooms to teach our children all about Mary Seacole, the kindly black lady who helped out during the Crimean War. I met a lot of these state school teachers at the pensions march in London last week and understood immediately Mr Little’s reservations.

James Bartholomew

Krona capitalism

Sweden is iconic, like Marilyn Monroe or Karl Marx. It is supposed to stand for something special: a kind of paradise where socialism and a big welfare state go together with being a successful, rich country. The left use it as a triumphant example: ‘See! It works in Sweden! High levels of equality, a big welfare state, socialism — and it works!’ People think that Sweden proves it is possible for a socialist welfare state to be prosperous, happy and civilised. They think it shows that relatively high levels of tax do not make much difference to economic performance. In fact, for the left, Sweden demonstrates that all that they dream of is possible.

Freddy Gray

Thank God it’s Thursday

Whitehall’s four-day week ‘What you doing here?’ says a cheerful security guard as I walk through the Houses of Parliament at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. ‘It’s early closing day.’ He’s right. The corridors are silent; the chambers are bare. There are a few tourists with their guides, some more guards, the odd cleaner … and that’s it. Where is everyone? Well, Friday is constituency day, as people in politics are quick to tell you. Our elected representatives and ministers are off running ‘surgeries’ with real people. What the insiders tend not to divulge, however, is that when the bosses aren’t around, their underlings sneak off early for the weekend.

Peter Robins

Peckham Notebook

For the past 18 months, it turns out, I have slept in a former royal place of worship. This has been less picturesque than it sounds. The old chapel on my corner of Rye Lane, Peckham, south London — named the Hanover Chapel because two of George III’s sons supported its minister, W.B. Collyer — was demolished to make room for tram tracks early in the last century. I live in the building that replaced it, a three-storey affair containing four flats, a pawnbroker and a branch of a sandwich chain. We are a mixed bunch up here above the pawnbroker. On the day I moved in, one of the other tenants ended a domestic dispute by opening a window and warning shoppers in the busy street below that she might have to jump.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Web exclusive: Review of Spectator debate on secularism, Islam and Christianity

Secularism is a greater threat to Christianity than Islam Royal Geographic Society June 29th 2011 Chair Rod Liddle   Proposing Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP Damian Thompson Prof Tariq Ramadan   Opposing The Very Rev’d Patrick Sookhdeo Nick Cohen Douglas Murray   Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican friar based in Blackfriars Oxford, proposed the motion arguing that secularism appeared in ‘strong and weak’ varieties. Weak secularism meant the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. Strong secularism entailed a belief that the only valid truths are the verifiable and falsifiable propositions approved by science. ‘Strong secularism is dangerous.

Fraser Nelson

Strike and counterstrike

For years, David Cameron has known that he would have to fight the trade unions and that the outcome of the battle would define his premiership. But neither side expected to fight so soon. The unions had intended to wait until the cuts would be at their deepest and the government was at its least popular. But the Prime Minister is moving too quickly, and making faster progress than his predecessors. School reform now looks unstoppable. Pension reform is next. The union bosses, Christine Blower, Mark Serwotka and Dave Prentis, are not ready for a long conflict — but they believe they have little option other than to strike now. In public, they make blood-curdling threats about the greatest disruption since the General Strike.

Conrad Black

I’ll be back

It has been confusing for anyone relying on the British media to fathom what has happened over the eight years of my persecution in the United States. And the volume of affecting messages I have received from the UK indicates that there remains some curiosity about it there. The short story is that a greenmailing shareholder who was trying to force the sale of the company (Hollinger International), and a quick realisation on the capital appreciation we had made in what had ceased to be a growth industry (newspapers), agitated for what is called in the United States a Special Committee, in 2003. This would look into all grievances of the requesting shareholder, and I agreed at once, as I had nothing to hide.

Rod Liddle

How did I get it right on the euro? Easy. I was racist

Do you remember the vicious debates back in the middle of the 1990s about whether or not we should join the single European currency? We don’t have that argument much any more; even the Liberal Democrats keep their traps shut about it these days and try to change the subject when any one mentions it. Do you remember the vicious debates back in the middle of the 1990s about whether or not we should join the single European currency? We don’t have that argument much any more; even the Liberal Democrats keep their traps shut about it these days and try to change the subject when any one mentions it. Anyway, the debate back then was remarkable because almost everybody except the entire British public was in favour of the single currency.

Brendan O’Neill

Confessional culture

If you were sexually abused by a Catholic priest nearly 50 years ago, and that priest was now dying or dead, would it not be wise to keep it to yourself? This awkward question invaded my mind as I watched last week’s BBC1 documentary Abused: Breaking the Silence. It featured mature, respectable and successful men recounting in eye-watering detail what was done to their penises by priests at a Rosminian boarding school in Tanzania in the 1960s. We were meant to be shocked by the alleged foul behaviour. I found myself more shocked by the willingness of these otherwise decorous men to make an emotional spectacle of themselves. Of course the allegations are very serious.

Theodore Dalrymple

Young Turks

Comparisons are odious, generalisations dangerous and stereotypes invidious, but without them conversation would be tedious and talk nothing but an endless regression of subordinate clauses, each qualifying what the previous one had asserted. It is cowardly and dishonest to refuse these means of arriving at truth, nor would we approach any nearer to truth were we to do so. Refusing to generalise is often a form of denial. So when I say that a recent trip to Turkey reminded me (once again) of the repellent character of British youth, I do not mean that every last British youth is repellent, very far from it: only that, as a human group, British youth is, by and large, the least attractive in the world, at least of any known to me.

Simon Hoggart

Kings and jokers

Last year I was having a thoughtful glass of champagne with the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell at the Spectator party during the Tory conference. We were suddenly interrupted by the Prime Minister, who greeted us warmly — ‘Hello Simon, hello Steve’ — because he’s a first-name kind of guy. Or possibly an aide had reminded him of our names. It very soon became clear that what he wanted to talk about was the way that Steve always draws him with a condom over his head. Steve explained courteously that this was because he seemed to have incredibly smooth skin. At first he had thought of clingfilm, but a condom seemed the natural extension. I said that the Guardian had wanted to drop the condom, but readers demanded its reinstatement. Cameron seemed unsatisfied.

Douglas Davis

Syria’s family business

In the absence of free speech, a free media and other political mod-cons in Syria, Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar cultivated the convenient habit of transacting business in the shadows, advancing and protecting — brutally, when necessary — the interests of the family and their fellow Alawites. But Damascus has always remained alive with intrigue and speculation. To process and disseminate that mix of conjecture and fact, a highly developed rumour mill sprang up. And for those interested in Middle East affairs — particularly Syrian affairs — London became the hub of the Syrian information exchange. Take the unlikely succession of Bashar following the death of his father in June 2000. It wasn’t meant to be like that.

Mary Wakefield

‘Anti-semitism is on the rise’

Exactly halfway through my conversation with the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, I had an attack of conscience, a small one, but there it was. Sacks had explained the thesis of his book, The Great Partnership — that religion and science don’t have to fight but can co-exist, as separate strands of inquiry. We’d discussed our respective religions (I’m Christian) and agreed that man will always wonder: what am I doing here? And that science has no answer to this. Then Sacks began to speak about the need for the three great Abrahamic, monotheistic faiths to stand together.

Saturday

The Spectator

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Melanie McDonagh

What women want

The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what most feminists like to think, instinctive Tories, if you judge by the voting record since the advent of universal suffrage. Not in recent elections, admittedly, but in general. And women liked David Cameron — until about six months ago, when, judging by the figures, as a sex we started going off him. And that has created something like consternation right at the top of the government.