Features

Saturday

Richard Littlejohn

Obama vs the lightweights

This President should be beatable. But the real Republican contender won’t get in the ring for another five years Florida By rights, Barack Obama should be on the ropes. After what he himself described as a ‘shellacking’ in the midterm elections, he was given a mandatory count and still managed to stay on his feet. That ‘hopey-changey thing’ hasn’t worked out as advertised. America’s debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Last weekend, Washington was on the brink of a government shutdown as Obama’s government and Congress traded punches over budget cuts. Half the country hates Obama’s nationalised healthcare plan with a medieval vengeance. It gets worse. His promise to shut Club Gitmo has been shelved indefinitely.

John Laughland

A right mess

Observing French politics in the run-up to next spring’s presidential elections is like watching one of those slow-motion films of controlled car crashes in which a dummy and its vehicle are rammed into a wall. Nicolas Sarkozy is the dummy, who will make one last ungainly gesticulation as he lurches into catastrophe, and the coalition of liberals, centrists, free-marketeers, pro-Americans and careerists that carried him to power in 2007 is splintering as the laws of political aerodynamics wrench it apart. Two words explain this outcome: Le Pen. In 2002, the now governing party, the UMP, was created between the two rounds of the presidential election to support Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Rod Liddle

Even Conservative councils now think like the left

The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is very handsome, isn’t he? If I were a woman, or a homosexual, I would certainly set my cap at him; I would let him order for me in restaurants and handle me brusquely in the bedroom as he revealed to me the full tumescent glory of his ‘killer app’, as he would undoubtedly put it. The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is very handsome, isn’t he? If I were a woman, or a homosexual, I would certainly set my cap at him; I would let him order for me in restaurants and handle me brusquely in the bedroom as he revealed to me the full tumescent glory of his ‘killer app’, as he would undoubtedly put it.

Jules Evans

Fighting spirit | 16 April 2011

How does the army of a liberal, multicultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith? That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it confronts the apparent epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting a fifth of its troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Its response is a new psychological training programme called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which aims to strengthen the emotional, psychological and, yes, spiritual resilience of each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US Army.

Rachel Ward

Where there’s a will …

Why haven’t ladies challenged male primogeniture? When the Labour MP Keith Vaz introduced a private member’s bill in January ‘to remove any distinction between the sexes in determining the succession to the Crown’, he mentioned that, although not one of those in line for the throne, he did need to declare an interest. Vaz is a fervent monarchist who believes that in order to save itself, the monarchy must change; that it must fall in line with modern Britain’s values on gender or die. You wonder why, in the face of a thousand and one more pressing social issues, anyone would want to bugger with the Act of Settlement, which has sat like a fat cat in the corner of the British constitution for more than 300 years. Really, does anyone care?

Brendan O’Neill

Nannies v. nudgers

Colonel Gaddafi and his mad bald son are not the only has-been regime desperately clinging to power. In Britain, too, a gaggle of once-powerful but now isolated authoritarians is doing everything it can to continue dominating people’s lives. These unelected know-it-alls exerted an extraordinary and baleful influence over public life during the 13 years of New Labour rule — banning things they didn’t like, scaring the public witless, demonising fat kids as the great evil of our age — but they have seen their power wane in the Liberal-Conservative era. And they aren’t happy. Yes, it’s the nanny staters, those public health officials and their journalistic cheerleaders who took killjoyism to dizzy new heights between 1997 and 2010.

Saturday

Claire Sharp

Advertisement Feature: A healthy classic

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Matt Cavanagh

Operation amnesia

Britain’s failings in Afghanistan have as much to do with short memories as shortages of troops When Liam Fox visited Afghanistan in January, he was, like the defence secretaries before him, keen to tell the story of a country moving towards peace and stability. So he stopped by the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, seen as one of the most orderly and peaceful in the country. At least, that is how it was seen until last Friday, when a mob stormed a United Nations compound and murdered seven unarmed staff — apparently to avenge a Koran-burning in Florida. A year after America’s troop surge in Afghanistan, there are dispiritingly few signs of progress.

Taffeta Gray

Downe time

Kate Middleton has asked her wedding guests and well-wishers to donate money to Beatbullying, a British anti-bullying charity. This announcement has led to some silly stories in the press about how badly she was bullied when she was a pupil at Downe House, a girls boarding school in Berkshire. She was tormented, it’s said, because she was ‘too perfect’, so she left after two terms for Marlborough College, where girls mind perfection less. I was a couple of years above Kate, or Catherine as she was known, at Downe House. I don’t remember her, but a friend of mine in her year recalls her being ‘quiet and square, with brown hair’. In fact none of my old school pals can remember much about her, which suggests she wasn’t excessively singled out.

Rod Liddle

David Willetts should know better than to tell the truth to the Guardian

Are women to blame for almost everything, as the Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, seems to think? I would not lightly discount the possibility; they can, after all, be terribly trying. They are certainly to blame for most of the bad things which have happened in my life, if you discount me as a causal factor (which you do if you are me, if you get my drift). Not only that but there seem to be more of them around at the moment, in bars and restaurants, on our television screens, driving cars all over the place or arguing interminably with cashpoint machines as the queue behind them stretches way down the high street.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Bubble 2.0

There is nothing more maddening to an old-school investor than a bubble. And especially a bubble in which young people are getting outrageously rich. But here we are, 11 years after the last technology bubble popped, in the midst of another of those exuberant moments. Facebook valued at $75 billion. Groupon, a three year old coupon business, at $25 billion. College dropouts with a knack for programming and a devilish knowledge of our online behaviours are suddenly worth more than a roomful of Goldman Sachs partners. The valuations are crazy, the value investors splutter. There are real businesses with real earnings worth nothing like these shooting stars. It’s immoral! Well, maybe. The most dangerous thought in any bubble is ‘this time it’s different’.

Michael Henderson

Acting up | 9 April 2011

‘We’re asked to console with each tremulous soul who steps out to be loudly applauded. Stars on opening nights weep when they see their names in lights. Though people who act, as a matter of fact, are financially amply rewarded, it seems while pursuing their calling their suffering is simply appalling.’ The mummers couldn’t deceive Noel Coward. The Master knew all their ways, for he lived among them, as dramatist, actor, director and — as we have seen — songwriter. What a shame he’s not still with us, for the furore surrounding the ‘savage cuts’ announced last week by the Arts Council of England might have prompted him to add a few more humorous verses about the vanity of certain thesps. Not all; by no means.

Robert Gorelangton

The face of space

Everyone loved Yuri Gagarin – but he was always a Soviet sideshow Fifty years ago, on 12 April, Yuri Gagarin, a tractor-driver’s son from Smolensk, climbed aboard a capsule about the size of a Morris Minor, perched on top of a massive rocket. He followed into space a mongrel bitch called Laika, but unlike the poor mutt he survived. He completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes flat and parachuted safely back on to Russian soil. The first human in space, he instantly became the most famous man on earth. Within weeks of touchdown, the 27-year-old Gagarin arrived in Manchester, home of a new TV soap called Coronation Street. Yuri was mobbed, the girls infatuated with the beaming Soviet pin-up Macmillan called ‘a delightful fellow’.

Andrew Roberts

A vote against folly

Follow Churchill’s advice in the 5 May referendum On 5 May, in the name of a spurious pursuit of fairness, the nation will be asked to abolish the ancient system of first past the post by which we have for centuries chosen our parliamentarians. ‘It’s unfair!’ is the whine of the aggrieved infant down the ages, to which adults rightly reply that life is often unfair, and success goes to those who can adapt themselves to that fact. I hope the British people will tell Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg precisely that next month. First past the post selects the candidate constituents want the most, rather than the one they don’t want the least.

Lloyd Evans

‘The global warming concern is over. Time for a return to sanity’: a Spectator debate

Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, proposed the motion by addressing various myths promoted by the ‘relics’ of the opposition. The average temperature rise since fossil fuels were first used had been barely one degree Celsius, he said, and no warming had been observed this century. The cost of ‘decarbonising’ the economy, he added, would be catastrophic. Oil was not about to run out and ‘winnable gas’ was available in ever greater abundance. Yet schoolchildren were being deliberately scared to death about global warming by their teachers. ‘This is not just outrageous but wicked.

Saturday

James Forsyth

EXTENDED VERSION: Playing the heavy

A longer version of James Forsyth's interview with Eric Pickles, the Cabinet’s surprisingly intellectual bruiser There are politicians who shy away from confrontation and those who relish it. Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, is firmly in the latter camp. As we sit around a small table in his room in the House of Commons, he entertains with war stories from his days as the budget-cutting leader of Bradford City Council at the end of the Thatcher era. ‘I arrived at the railway station and there were thousands of people outside chanting “Death to Pickles”. So I pulled my hat down, pulled up my coat, got out of the cab chanting “Death to Pickles” myself and got in.

Ross Clark

A declaration of independence

In ten years’ time Oxford and Cambridge universities could be shining examples of social diversity, their student bodies reflecting the exact composition of the British population, a few sons of aristocrats educated alongside the children of benefit claimants from Teesside and a greater mass of suburban middle classes; all of them learning how to rub along with people of different cultures, attitudes and accents.

Ivor Roberts

Oxford under siege

The government’s interference in university admissions is unjustified – and may yet push our strongest institutions to go it alone It is a well-worn tactic for politicians to distract attention from their own failures by picking on an outside target. Thus Nick Clegg’s recent attack on Oxford and Cambridge last month for proposing a maximum of £9,000 in tuition fees. ‘They can’t charge £9,000 unless they can prove that they can dramatically increase the number of people from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds who presently aren’t going to Oxford and Cambridge,’ said the Deputy Prime Minister.

Melanie McDonagh

Adultery rewarded

Funny, isn’t it, how the unthinkable becomes the thinkable, then the possible, then the acceptable and finally the inevitable? You can see the process in motion when it comes to the prospect of the Duchess of Cornwall becoming Queen Consort in Waiting. Once, the Duchess was lucky to appear in public without getting pelted with bread rolls; now she’s allowed on The Archers, having redeemed her cameo appearance with a plug for osteoporosis awareness, and, ahem, for Duchy Originals shortbread. When a girl in Wiltshire asked her whether she was to become Queen, she said: ‘You never know.’ Which, in terms of ambiguity, equals Prince Charles’s response to a similar question in the US: ‘We’ll see, won’t we? That could be.

Rod Liddle

Are we supposed to think of heroin users as just another persecuted minority?

‘When I’m rushing on my run, And I feel just like Jesus’ son And I guess but I just don’t know, And I guess but I just don’t know.’ Lou Reed Would we be happier, do you think, if we all took large quantities of heroin? It would take the edge off some of the misery, I suppose. A house guest of mine once left the room to ‘jack up’ — as I believe the act is known — just as The X Factor came on the television. I remember thinking at the time — well, fair enough, mate. There isn’t enough alcohol in the world to dull the misery of The X Factor and it’s no use groping for the remote control when there are avid women in the room. Sometimes heroin seems a perfectly reasonable solution.