Features

Saturday

Peter Oborne

PAKISTAN NOTEBOOK

Karachi is a notoriously lively city, with gun battles on the streets a daily occurrence — so it seems only sensible to stay in the comfort and safety of the Sind Club, a grand institution built during British rule in the centre of the town. Karachi is a notoriously lively city, with gun battles on the streets a daily occurrence — so it seems only sensible to stay in the comfort and safety of the Sind Club, a grand institution built during British rule in the centre of the town. It was here that my travelling companion, Charles Alexander, and I watched the royal wedding in Urdu in company with elderly members. I blubbed as we joined in the hymns, but when it was all over it did seem odd that there had been no kiss.

Theodore Dalrymple

Scarborough unfair

If it is evidence of the decline of British civilisation that you are after, you cannot do better than go to Scarborough. It is precisely because the material traces of that civilisation are still so much in evidence there, albeit dolefully altered, that the impression is so strong and so painful. The town retains its wonderful position, of course. One is still struck immediately on arrival by ‘the freshness of the air, so different from what is breathed in the interior of England’, as described by Dr John Kelk in his The Scarborough Spa, its new chemical analysis and medicinal uses; to which is added, On the Utility of the Bath (3rd ed. 1855).

James Forsyth

Axeman in chief

After a year in government, most ministers look ten years older. Not Francis Maude. He bounds into the anteroom of his ministerial suite to greet me, wearing his customary open-necked shirt with a red check that matches the colour in his cheeks. In a confident voice, he says, ‘I just need to get some things decided and then we’ll be right with you.’ It is more like meeting a businessman at the height of a boom than a politician in the age of austerity. In Maude’s office overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the businesslike atmosphere becomes even stronger. Phrases like ‘saving money off the overhead’ and ‘drive prices down in procurement’ tumble from his lips.

Saturday

Andrew Roberts

The meaning of a marriage

‘A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind,’ wrote the great constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot. ‘A royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government, but they are facts which speak to men’s bosoms and employ their thoughts.’ Bagehot was writing about the marriage of the future King Edward VII to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, but his sentiments equally apply to the coming royal wedding, for he concluded that one half of the human race at least ‘care 50 times more for a marriage than a ministry’.

Hugo Vickers

Royal Notebook

No one was more irritated than I was when the royal engagement was announced on 16 November. Not, I hasten to say, because I did not welcome the news, but selfishly, because I realised I would miss a rare lunch at the Historic Houses AGM — and many further lunches over subsequent weeks. Since then, as when the Princess of Wales was killed, I have been a prisoner of the media. The engagement took everyone by surprise — and the calm discretion with which the whole process has been handled since must be a delight, and even possibly a surprise, to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Nothing leaks. I also detect a gentler approach from the media. They seem glad for any titbits that we veterans can provide, since a new, uninformed generation of journalists has sprung up.

Rod Liddle

All theatrical bigots should be equal in the eyes of the law

What, to your mind, constitutes a ‘hate crime’? I’ve been wondering about this since reading the comments of Paul Marshall, of the Cumbria CID. What, to your mind, constitutes a ‘hate crime’? I’ve been wondering about this since reading the comments of Paul Marshall, of the Cumbria CID. Paul had been expressing his great satisfaction that a shaven-headed lumpenprole idiot called Andrew Ryan had been sentenced to 70 days in prison for burning a copy of the Koran in public. Speaking in the manner of a Premier League football club manager, Marshall said: ‘Today’s result shows how seriously we take hate crime.’ And he added: ‘The incident was highly unusual for Cumbria in that we have such low levels of hate crime in the county.

Quentin Letts

How to play the big day

Through fashionable London the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton is causing confusion. Privately, the snoots of Islington and Notting Hill are no different from the rest of us. They think Kate looks cracking and RAF pilot William would make a fine son-in-law. Is there not always something irresistible, my dears, about a tall, young prince with a chopper? Yet metropolitan smoothness makes them hesitate. Is royal fever socially wise? Is it ever acceptable for a cool cat in designer denim to wave little Union flags and sing the national anthem? Metro-smoothies fret about expressing their gaiety at this fairytale wedding. They do not want to be reported to Commissar Polly Toynbee. They fear being haunted by the ghost of republican Claire Rayner.

Mary Wakefield

Harlem renaissance

A massive project to change the lives of America’s poorest children It’s raining in Harlem this morning — big fat American rain tipping out of the big gray sky, sluicing down the crumbling brownstones, over the awning of the Manna soul food and salad bar (‘we serve oxtail, collard green, candy yam, fried fish, chips and tea’) and on to the corner of 125th street and Madison in an oily pool of such enormity that the word puddle is no good as a description — you’d have to call it a pond. Each Harlem citizen manages the pond in his own peculiar way. Two gangster-looking guys with hats askew take a traffic-stopping stroll around the outer rim; a man with no legs drives his electric scooter through the middle like a jet-ski.

Bruce Anderson

‘What is truth?’

It’s unwise to rely on the Gospels for an accurate description of that first Good Friday ‘And yet we call this Friday good.’ So what actually happened on the first Good Friday? The balance of probability is heavily against those who would dismiss the whole affair as a mere addition to the literature of mythology. Beyond all reasonable doubt, we can be certain on two points. A man was crucified and His death had dramatic consequences. Even though we are aware of the story’s ending, the Gospel narratives are a compelling read. Yet there is one difficulty: a childishly incoherent distortion of the historical record, which is in danger of undermining the four authors’ credibility, but which does tell us a lot about the Palestinian politics of the period.

William Von-Raab

Mexistan

It’s high time the US ended its ‘see no evil’ approach to Mexico More dead bodies found in Mexico this week. As we all focus on Libya and Afghanistan, the cartels keep stepping up the violence just over the border — so perhaps the time has come for America to take a really objective look at our neighbours to the south. We could start with a quick rereading of Alan Riding’s rather good book on Mexico, Distant Neighbors. The picture is not comforting. Parts of it, near the border, are more like Afghanistan than America. There is unbridled violence, financing of corrupt activities through drug trafficking, control of what should be governmental authority by brigands or worse, and corruption all the way through the social and political hierarchy.

Interconnect

The Spectator’s over-80 power list

It is hard to think of a time when the over-80s have held such sway over British public life. Shirley Williams has the government at her mercy as she decides what to do about its NHS reform bill. If many are unaware that P.D. James is woman, then even fewer will know (or care) how old she is. This is a list of people who are still filling theatres, selling books and inspiring millions in their ninth (and, in some cases, tenth) decade. Their artistic, political or scientific brilliance has only been cast into sharper relief by the passage of time. This far-from-comprehensive list of Britain’s great octogenarians (with a sprinkling of nonagenarians) has one particularly notable exception: the Queen. The success of her reign requires no elaboration.

Florence King

Reason vs romanticism

The American South? You don’t know the half of it Stand by. I am going to explain the American South, a subject that makes the quantum theory seem like child’s play. The first thing you must understand is that there is no South — there are two. One is the Upper South of horses, tobacco and Episcopalians; and the other is the Deep South of mules, cotton and Baptists. The second thing is that there is no mid-South. It’s a geographical term with no sociological undercurrents, used by climatologists and weather reporters to locate their own brand of undercurrents. The Upper South in its purest form consists of Maryland and Virginia.

Gerald Warner

‘We’re all doomed!’

Scotland is staring into a £4.5 billion black hole ‘Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering…’ That description of the Scots by Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, in the early 3rd century testifies to the consistency of the Scottish character over 1,800 years. Today the Scots are so democratic they have saddled themselves with three tiers of government, while their enduring taste for plunder has progressed from the crudity of border reiving to the sophistication of the Barnett Formula. Scotland has successfully reversed the fiscal arrangements that would have been familiar to Cassius Dio in the days when outlying nations paid taxes to Rome: contemporary Caledonia is a dependency that exacts tribute from Westminster.

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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