Features

Saturday

Toby Young

Queens of the blog age

What’s the right analogy to describe the parallel careers of Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown? The hare and the tortoise? All About Eve? Alien vs Predator? Nothing quite works, not least because the race isn’t over. But there’s little doubt that with the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, Arianna has momentarily eclipsed Tina Brown as Queen of All Media. Arianna is said to have pocketed $100 million. I don’t envy the person standing next to Tina when she heard that. The career paths of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (b. 1950) and Christina Hambley Brown (b. 1953) are remarkably similar.

Michael Henderson

Speaking for England

Three decades ago, when his voice still carried some weight, Malcolm Muggeridge reckoned that social historians of the future would be puzzled by the middle-class death wish that took root after the second world war. It isn’t hard to see what he meant. Some time in the Sixties, politicians and other public figures who had been educated at private schools started to feel ashamed at their good fortune, and moved heaven and earth to deny those who followed the advantages they had enjoyed. Today the consequences are evident wherever one looks. Thousands of lives have been blighted by the doctrine of bogus egalitarianism, and we are all weaker for it. But it is not just schools and universities where standards have been eroded.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Councils of despair

Local authorities are slashing vital services, but keeping extravagant offices and salaries – and handing blame back to David Cameron We are, of course, all in this together. It is just that an awful lot of people feel that they are rather further in it than anyone else, and believe that while they are drowning in the deep end they can see David Cameron happily splashing about in his Gucci shorts in the shallows. I certainly felt that way when I read through Cambridgeshire County Council’s new budget and realised that my daughter’s transport to school has been selected for the chop. Like many disabled children, she has a long daily journey to a special school which is far removed from where we live.

Lloyd Evans

Family trees

How Rachel Johnson became the voice of Britain’s forests Clueless, aimless, rudderless, directionless. Labour’s disarray has left the task of holding the government to account in the hands of volunteers and publicity-seekers. The result is pop-up opposition, scrutiny by happening. Groups of protestors coalesce around a famous figurehead and raise merry hell until the coalition gives them what they want. Joanna Lumley established the format with her spirited campaign for the Gurkhas. The latest blonde bombshell to enter the lists — it seems to help if you have a flaxen mane — is Rachel Johnson, president of Save England’s Forests.

David Tang

Hong Kong Notebook

I have an aunt who is a 90-year-old Chinese Catholic nun. Until last year she was confined to a wheelchair, badly arthritic, and totally blind, but then a miraculous operation gave her back sight in one eye. Last week, to celebrate the Chinese New Year, she bravely travelled from her home in Wicklow to Hong Kong — which she left 20 years ago and thought she would never see again. Her visit was a surprise for her sister, my 83-year-old mother, and so our traditional family dinner on New Year’s eve was an emotional affair. Together we had four generations’ worth of memories of Hong Kong — a city that has changed a great deal. My aunt talked about the Japanese occupation, and her 60 years with the St Columban Sisters.

Theodore Dalrymple

The Disneyfication of death

Why are children’s graves now littered with toys? Is a graveyard a public amenity or an arena of self-expression? An Essex council recently ordered grieving families to remove ‘decorations’ from the tombs of their dead children. ‘One councillor claimed that it looked like Poundland,’ said Anne Lee, who was asked to remove the wind chimes from her daughter’s grave. ‘But we think they’re beautiful.’ Is a council a better judge of what is right and fitting in funerary monuments than at least some of the citizenry? Municipal cemeteries are among the many achievements of our Victorian forefathers. They are usually still well maintained.

Victoria Lane

In the beginning was the crossword

On Thursday evening, a stream of distinguished visitors poured through the doors of 22 Old Queen Street. These were the readers who had applied and been picked to attend a party to celebrate the publication of the 2,000th Spectator crossword. Tom Johnson, aka Doc, crossword editor, presided over a roomful of dons, doctors, vicars and at least one astrophysicist — ‘the country’s finest crossword minds’, as Spectator editor Fraser Nelson put it. The atmosphere was heady with wine fumes, wit and only the occasional whiff of pedantry. News had got around, and there were guests from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, France...

Naomi Oleary

Mother of the revolution

The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, 80, has joined the struggle that she has dreamed of since she was a child Cairo The atmosphere in Tahrir Square is festive. The protestors, in their bid to force President Hosni Mubarak to resign, have set up a tent city, sleeping out in the square so that it cannot be taken. Doctors are running makeshift hospitals with donated medical supplies and blankets. Casual traders hawk everything from Egyptian flags to socks. Amid a crowd of youngsters, an 80-year-old woman with a shock of brilliant white hair stands out. Dr Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian writer and activist, has been camping in this square for two weeks. She was here on Wednesday 2 February, when armed thugs riding camels and horses stormed the square.

Rod Liddle

The liberal consensus only prevails because if you challenge it you lose your job

Which do you prefer as a leisure pursuit — taking ecstasy or riding on a horse? I have done both and am slightly inclined towards the former, although not by much. Which do you prefer as a leisure pursuit — taking ecstasy or riding on a horse? I have done both and am slightly inclined towards the former, although not by much. Ecstasy rendered me an immobilised sap with a rictus grin and a vocabulary of about 19 words — like a slightly sinister CBeebies presenter who had not been adequately CRB checked. Riding a horse simply transposed my testicles from their more usual berth and left them instead hanging from the ends of my ears. Both activities imparted psychological or social or physical discomforts which easily outweighed any fleeting pleasures.

Saturday

The Spectator

The world after Mubarak

Experts debate what happens next in Egypt and the countries around it In his retirement, Dwight Eisenhower admitted that the biggest foreign policy mistake of his presidency had been not supporting Anthony Eden over the Suez crisis. How right he was. If Arab nationalism had been strangled in its cradle in 1956 by the vigorous action that Eden, and also initially Hugh Gaitskell, prescribed, then the oil-price hikes of the early 1970s and all the economic woes that flowed from them would never have happened. I doubt there would have been a 9/11, either. Today, instead, we face a situation whereby, since half of Israel’s natural gas consumption comes from Egypt and because of Gaza’s geographical situation, regional catastrophe looms.

Daniella Peled

‘This is our city now’

It’s strange how quickly a revolution becomes ordinary. For decades, Egypt was the quintessential Middle East police state, but now the sight of freshly sprayed ‘Fuck you Mubarak’ graffiti seems normal. Cairo’s famous traffic gridlock is long gone; the shops are shuttered. Amid the protestors in Tahrir Square, dozens of young and middle-aged men are picking up rubbish and piling it into the scorched carcass of a police truck. ‘Why are we cleaning the streets?’ says one old man. ‘Because this is our city now.’ Cairo It’s strange how quickly a revolution becomes ordinary.

John R. Bradley

Aims of the brotherhood

Make no mistake: the Muslim Brothers’ vision for Egypt is a frightening one Hosni Mubarak should be given credit for at least one achievement in his three decades in power: his deft exploitation of Washington’s fears about the Muslim Brotherhood. There is, in fact, no evidence that the Brotherhood has ever been able to count on the support of more than a small minority. For its part, the Brotherhood has used Mubarak’s persecution of its rank-and-file membership with equal cleverness to elevate its status within Egypt and, perhaps more importantly, among the champions of ‘moderate Islam’ in the West.

Anthony Sattin

The dominoes rally

First Tunisia, then Egypt. Whatever next? The laws of the Arab world are supposed to prohibit any domino effect: the military is supposed to be too strong, the governments too unresponsive. But these laws no longer hold now that two of North Africa’s most deeply entrenched leaders have been unsettled by popular protests. The ‘Arab street’ has suddenly become aware of the power it can wield. When President Ben Ali fled Tunisia with his wife (and perhaps some of the country’s gold reserves) alarm bells rang in palaces across the region. All over the Arab world reform is being nervously pledged. Even in Yemen, the president has promised to stand down — albeit in two years’ time.

Quentin Letts

Talk like an Egyptian

Few of us understand what is going on at the dusty end of the Med. There may be a few chinstrokers who cup, in their wizened palms, a concise comprehension of the Cairo crisis — see pages 14 to 18 — but the rest of us struggle for something to say. Vivid reporting has been sparse. The Today programme produced an English-speaking dentist in Cairo but he let the side down by saying, before Thought for the Day, how ‘pissed off’ the protesters were. Use some of your mouthwash, mister! The Times resorted to a photograph of Omar Sharif. On Monday Penelope Keith was wheeled out on Radio 4 to describe how the protestors were sitting in deck chairs, holding earnest discussions about mathematical problems.

Harry Mount

Speak to me

Critics have been predicting the death of the public lecture ever since Johannes Gutenberg got his printing press going in 1450. Why bother negotiating the market-day crowds in downtown Mainz to hear someone read from the Bible, when you can sit by the fire in your parlour and read your own copy? The same argument was made ad nauseum about the internet when it first kicked off: who on earth will bother trotting off to an expensive talk when you can see and hear the best lecturers in the world on your computer for free? TED, an American website, offers you hours of fun from David Cameron, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It can even resurrect the dead — Douglas Adams is on their books.

Rod Liddle

If Western Islanders want miserable Sundays, what right have the rest of us to interfere?

Sunday was a fairly dismal time for me, as a kid — and indeed for our dog, Skipper. Sunday was a fairly dismal time for me, as a kid — and indeed for our dog, Skipper. Church I could just about put up with, but Sunday school was an embarrassment too far: I would scurry home from it in fear that my friends might see me, wracked with shame, like a Tory MP on his way home from a visit to the rent boy. Attending Sunday school did not do much for you with your mates, in the way of kudos. But then home wasn’t much better. The television was allowed on only for Songs of Praise at about 7.30 p.m., and I wasn’t allowed out to play because it was, of course, the Lord’s day, and He didn’t approve of football.

James Walton

There is no alternative

Stand-up comedians: is there anything they can’t do? Not only do they make up a huge proportion of chat-show guests — and of chat-show hosts — they also present Horizon, give us guides to the night sky, utterly dominate panel shows and regularly pop up on Question Time. Recently, they even set up their own news discussion programme in the as yet formless shape of Ten O’Clock Live. And that’s just television. In the lead-up to Christmas, Dawn French saw off Stephen King, John Grisham and Maeve Binchy to have the country’s bestselling hardback novel, while the fastest selling DVD in British history is Michael McIntyre’s ‘Hello Wembley!’, whose title is a clue to the type of places he and many of his fellow comics play these days.

Kenneth Clarke

Less time, less crime

I have a confession to make. In 18 years in government, I have never come up with a policy that was instantly popular. Today, as Justice Secretary, my job is to mend Britain’s broken prison system and make it less expensive. My proposals have prompted widespread criticism, not least from The Spectator, which said recently on its leader page that decreasing the number of prisoners in Britain will lead to more crime. I disagree. Our prisons are expensive and dysfunctional — but they do not have to be. Labour introduced 21 criminal justice acts, which increased the cost of prisons by two thirds and sent the prison population soaring. Their attempt to outflank the right on law and order became a shambles. They ran out of cells in both prisons and police stations.

Carol Sarler

The hangover from hell

If a drunken woman and a drunken man have sex, our legal system treats the man as a rapist. That’s wrong — and patronising Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve had a few sherries. Perhaps, even, more than a few; perhaps you have enjoyed that most pernicious of doses: the one that leaves you on the right side of consciousness but the wrong side of common sense. In which demonically stupid state, you do things that you would never do when sober: you prang a car, smash a window, break a nose, bare a backside, betray a confidence, dish an insult or, more generally, just bore for England.