Features

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Bookselling for illiterates

Books, we are continually told, particularly by people who rarely read them, are going the way of the dodo. The shops that sell them are closing at an alarming rate, as the dreaded Kindle takes over, and public libraries are being encouraged to turn themselves into noisy ‘resource centres’, designed to attract the feckless young. One might think that the places continuing to sell such glorious, old-fashioned things would be eager to put their best foot forward. So a post-Christmas visit to the biggest bookshop in Europe, as Waterstone’s in Piccadilly likes to call itself, was an eye-opener. It’s a shop that evokes happy memories. I have been buying books there for years, including a complete set of Proust, which is not so much a purchase as an investment for life.

Andrew Neil

The fall of the meritocracy

I caught the figure strolling towards me out the corner of my eye. At first I thought I was mistaken. Then it nearly took my breath away. I was standing in the impressive wooden-beamed assembly hall of Paisley Grammar, where I’d gathered at the start of each school day many years before, silent and smartly uninformed, along with 900 other pupils. The current head was explaining how this ancient institution, dating back to the 16th century, was still giving children as fine an education as the one I had enjoyed. It was then I noticed the policeman coming along the corridor and into the hall, sauntering along as if his presence were as natural as a French or physics teacher. His uniform was clean and tidy. So was his stab vest.

Peter Oborne

Where’s the divide?

The outcry over Sayeeda Warsi’s speech on Islamophobia last week cannot be understood without a clear grasp of the balance of power within the coalition government. There are two factions, and the strongest can loosely be described as neoconservative. This faction remains an unconditional supporter of the United States of America, continues to defend the Iraq invasion, powerfully admires and in some cases worships Tony Blair, and automatically takes the side of Israel in the middle east. This section of the coalition also takes a hard line on domestic security arrangements, supporting control orders and the divisive Prevent strategy for confronting its special interpretation of the Islamic terror threat.

Rod Liddle

Islamophobia? Not until after dessert

When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. ‘Friends: it’s time to have a go at the Muslims’?

Anna Szlejter

Go east, young man

When Poles arrive in Britain, we learn some fascinating things about ourselves. We are, it seems, from a part of the world known as the ‘Eastern bloc’. It is populated by lazy benefits thieves, most of whom want to move to Britain. When the EU flung open Britain’s barriers seven years ago, the stereotype wasn’t entirely false — at least about wanting to move. Hundreds of thousands of Polish workers, students and professionals did come to Britain; I was one of them. Today, though, only a trickle of Poles come over, and a migratory tide is flowing in the other direction. Britons are going to Poland. Poland has had a tempestuous history, but immigration is a new and exotic phenomenon; we Poles think of our country as a net exporter of people.

Susannah Herbert

Social engineering

Heinz Wolff’s latest and most ambitious experiment might just solve the problem of care for the elderly Heinz Wolff has been offered Maidenhead by the government as the laboratory for his next and boldest experiment, but it is not enough. ‘They should give me the Isle of Wight,’ he cries, domed cranium pulsing beneath his Branestawm specs. ‘All of it. It’s perfect for my purposes.’ As seasoned film audiences know, when a scientist starts making territorial demands in a strong German accent, it’s generally time to confiscate his Bunsen burners. But at the age of 82, Emeritus Professor Wolff — the father of bio-engineering, the beaming genius of television’s The Great Egg Race — is through with science.

Tim Stanley

Welcome home, Baby

Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator of Haiti once known as Baby Doc, returned to his native land last week, looking wide-eyed and frail. He read a statement in which he expressed ‘deep sorrow for all those who say they were victims of my government’ and promised that he hadn’t come home to cause trouble, but to help rebuild his country. Should we believe him? The press think that he wants to clear his name in order to get access to $6 million in frozen Swiss bank accounts; Haiti’s socialist leaders worry that he has returned to seize power; many people living in dugouts beneath scraps of corrugated iron might secretly hope that he has and — although it seems a shocking thing to say — perhaps we should too.

Saturday

James Forsyth

What would Tony do?

It is easy to tell when David Cameron is wading into trouble during interviews. He becomes defensive, audibly irritated and — as an emergency self-calming measure — tries to force a little laugh. He performed this telltale routine on the radio on Monday, when challenged over his NHS reforms. He had promised the country no more upheavals to the NHS — and had clearly reneged. How to get out of this tight spot? Cite Tony Blair. In a speech later that day Cameron invoked the former PM’s name to justify himself. Bringing in these health reforms was just what Blair would have done. How could any sensible person disagree with that? It might sound like an odd line of argument to the many people who regard Blair as a charlatan.

Paul Wood

Blood price

Sangin, Afghanistan ‘You don’t want to end up on a bracelet or on a fucking T-shirt. If you see people that need to die, kill them,’ said the US Marine Corps sergeant, briefing the convoy about to leave. It was night and we were setting off along the main road out of Sangin. Highway 611 had recently reopened — one of the successes here trumpeted by Nato — but no one would call it safe. ‘If you need to fire your weapon, that’s between you and Jesus. Good to go? Let’s do this shit.’ As the armoured vehicles rumbled into the pitch black, I remembered a friend’s account of a dinner party in Kabul at Christmas. Two visiting American newspaper editors were holding forth about the UK’s ‘failure’ in Sangin.

Melanie McDonagh

Sir Humphrey’s new suit

A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly learning”, “career pathing”, “energy management” and — my absolute favourite — “impact residue”, which is what you leave behind when you have met someone: what the uninitiated would call a lasting impression. I was encouraged to “flex my styles” and identify “meta-objectives”. In short, I am a new man.’ In other words, he’s learned management-speak.

Brendan O’Neill

America’s Islington

The New York City neighbourhood where politically correct prejudices are born Most people, when they hear the word Brooklyn, will think of big-bellied pizza-spinners, or men hunched over pints of the black stuff in Little Ireland, or black kids in hanging-down trousers ghetto-limping through the streets. But there’s another side, a whiter, cleaner, more PC side, where the inhabitants probably don’t eat pizza at all, never mind drink Guinness, because they’re more than likely allergic to the gluten in the pizza base and probably disapprove of booze.

Dominic Prince

The racehorse diet

Being married to Rose, one of the greatest cooks in the country, is an especially pleasurable thing. No meal is ever dull. Breakfast can be a variety of treats from toast to scrambled eggs to a fried venison liver. Lunch is usually a sausage, perhaps some lentils or something leftover from the evening before. Dinner kicks off around 6 p.m. with a cocktail or two followed by wine. In winter we are great consumers of game, partridge, hare and pheasant. Thick creamy curries, poached fish, beef dripping with red blood. Great hunks of homemade bread lashed with butter and topped with a piece of artisan cheese. There are always leftovers.

Ross Clark

How to warm your mansion with other people’s money

Let no one say this is not a redistributive government. It is taking benefits away from the poor and giving them instead to people with large houses and a bit of spare capital. How? Through a great green energy scam, originally devised by Labour, which could not be better designed to penalise the poor and reward the rich. In fact, the government might just as well have come up with Spat Credits or a Top Hat Top-Up Allowance. Here is a brief guide to benefits for the better-off. Got a roof space the size of half a football pitch? You can coin it by covering it with 4kW worth of photo-voltaic panels, thereby qualifying you for a 41.3p handout from your electricity company for every kilowatt-hour of electricity you produce.

Saturday

Nick Cohen

Liberal England dies again

The Lib Dems’ troubles are a result not only of coalition and foolish promises, but of a resurgence of the old left-right division In 1935, George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England, one of those rare histories that survive long after the author’s death. The elegance and vigour of his description of Edwardian society account for much of his appeal — Dangerfield is as bracing an antidote to the banality of Downton Abbey as you could hope to find. But what stays in readers’ minds is not the style but the brilliance of the argument. Late Victorian liberalism, ‘a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, Bibles, progressive thoughts and decent inhibitions’, appeared to survive the death of the old queen.

Craig Brown

The man who read everything

Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of his friend John Gross half-buried beneath piles of hardback books while glancing up from a copy of Tatler. It’s a caricature that contains a nugget of truth — it is rare, these days, for anyone so bookish to keep such a close eye on the toings-and-froings of high society and showbiz — but there is still something not quite right about the rather severe, tight-lipped expression on John’s face. Though he always read everything with a singular intensity, the moment he looked up he would start talking and smiling, his eyes a winning mixture of benevolence and glee.

Christopher Caldwell

You can’t say that here!

Thilo Sarrazin is breaking Germany’s taboos on welfare and immigration – and selling over a million books in the process In Berlin in September, I noticed that Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘The Abolition of Germany’), a taboo-breaking blockbuster by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sarrazin, had just come through a new printing after having been sold out for a week. In the morning, as I walked off to work, there would always be a large table near the front of the Hugendubel bookstore on Tauntzienstrasse stacked two feet high with bright red copies. In the evening, as I returned to my hotel, the table would be denuded, or have just a few scattered copies, like the bar after an undergraduate drinks party.

Jonathan Mirsky

Finding my voice

I was cured of a lifelong stammer by a technique even Lionel Logue, George VI’s celebrated speech therapist, never tried. The cure lasted exactly three minutes, and has never been repeated. In the mid-1990s, when I was stationed in Hong Kong as the East Asia editor of the Times, the BBC commissioned me to write and broadcast three three-minute pieces to be called Secrets in China. A producer arrived with a cameraman. What I had written was now in front of me on an autocue. I told the producer that I, a stutterer, couldn’t read smoothly from a text; when reading out loud stutterers can’t employ those little tricks — pauses for thought, substituting easy words for hard ones, purring a bit — that the lifelong hesitator knows to a t-t-t.

Matthew Smith

Old school ties | 15 January 2011

Last week, Michael Gove marked an important moment in the coalition government’s school reforms. The number of academies — that is, state schools granted independent status — reached 407, twice the number created in almost a decade of Labour’s academy programme. Since September, schools have become academies at the rate of one a day. But then the later stages of a reform are often easier than the first. The man most responsible for the early stages of this reform was Andrew Adonis, a former journalist, policy adviser, Labour peer, minister and now director of the Institute of Government. His new job involves helping Whitehall improve the policymaking process.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Jihad against justice

For a jihadi, Britain is one of the very best places in the world. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, overhead drones kill terrorists on a regular basis. In most democratic countries, politicians try to limit their enemies’ ability to operate — so one runs the risk of being thrown into prison, if caught mid-jihad. But not in Britain. Here, the Islamist insurgents have found that there are a hundred ways to run rings around our police and justice system. Nothing demonstrates this more spectacularly than the control orders farce.

Stanley Johnson

For the love of cod

Years — actually decades — ago, a gentleman from the British civil service, interviewing me as a potential candidate for a job in the European Commission, explained that ‘all the important decisions in Brussels are prepared by the chefs’. As he spoke, I had a vision of men in tall white hats stirring dishes on a large stove in the middle of the Berlaymont. ‘Chefs?’ I queried. The man quickly explained that he meant the ‘chefs de cabinet’, the Commissioners’ aides, who basically ran the show while the great men had long lunches at expensive Brussels restaurants.