Features

Saturday

Philip Delves-Broughton

Mormons on the march

In any discussion of Mormons, it’s worth getting the gags out of the way first. There’s the chafing underwear they must wear to deter them from temptation, which looks like a cilice by Fruit of the Loom. There’s polygamy, which though rejected by the Mormon church in 1890, is still practised by a few perverted loons in remote corners of Utah and Colorado, who construct architecturally fascinating networks of trailers to house their multiple families. There’s Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon Church after experiencing a vision in western New York State. The notion that God would choose to appear here seems hilarious to many who happily accept He would show himself in south-west France or the Levant.

Mary Ann-Sieghart

Queen’s gambit

Rania of Jordan’s glamour and eloquence have won her celebrity friends in the West – and comparisons to Marie Antoinette at home Amman, Jordan To the western world, she is the closest the 21st century gets to Princess Diana: glamorous, beautiful, charitable and royal. But to many of her citizens, she is extravagant, meddling and possibly even corrupt. She describes herself on Twitter as ‘a mum and a wife with a really cool day job…’ So which is the real Queen Rania? As the Arab spring spread across Jordan, I took a trip to Amman to find out. The 40-year-old Palestinian never expected to be Queen of Jordan. She was born and brought up in Kuwait; her father, a doctor, was first-generation middle-class.

David Horspool

Best shot

I have learnt to be wary of proselytising about football. The last time I tried was the final of the World Cup in South Africa, Spain versus the Netherlands, two teams with a reputation for skilful, attacking play and thoughtful rather than hopeful passing. These two sides, I explained to people whom football fans like to call ‘neutrals’ (it means they’re not interested), would show how the game is meant to be played at its most refined — especially if your most recent encounter with football was watching England’s concrete-booted performances in that tournament, culminating in ignominious exit against an unusually exuberant Germany. I was half right.

Saturday

John R. Bradley

Arabian nightmare

In Abdallah Guech Street, a few hundred metres from the main mosque in the heart of Tunis’s old quarter, lies a red-light district which has thrived since the 19th century. Here the Ottomans legalised (and regulated) prostitution as they had in much of the rest of the Muslim world. Uniquely, though, in the Arab world, the tradition in Tunisia endured: every one of the country’s historic quarters boasts bordellos — even, most remarkably, Kairouan, Islam’s fourth holiest city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

Kevin Myers

Eire of sorrows

It doesn’t matter who wins the Irish elections – the country will remain an outpost of Brussels Dublin There is something tragically irrelevant about the elections taking place this weekend in Ireland. In recent months, Ireland has felt less like a country and more like the first acquisition of the Reborn Frankish Empire, after the Central European Bank and the IMF in effect took over day-to-day management of Irish affairs. The effect of this is to so reduce the significance of the general election that it’s more like appointing the staff of a small post office, in which the Taoiseach is actually just a shop steward negotiating tea breaks. The incoming Irish government will be merely administering the country as a satrapy of Brussels and the European Bank.

Matthew Lynn

Sister act | 26 February 2011

Josef Ackermann is something of a rarity in big business these days. Speculating last month on the possibility of a woman one day joining his board, the Deutsche Bank chief executive remarked that she might make it ‘more colourful and prettier’. Despite howls of outrage from the sisterhood — or the Schwesternschaft, as they are somewhat scarily called in Germany — what was interesting about the banker’s casual sexism was how odd it sounded rather than how ordinary. Most CEOs these days would rather boast about how their factories pumped millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere than make any remark that could be construed as disparaging to women.

Ed Howker

The alternative story

What the Electoral Reform Society doesn’t want you to know In ten weeks’ time, Britons will be asked to vote on arguably the dullest question ever put to a referendum: whether to adopt the Alternative Voting system in our general elections. Under AV, instead of picking one MP, voters would list their first, second and third preferences. Our elections would be made infinitely more complicated. Counting extra votes means extra bodies, computers, and so on. And that, in turn, means lots of money can be made. The additional cost of switching to AV could be as much as £120 million, since this complex system may require voting machines. Little wonder Britain’s largest provider of voter-counting software is pouring cash into the ‘Yes to AV’ campaign, then.

Cosmo Landesman

Prize dupes

Britain now takes the Oscars seriously. That’s a crying shame There was a time when the British took a great deal of pleasure — and not a little bit of pride — in laughing at the self-adoring parade that is the Academy Awards ceremony. The Oscars were regarded as the film equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest: a fun event that brought out the British talent for mockery. It was nothing more than a chance to check out the fashions and watch Hollywood’s A-list make fools of themselves with overlong and overwrought speeches. Ah, those were the days. It has all changed now that Britain’s The King’s Speech is up for 12 Academy Awards, including Colin Firth for best actor.

Paul Johnson

Dirty rotten scholars

Who was the dirtiest don in history? There must be many claimants for this title, especially in the 17th century, when all dons (except heads of houses) were bachelors. The diaries of Anthony à Wood bear witness. Actually my candidate for the title lived until 1940, and had a wife, too, though she was instrumental in his filth-accumulation. I know a bit about foul dons, having been up at Oxford over 60 years ago, when bathrooms were rare. I was tutored, happily briefly, by an ancient monster from outside my college, whose fingernails were an archaeological site and whose neck exhibited what Morland nannies used to call ‘tidemarks’. He once walked to the room in New Buildings where he taught me across the long grass of Magdalen deer park.

Saturday

Matt Ridley

Breaking the ice

Has Antarctica been getting warmer? To the frustration of many environmentalists, it’s not an easy question. Manned weather stations have existed there for over 50 years, unmanned stations from 1980 onwards. Coverage is patchy both in space and time, with weather stations clustered in a few spots and records full of gaps from when sensors got buried in snow, breakdowns occurred or stations were closed. From 1982, satellites have measured the temperature over the continent but inaccurately, because of clouds and instrument inconsistencies. So taking Antarctica’s temperature involves considerable mathematical skill and leaves much room for statistical disagreement.

Melanie McDonagh

Take my DNA, please

What are the chances, do you reckon, of my finding a taker for my DNA? I’d like to make the offer on account of the forthcoming (Protection of) Freedoms Bill, which promises to make the police drop the DNA details of roughly a million people from the national database who have never been found guilty of an offence. I’m against, which I know puts me at odds with the mass of right-thinking opinion. From the Daily Mail to Nick Clegg, liberals and libertarians are united in regarding the database as one of the more Big Brotherish manifestations of the state, and its restriction as a return to the spirit of Magna Carta.

Rod Liddle

India deserves our aid despite its nuclear programme – or rather, because of it

I wonder what happened to Edward Nkoloso? And, for that matter, the pouting, pneumatic Ms Matha Mwamba? They were last heard of in the early winter of 1964, when reporters descended upon a disused farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka to watch the intensive preparations for the exciting Zambian space programme. Edward was the boss of the operation, the 16-year-old Ms Mwamba one of the putative astronauts. Reporters watched as the astronauts carried out their anti-gravity training — swinging through the jungle on ropes, often upside down — and becoming acclimatised to the rigours of space travel by being pushed down a large hill inside an oil drum.

John Casey

A prayer for the Copts

Among the many heartening images coming from Egypt’s winter revolution in Tahrir Square was a photograph of a Muslim and a Copt holding up, respectively, a Koran and a crucifix. While the President of Iran, with motives that were all too plain, nervously hailed what had happened in Egypt as an ‘Islamic revolution’, many of the demonstrators vehemently contradicted him: ‘No — it is our democratic, secular revolution.’ Even spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood insisted that it had been a revolution made ‘by men and women, Muslims and Christians’. Does this mean that the ancient Coptic community of Egypt — possibly 15 per cent of the population — has nothing to be afraid of?

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...