Features

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Can this man defeat al-Qa’eda?

Amr Khaled’s TV preaching has made him Islam’s answer to Billy Graham – and he’s mounting a direct attack on the terror camps of Yemen Aden, Yemen There’s a new weapon in the war on terror, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind drones and spies, surgical strikes and covert ops, they’re old hat. There’s a time and a place for them, of course, and we must thank our spooks and soldiers for helping to keep us safe, for foiling plots and knocking off the odd wayward beardie in distant deserts and freezing mountain passes. But that’s not really draining the swamp.

Francis Stephen

Prison Notebook

Christmas Day is quiet in the prison. There’s a tree in the chapel, and a few bits of tinsel on the wings, but the air is not celebratory — it’s subdued. The men eat their processed turkey alone, or in pairs, in their cells, while images of happier Christmases flicker tauntingly from their TVs. There are countless people in the outside world who spend a lonely Christmas, too, of course; but on Christmas Day in the prison in which I work as a chaplain, there will be 700 lonely men under one roof. On the first Sunday of Advent, I give a sermon on the significance of the Advent candles: the purple ones for penitence, the pink one for Gaudete Sunday, and the white one in the middle for Christmas Day.

Saturday

Andrew Gilligan

The true cost of the Olympics

There was something rather un-British about all that grovelling to Fifa last week. That, at least, appears to be the new national consensus after even the combined charms of Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham failed to land England the World Cup. We are not, we now realise, the kind of people who prostrate themselves to fat foreign sports bureaucrats. The mother of parliaments will never yield its cherished prerogatives to the rococo whims of some grubby Swiss tax-dodgers. Oh, wait a minute... Entirely without the help of Mr Julian Assange, The Spectator today publishes an international sporting equivalent of the WikiLeaks cables.

Anne Applebaum

The sensational truth

For a man who earns his living by publishing other people’s email, Julian Assange has a high opinion of himself. You can hear that in his rhetoric, which combines the paranoia of the early Bolsheviks with the arrogance of a teenage computer hacker. When a subordinate dared threaten him a few months ago, Assange slapped him down by declaring himself ‘the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest’. When others threatened to leave, he declared, in the manner of the young Lenin, that the organisation was in ‘a Unity or Death situation’. His goals are as vast as his self-esteem: chief among them is the destruction of the American government as we know it.

Ollie Lewis

The Gaokao challenge

There is a word, unknown in this country, which once a year strikes terror into the hearts of millions of young people: Gaokao. This is the slang term for the Chinese National Higher Education Entrance Examinations, and though only a few translated questions have found their way out of the secretive state, their level of complexity raises serious concerns about our own education system. The results released by Pisa (the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment) this week not only raise the same concerns but absolutely confirm them. The Pisa people tested nearly half a million 15-year-olds worldwide, in maths, literacy and science. What did they find? China comes top; Britain 25th, having dropped several places since the last study.

Melanie McDonagh

Scents and nonsense

Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought my mother some pleasing aftershave. Others will know exactly what they’re after: the scent their womenfolk have always liked, the perfume their own mothers used to wear. Which is dandy: some of the most beautiful and original perfumes have been with us for decades, a century even. But it’s an illusion to think that what we’re buying is the same scent as Coco Chanel et al used to wear. What we’ve got now is a 21st-century version of the originals.

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

White mischief

Boris Johnson’s enemies are hoping for a final snow-down London woke to snow and people wondered whether this time Boris Johnson would show true grit. His enemies reckon there’s no business like snow business for catching him out. They trust he will be found wanting, as he was by the unexpected snowfall in February 2009, when the city ground to a halt. Many people treasure the belief that the Mayor of London is fundamentally incompetent, and are disconcerted to find that sometimes whole months go by without any real evidence that the Tories have, in the words of the immortal Polly Toynbee, ‘put up a clown to run a great global city’. The snow reached Scotland and the north of England first.

Fraser Nelson

China’s spy network

We are at war online – and we are losing Almost exactly two years ago, an American army officer found a memory stick in a car park in the Middle East and, out of curiosity, inserted it into his military laptop. It seemed to be empty, but there are a million ways of disguising a Trojan computer virus. Instantly, a malicious software code uploaded onto the US Central Command military computer network and embedded itself in the system. And there it lay undetected for weeks, able to send back all manner of classified information. In the words of the deputy US defence secretary, William J. Lynn III, it was ‘poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary’. That unknown adversary was almost certainly China.

Carol Sarler

Hard labour

More women than ever are having their babies by Caesarian section. Not the old last-resort emergency type, either; the ones where mothers howl for days, to the point of peril for self or child, until mercy descends in a scalpel — life-saving, but adding to existing trauma. No. This marked increase, by as much as 40 per cent in one year at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, has been among women who elect a Caesarian; those who plan, often months in advance, to be delivered calmly, swiftly and relatively free of pain in a modern, controlled, 21st-century environment. In short: an increase in women who are aware that there is a choice and are happy to exercise it. So good news all round then.

Rod Liddle

What is the racial composition of a hobbit?

What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you know — white. Nearly white, maybe, but not quite. Proper white people, I thought, are taller than hobbits, less hysterical and tend not to live underground. But this was back in the days before I had heard of John Bercow. Also, proper white people had electricity, cars and supermarkets. One’s views change markedly over the years. Back then, I assumed that hobbits were Latins, or perhaps even Romanian, a Slavic-Latin mélange.

Owen Matthews

A crackdown on kleptocrats

The law is catching up with Russia’s corrupt oligarchs Moscow’s White House is a fairly pleasing pile, at least by the standards of late Soviet architecture. Its colonnaded white stone façade enjoys handsome views over the Moscow River, and its interiors are a symphony in green malachite, light teak and gold ormolu, a mid-1990s decorating style best described as mafia rococo. From the corner offices, now occupied by the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, and his deputies, one can gaze over gridlocked traffic, enlivened by the blue flashing lights of government Mercedes as they charge down the reserved central lane. ‘Do you remember Mabetex?’ I asked one of Putin’s deputy premiers a few months ago.

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

Auntie’s blind spot

The BBC is like a goldfish. Just as we have no way of communicating to the poor creature that it is confined by a bowl, experts of the utmost skill and renown have sought in vain for years to explain to the corporation that its ethos is slanted towards the left. It knows no other world but that of the Guardian, in which it lives and moves and has its being. It would die, more of shock than anything else, if it were removed from it. And so it swims round and round, opening and closing its mouth and burbling that such accusations are fanciful. But now at last I believe I have found a way to signal across the vast divide that separates the BBC and the rest of us. This is thanks to what turned out to be a rather amusing thing which recently happened to me.

Amanda Foreman

How to marry a prince

The turbulent but often triumphant record of Britain’s royal weddings is full of lessons for Kate and William The popularity of the monarchy has been slowly improving since the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’ speech in 1992. But the vital spark needed to win over the country was missing. Not even the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday could fully repair the damage caused by years of controversy and embarrassing revelations. It is only now, with the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton, that the monarchy has a real opportunity to remake itself for the 21st century. But first, the handlers and planners for the royal event need to learn from history. Good intentions are not enough.

Josie Appleton

A common sense revolution

Last January, Annabel Hayter, chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral Flower Guild, received an email saying that she and her 60 fellow flower arrangers would have to undergo a CRB check. CRB stands for Criminal Records Bureau, and a CRB check is a time-consuming, sometimes expensive, pretty much always pointless vetting procedure that you must go through if you work with children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Everybody else had been checked: the ‘welcomers’ at the cathedral door; the cathedral guides; the whole of the cathedral office (though they rarely left their room). The flower guild was all that remained. The cathedral authorities expected no resistance.

Michael Henderson

This be the verse

Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which would have put another nought on the price. The book belonged to the fourth impression, published four years later, but it came with an inscription from another famous writer, who had presented it to an actress friend. ‘I hope you like these poems,’ he had written. ‘They are what I wanted the play to be — very English and full of affection and dissatisfaction. All my love. A.

Dennis Sewell

Lessons from south London

Having transformed his inner-city primary, Greg Martin has bought a stately home in Sussex – and is preparing to turn it into a fully free state boarding school We’re chatting poolside, which feels somewhat incongruous since this isn’t the Riviera or a spa hotel, but a primary school in Stockwell, one of the rougher districts of south London. Greg Martin, the school’s executive head, leans forward confidentially. ‘Look,’ he whispers, pointing to the door. ‘Here comes the middle class now.’ There’s a sudden inrush of boys and girls who seem familiar. Is it the Boden or the John Lewis catalogue they stepped out of? For sure, these children are not pupils at the Durand Academy.

The Spectator

Mohammad Sawalha: Apology

On 2 July 2008 we published an article entitled “Just look what came crawling out” which alleged that at a protest at the celebration in London of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, Mohammad Sawalha had referred to Jews in Britian as “evil/noxious”. We now accept that Mr Sawalha made no such anti-Semitic statement and that the article was based on a mistranslation elsewhere of an earlier report. We and Melanie Phillips apologise for the error.

Saturday

Irwin Stelzer

Do not resuscitate

No one can fault the doctors: they are using every tool available to them to save their very ill patient. But they will probably fail in their efforts to save the euro in its current form. And this will be because the regimen they originally prescribed did more harm than good. Economists were almost unanimous in warning that it is beyond the wisdom of man to set an interest rate that suits 16 countries without also unifying fiscal policy, creating income transfer mechanisms, and a common language to reduce barriers to labour mobility. So we have Ireland, a country that devised a low-tax path to prosperity. Rather than raising interest rates to cool its overheating economy, the European Central Bank kept area-wide interest rates low to suit Germany.

Kevin Myers

Going south

The moral nadir of any state must surely have come when Mr Gerry Adams MP announces that he is its white knight. Yes, this IRA butcher and architect of countless bombings and killings is abandoning Northern Ireland politics, and even his empty seat in Westminster, to stand in Ireland’s general election next year. He actually thinks that he is entitled to berate the politicians of the Irish Republic for their conduct. And by God, he could well have a point. Just look at the latest nugget to emerge from the parliamentary sewer that is Leinster House — the equivalent of the Palace of Westminster.

Aidan Hartley

Pride of Somalia

When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of being held hostage by pirates in Somalia — now that certainly strikes me as news. Britain’s 300,000 or so Somalis are a particularly unpopular Muslim community. Somalis are often seen as a drain on the state. They form the hardest inner-city gangs. They mistreat their women. They chew the drug qat.