Features

Saturday

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.

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.