Features

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Failure of the feminists

After 100 International Women’s Days, real achievement still trumps leftist ideology Nothing illustrates better the difference between political idealism and political realism than the campaign to advance women in power, now a century old. The idealists insist on universal principles, based on rights theory, which benefit all women equally. Realists grasp the point that gifted women, in actual office and able to exercise authority, do more to persuade the public of women’s fitness to rule than anything else. Women’s rights campaigners, suffragettes and feminists have achieved astonishingly little. One reason is that most of them were also radically engaged in advancing left-wing causes across the board as well as the specific demands of women.

Toby Harnden

Pulped by the MoD

Even at the time, I knew it was a deal with the devil. Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the Welsh Guards and a friend of mine from the late 1990s, had just been killed in Afghanistan. He was the first battalion commander to die in action since the Falklands. Colleagues of his were encouraging me to consider writing a book about him and his beloved Welsh Guardsmen, who were still engaged in ferocious fighting. I had spent time with the Welsh Guards in Northern Ireland and Iraq. It seemed like an opportunity presented by fate. To explore the idea, I had to go to Helmand to be with the Welsh Guards. Three years earlier, I had been driven there from Kandahar (albeit clad in a shalwar kameez and lying on the back seat). By now, however, it was the summer of 2009.

Robin Oakley

Not at the races

Ireland’s woes make themselves felt in Cheltenham The bookmaker Paddy Power summed it up: ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ For the Irish the Cheltenham Festival, which starts next week, is more than just another sporting event, it is one of life’s defining experiences. As John Scally put it in Them and Us, a study of Anglo-Irish rivalry: ‘When they bet on an Irish horse at Cheltenham, Irish fans are betting on national property, investing emotional as well as tangible currency.’ In 1996 Judge Esmond Smythe postponed a Dublin court hearing so that witnesses could attend Cheltenham.

Saturday

Dan Jones

Enduring love

Just over two years ago, Barack Obama delivered a calculated insult to Britain. He returned the Epstein bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to America by the British government as a token of solidarity following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Churchill had pride of place in the Oval Office between 2001 and 2009, a symbol of the tight-knit transatlantic relationship that had flourished under Tony Blair and George W. Bush. The rejection of the greatest Anglo-American in modern history in favour of a bust of Abraham Lincoln therefore seemed to mark a profound moment.

Justin Marozzi

Killer clowns

For 20 years I have seen Colonel Gaddafi every morning. He greets me with a faraway look in his eyes as I step into my study. It is one of those vast propaganda portraits, 5ft by 3ft, beloved by serial kleptocrat dictators. Looking youthful, almost serene, he sports a bouffant hairdo and military uniform with enough gold thread on his epaulettes to embroider a WMD. Behind him is a desert panorama of rolling sand dunes, date palms, camels and a huge pipe with torrents of water gushing out to create fertile agricultural land, along with combine harvesters, a flock of sheep and the sort of Harvest Festival fruit basket most vicars could only ever dream of. All of this above the legend, ‘THE GREAT MAN-RIVER BUILDER’.

Rod Liddle

Blair’s vision of the Middle East is wrong on an epic and magnificent level

Ah, what it is to have the gift of self-awareness, and how we pity those without it. Tony Blair got off the phone to his friend Muammar Gaddafi and reported that the Libyan leader was delusional and could not face reality. He did not understand that the people had put up with him for long enough and it was time to stand aside for a new leader. I suppose we should be grateful that Tone didn’t use the RAF or mustard gas when he was of a similar mindset. The Blair-Gaddafi business, the criticisms of the former New Labour regime for its ‘cosy’ relationship with the psychopathic Arab fruitcake, have attacked the right people for the wrong reason.

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.