Features

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.

Michael Henderson

Life of pie

‘To tell the truth,’ says Peter Myers, his Cumbrian baritone untouched by four decades of life in Manhattan, ‘I’m glad it’s all over.’ By ‘it’ he means Christmas and new year, when Myers, the sausage-knotter and purveyor of pies to New Yorkers, is at his busiest. ‘It was bedlam. They began to queue up outside the shop ten days before Christmas for their mince pies. We were making thousands a day. Bedlam, I tell you’. Myers of Keswick, the shop on Hudson Street that bears the name of his birthplace, is not your average butcher’s.

Mike Paterniti

The hero of Nanjing

The Nanjing Yangtze river bridge is four lanes wide and four miles long, a monument to Maoist endeavour clogged with the traffic of China’s economic boom. And every weekend, at one of its two towers, you can see Chen Si. He is 42 years old, with spiky black hair, a rasping cough from cheap Nanjing-brand cigarettes, and a baseball cap bearing the slogan ‘THEY SPY ON YOU’. Around his neck is an oversized pair of binoculars, through which he watches the crowds unceasingly. In the past six years, according to his blog, he has saved 174 people from suicide. Mr Chen used to be a functionary at a transport company.

Bryan Forbes

A rare, unvarnished honesty: Pete Postlethwaite remembered

Pete Postlethwaite, with whom, sadly, I never worked, belonged to that group of journeymen actors who command the respect and admiration of their peers but are denied the wider honours until death claims them. How amazed he would have been by the enormous photograph that graced the front-pages of the newspapers — his unique, craggy face that had never known botox or cosmetic surgery, displaying more character than many of his more vaunted fellow thespians. It is sometimes forgotten that an actor’s career is more often than not sculptured in snow and disappears so quickly when he or she is removed from public view, for it is an inescapable fact that for the majority who choose the profession there is little public recognition.

Patrick Allitt

At war with the Greeks

America’s love of the ancient republics has had military consequences in the present If you’re 40 or older and I ask you to think back to the worst moments of your life as a schoolchild, memory will probably take you straight to Latin class. Remember how it was taught by a wizened old beak in a faded gown, who favoured merciless drilling, responded to grammatical errors with a rap of the cane, and squeezed the fun out of even the most heroic Roman tales? Latin has largely disappeared from English schools and I dare say that 19 out of every 20 among you don’t miss it. By contrast, it is thriving on the other side of the Atlantic. Eager young teachers offer Greek and Latin classes in a growing number of schools, public and private.

Saturday

Michael Deacon

Lords of laughter

What do the following comedians have in common? Morecambe and Wise, Ronnie Barker, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Sellers. They’re all dead, yes. But something else. None of them was knighted. Instead they were all made OBE, an honour Michael Winner once charmingly described as ‘what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station’. Still, they did better than Les Dawson, Tony Hancock, Tommy Cooper and Peter Cook. Those four got nothing. I find this curious. In most cases, at least. Hancock died a bit too young (suicide at 44), and accepting anything from the honours system would have turned Cook from satirist to court jester, in two ways a fool. But the rest?

Mary Wakefield

Egyptian Notebook

The adventures of a wrecked ship can be pieced together from entries in its log book. The last moments of some doomed flight can be reconstructed by consulting its black box. If Dominic and I come a cropper here on the hard shoulder of the Cairo–Alexandria desert road, our iPhones will tell our story in Google searches: 23:30: ‘how do you get out of Cairo airport?’ 00:07: ‘why don’t Egypt drivers use headlights?’ 03:00: ‘Toyota Corolla won’t start’ 03:30: ‘How to deactivate Toyota Corolla immobiliser?’ 04:00: ‘Hertz Cairo number’ 05:00: ‘Hertz worldwide emergency number’ 05:14: ‘What time sun rise in Egypt?

Johan Norberg

The great debt bubble of 2011

Have our governments averted a financial disaster – or paved the way for one? ‘The worst of the storm has passed,’ declared Barack Obama at the start of last year, seeking to calm the fearful. For his part, Gordon Brown assured Britain that talk of tough years ahead was ‘simply not true’. Both men spoke of their resolve to cure their economies, and did not seem to mind using the same techniques that created the old bubble. Bank bailouts and massive stimulus efforts have indeed encouraged us to borrow, spend and speculate again. Bank interest rates have dropped to historic lows, bringing cheap credit to the housing market and the high street. The mood this year is one of cautious optimism. It would all be reassuring, were it not so eerily familiar.