Features

Saturday

Simon Jenkins

Who do you Trust?

Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those irritated at such intrusion can walk through the house and enjoy the garden undisturbed. Most are entranced. When I arrived at the National Trust as chairman two years ago, I received two clear messages. One was to relieve its 330 houses open to the public from the ‘dead hand’ of the Trust’s house style, and the other was to cut the suffocation of its centralised bureaucracy.

Tanya Gold

Only prigs wear mini-skirts

Uncle Norman likes to talk about the year the mini-skirt was born. (The name has been changed to protect him.) It was 1965 and he was a law student living in Chelsea. And when the skirt arrived, he took a year off university, and spent it on the No. 22 bus on the King’s Road, following women up the stairs. At this point in the anecdote Uncle Norman usually closes his eyes. I mention Uncle Norman’s contribution to social history because mini-skirts are in the news again, this time in Italy, which I always thought was a place where men liked women. But if this was ever true, and it probably wasn’t, it is now obvious that this amazing, never-to-be-repeated liking of women was, like the Enlightenment, a blip.

Dylan Jones

American Notebook | 30 October 2010

To New York, for a benefit gala at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Norman Mailer Centre and Writers Colony. We are there as a team to present British GQ’s first student writing award to a 65-year-old mother of two: Helen Madden, who presented the children’s TV show Romper Room in the early 1970s and still looks about 40. She wrote the winning story, ‘Rod, Roy and Jerry Lee’, while doing a creative writing MA at Queen’s University in Belfast, and its hearty nature appealed to almost everyone on the panel of judges. Tina Brown, Jann Wenner, and the super-cool Gay Talese were all in evidence, along with Taki, Michael Wolff, the irrepressible Larry Schiller and Mailer’s beautiful widow Norris.

Ross Clark

Carbon captives

While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting tones, unveiled the Bristol Brabazon — the elephantine passenger plane with wings longer than Waterloo Bridge which was supposed to bolster the British aeronautical industry. A single phrase stands out as the camera fixes on mechanics carefully removing the chocks for its maiden flight: ‘You don’t take any chances with £12 million of taxpayers’ money.’ It is a laughable untruth.

Mark Palmer

The pecking order

Every now and again you read about ‘Empty Nest Syndrome’ — a curious affliction suffered by parents who are sad that their children have left home. It sounds like heaven to me. My wife and I should be, well, free as a bird now that all our little ones have fled to university and beyond. Those arduous parent evenings, competitive end-of-term picnics and final warnings from the bursar are already a distant memory. We can come and go as we please, spending weekends learning to grow asparagus. Except that we can’t. Because of Nero. Nero is a parrot who lives with us and who will still be squawking a decade or so after I’ve joined the great grumpy chorus in the sky. We are chained once more.

Nicholas Barrow

Work? Nice if you can get it

I am not unemployed due to laziness. I have ambitions. I would like to be successful. I would like to have a beautiful, grounded wife, children, and earn a good crust. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was in the Navy during the second world war. In his field he was an important person who gained respect. I would like to gain respect too and to achieve my goals, but I find it very difficult because I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum that produces impaired social skills, obsessions, high anxiety and, certainly in my case, extreme emotion and passion. I very much want to have a job, but it has proved trickier than I expected. It’s going to be even harder now after the cuts.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator defence debate

‘The army, navy and air force are so 20th century. Scrap them and have a massive British Marine Corps.’ Just a few hours after the publication of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, two crack teams of speakers clashed over the future of the armed forces at the Spectator debate. Brigadier Allan Mallinson, the novelist and military historian, proposed the motion with a heavy heart. ‘I love the armed forces,’ he confessed. ‘I watch the “Battle of Britain” with tears in my eyes.’ But the trinitarian approach had failed. He imagined a new combined force under the command of an army general.

Allister Heath

Forget the cuts

To listen to the reporting of the Chancellor’s phased and rather limited spending cuts, you would think that the gates of fiscal hell opened at 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday. They are the ‘most savage cuts in our lifetime’, said an ITV reporter. The ‘fastest, deepest cuts in public spending ever mounted by a government in modern times’, declared a hyperventilating Will Hutton, a newspaper columnist and government adviser. It has been so long since Britain attempted fiscal restraint that a cut in total government spending of under 4 per cent in real terms over four years is treated like the coming of the apocalypse. That there will be severe pain is not in question. There will be real hardship for the soldiers and public-sector workers who are laid off.

Luke Coppen

Unfair sex

Lana Lawless, a stocky blonde in her fifties, stepped up to the tee at the 2008 World Long Drive Championship and smashed the ball into a 40 mile per hour headwind. It landed 254 yards away, the length of two-and-a-half football pitches. With that swing, Lawless became women’s world champion. At the turn of the millennium, Lana didn’t even exist. Or rather she existed only in the mind of a 17-stone police officer assigned to a gang unit in one of California’s roughest cities. Lawless’s SWAT team colleagues never guessed that he longed to be ‘a normal girl’. In 2005 he had a sex-change operation and began to pursue the title of long-drive queen. But now Lawless’s career is on hold.

Victoria Lane

For his next trick …

‘I think he is probably the devil,’ said the work experience boy when I was going to meet Derren Brown, the magician, mindreader, ‘psychological illusionist’, what-have-you. ‘Because he does exactly what I’d do if I was the devil, which is pretend he can’t really do magic and that it’s all just a trick.’ Brown turns out to be an extremely nice man, so his evil telly presence must at times be a bit of an albatross for him. The thing is that, meeting him, you can’t help being aware that he is a genius puppet-master with strange powers of perception and the ability to manipulate people into doing the most extraordinary things.

Melanie McDonagh

Who’s the daddy?

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter. Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away, the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers.

Kevin Spacey

Design for giving

The question I’m most often asked is this. How did I end up living and working in south London instead of doing what most reasonably successful movie actors tend to do — sitting around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in Beverly Hills, sipping cocktails and collecting cheques? The question I most often ask myself is a little different. How did a kid from South Orange, New Jersey, end up being artistic director at the Old Vic in London? The answers to the two questions are interrelated. I work at the Old Vic because I believe passionately that theatre can help society. And the reason I believe that so strongly is that it helped me so much.

Lloyd Evans

Spectator Debate: ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools

Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Proposing the motion ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’, the Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin said that the child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for wearing Ninja-branded pyjamas. Religious schools, she went on, led to ghettoisation and contempt for the host culture. Three Islamic schools in the UK require girls to wear the full veil, and they boast that they ‘oppose the lifestyle of the West’. Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, trumpeted the success of faith schools.

George Bridges

Whose side are they on?

The Conservatives have proved unafraid of making enemies with their cuts. It’s less clear that they know who their friends are With all the spending review figures published, one question still hangs in the air: whose side is the coalition on? Families with teenagers? No, they’ll be hit by higher university fees. Families where the single earner brings home more than £45,000? No, they’ll lose child benefit. High earners? There’s the new 50p tax for them. The public sector? With all those job cuts, that’s a sick joke. The armed forces? Unlikely, after the hatchet job on the defence budget. Commuters? No, it’s higher fares for them.

Daniel W-Drezner

A world of ignorance

America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies that demonstrate a breathtaking ability to think that other countries were just like the United States. During the Cold War, US policymakers continually misread the Pacific Rim. In the 1940s, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska vowed that ‘with God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City’. It turned out that the communists were more successful in that endeavour than Chiang Kai-Shek.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator Faith Schools Debate

'Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools' Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at the Spectator debate. The motion ‘Taxpayers’ Money Should Not Fund Faith Schools’ was proposed by Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin. She evoked the green cartoon reptiles as proof that faith schools are discriminatory and irrational. The child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for wearing Ninja-branded pyjamas. Religious schools, she went on, are not only divisive, they lead to ghettoisation and contempt for the host culture. Three Islamic schools in the UK require girls to wear the full veil, and they boast openly that they ‘oppose the lifestyle of the West’.

Rod Liddle

Orange alert

Amsterdam Be careful if you are planning to attack a Jew in Amsterdam. What you see is not always what you get. Throw a rock or spit at some bloke with long curly sidelocks and a yarmulke and before you know it you might end up handcuffed in the back of a police van. What you attacked, then, was not a Jew, but a Decoy Jew. Decoy Jews are policemen pretending be Jews, a cunning initiative dreamed up by the city authorities to prevent anti-Semitic behaviour. They’ve borrowed it from the Dutch town of Gouda, where the local coppers dressed up as grannies in order to cut down on muggings: I would have paid to see that. Elsewhere there have been policemen dressed as homosexuals and prostitutes, both groups that some people also enjoy attacking, and next it’s Joods.

Dan Jones

Gym junkie

A trip to the local bodybuilders’ gym under the influence of muscle drugs If you want to get ahead in sports, there’s nothing better than a nice big helping of performance-enhancing drugs. Just ask the guys on the Tour de France. At the end of last month the Spanish cyclist and three-times Tour winner Alberto Contador was banned from cycling after testing positive for the illegal anabolic agent Clenbuterol. He says that he accidentally ate it in a steak his mate brought him from Spain. You have to agree it’s a great excuse. I have a feeling I wheeled out that line, or a very similar one, to my appalled mother after returning green-faced and soused in my own bile from a house party in the mid-1990s.

Irwin Stelzer

Picking losers

So we are to have a new industrial policy, this one courtesy of the coalition government and, more specifically, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Transport Secretary. Both are economically literate, professing faith in markets as allocators of resources; but they have found the lure of shaping the economy in their image irresistible. The goals of the new industrial policy are two: to reduce the relative importance of financial services, and to disperse economic activity more widely throughout the nation.

Harry Mount

Left out

New Labour Islington is no more – it is now an area for Tory-voting bankers When I grew up in Islington in the 1980s and 90s, there was a reliable election ritual: the bigger the Georgian villa, the more likely the resident barrister was to put up a Labour poster in his sash window. If they weren’t barristers, they were senior Labour politicians. Some were both. The poster in the window in the rambling terraced house in Canonbury belonged to Charlie Falconer, later lord chancellor. Nearby was Malvern Terrace, home to Brenda Dean, later Lady Dean, former general secretary of the print union Sogat. Next door was Margaret Hodge. A few doors down, at 1 Richmond Crescent, was the spiritual king of fashionable Islington, Tony Blair.