Features

Saturday

Con Coughlin

Blame the generals

When Dr Liam Fox talks about the ‘ghastly’ inheritance he has been bequeathed by New Labour on the defence budget — which is expected to be butchered further in next week’s spending review, he is not giving us the full roll call of shame. Certainly, there were a succession of clueless Labour defence ministers, who allowed the Ministry of Defence to run up a staggering £36 billion overspend on a variety of contracts. Perhaps some of them believed this financial chicanery was the only way of fighting wars on a peacetime budget, but they must take their share of the blame for the current mess. But so, too, should the service chiefs who commissioned the projects in the first place — knowing full well that there was no money to pay for them.

Mary Wakefield

Director’s cut

In the spring of 2008 I went on a press trip with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, to Hadrian’s wall. It was one of a series of jaunts planned by the BM in the run-up to its great Hadrian exhibition, a little Roman holiday. But though the wall was fascinating, I spent most of my time inspecting the director. He’s charming and universally admired — but also enigmatic. What are his politics? What does he do for fun? Nobody seems to know. So I watched him at Segedunum in Newcastle, talking to local grandees, charming, mercurial, alert. I watched him out by Housesteads fort, chatting to the curators.

Saturday

Rachel Johnson

How to spend it

Leisure and pleasure have always been Scylla and Charybdis for politicians. Vacation on a yacht called Monkey Business, borrow a Caribbean pile from a billionaire, spend time with Cliff Richard, and you’re tabloid toast. Not this lot. The Cameron and Clegg sets have steered through the whirlpools without hitting the rocks. David Cameron, the 19th Prime Minister to have been to Eton, and his Westminster-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, are wealthy, healthy, educated and entitled. They have connections to crowned heads of Europe. But neither is taking the toff path. On paper at least — in the news pages of the dailies — they’re taking the high street, loading the boot of the Espace at Waitrose, dressed in Gap and Converse, somewhere in middle England.

Toby Young

Different class

Two years ago, I put together a proposal for a book about the coming sea change in British politics. It was going to document the resurgence of a political clique that, until recently, had been written off as a busted flush. How had David Cameron, the grandson of a baronet and a member of the Bullingdon Club, managed to overcome the anti-toff prejudice that had put paid to Douglas Hurd’s leadership bid 18 years earlier? The idea was for publication to coincide with the Conservatives thunderous election victory of 2010. I was going to call it The Return of the Eton Mob. I never got around to writing it, which is probably just as well. This analysis now seems completely wrong-headed — and not only because the Tories failed to win a majority.

Quentin Letts

A perfect spad: young Cameron was as guided as a Navy missile

My wife, a keen gardener, has a cold-frame forcing pen. It contains privileged seedlings which, thus sheltered, are hardened off before planting. These are the star blooms of seasons to come. In Britain’s New Establishment we call such specimens ‘ministerial special advisers’. They are placed in the Whitehall cold-frame and given special treatment. Within a few years these ‘spads’ become vigorous bushes. David Cameron and George Osborne used to be special advisers, as did all but one of the candidates in the recent Labour leadership contest. Nick Clegg was a special adviser in Brussels. The lucky lad worked for Leon Brittan when that housewives’ favourite was a European commissioner.

Allister Heath

The Irish problem

It isn’t spending cuts Those arguing against spending cuts have recently adopted a one-word argument: Ireland. The case it stands for is as simple as it is bogus. Ireland had a deficit, now even worse than Britain’s. It adopted an agenda of sharp public spending cuts, on the same logic used by the British government. The result? A double-dip recession and a fresh round of misery. The lesson from Ireland is that cuts don’t work — and that George Osborne is leading Britain into the swamp. The argument is seductive, but only if one is ignorant about what has just happened in Ireland.

John Laughland

Revenge tragedy

As a hardened opponent of military interventionism and international war crimes tribunals, I find I am often floored when Rwanda is invoked. ‘How can you possibly advocate standing idly by when hundreds of thousands of people are being massacred?’ is a difficult question to answer. The events in Rwanda in 1994 have become the supreme moral reference point for interventionists, long after other similar causes célèbres have vanished from memory, because to contemplate the scale and method of killing there is to stare into the very heart of darkness. William Hague last year expressed the prevailing sense of certainty when he said casually, ‘We are all agreed that we would intervene if another Rwanda were predicted.

Douglas Murray

Blackballed by Cameron

David Cameron’s Conservative party has several uniquely destructive traits. But perhaps foremost is that it believes the lies of its enemies. And even when it doesn’t, it panders to them. A perfect example arose three years ago when the shadow minister of homeland security, Patrick Mercer, gave a newspaper interview in which he mentioned the fact that he had heard racist comments while he was in the army. Even a cursory glance at the interview showed that Mercer was reporting — and deploring — these comments. But Cameron didn’t bother with a glance. Here was an opportunity to show the new Conservative party.

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

We need your vote

To celebrate 25 years of The Spectator/Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards, we invite you to nominate the best MP of the past quarter-century The question hangs in the air: what makes a great parliamentarian? And the answer echoes back: many things. A great parliamentarian may be a swashbuckling orator whose rhetoric never fails to draw blood. He or she may be an energetic campaigner, striving on their constituents’ behalf for a new hospital or school. He may be a crumpled backbencher who upholds the tenets and conventions of their party. He may be a thinker, a gambler, a rebel or a ham. A gilded few might claim with some justification, ‘I am all of the above.

Melanie McDonagh

Find yourself in Thurso

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, starring Julia Roberts. The story involves Julia/Elizabeth taking a year out of her life — funded, though the film doesn’t make this clear, by a generous advance from her publisher — in order to discover food in Italy, God in India and love in Bali.

James Forsyth

Cameron’s new model army

The Conservatives are planning to chip away at the lower middle-class voter and release his inner Tory Two inconvenient truths will put the dampeners on what could have been a celebratory Conservative party conference in Birmingham next week. First, there is a champagne ban for the third year running. There are to be no pictures of Tories with bubbly. Next, there is no real victory to toast. David Cameron failed to win a majority against Gordon Brown, which is something of a sore point among his advisers. Visitors to No. 10 are told that this is ‘not a helpful subject’ to bring up. There is a ‘don’t mention the campaign’ policy running in Cameron Towers. But beneath this defensiveness lies an understanding of what went wrong.

Sholto Byrnes

Moral authority

Baroness Warnock, atheist pillar of the liberal establishment, on the need for Christianity in schools and the folly of human rights Baroness Warnock has had many battles with religion over the course of her long and distinguished career. In 1984, when the Warnock Report recommended allowing in vitro fertilisation and research on embryos, she was attacked by the chief rabbi, Immanuel Jacobowitz. The Times headline, she recalls when we meet at the Royal Society of Arts, was ‘Warnock destroys morality’. ‘I rather treasured that.’ The next year, Enoch Powell, who expressed ‘revulsion and repugnance’ at the report, introduced the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill into parliament to counteract it.

W James-Antle-Iii

It’s their party

Right-wing Tea Party activists might well reshape the US Congress – but they have already routed the Republican establishment When angry right-wing American voters started taking to the streets to protest against the Obama administration’s policies, leading Republicans were ecstatic. In the group of protesters who became known as the Tea Party, they saw a grassroots movement they could ride back to power. Now, with the midterm elections approaching, Tea Partiers may indeed change the balance of power in Washington — but a lot of establishment Republicans will be joining their Democratic counterparts in the unemployment queue.

Tanya Gold

In bed with politicians

Who on earth wants to know about the leaders' children, pets, kitchens and favourite biscuits? I am sitting in the audience at Labour party conference, watching a tribute video to Gordon Brown. As Brown smiles, walks, talks, scowls and moves his limbs up and down, giving a fairly decent impersonation of a soon-to-be-discontinued toy, I have a sudden realwisation. I don't know if Stanley Baldwin liked Murray Mints. I have never seen Winston Churchill sob on Piers Morgan's lap, like cheese melting on toast. And I - I - I have no idea whether Clement Attlee had a nice kitchen. Why is this? Is it because the private lives and decoration choices - the mood boards, if you will - of politicians used to be yucky, but shrouded?

Rod Liddle

I refuse to buy meat from supermarkets until they ban halal slaughter

There is a view, prevalent among a sizeable minority of people in this country, and particularly within the angry, fat and drunk white underclass, that one day very soon the green flag of Islam will fly above Westminster and Britain will have become a Muslim country, by stealth. This is the snarled and yet resigned reaction to every inflammatory news story printed in the popular press about Muslim-only swimming nights at local leisure centres, or councils banning Christmas, or teachers upbraided for talking about Jesus Christ in school and so on.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Risky Business

The Spectator/KPMG conference explored investment opportunities in today’s uncertain geopolitical climate We live in an age of uncertainty. The predictable threats of the Cold War have been replaced with more nebulous dangers: great power politics might be stable but across large parts of the world instability rules. The Spectator’s ‘Global Risk and Opportunity’ conference in association with KPMG explored the consequences of this uncertain global environment for business. Andrew Neil opened the event by observing how the all-party desire in America to withdraw from costly foreign entanglements threatened the Pax Americana that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War.

Harry Mount

Post-racial America? Forget it

The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere. Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was, do black people use the social networking site Twitter differently from white people? According to Farhad Manjoo, Slate magazine’s technology correspondent, the answer is yes. He’d noticed that a group of black Twitter users in America were much more likely to react to particular topics. Some of them were race-based, such as ‘If Santa was black …’; answers included ‘He wouldn’t say ho-ho-ho, he would say yo-yo-yo’.

Daniel Kalder

City of fear

A day in Juárez – once a party town, now the murder capital of the world ‘We’re not going to die, are we Dan?’ asked my friend Joe, a CBS radio reporter, shortly before we crossed from El Paso into Juárez, Mexico, murder capital of the world. ‘Nah,’ I replied. ‘Our guide is a priest. It’s a Sunday. The narcos will respect that.’ I was lying to make him feel better. In February, a sacristan in Juárez was killed, one of more than 1,000 drug-related murders in the city so far this year. Elsewhere in Mexico priests had been beaten and butchered: for the cartels, nothing is sacred.

Mary Wakefield

Gut reaction

Hookworms are parasites. But could they also be a revolutionary medical treatment? In a bright modern office in the University of Nottingham's complex of bright and modern buildings, Dr David Pritchard has fallen silent and is sitting staring at his hands. It's been a few minutes since he stopped talking. In the first 30 seconds I sent off a string of little vacuous questions that hung in the air like soap bubbles, then popped for want of response. Now I'm sitting silent too, also looking at his hands, considering - as perhaps is he - how much may be within their reach.