Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

China’s spy network

We are at war online – and we are losing Almost exactly two years ago, an American army officer found a memory stick in a car park in the Middle East and, out of curiosity, inserted it into his military laptop. It seemed to be empty, but there are a million ways of disguising a Trojan computer virus. Instantly, a malicious software code uploaded onto the US Central Command military computer network and embedded itself in the system. And there it lay undetected for weeks, able to send back all manner of classified information. In the words of the deputy US defence secretary, William J. Lynn III, it was ‘poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary’. That unknown adversary was almost certainly China.

Carol Sarler

Hard labour

More women than ever are having their babies by Caesarian section. Not the old last-resort emergency type, either; the ones where mothers howl for days, to the point of peril for self or child, until mercy descends in a scalpel — life-saving, but adding to existing trauma. No. This marked increase, by as much as 40 per cent in one year at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, has been among women who elect a Caesarian; those who plan, often months in advance, to be delivered calmly, swiftly and relatively free of pain in a modern, controlled, 21st-century environment. In short: an increase in women who are aware that there is a choice and are happy to exercise it. So good news all round then.

Rod Liddle

What is the racial composition of a hobbit?

What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you know — white. Nearly white, maybe, but not quite. Proper white people, I thought, are taller than hobbits, less hysterical and tend not to live underground. But this was back in the days before I had heard of John Bercow. Also, proper white people had electricity, cars and supermarkets. One’s views change markedly over the years. Back then, I assumed that hobbits were Latins, or perhaps even Romanian, a Slavic-Latin mélange.

Owen Matthews

A crackdown on kleptocrats

The law is catching up with Russia’s corrupt oligarchs Moscow’s White House is a fairly pleasing pile, at least by the standards of late Soviet architecture. Its colonnaded white stone façade enjoys handsome views over the Moscow River, and its interiors are a symphony in green malachite, light teak and gold ormolu, a mid-1990s decorating style best described as mafia rococo. From the corner offices, now occupied by the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, and his deputies, one can gaze over gridlocked traffic, enlivened by the blue flashing lights of government Mercedes as they charge down the reserved central lane. ‘Do you remember Mabetex?’ I asked one of Putin’s deputy premiers a few months ago.

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

Auntie’s blind spot

The BBC is like a goldfish. Just as we have no way of communicating to the poor creature that it is confined by a bowl, experts of the utmost skill and renown have sought in vain for years to explain to the corporation that its ethos is slanted towards the left. It knows no other world but that of the Guardian, in which it lives and moves and has its being. It would die, more of shock than anything else, if it were removed from it. And so it swims round and round, opening and closing its mouth and burbling that such accusations are fanciful. But now at last I believe I have found a way to signal across the vast divide that separates the BBC and the rest of us. This is thanks to what turned out to be a rather amusing thing which recently happened to me.

Amanda Foreman

How to marry a prince

The turbulent but often triumphant record of Britain’s royal weddings is full of lessons for Kate and William The popularity of the monarchy has been slowly improving since the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’ speech in 1992. But the vital spark needed to win over the country was missing. Not even the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday could fully repair the damage caused by years of controversy and embarrassing revelations. It is only now, with the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton, that the monarchy has a real opportunity to remake itself for the 21st century. But first, the handlers and planners for the royal event need to learn from history. Good intentions are not enough.

Josie Appleton

A common sense revolution

Last January, Annabel Hayter, chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral Flower Guild, received an email saying that she and her 60 fellow flower arrangers would have to undergo a CRB check. CRB stands for Criminal Records Bureau, and a CRB check is a time-consuming, sometimes expensive, pretty much always pointless vetting procedure that you must go through if you work with children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Everybody else had been checked: the ‘welcomers’ at the cathedral door; the cathedral guides; the whole of the cathedral office (though they rarely left their room). The flower guild was all that remained. The cathedral authorities expected no resistance.

Michael Henderson

This be the verse

Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which would have put another nought on the price. The book belonged to the fourth impression, published four years later, but it came with an inscription from another famous writer, who had presented it to an actress friend. ‘I hope you like these poems,’ he had written. ‘They are what I wanted the play to be — very English and full of affection and dissatisfaction. All my love. A.

Dennis Sewell

Lessons from south London

Having transformed his inner-city primary, Greg Martin has bought a stately home in Sussex – and is preparing to turn it into a fully free state boarding school We’re chatting poolside, which feels somewhat incongruous since this isn’t the Riviera or a spa hotel, but a primary school in Stockwell, one of the rougher districts of south London. Greg Martin, the school’s executive head, leans forward confidentially. ‘Look,’ he whispers, pointing to the door. ‘Here comes the middle class now.’ There’s a sudden inrush of boys and girls who seem familiar. Is it the Boden or the John Lewis catalogue they stepped out of? For sure, these children are not pupils at the Durand Academy.

The Spectator

Mohammad Sawalha: Apology

On 2 July 2008 we published an article entitled “Just look what came crawling out” which alleged that at a protest at the celebration in London of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, Mohammad Sawalha had referred to Jews in Britian as “evil/noxious”. We now accept that Mr Sawalha made no such anti-Semitic statement and that the article was based on a mistranslation elsewhere of an earlier report. We and Melanie Phillips apologise for the error.

Saturday

Irwin Stelzer

Do not resuscitate

No one can fault the doctors: they are using every tool available to them to save their very ill patient. But they will probably fail in their efforts to save the euro in its current form. And this will be because the regimen they originally prescribed did more harm than good. Economists were almost unanimous in warning that it is beyond the wisdom of man to set an interest rate that suits 16 countries without also unifying fiscal policy, creating income transfer mechanisms, and a common language to reduce barriers to labour mobility. So we have Ireland, a country that devised a low-tax path to prosperity. Rather than raising interest rates to cool its overheating economy, the European Central Bank kept area-wide interest rates low to suit Germany.

Kevin Myers

Going south

The moral nadir of any state must surely have come when Mr Gerry Adams MP announces that he is its white knight. Yes, this IRA butcher and architect of countless bombings and killings is abandoning Northern Ireland politics, and even his empty seat in Westminster, to stand in Ireland’s general election next year. He actually thinks that he is entitled to berate the politicians of the Irish Republic for their conduct. And by God, he could well have a point. Just look at the latest nugget to emerge from the parliamentary sewer that is Leinster House — the equivalent of the Palace of Westminster.

Aidan Hartley

Pride of Somalia

When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of being held hostage by pirates in Somalia — now that certainly strikes me as news. Britain’s 300,000 or so Somalis are a particularly unpopular Muslim community. Somalis are often seen as a drain on the state. They form the hardest inner-city gangs. They mistreat their women. They chew the drug qat.

Susannah Jowitt

Citizen’s arrest

My husband foiled a theft at the Saatchi Gallery – and was rewarded with a night in the cells Back in October, in the same week that David Cameron was trying to persuade his party conference of the merits of the Big Society, my husband Anthony did what the Prime Minister urged and tried to help someone in need. As a result, he spent a night behind bars. Here’s what happened. We were guests at the glitzy preview night of a new art charity show called The Art of Giving at the Saatchi Gallery on King’s Road in London. Towards the close of the evening, amid the hubbub and the plying of prosecco, a drama started. One of the event’s curators had left her laptop and phone lying around, and somebody had stolen them. She screamed for help. Anthony was standing nearby.

Ed Smith

Ashes to Ashes

Australian cricket’s fearsome tradition of toughness may be coming to an end This is not wise. In fact, it is madness. For me, as a former professional cricketer, it is a hostage to fortune. For England, with the Ashes fast approaching, it could be worse: I am tempting fate and inviting revenge. It would be risky to whisper it at dinner, let alone spell it out in print. The timing is abysmal and I am not even sure I am right. But the idea will not leave me alone. A sneaking question keeps coming into my head: are Australia losing their cricketing edge? And I don’t just mean the Ashes. I mean the whole legend of the Aussie battler that has been constructed over decades of flinty toughness. Australia have lost their past four series. But it’s deeper than that.

Alistair Horne

A portrait of the Lady

Aung San Suu Kyi is free, but has the ruling junta won the battle for Burma’s future? Aung San Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, was a good friend of mine at St Antony’s, Oxford. The gentlest of gentle academics, he helped establish a centre in Tibetan studies at Oxford, and converted to Buddhism. In 1972, he married Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had met while they were both studying in Oxford. They had two young sons, Alexander and Kim, and for a while settled into the quiet life of north Oxford. But as we all know, in 1988, Suu Kyi returned to Burma to tend her ailing mother and soon found herself swept into politics.

Saturday

Jo Johnson

Generation jihad

Driving through Gaza City last weekend, in an armoured UN land cruiser, I ask our guide what the ubiquitous green flags symbolise. ‘Hamas,’ he replies. And the black ones? ‘Jihad.’ It is almost five years since Hamas won 74 out of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council election, in a massive rejection both of the corruption of Fatah politicians and of the peace process with Israel. Since then, under a land and sea blockade imposed ostensibly to protect Israel from rocket attack and Egypt from Islamist contagion, Gaza has sunk ever deeper into a mire of victimhood and fundamentalism. It’s an alarming thought: young Gazans — 60 per cent of the population is under 15 — are growing up in an environment tailor-made for radicalisation.

Tessa Keswick

Beijing Notebook | 13 November 2010

David Cameron should have enjoyed his trip this week. Autumn is a great time to be in Beijing. The sky is deep blue, the sun hot and the evenings cool. As the season progresses, the shadows thrown by the tall buildings lengthen and the north wind from Mongolia blows a little more urgently. The pollution in Beijing is much less bad than in other Chinese cities, and the new parks and landscaped gardens and flower beds are beautifully tended. Rem Koolhaas’s massive CCTV headquarters, Paul Andreu’s National Theatre ‘the Egg’, and Ai Weiwei’s Olympic Stadium add to the grandeur of this great northern capital. During the autumn holiday, half of China migrates from one side of the country to the other to visit their families.

Matthew Lynn

Bust and boom

Iceland is recovering from its financial shock – without the aid of a bank bailout It’s been a good week for the admittedly small band of people who get excited about the decisions made by central banks. In America, the Federal Reserve embarked on a second great round of printing money. In this country, the Bank of England abandoned any idea of controlling inflation, leaving interest rates at a three-century low despite having missed its inflation target for seven months. But by far the most interesting decision was made a long way to the north, in a country which people usually only pay attention to when its banks or volcanoes blow up, bringing either the financial or air traffic system grinding to a halt.

Aidan Hartley

White man’s burden

Suffering has had at least one benefit for white Zimbabweans, says the writer Peter Godwin – it has brought them closer to the rest of the population When Robert Mugabe dies — when the blood transfusions, the vitamin jabs, Botox and hate-filled rants come to an end — few Zimbabweans will miss him. Yet while reading Peter Godwin’s new book, The Fear, it strikes me that one group will have a reason not entirely to curse him: Zimbabwe’s whites. An unintended consequence of Mugabe’s persecution of his Caucasian citizens — a revelation in Godwin’s book that might hasten the 86-year-old despot’s death in one last carpet-chewing frenzy — is that he has massively improved their reputation.