Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Why not make the children of the unemployed work, too?

I suppose I am past the point in life where, as Gore Vidal put it, litigation takes the place of sex. I have consulted lawyers at least 12 times so far this year, which easily exceeds the amount of times I have engaged in mutual sexual activity. Even on my birthday I rang a lawyer and did not have sex. As it happens sex was on offer, as a special treat — along with the cake with its 50 bloody candles, each one lit with malevolent glee by my wife — but I had somehow wrenched my knee out of joint and any form of movement caused excruciating pain and a sinister, strangely synthetic popping noise from within the wrecked joint. You cannot have sex under those conditions; you cannot have sex while hopping. Or at least you can, but only with a kangaroo.

Douglas Murray

Costs in space

‘Hello. Is that the European Union? This is Earth.’ It’s a conversation that could have happened at any time in recent years, but if the EU’s planned global satellite system ever actually takes off it might yet become reality. The plans for ‘Project Galileo’ were dreamt up in the late 1990s. They are intended as a rival to the Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS, used by almost all of today’s satnav devices. GPS worked well — but it was owned by the United States. This did not please Jacques Chirac, then French president, who thought a rival satnav project would make a fine grand projet. Lift-off for Galileo has taken a while, with hopes for a speedy launch repeatedly thwarted.

Melanie McDonagh

Bad sex awards

Every year, every month, there are more of them, the Women of the Year awards when female journalists are invited to join other women for a celebration of our sex at some London hotel. The other week it was the Harper’s Bazaar magazine’s Women of the Year awards, followed closely by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Women of the Year awards, not forgetting the Bounty Celebrity Mum of the Year award (which Samantha Cameron just narrowly missed). Then there’s the Veuve Clicquot Women in Business Awards, the Glamour magazine awards (this year’s winner: Cheryl Cole), the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and the Barclays Women of the Year — won, I need hardly say, by Annie Lennox.

Fraser Nelson

Osborne’s tax exiles

Earlier this year, officials in the Indian driving licence department received an extraordinary application. It was from Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain, who wanted to know — given the circumstances — if it would possible for him to be posted the documentation rather than sit a driving test. They refused, and the steel magnate duly turned up for his fingerprints a few days later. The Indian press were delighted, and not just to see a billionaire humbled. A driving licence application looked very much like the first step back to residency. India’s richest exile might just be the latest to flee London. If he did, it would be a symptom of what could be a much wider problem.

Saturday

Andrew Neil

The New Republicans

After the Tea Party’s election success, the American right has a mandate to fight for a smaller state ‘I am not a witch.’ Now that’s not something you hear very often from a politician. But Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party darling and Republican candidate in Delaware for the US Senate, felt the need to say these words in a campaign commercial, after a youthful dalliance with witchcraft was revealed. The denial was somewhat undermined by the all-black outfit and smoky background. But the Democrats and their cheerleaders in the US media had a field day. These Tea Party folks? Strange, barking, dangerous. Who’d vote for them?

Peter Oborne

Tartan Taleban

On a freezing January morning two years ago, I joined a US army assault in an al-Qa’eda-controlled village in northern Iraq. We were dropped by helicopter half a mile from the village not long after midnight and shivered till dawn, when the soldiers launched their assault. They met with no resistance and by late afternoon had completed their searches and were mostly asleep. I sat in the garden of the makeshift company HQ — the largest house in the village, commandeered from a reluctant sheikh. Above me a US soldier was on sentry duty, while at the bottom of the garden women were cleaning clothes in a stream. There was just enough warmth from the winter sun, so I took out my book, Sir Walter Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate.

Theodore Dalrymple

Common people

When I returned recently from Paris, everyone asked about the strikes, the riots, the violence and the chaos. All I had seen was a queue at one petrol station and a notice of closure at another: otherwise, it was all oysters and Sancerre. My questioners were disappointed. It was as if the travails of France were the salvation of England. Much more pertinent to our national predicament is something that strikes me each time I return from France: the extreme vulgarity of the English by comparison with the French. It is as if the English had adopted vulgarity as a totalitarian ideology, a communism of culture rather than of the economy. This vulgarity is insolent, militant and triumphant, will brook no competition and tolerate no dissent.

Ed Howker

Cameron’s clearances

James Cummings could never refuse a drink. Even after his boss — a Watford publican — threatened him with the sack he couldn’t lay off the bottle. He’d worked his way through the profits of a family business, two houses and a marriage by then. He eventually awoke in a tunnel under the Elephant and Castle three weeks after he was sacked from the pub. That was the winter before last. Now, having recovered sufficiently to rent a flat, fight his addiction and get some qualifications, James is doing everything we expect of those on unemployment benefit. He is teetotal and has avoided debt; he does voluntary work with other addicts and is applying for jobs.

Peter Robins

Wheels within wheels

I have seen only one actual fight in a London cycle lane. It was at St George’s Circus, south of Blackfriars Bridge, on an afternoon late last summer. Two young women were attacking each other over a prone Boris bike, with a third attempting to pull them apart. It seems likely that one had ridden the bike into the other, but I did not interrupt them to check. One learns quickly not to intervene in bike rage incidents. During my first year as a London cyclist, when I was less good at staying quiet, I was spat at, hit with an egg and, just the once, punched in the face by a man who had run uphill in front of me. Keep your head down and pedal, that’s the best thing. London, you see, is a city officially in the throes of a bicycle revolution.

Celia Haddon

Legitimate question

My father believed – wrongly – that I wasn’t his child. If only there had been DNA tests to reassure him In this magazine two weeks ago, Melanie McDonagh suggested that DNA testing is tough on children whose apparent fathers turn out not to be anything of the kind. In particular, she had sympathy for the child whose TV presenter ‘father’ discovered that for years he had been paying child support for somebody else’s offspring. No doubt she has a point, but what of the children whose true fathers doubt their paternity? For me, DNA testing would have been a blessing. My father doubted I was his child, though I didn’t know it. I just knew that he didn’t seem to care for me very much. ‘The cuckoo in the nest’ is what he called me.

Rod Liddle

My sympathies are with the Meedhuffushi One

It is time we started a campaign to free the Meedhuffushi One, a victim of government persecution. Hussein Didi was arrested and faces prosecution for the crime of having officiated at a hotel ‘wedding’ ceremony on the tiny island of Meedhuffushi in the Maldives. You may have read about his unorthodox benediction to the Swiss couple who paid £830 to have their right to fornicate endorsed fraudulently while they sipped cocktails out of a coconut shell in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Or you may have watched the video online. Either way, it is worth reacquainting ourselves with some of the details, especially those not reported in the press.

Daniel McCarthy

Mr Tea

The last time Republicans retook control of Congress, in 1994, the face of the revolution belonged to the party’s leader in the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. This year the standard-bearer is a less obvious figure: Rand Paul, the newly elected junior senator from Kentucky. Not only is Rand not part of the leadership, he is the son of Ron Paul, a maverick former presidential candidate who is considered a pariah within his own party. But this is an outsider’s hour in American politics, and the younger Paul is everywhere hailed as the paragon of the Tea Party revolt. That revolt has been directed as much against the Republican establishment as against Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Saturday

Gideon Rachman

Playing with fire

In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in British spending — and they are drawing the obvious conclusions about the relative fortunes of the two nations. As one of my colleagues in China put it to me, ‘Nobody spots blood in the water faster than the Chinese.’ The contrast between the boom in China and the gloom in Britain is part of a bigger story of the shift in economic and political power from the West to the East.

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.