Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Climbing inside a gym bag isn’t erotic or lethal – believe me, I’ve tried

Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. Can I ask a small favour of you? Nothing too onerous, just something you might usefully store away at the back of your memory. It is this: if I am ever found dead, padlocked inside a sports hold-all and dumped in the bath and the police — having investigated events ineffectually for a week or more — tell you I did it all myself as part of an auto-erotic experiment which went horribly wrong, don’t believe them. However fervent the rozzers might seem in their belief, no matter what contortionist, escapologist or magician they employ to prove that it can be done, please trust me on this: I did not do it, someone else did it to me.

Ross Clark

Waving while drowning

With or without global warming, Britain is disappearing into the sea. We must invest more in coastal and river defences I have an idea for saving public money: replace the Department for Energy and Climate Change with one man and a sandwich board carrying the words: 'Prepare to Meet Thy Doom'. It shouldn't cost much more than £40 a day to pay for him to pace up and down Oxford Street. And it would achieve exactly the same as DECC: constantly reminding us of the grim warnings regularly put out by ministers - while doing sweet Fanny Adams to save us. Maybe that is just a tad unfair. We do, after all, have the new Committee of Climate Change, established by the Climate Change Act 2008, which last week published its report 'How Well Prepared is the UK for Climate Change?

Lloyd Evans

From the trenches to the stalls

The writer Sebastian Faulks exudes a sense of calm accomplishment. But even he seems tense about the stage adaptation of his bestselling novel Birdsong 'I'm not excited. I don't do excitement,' says Sebastian Faulks. Which is probably just as well. Four years have elapsed since the project he's currently involved with, a dramatisation of his bestselling novel Birdsong, was first suggested to him by the playwright Rachel Wagstaff. I meet them both in Faulks's Holland Park flat, where he writes every day on a huge Apple Mac overlooked by miniature portraits of two deceased colleagues. A picture of Dickens, which belonged to his mother, hangs on the wall beside a relief of Tolstoy reproduced on what looks like the bottom of an ashtray. 'From his house in Moscow,' Faulks explains.

The Spectator

The night our house burnt down

Murray Sayle, who died last weekend, wrote regularly for The Spectator. Here is an edited extract from his column of 13 May 1989. Aikawa, near Tokyo The night of 19 December last was cold and starry. Our house stood in a clearing in a pine forest halfway up a mountainside, and the flames could be seen a good ten miles away, down by the Nissan factory. Some of them even downed tools for a moment or two, we heard, wondering what the bright light was. Not that fires are unusual in Japan. Before the days of concrete cliffs they were called ‘The Flowers of Edo’, the old name of Tokyo.

James Forsyth

Labour’s coming up on the rails

Even leaderless and without fresh ideas, Labour has surged in the polls. Think what the party might be able to do with someone – anyone – in charge The Labour leadership contest has been easy to mock. It has set brother against brother, lasted for months and shown that the party has no heir to Blair. In private, Labour politicians are frank about the failings of their candidates. When I asked a senior backbencher about who he was endorsing, he replied, ‘The least worst one.’ Coalition ministers are gleeful about the weaknesses of the field.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator arts funding debate

‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the taxpayer’ From the start, the combatively worded motion came under attack. Culture secretary Ed Vaizey called it ‘brutal, vulgar, left-wing, and hostile to excellence and quality.’ He urged us not to think of the arts as a layabout teenager watching Neighbours and eating cold pizza all day. The arts doesn’t sponge off the taxpayer, he said, it’s the other way around. The subsidy supports the burgeoning tourism market. He revealed that the independent arts sector welcomes stated-funded art and regards it as a research and development department. He defended free entrance to museums with this economic parable.

Melanie Phillips

I think, therefore I’m guilty

Britain is a liberal and progressive utopia – and the authorities will arrest anyone who disagrees Everyone can agree that today’s Britain — which we’re always being told has become so much more liberal — is the very model of a forward-looking, tolerant society in which freedom of expression is paramount. Correct? If only. In fact, the intellectual trend in Britain is a remorseless slide towards a dark age of intolerance, reverting to a reason-suppressing, heresy-hunting culture in which certain opinions are being turned into thought crimes. Astoundingly, people are being arrested by the police — even if the case against them eventually falls — because of what they have said. They are not inciting violence or any criminal activity.

Alan Rusbridger

How to stifle the press

It feels wrong, as a journalist, to be letting outsiders into this secret, but it is really quite easy to cover things up in England. If you are determined enough it won’t cost you a penny to buy silence. Nor does it even much matter whether you live in this country: our legal system stands ready to help all-comers. It couldn’t be simpler. You hire a solicitor with a working knowledge of Britain’s libel laws to fire off a fierce letter to whichever journalist has been pestering you. It will be the opening salvo in a process which rapidly threatens to become eye-wateringly expensive. If it’s a local paper that may well be all it takes.

Matthew Parris

Let’s hear it for contempt

The Blairite ‘Respect agenda’ is bunkum. We must all be free to insult each other or else only bullies will prevail Stealthily, an idea which was born under New Labour has wormed itself into the imagination of post-millennial Britain. It is the concept of Respect, not least as applied to how we talk or write about each other. The implications of the ‘Respect agenda’ for free speech are perilous, and subterranean — the more insidious for imposing self-censorship by means of a model of supposed 21st-century good manners backed by laws which ‘send a message’ and chill the climate in which ‘hate-speech’ might otherwise occur.

Christopher Booker

Scientists in hiding

Academics who dare to question the scientific establishment’s consensus on Darwinism or global warming increasingly find themselves ostracised and demonised Three months ago I spent a fascinating few days in a villa opposite Cap Ferrat, taking part in a seminar with a dozen very bright scientists, some world authorities in their field. Although most had never met before, they had two things in common. Each had come to question one of the most universally accepted scientific orthodoxies of our age: the Darwinian belief that life on earth evolved simply through the changes brought about by an infinite series of minute variations. The other was that, on arriving at these conclusions, they had come up against a wall of hostility from the scientific establishment.

Hardeep Singh-Kohli

Last laughs

Growing up in Glasgow I saw the word ‘Paki’ spray-painted on to the metal shutters of corner shops across the city. I was called a Paki. It was whispered, spoken and occasionally shouted, as I was pursued through the streets, running in terror from yobs. Those more attuned with the socio-geographic affairs of the Indian subcontinent would note my turban and be aware, therefore, that I am not Pakistani in origin. Actually, the jibe was all the more hurtful for its inaccuracy. In later years I was grateful for the rise of political correctness and the protection from racist and vicious language it affords. But now even I get the sneaking suspicion that things have gone too far.

Brendan O’Neill

Drunk and orderly

In the adult world of the pub, under-18s can learn to drink alcohol responsibly Why are so many young people so bad at getting drunk? No sooner have they necked a couple of lagers or downed a bottle of sickly alcopop than they start parading through the streets, skirts up or trousers down. There’s no dignity to their drunkenness. They get obviously, stupidly drunk. Things have got so bad that this week the British Red Cross — more used to helping out in disaster zones — suggested teaching young people ‘alcohol first aid’, to give them the ‘ability and confidence to cope in a [drinking] crisis’. The inability of today’s yoof to consume booze in an adult fashion is, ironically, a by-product of the authorities’ war on underage drinking.

Patrick Allitt

Get ready for Bush III

John Ellis ‘Jeb’ Bush insists he doesn’t want to run for president. Don’t believe a word of it The next presidential election is 26 months away and already the parties are fretting about it. Barring a disaster, President Obama will be the Democratic candidate, but history is not treating him well. When he took office, the millennial hopes raised by his candidacy bumped into the realities of a long recession and two hard wars. He was just another politician, after all, not a messiah. But if the Democrats have come down to earth with a bump, the Republicans are still trying to shake their post-2008 hangover. John McCain lost badly and won’t be back. His running mate Sarah Palin, the Alaska maverick, is loved by some Republicans but hated by others.

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

The Book of Common Prayer should be our manifesto

What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the steadfast defence of Christian morality? For at least some Anglicans, the savaging of the Bishop of Rome will give rise to sinful pangs of envy. We would like Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman — and, I am rather compelled to mention, my brother Christopher — to be hurling their fiery darts at Thomas Cranmer’s church instead. But these professional scoffers unkindly refuse to scoff at our texts and formularies.

Dominic Cummings

How to solve our welfare problem

Dominic Cummings meets Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who has the answer to some of the West’s intractable problems. So why won’t politicians listen to him? One day in 1974, at the height of the famine in Bangladesh, an economics teacher from a nearby university wandered into a village called Jobra. There he found the ladies of Jobra struggling to survive. No proper bank would deign to lend to them, so in order to finance their tiny basket-making businesses the ladies were forced to borrow from loan-sharks and pay punitive interest rates. ‘This is absurd,’ thought the teacher, Muhammad Yunus.

Robert Gray

Cardinal virtues

According to Cardinal Newman, who is to be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday 19 September, it is a rule of God’s providence that Christians succeed through failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that Newman’s great contemporary Cardinal Manning has never been a candidate for canonisation. He did not care for failure. That these two titans of Roman Catholicism in Victorian England — Newman, born in 1801, was seven years the senior — were frequently at loggerheads is well known. Indeed, the differences between them appear set in stone: Newman, the subtle, sensitive and (it is now official) saintly religious genius; Manning, the ruthless and wily Machiavellian, bent on crushing his rival beneath the Roman wheel.

Rod Liddle

Cameron said he’d clean up politics — so why is Coulson still around?

Things are speeded up these days, there is no time to wait. Everything is hurried along to fit our frenetic lives, our shorter attention span, our impatience with the world. You remember poor Jade Goody, the coarse-natured and half-witted ‘reality’ TV star who presented, as the medical people put it, during an episode of the programme Big Brother? No sooner had you heard of her than she was in disgrace for being racist. No sooner was she in disgrace for being racist than she had contracted cancer. No sooner had she contracted cancer than she was dead. No sooner had she died of cancer than she was forgotten.

Michael Henderson

Proms notebook

The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. The world’s greatest festival of music continues to grow under the splendid stewardship of Roger Wright, but there is always plenty of missionary work to do, for the world will never run short of grouches. Perhaps, like Sir Harold Acton in his Tuscan grotto, who loved to ‘hunt philistines’, we should trap the blighters in cages and force them to listen to lashings of Beethoven and Wagner until they recant. Step forward, if you will, Miss Lynsey Hanley.

Andrew Gilligan

The real battle for Labour’s soul

This summer’s election to choose a new deputy regional sales manager of the Co-op, sorry, a new leader of the Labour party, has rather obviously failed to set the nation on fire. But one level below the sundry Eds and assorted Milibands, there’s a much clearer and more interesting battle for Labour’s soul. In the party’s highest-membership region, London, the graphic designers and diversity outreach consultants who make up Labour’s new industrial base are choosing a mayoral candidate to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012.

Ross Clark

Don’t bet the house on a property plunge

The bubble may have burst, says Ross Clark, but a crash looks unlikely. For now, property remains a sensible investment — better than sticking cash in a low-interest account I’m getting fed up with my 2.5 per cent Northern Rock Super-Sucker’s Account. It was OK when it was paying 6 per cent and Alistair Darling was promising by the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin to repay every penny in the event of the bank going belly-up. But I can’t see the point now: why risk your capital for some measly little apology for interest which isn’t even keeping up with inflation? I keep wanting to hook out the money and put it into something solid: gold or property.