Features

Saturday

Matthew Adams

The Hitch comes home

I met up with Christopher Hitchens in the smaller hours of a warm morning in May, at Heathrow airport. (This was Christopher’s idea. ‘See you at Heathrow,’ he had told me.) From Heathrow we were to drive together to Bath, where he had a speaking engagement that evening to promote his new (and great) memoir, Hitch-22. When Christopher trudged into view he looked as I knew he would look: the Hitchens-style suit; that dolphin-like face; that dirty-grey fringe. And as he stood alone in the queasy light of Arrivals he gave the impression of a raffish (and impressively bibulous) don. Christopher? ‘Ah, my dear chap. How good of you to come. Now, I must have some tea. Do you know somewhere?’ We made our way to the on-site pub. I ordered a gin and tonic.

Max Hastings

The guns of August

Anybody who wants to get on in America must give handsomely to good causes. In our own essentially philistine society, the newly rich get further faster by buying grouse moors. I recently heard a tycoon observe sardonically, in an inimitable gravelly Norwegian accent: ‘Grouse-shooting makes all the English prostitutes.’ He meant that lots of people who otherwise think themselves principled, honourable, choosy about the company they keep, prostrate themselves before hosts who offer them an early entry to paradise, shooting the red grouse amid some of the most glorious landscapes in this island. I became an addict very young, and almost ruined myself renting a little place in Sutherland where we walked miles, shooting grouse over pointers.

Saturday

Doug Saunders

In 100 years we will be an entirely urban species

Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people. It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it’s growing at an extraordinary rate. Every day a tide of 1,500 new people washes in to Chongqing. Every day an extra 1.5 million square feet of floor space is constructed for new residents. It’s a vast megalopolis, a megacity of the sort that will soon take over the world. I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village.

Jonathan Foreman

‘How many must be shot before Kashmir is news?’

It was unfortunate timing. At the very moment David Cameron was pleasing his Indian audience by criticising Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism, security forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir were gunning down civilian protesters in the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of the disputed state. It is not clear why Cameron failed to mention the worsening crisis in Kashmir — the violence and civilian deaths have been all over the Indian media — particularly after he was so forthright about the Gaza crisis during his trip to Turkey. But the killings of demonstrators, curfews and riots in the Muslim-majority state have not gone unnoticed in the Muslim world, and Pakistan’s President Zardari will almost certainly have raised the issue in London this week.

Isabel Villiers

What is Zardari doing at Chequers?

Pakistan’s President has provoked outrage by taking a tour of Europe with his son while thousands die in the floods at home. Isabel Villiers reports Pakistan’s worst monsoon rains continue, and thousands are now dead, many more trapped, surrounded by floods. The images on TV over here show vast expanses of putrid water where riverbanks have spilled, chasing families from their homes, swallowing crops, destroying livelihoods. In one of Pakistan’s worst affected flooded areas around Peshawar, people are very angry. They claim their privacy, their culture has been violated as women and children have been forced to sleep in the streets and wash in a contaminated mix of water, mud, human and animal faeces.

Rod Liddle

Why is the ‘Director BBC North’ staying down south?

On his vast salary, Peter Salmon could buy Wigan, says Rod Liddle. But he and the rest of the corporation’s managerial elite will not be abandoning their cosy London lives any time soon Do any senior BBC executives wish to move to Salford, as is being urged upon the corporation’s exponentially less well paid staff, i.e. the ones who make the programmes you watch or hear? Peter Salmon is the latest exec to announce that he would rather hack off his own face than move his family anywhere remotely near the north. This is a problem because Peter is ‘Director BBC North’, a post given to him presumably because he is married to a woman called Sarah Lancashire. Lancashire is in the north, isn’t it? About as close as the BBC gets, anyway.

Christopher Howse

Suburban hymns

Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs is in a long, glorious tradition of pop lyricism inspired by everyday life, writes Christopher Howse Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral was not about a funeral. But, goodness, when we saw Régine Chassagne hammering away at her keyboard in red elbow-gloves with her husband Win Butler singing one of its tracks, ‘Power Out’, on Jools Holland’s show in 2005, we sat up and knew something had changed. Funeral was, in part, about the suburbs. Arcade Fire’s third album, The Suburbs, out this week, continues the interpretation of city life from the viewpoint of the ‘kids’, with particular reference to parents, and disaster. Not that the kids get off without criticism.

Ross Clark

Train à Grande Vexation

The marvels of French rail travel are a myth, says Ross Clark. Travelling by TGV is a rip-off — and the customer service is appalling Which Ryanair passenger, left fuming by lousy service and lashed by Michael O’Leary’s tongue, hasn’t opined that, if only they had more money and a bit of extra time, they could glide to their holiday destination on a French TGV? Why do we insist on subjecting ourselves to the torture of budget airlines when down there, at ground level, we could be travelling on the fastest and most envied railway system in the world and one that is, according to the marketing bumf, ‘high-speed and hassle-free’? I’ll give you a good reason: because the customer service on French Railways (SNCF) is no better than on Ryanair.

David Tang

Letter from the Far East

In a tiny flat in Peking I heard a 105-year-old Chinese man explain how he was responsible for the capital of China being called Beijing. The centenarian, Mr Zhou Youguang, was the founder of Pinyin, the system of phonetic transliteration for all the Chinese characters. It might be argued that he is one of the most influential men of our age, for he has made it possible for foreigners to speak Mandarin without writing the characters and dramatically improved the literacy rate of the Chinese population. Chairman Mao had asked Stalin for advice on the gloomy 80 per cent illiteracy rate in China in the 1950s. Comrade Joseph thought that the only way forward was for China to use phonetics to substitute the complicated Chinese characters.

Saturday

Con Coughlin

Cameron has given up on Afghanistan

A fundamental shift has quietly taken place in Britain’s approach to Afghanistan: the focus is now on leaving, not winning. Con Coughlin asks if we are seeing the return of the politics of appeasement It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment that David Cameron gave up on the war in Afghanistan. But the Prime Minister’s indisputable position today is that the Nato campaign is unwinnable, and that the sooner Britain withdraws its 10,000-strong combat contingent the better.

Ahmed Rashid

Increasingly isolated, Karzai turns to Pakistan

The extraordinary raw intelligence leaks from the Afghan battlefield confirmed what many people already believed, or feared, about the war. But amidst the avalanche of documents, several new facts have emerged. We now know, for example, that civilians are being killed in much larger numbers than officially admitted by Nato. We know that the Taleban has acquired surface-to-air missiles which downed Western helicopters. We know that both Iran and Pakistan are deeply involved in the conflict, working closely with the Taleban. Finally, we know that the Taleban’s deployment of new weapons, tactics and especially landmines has been devastating to Western and Afghan forces — but, above all, to civilians.

Rod Liddle

Mr Haque’s murderers were racists — so why won’t anyone admit it?

The moment on the video that really hurts, that really digs in — if you are a human being, rather than an ape — is when Marian runs to the prone and inert body of her grandfather and, bending down, distraught, implores him to move, pawing at his body with her hands. She is so small and ineffectual against this sudden new thing in her life, death. Her granddaddy will never move again. Marian is just three years old. Her grandfather is, was, Ekram Haque, 67 years old, a Muslim born in Calcutta who moved to this country almost 40 years ago, hard-working — spent his last years earning a living in a care home — and retired just recently. He was looking forward to taking little Marian on holiday to Pakistan and Australia, the money was all saved up, the flights booked.

Carol Sarler

The burka curtails my freedom

The great debate about the full-face Muslim veil is usually cast in terms of religious rights, says Carol Sarler. But what about my right to see who I’m talking to? So we’re all agreed then. The great burka debate has enthusiastically consumed recent weeks, even though its conclusion was never in doubt: nobody actually intends to ban the thing. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman was correctly smacked for gushing that the garment ‘empowered’ women, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown raged against it as ‘a perversion of our faith’, while on these pages last week Hugo Rifkind more calmly disparaged the robe as ‘rude’. Nevertheless, all would prefer that the sledgehammer of legislation not be used.

Patrick Marnham

Because she’s worth it

The scandal over Liliane Bettencourt’s L’Oréal fortune is exposing the way French high society operates, says Patrick Marnham. And it is harming President Sarkozy in the polls It all started as a banal family squabble over €17 billion. Liliane Bettencourt is heir to the L’Oréal family fortune and among the 20 wealthiest individuals in the world. She is 87 years old, a widow and rather deaf, and she lives alone with half a dozen servants in a mansion in Neuilly, the most expensive suburb in the Paris region. Last year her daughter, Françoise, discovered that her mother had given about €1 billion to a pushy society photographer who had also become a major beneficiary in Liliane’s will.

Harry Mount

Dressing down

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the continental midday sun. But at least the mad dogs don’t dress in vests, belly-hugging T-shirts or those cut-off trousers that make short men shorter and fat men fatter. Why do they do it? How has it happened that you can spot Holidaymakerus britannicus in an instant, from the other side of the piazza — from the far end of the tapas bar? The romantic legend that the British provide a model of good dress still lingers on. The British invented the modern suit, so the myth goes, Savile Row stands for the best tailoring in the world, so those sartorial standards must be written into our dressing DNA. Well, it just goes to show how difficult it is to dislodge a national stereotype.

John Redwood

Time to take the thumbscrews off the banks

The biggest risk to the economy is not government cuts, says John Redwood, but lack of credit. There’s plenty ministers can do to get companies, and people, borrowing again This time it is different. Normally the UK economy bounces back from a downturn, and we have several years of rising prosperity. Today there are many experts who fear another downturn hard on the heels of the big recession we have just lived through. I welcome the government’s decision this week to write about the funding gap for business, and to float ideas including more banking competition. They will need to move quickly and purposefully from consultation to remedies to fuel the recovery.

Saturday

Michael Heath

Cartoons Special 

Here is a collection of some of The Spectator’s best cartoons from the last decade, put together to take your mind off the humourless PC world we are now trapped in. Some people say they only read The Spectator for the cartoons. Who am I to argue? Here is a collection of some of The Spectator’s best cartoons from the last decade, put together to take your mind off the humourless PC world we are now trapped in. Some people say they only read The Spectator for the cartoons. Who am I to argue? My sincere thanks to all the cartoonists, even the ones whose names I have inadvertently left out: Sally Artz, Bernie, Hector Breeze, Dish, Dorrance, Nick Downes, Dredge, GG, Grizelda, Hawker, Nick Hobart, Holland, Hunter, Tony Husband, Ivor, Meyrick Jones, K.J.

Jo Johnson

Britain needs a new ‘special relationship’ with India. We should start by ending overseas aid

For too long, Britain has been complacent about the progress made by its former colony. Now we risk missing out on the important part India will play in the new economic world order. Jo Johnson on the Prime Minister’s attempt to woo New Delhi David Cameron is, by instinct, sceptical of the Heseltinian tradition of herding businessmen onto aeroplanes bound for faraway countries. Yet when he heads to India next week, he will be accompanied not only by perhaps the largest trade delegation the country has ever seen, but by his Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Business Secretary and other assorted ministers. They will scatter themselves across the subcontinent before converging on New Delhi on Wednesday, in an unprecedented attempt to woo this rising world power.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Rotten Apple

There is a point in the life of all companies where they go from being truth machines to lie machines. The honesty necessary to succeed when times are difficult, either as a start-up or as a firm fighting off disaster, becomes a tendency to distortion when the cash is flowing freely and the profits seemingly endless. Apple may not quite be there yet. But the firm regarded as the benchmark for elegant, popular technology is fast becoming one of the bad guys, a byword for the moral failings of global capitalism. While its profits soar, minor blips, like the recent news that the latest iPhone has a dodgy antenna, can be smoothed over. Last week, all it took was a presentation by its revered CEO Steve Jobs, and consumers were reassured.

Theodore Dalrymple

Prison may not work for them, but it works for us

Crooks who are in prison are not burgling your house, says Theodore Dalrymple. They themselves understand that perfectly clearly: it is only sentimental mugs who don’t When Mr Clarke went recently to Leeds Prison, prior to announcing in a speech that prison wasn’t working and that therefore fewer people ought to be locked up, he was reported to have been much affected by the story of a man he met there who had been imprisoned for six weeks for having failed to pay child support. The man told him that the brief sentence had ruined his life, that he had lost his job because of it and that when he came out of prison he would have to go on the dole. Whether Mr Clarke asked himself some rather obvious questions about the case is unknown.