Features

Saturday

John C-Hulsman

Not so special any more

However cosy they may appear, neither Obama nor Cameron care much for the ‘special relationship’. But, says John C. Hulsman, that may be no bad thing Good student that he is, Barack Obama has been careful to dot his ‘i’s and cross his ‘t’s after the British election. Well aware that he is viewed as uninterested in transatlantic relations, Obama made sure he was quick off the mark; he was the first foreign leader to phone David Cameron when he became PM. It’s well known in Washington that the President considered Brown uninspiring, but Obama made it clear that this time it was different; that between them, Barack and Dave, they were truly the new guardians of the special relationship. So — did he mean it?

Fraser Nelson

Can Cameron assuage the Tory tribes?

Amid the chaos in the House of Commons, with newly elected MPs finding their offices and newly appointed ministers being kicked out of them, Graham Brady is the picture of calm. As the only MP to resign on principle from David Cameron’s front bench (over grammar schools), he knew there would be no phone call from Number 10. Yet next week, he may end up being more important than any minister of state. He is favourite for a position that has suddenly started to matter again: chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs. In the era of Blair-style landslides, the likes and loves of backbench MPs mattered little: the government’s majority was big enough to force through most votes. But the loyalty of Tory MPs to a coalition government is untested.

Rod Liddle

Was it in the public interest to stitch up Lord Triesman?

No, says Rod Liddle, in fact it was against it — but you won’t see the Press Complaints Commission punishing the Mail on Sunday for breaching its own code You know as soon as you see the posed photograph of some sweetly smiling young and hitherto unknown bint on the front page of your morning newspaper that somewhere a man, probably a famous and powerful man, is in the doghouse. Stitched up by the papers, having been dragged towards his doom by the relentless, exhausting power of his own gonads. I say stitched up by the papers, but most of the time we can be more specific than that; it will almost certainly be a newspaper of which the editor-in-chief is also the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editorial Code of Practice, i.e. Paul Dacre.

Tanya Gold

‘I never talk to anybody’

So Ben Kingsley, or, as he apparently demands to be called, Sir Ben Kingsley, who are you? I’m sitting in a windowless corridor in the Dorchester Hotel, waiting for him. It’s amazingly pink, this corridor. It looks like a cake. He comes out to collect me and he doesn’t look like he belongs here at all. Perhaps it’s because misery clings to all his famous roles — Gandhi, Simon Wiesenthal, Otto Frank, the sociopath gangster Don Logan, the accountant Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List. And now he’s neither in prison nor a concentration camp, but standing behind an enormous teapot, looking as Home Counties as a John Lewis valance. We sit down and I am slightly tongue-tied because I think he’s a great actor, one of the best.

Brendan O’Neill

China’s parents have begun to rebel

Brendan O’Neill says that the state’s cruel and antiquated one-child policy is being propped up by British environmentalists with an agenda — but the Chinese are striking back Professor Yang Zhizhu is a brave man. In flagrant defiance of China’s womb-policing one-child policy, he and his wife have chosen to become outlaws by having two children and flat out refusing to pay the second-child fine (around £18,000). ‘Why should I pay money for having my own kid?’ asked Professor Yang in an interview last month. ‘It’s our right as citizens.’ For the crime of starting a two-child family, Professor Yang was fired from his job at the Beijing Youth Politics College and now faces an uncertain future.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can this marriage of convenience work?

‘It is not the prize. It is a means to the prize.’ This is how one long-time political ally of David Cameron described the Tory leader’s entrance into Downing Street at the head of a coalition government. The deal with the Liberal Democrats which has put Cameron in Downing Street is, as this Cameron ally admits, ‘an arranged marriage not a love match’. In the run-up, the bride’s family was trying to negotiate a better dowry from an alternative suitor, and many in the groom’s family were praying that he would be jilted at the altar. Guests on both sides of the church could be heard whispering that the marriage would never last.

Phil Collins

Beyond Brown and Blair

Labour has to reinvent itself to fight the next general election, says Phil Collins. The leadership contenders must look to the party’s radical roots So, they were looking in the wrong place all along. For years now the Labour party has been seeking a steely assassin to deal with its unelectable leader. Finally, where James Purnell failed tragically and Geoff Hoon failed farcically, Nick Clegg has succeeded. Gordon Brown has gone and the Labour party is even more leaderless than when he was actually there. Now that Britain has finally settled on a government, the campaigns will start. Or rather, resume. Discreet campaigning has been going on for some time. For Ed Balls, that means visiting constituency dinners and spending Saturdays writing the front half of the Sunday papers.

Lloyd Evans

A man of many parts

‘Heroin?’ I say to Simon Russell Beale. ‘Sorry?’ he says. ‘To relax after a show. To come down off the high. You take heroin?’ ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Yes… if only. Well, as you can probably tell from my shape I like my beer. I can’t imagine a performance without a pint or two afterwards.’ ‘Which brand?’ ‘Oh cheap stuff. Stella or Export, yes, cheap as chips, cooking lager.’ The man widely regarded as the finest theatrical talent of his generation has surprisingly simple tastes.

Irwin Stelzer

Requiem for a heavyweight

It’s a dirty business. When you’re on top, everyone wants something from you; when you’re not, well, as Billie Holiday says, ‘God bless the child that’s got his own.’ It is a business of sharp elbows, few loyalties, and one in which winning is all that matters. That’s how Rod Serling describes the boxing racket in his Requiem for a Heavyweight. He could just as well have been describing politics. Tony Blair might have been the Labour party’s meal ticket (as Margaret Thatcher was the Tories’) through three general elections, just as Serling’s boxer was the meal ticket for his managers and entourage.

Rod Liddle

The real political fight was Boulton v Campbell

Why can’t Alastair Campbell understand that proper journalists aren’t partisan and malevolent, asks Rod Liddle. Most of them just genuinely want to uncover the truth Who were you rooting for in the real political battle of the week, Adam Boulton of Sky News versus Alastair Campbell? It didn’t quite come to a ruck, which is an enormous shame, but Adam did pursue Campbell in the manner of one of those inexplicably angry men you sometimes meet in a kebab shop at two in the morning, driven by a splenetic fury and a sense of implacable self-righteousness and with sputum dribbling down the front of his nursery-coloured acrylic leisurewear. You can watch it right now, on YouTube, if you like.

Patrick Marnham

Is it all over for Sarko?

The French president’s chances of re-election look bleak. But the problem is not his politics, says Patrick Marnham, so much as his embarrassing personal life Gordon Brown is not the only European leader who is regarded as an electoral liability by his own party. With two years to go before France’s next presidential election Nicolas Sarkozy’s chances are not looking good. He is entitled to run for a second five-year term, but in 2012 it will be 24 years since the French chose a president from the left. Many voters think it is time for a change. Mr Sarkozy is now one of the most unpopular political personalities in France.

Ferdinand Mount

Raise a glass to Alan Watkins

Ferdinand Mount mourns the passing of his friend and colleague — and a former Spectator columnist — whose wit, humour and clarity of expression remain unrivalled As Alan Watkins lay dying last Saturday, his younger grandson Harry recited to him the passage from Macbeth he had just learnt at school. It was an apt send-off for the most enchanting political commentator of his day, as meanwhile in Downing Street Birnam Wood was inching closer to Dunsinane (though to be fair to Macbeth he did not claim that he was merely ‘securing a progressive coalition’). To those who professed to be shocked by the shenanigans of the past few days, Alan would surely have rolled his great bloodhound eyes and sighed, ‘politics is a rough old trade, you know’.

Saturday

The Spectator

What the new government must do first

After an exhausting election, the incoming administration is expected to introduce reforms immediately. But which ones are most urgent? The Spectator asked some of its favourite writers and thinkers to advise the new Prime Minister Stabilise the economy The new government now has to move with utmost swiftness to stabilise British public finances, which Gordon Brown has left in a truly abysmal condition. We are in the middle of the worst debt explosion in the Western world, according to the Bank for International Settlements, and nothing discussed during the election campaign would remotely suffice to bring the situation under control.

Evgeny Lebedev

Art is now an acronym for Arid Retail Trade

As the spring auctions begin, it looks as if there’s never been a greater demand for art, says Evgeny Lebedev. But despite a booming market, the art world itself is stagnant If one was to commission a sculpture that depicted the woeful state of the British art market, then it would be difficult to improve on what Boris Johnson is proposing for the London Olympics. The Mayor’s venture represents the fusion of everything that is wrong with the system: a steel billionaire, a £19 million price-tag, a world-famous artist and 1,400 tons of metal in the shape of crashed pylons. And the end result? That the contraption will be used as a mega funfair. Publicity for the so-called ArcelorMittal Orbit speaks of its size, price and persona. There is no majesty, no mystery. No art.

Daniel W-Drezner

The paranoid style in world politics

Polio vaccines in Nigeria are part of a Western plot to make African women infertile. Foreign zombies are replacing indigenous labourers in South Africa. Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim who hates the United States and wants to institute ‘death panels’ to govern the healthcare system. The United States triggered the earthquake in Haiti to expand America’s imperial reach. These are just a small slice of the conspiracy theories floating around the global ether of rumour and innuendo. Such theories are hardly a new phenomenon in world politics. Athens fell victim to the politics of rumour and conspiracy during the Peloponnesian war.

Stephen Pollard

It was Mandy wot lost it

It’s time to drop the myth of Lord Mandelson as a political genius, says Stephen Pollard. No one has done more to wreck the Labour party Whatever the election result, one thing is sure: industrial quantities of obloquy will be heaped on Gordon Brown as the man responsible for Labour’s result. But if the party is after the real villain of the piece, it is looking in the wrong place. Mr Brown was, it was clear from the start, never suitable for the job of Prime Minister. By last summer, such a conclusion was not merely clear, it was being beamed in blinding neon lighting from the door of 10 Downing Street. So long as Gordon Brown remained leader, Labour was guaranteed defeat.

Rod Liddle

After all the fuss, will anything actually change?

Did you vote for change, then? Or did you, as David Cameron put it during the second of those frigid televised leaders’ debates, vote for ‘hope, not fear’? I decided in the end to vote for fear, as I’ve never been very keen on hope. I think hope is overrated, if we’re honest, whereas there is a dark, brooding intensity to fear. But change? Some things will change, I suppose, but a lot of the things which make people angry will not change at all, the sort of stuff that was rarely if ever mentioned during the election campaign, but which we know thoroughly annoys many people. Here is my list of things which will continue pretty much unabated, regardless of the election result.

Lloyd Evans

Travel narrows the mind

The holiday season is upon us, but it’s nothing to celebrate, says Lloyd Evans. Tourism is torture, no matter how you do it Oh God. Here it comes again. The days lengthen, the temperature climbs, the pollen spreads and the mighty armies of foreign invaders prepare to make their move. It’s not illegal immigrants who cause my heart to sink at this time of year. Those brave defectors deserve our admiration for their persistence and ingenuity. They travel here in conditions no westerner would tolerate. They cling upside down to the exhaust pipes of juggernauts. They squeeze into the drums of imported washing machines. Unlike casual holiday-makers they’re serious about this country. They’re here to learn English, find a job, raise a family, get sick and die.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

‘The manifesto is what we believe in, that is what matters’

As election day approaches, David Cameron talks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth about Tory principles, where his campaign went wrong, and what might happen if he doesn’t win To gauge how much trouble David Cameron is in, one need only check his smile. In the days when he enjoyed a seemingly impregnable lead over Labour, he appeared fretful and inactive. But when he meets The Spectator on a train to Southampton, he is wearing a grin. This can only mean one thing: he is, once again, fighting for his political life. The polls are no longer predicting a Tory victory but a hung parliament — and senior Conservatives wonder if their leader will have to do a deal with the Lib Dems. Defeat seems to have been snatched from the jaws of victory.

Rod Liddle

The Asbo swan of Cambridge: a fable for our time

A swan won’t take your eye out, says Rod Liddle. So why the health and safety paranoia? Never mind hung parliaments and the ending of the two-party dominance of British politics (a notion I seem to remember being mooted in about 1982) — here’s the important question of the week: was the BBC right to provoke that swan? It’s a story you may have missed while worrying yourself stupid over who to vote for, or the fact that the Greeks are skint again, or Icelandic ash sending planes spiralling to earth like sycamore keys in an autumn gale.