Features

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Spectator debate: ‘Pity Cameron’s a Heath not a Thatcher’

Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Proposing the motion, Simon Heffer surprised everyone by launching into a warm tribute to Ted Heath. ‘A serious talent’, Heath had been hobbled by a ‘terrible desire to let the state take control’. In office he demonstrated a fatal ‘flexibility of principle’.

John L-Allen-Jr

Don’t be daft — you can’t put the Pope on trial

Benedict XVI’s handling of sex abuse cases is not above criticism, says John L. Allen Jr. But the campaign for him to be hauled before an international court is ill informed A Vatican spokesperson recently laughed off the campaign to issue an arrest warrant for Pope Benedict XVI when he visits the United Kingdom in September, describing it as an idea designed to make a splash in public opinion rather than something ‘serious’. One understands that response.

Saturday

Leanda De-Lisle

A Tudor mystery unravels

The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells all At the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, scribbles on the walls of the 12-foot prison room bear testimony to the dreary misery of the woman Elizabeth I had kept there. An heir to the throne, a potential English queen, now buried in obscurity. If Lady Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote. She was the dwarf who married a giant, the curious youngest sister of the famous Lady Jane Grey. But Mary was a more significant figure than her stature in the literature suggests.

Kim Levine

Bringing up baby

For my 19-month-old son Santo, living in Rome meant that a typical morning went something like this: get up, get dressed, get hoisted up and down by a hydraulic car lift in our local garage (the mechanic Paolo was one of his good friends), stop for a sugary cornetto for breakfast, help the barman make a café for Mama, sit on a random selection of parked motorini (motorbikes), hang out at our friend Emiliano’s alimentari sticking grubby hands on legs of prosciutto while being fed hunks of parmigiano, get kissed passionately by a wide variety of complete strangers. I am fairly certain that this is not the routine spoonfed to increasingly fear-driven parents by modern British childcare experts.

Daniel McCarthy

The trouble with tea parties

For many Tory voters, a change of government on 6 May will not be enough. What Britain needs, they think, is little less than a revolution — against skyscraping taxes and personal debt, a corrupt parliament, and a surveillance state that is stripping away liberties as old as Magna Carta. In short, Britain needs what America has: tea parties, a grassroots movement willing to take to the streets in protest against state power. Daniel Hannan and his Freedom Association lit the fuse for such a rebellion, or so they hoped, in February with a Brighton tea party. And Hannan is not alone, there are signs everywhere of a longing for a populist backlash.

Freddy Gray

‘If we have souls, then so do chimps’

Freddy Gray meets Jane Goodall, the primatologist whose ‘unprofessional’, empathetic approach led to astonishing discoveries about how human-like chimpanzees really are A 76-year-old woman is making chimpanzee noises at me. ‘OOOHHH HAAAAA, OOOHHH HAAAA,’ she shouts. ‘And then there’s a WRAAAAH! That’s a threat! WRAAAH!’ This woman isn’t mad, though. She is Jane Goodall, the world-renowned primatologist, arguably the greatest behavioural scientist of her time. She is making ape sounds because I’ve asked her to, and because the subject of chimpanzees still inspires in her a child-like excitement.

John Mcentee

A very Catholic education

It seems mandatory at the moment to refer to all cases of child abuse as ‘child rape’. Well — I wasn’t raped but I was, as the euphemism goes, ‘interfered with’ by a representative of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. And rather than seek out those who were sexually abused by priests, nuns and members of religious orders in Ireland, it would, I believe, be easier to identify the minority who were not subject to a sexual advance of some kind. When I was growing up in a border county town in the 1950s and 1960s, sexual advances by priests and brothers were as common as the use of the ruler and cane to inflict corporal punishment.

Rod Liddle

The sheep-worrying aliens made me think about homosexuals and B&Bs

Alien life-forms have been cutting holes in sheep in Shropshire with highly powered lasers and strange glowing balls of light. According to a local farmer, reported by an oddly credulous chap from the Daily Telegraph, there is a ‘corridor’ of 50 miles stretching from Shrewsbury towards the Powys border where UFOs arrive quite regularly and do weird stuff with sheep. The farmer insists that sheep have been found with perfectly circular burn holes on their foreheads, and sometimes their brains dissected. Also he has seen the UFOs and pronounced them ‘frightening’. I agree with him. Most of the UFOs I have seen have been frightening, especially those which turn up just after there’s been a lock in at the local pub.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The Spectator Debate

The Roman Catholic Church is a constant source of controversy, as the ongoing outrage over clerical sexual abuse shows. But the Church also inspires great devotion and loyalty. The Spectator recently hosted a debate under the title ‘England Should be a Catholic Country Again’. Here, we reprise two passionate arguments for and against the motion. Yes, says Piers Paul Read. A Catholic England would counter the barren hedonism of our culture ‘A weak priest inspires contempt,’ wrote François Renée de Chateaubriand in the early 19th century, ‘a vicious one excites abhorrence; but a good priest, meek, pious, without superstition, charitable, tolerant, is entitled to our love and respect.’ As it was then, so it is now.

Paul Goodman

The romance of Islam

For anyone trying to follow the journey begun by Abraham, conversion to Islam should recommend itself with compulsive force. It’s the most plausible of the three religions that look back to him. Near the root of Judaism is the conviction that a single people are chosen by God — a people, moreover, who are hard to join. At the core of Christianity is the belief that a man was God and rose from the dead. Both claims seem to spit in the face of reason. Isn’t it an offence against justice to assert that God specially favours one people in particular? Isn’t it an affront to common sense to hold that a baby was divine, and that a dead man walked from a cold tomb?

Peter Oborne

They were chanting ‘Kill, kill, kill’

There was total silence, apart from birdsong, when we entered the village of Kuru Karama. Every building had been burnt or destroyed. There were no villagers in sight, just two or three soldiers at a guard post dozing in the late afternoon sun. At length we found a group of young men and women. Did they live here? Yes. Had they been here on the day of the massacre? No, they knew nothing. Were they Christian or Muslim? Christian. They bent their heads and one woman placed her hand over her mouth. Finally we came across Abdullah. He took us to a little square and pointed out some of the wells into which the Christian killers had thrown scores of dead bodies, head downwards. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that they could not be removed. The stench of death seeped out of the wells.

Luke Coppen

Fight the good fight

A few Saturdays ago a stocky 32-year-old went to mass at the quaintly named Gaylord Texan Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Later that day he had an altercation with a 34-year-old Ghanaian. Records show that he threw over 1,000 punches at the older man during a half-hour scuffle. Countless bystanders witnessed the brawl but not one called the police. Why not? Because the violence was sanctioned by the World Boxing Organization. The welterweight title fight between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey attracted almost 60,000 spectators, the third-largest audience in boxing history. Days earlier a raucous crowd had filled Oxford Town Hall for the 103rd Varsity boxing match. The event drew one of its biggest ever crowds, despite ticket prices as high as £60.

Robert Gorelangton

What’s a war book without a dead Nazi?

Objections are raised to a cracking new children’s book on account of a dead German soldier and pictures of frostbite. But the young adore grisly bits, says Robert Gore-Langton There’s a cracking new children’s book out, Mission Telemark, by the award-winning writer Amanda Mitchison. It is set in the second world war and it’s based on the story of the Norwegian sabotage raid on Hitler’s ‘heavy water’ atomic plant in Telemark. You might remember the film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas as a most unconvincing Norwegian. Both the film and the book were based on the famous 1942 mission — a tale of great courage, skis and atoms.

Rod Liddle

Will the Press Complaints Commission send me hurtling into hell?

Rod Liddle fears he may be doomed — although the modern Church of Englandis reluctant to admit that anyone at all suffers eternal damnation Not so long ago, when I was making a film about some aspect of Christianity for Channel 4, I asked a Church of England bishop about the concept of heaven, what it was like up there, whether or not there was a Starbucks, would we all get our own rooms and is there WiFi etc. He looked at me as if I were mad. In fact, the expression on his face was exactly the same as when I put the same question to the science writer and paradoxically committed atheist Richard Dawkins. ‘Oh, good grief… I really wouldn’t bother yourself with any of that nonsense,’ he said, after ascertaining that I had asked my question in all seriousness.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The battle for Labour’s soul

Bloody civil war lies in store for the Labour party if it loses the election, says James Forsyth. Brown’s henchmen are hoping to keep power, with Ed Balls as the next leader. The Blairite resolve to play nice will be tested The public gallery of the House of Commons was unusually full on Monday afternoon. For the visitors kept behind the glass wall, the proceedings will have been particularly perplexing. A scandal had erupted: that of Stephen Byers and other Labour MPs caught offering their services to lobbyists. There was plenty of anger. Yet little of it was coming from the Tories, who restricted themselves to rather dull pro forma points. The venom was all coming from the Labour benches, who were turning on their own with a vengeance.

Ross Clark

Thank God for the NHS

American healthcare makes our system look good, writes Ross Clark. But however revolutionary Barack Obama’s health reforms are, Americans will still pay through the nose Had I a more devotional attachment to free-market economics I suppose I would be joining all those Republicans condemning Barack Obama’s health reforms. I have written enough about the failings of the NHS over the years to fill an entire symposium at a Washington think-tank. How tempting, then, to echo the sentiments spewing out of Fox News, predicting US bankruptcy and state-sponsored euthanasia. ‘Say no to totalitarianism,’ appealed Republican congressman Devin Nunes, not content with the charge of mere ‘socialism’ made by many of his colleagues.

Aidan Hartley

Will China kill all Africa’s elephants?

At first he was coy. ‘Yes my brother,’ Salim the dealer smirked. ‘How many kilos you want?’ It had taken us only a day to find a man in Tanzania who would sell us ivory tusks from poached elephants. We met Salim in a Dar es Salaam hamburger joint and the whole exchange was ridiculously easy. I asked him: ‘How many kilos have you got?’ ‘I have 50, 100, 200 kilo. How much you want?’ ‘How about 200 kilos?’ I challenged. Salim licked his lips. At Tanzanian prices, this was worth $24,000. On the international black market, it could fetch $200,000. That meant dozens of dead elephants.

Peter Hitchens

Cameron is a sham…

If the Conservative party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. No commercial organisation or product so completely fails to fulfil the claims made on its packaging. The Conservative party claims to stand for national independence, tradition, law and order, rigorous education, low taxation and light regulation, strong armed forces, the family and marriage. Its very name commits it to the defence of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Bruce Anderson

…No, he will be a great PM

It is almost impossible to compare a mere Leader of the Opposition to our greatest peacetime Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. But three points should be borne in mind. The first is that back in 1979, no one was predicting that Mrs Thatcher would become a world-famous figure. She was governing a troubled nation with a divided Cabinet. Although she heaped scorn on the defeatist sophisticates who thought that the best any government could achieve was the orderly management of decline, would scorn be enough? The idea that this woman would help to win the Cold War while bringing the unions within the rule of law and the nationalised industries within the laws of economics, as well as cutting income tax to 1930s levels; in 1979, that would not have sounded like prophecy.

Rod Liddle

This is far worse than MPs’ expenses

Stephen Byers either pimped himself out to big business and betrayed the electorate, or he didn’t, in which case he made fraudulent claims, says Rod Liddle. Either way, the public won’t tolerate this level of corruption I once fell into conversation with a whore, up on Streatham Hill in south London. A long time ago now; back then, in the early 1980s, it was a renowned red-light district. You’d look out of your window at night and see a street full of parked cars bouncing up and down, as if they were in a weird theme park. Whoreworld©. Most of us who lived there were propositioned from time to time, which always made me feel useful and wanted. Anyway, one time I engaged some rather worn-out old hag in a pious and cringing (on my part) conversation about her trade.