Features

Saturday

Stephen Pollard

Stick to making your schmaltzy films, Mr Curtis

Richard Curtis’s films — rose-tinted, upper-middle-class parodies of modern Britain — are bad enough, says Stephen Pollard. But his politics are even worse There are few film-makers whose name instantly conjures up a style, an atmosphere, a set of recognisable characters, even a plot. Richard Curtis is one of them. From Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill to Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary, the label ‘Richard Curtis’ on a film tells you straightaway pretty much all you need to know. For myself, I’d rather boil my eyeballs than spend another second of my life being sucked in to his film-making-by-numbers Disney-Britain.

Saturday

Francis Fukuyama

Is the age of democracy over?

Twenty years ago, Francis Fukuyama forecast the final triumph of liberal democracy and the ‘end of history’. As pro-democracy movements falter from Ukraine to China, he revisits his thesis — and asks if history has a few more surprises to spring It looked like a revolution in reverse. The announced victory of Viktor Yanukovich in Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential election undid that country’s Orange Revolution of 2004 by returning to power the very man whom tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters came out to defeat. And this is only the latest in a series of apparent setbacks for democracy in recent years.

John Laughland

The end of the rainbow: a guide to the colour revolutions

In contrast to the storming of the Bastille, the spate of revolutions which have flickered across our television screens in the last two decades have tended to adopt brand images connected with colours or plants. Most of them have wilted as quickly as they flowered. Whether Burma in 2007, Armenia in 2008, Tehran in 2009, any pro-Western demonstration is now immediately given a brand. And ‘revolution’ is proclaimed even if everything stays the same as before. The ‘rose revolution’, Georgia, 22 November 2003 The ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia turned on a disputed election. Street protests were organised by a group called ‘Kmara’.

Jeff Randall

Dubai Notebook

Easing myself into an expensive seat on a British Airways overnight flight to Dubai, I notice two empty places to my left. The plane, I was told, was full. Someone must be very late. At this point, the rogue bookmaker who operates exclusively inside my head, laying odds on life’s little challenges, pipes up: ‘It’s 1-5 you cop a screaming toddler in that spot; 9-2 you don’t.’ My heart sinks. The bookie is shrewd; he knows the form. Sure enough, just as the crew is preparing to lock the doors, a flustered-looking couple rush on board, with their baby banshee already in full cry. Waahaahaah! As we thunder along the runway, the Caterwauling Kid’s nerve-shredding performance is, literally, drowning out the roar of the jet engines.

Neil Clark

An actor from the age of elegance

I don’t think I have ever been so nervous before a telephone call. I had written to Ian Carmichael, via his agent, to ask if I could interview him for an article I was writing on the late Dennis Price, who had played Jeeves to Carmichael’s Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC series The World of Wooster. Carmichael had written back to say that he’d ‘try to oblige’ if I telephoned him at his North Yorkshire home. ‘I don’t think I’ll be very much help,’ he added. ‘Dennis was a very private man.’ Hardly encouraging. I was nervous because Carmichael, like Price, was a hero of mine.

Lloyd Evans

Spectator debate: ‘We must quit Afghanistan now’

Chair – Andrew Neil Proposing – Correlli Barnett, Simon Jenkins Opposing – Charles Guthrie, Andrew Roberts Farce very nearly visited the debate on Afghanistan on Tuesday. A parliamentary three-line whip prevented the MPs Liam Fox and Peter Kilfoyle from reaching the hall. So our ancient democracy threatened a debate on Afghanistan’s brand new one. The issue that kept them in parliament? Democratic reform. Correlli Barnett proposed the motion and lamented that America’s ‘panic and rage’ had precipitated the war after 9/11. Accepting the consequences of retreat would be bolder than propping up the ‘posturing clown’ Hamid Karzai. We should leave by September.

Victoria Lane

An 80-year-old mystery

‘The older I get, the more inclined I am to say those three words: I don’t know,’ says Baroness Rendell of Babergh. She turns 80 this week, and seems milder in person than in her writing. In photographs, too, she looks a bit haughty and forbidding, with incredible Ming the Merciless eyebrows. But the door was opened by a smallish woman with a sandy helmet of hair, a quizzical expression and an illuminating smile that appears from nowhere and sends her features skywards. The mouth, the eyebrows, the hair — everything lifts, as though she has stuck her finger in a socket. She has written, she estimates, about 70 books: her output is catching up with her years.

Rod Liddle

We are all victims of institutional anti-racism

I don’t suppose that anyone is about to build a community centre in commemoration of Waad al-Baghdadi, but maybe they should. There’s one for Stephen Lawrence, constructed as a token of our disgust at what Sir William Macpherson called the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police. Lawrence’s murder was not competently investigated by the Old Bill at least in part, Macpherson argued, for institutionally racist reasons, borrowing the phrase from the borderline psychotic black American activist Stokely Carmichael. Mr al-Baghdadi, meanwhile, was not killed by anyone, but he was smacked around a bit by a copper.

Andrew Gimson

The property bubble is waiting to burst

As a general rule, it is a mistake to go through life thinking about how much one’s house is worth. In the summer of 2002, when I bought my ‘lovely end of terrace period cottage providing compact character accommodation’ in Gospel Oak, London NW5, I assumed I had managed, with unerring incompetence, to buy at the very top of the boom. It seemed to me unimaginable that anyone would be willing to spend more than the grossly inflated sum of £385,000 which I had paid for my small, damp, jerry-built house. My imagination was defective: to my stupefaction, the property boom continued for another five years, until the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007.

Saturday

Matt Ridley

The global warming guerrillas

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources. It was not Private Eye, or the BBC or the News of the World, but a retired electrical engineer in Northampton, David Holland, whose freedom-of-information requests caused the Climategate scientists to break the law, according to the Information Commissioner.

Richard Orange

Story of a sinking land

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide had already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the deluded hope of building the island back up. And each monsoon, the sea ripped the crude barriers down, tearing off another chunk of his birthright.

Rod Liddle

Is it really racist to want an English-speaking cab driver?

Rod Liddle says that the outrage directed at a taxi firm for advertising ‘English spoken here’ serves only to strengthen white working-class resentment — and the BNP ‘Rraaaaaaaacissst!’ — that Pavlovian whine of complaint, almost always from a white person, an idle and meaningless howl of outrage where once, when uttered by a black or Asian person who had suffered discrimination, it had a point and a potency. ‘Raaacisst’ — a new definition; a word which, as soon as it is uttered, can cause debate to cease, people to be punished, argument to be subverted, the Old Bill to get involved. ‘Raaaaacccissst!

Christopher Hitchens

Washington Notebook

Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. Call me blasé if you will, but of all the clapped-out forms of instant publishing, I had concluded that the ‘campaign book’ was the most dire. I also generally think that any use of sporting metaphors to describe politics is an infallible sign of an exhausted hack. But Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin is so invigoratingly revealing — in the best and nastiest sense of that word — that it gripped me and held me tight. Senator John McCain shouts the f-word nine times into his wife’s face in front of the staff, while raising both middle fingers.

Rian Malan

F.W. de Klerk: a hero of our time

I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and then forced to do a decent thing that should have been done decades earlier.

Leah McLaren

There’s nothing cute about a Canuck

Next week, when the Winter Olympics come to Vancouver, the eyes of the world will be on Canada, the sprawling, frigid nation of my birth. It doesn’t happen often, so when the international spotlight swivels our way, we Canadians do our best to hog it. We don’t go in for patriotism and self-belief like our American cousins, but like the shy wallflower who ends up closing the karaoke bar with a lampshade on her head, Canadians are compelled to make fools of ourselves if we are flattered into thinking anyone might notice. So brace yourself in the coming weeks, Britain, for a gushing torrent of maple-flavoured praise for all things Canuck.

Fraser Nelson

Is Cameron a Heath or a Thatcher?

Fraser Nelson says that electoral victory is not enough. To be a great Tory prime minister, David Cameron must be bold enough to abandon Labour’s failed agenda entirely and implement his own Winning office is not the same as winning power. To get the keys to No. 10, a politician needs to be skilled in the arts of electoral combat. But to take power, a prime minister needs an agenda. Without one, he is a slave to his predecessors. The last two Tory leaders who took over from Labour promising change fared differently. Ted Heath, in 1970, was forced into a U-turn and lost power after four years. Lady Thatcher had her own agenda, and transformed the country. The question being raised in Westminster now is which of these two models Mr Cameron is likely to follow.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

As Basra slid towards hell, Blair looked the other way

It’s a mistake to focus on the dodgy dossier, says Fraser Nelson. Blair’s real crime was to invade Iraq with no strategy, no understanding of the Islamist factions and no qualms about leaving Iraqis to the mercy of death squads There has always been a faction of the Labour party that wanted Tony Blair in the dock for the Iraq war — no matter how pointless it would be. This was the sole purpose of the Chilcot inquiry. Gordon Brown agreed to it simply to assuage his backbenchers, and the whole exercise was intended to be more a mischievous distraction than an inquisition. But almost by accident, the inquiry has exposed the real scandal of Iraq: the appalling mismanagement of the war and the defeat of the British army, which left the people of Basra to the death squads.

Andrew Gilligan

How can we punish Blair?

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.

Luke Coppen

Welcome to the age of Gaga

Unpredictable, spectacular, bold and contentious — Lady Gaga is the perfect pop star for the 21st century, says Luke Coppen In 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a young man who yearned to be a great artist. ‘In the deepest hour of the night,’ the German poet advised, ‘confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: must I write?’ It’s fair to say that Rilke never imagined his words would end up tattooed on the arm of a pop star with a penchant for porcelain bikinis and flamethrower bras. Lady Gaga, who has sold eight million records in the last 18 months, claims to read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet every day.

Peter Oborne

Time for a Major re-think

Instead of deriding John Major we should celebrate him, says Peter Oborne. His government was stunningly radical and initiated most of Blair’s so-called reforms Gordon Brown may be in terrible trouble but he and his allies have a defence strategy. However bad things are, they say it was much worse under John Major’s weak, hopeless and sleazy administration. I believe that the time has come to mount a serious challenge to this analysis and make the case for both Major and his government. It is becoming obvious, especially with the benefit of hindsight, that John Major was a formidable leader with substantial achievements to his credit. But the narrative of John Major’s hopelessness was so strong that for many years it was impossible to make the case in his favour.