Features

Saturday

Barry Humphries

Christmas Notebook

I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic. I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic. But it was the first time that my not inconsiderable achievements as a music-hall artiste had been publicly described as ‘a body of work’.

Tuesday

Monday

Joan Collins

Christmas in L.A. | 14 December 2009

When my daughter Katyana was eight years old she fell into a coma in hospital. I would not allow any of the medical staff around her to talk about her condition in a negative fashion. I was convinced that she was able to comprehend what was being discussed around her bedside and that it would somehow affect her recovery. The doctors, interns and nurses all believed I was a raging nutter and I would hear them tut-tutting as they backed away, whispering how sad it was that my daughter didn’t have much of a chance of recovering. Seven weeks later, much to all the medicos’ amazement, Katy started to open her eyes and react to the world around her.

Lloyd Evans

How vodka cured my fear of flying

I’ve discovered a brilliant way to cure my phobias. It’s so easy, so ingenious and so cheap (it cost me nothing), that I want to share it with as many people as possible. My technique will work its magic on any trivial or unreasonable fear you suffer from. Mine happens to be flying. Or it used to be. Until 28 July this year I hadn’t travelled in a plane, or even visited an airport, for 16 years. I was perfectly content as a flightless species, but my wife likes to flit off to the Med whenever possible and enjoy a week of sunstroke and food poisoning, so she booked us a holiday in the island paradise of Gozo, a tuffet of volcanic rock near Malta.

Fraser Nelson

Meet Farmer Mandelson

Lord Mandelson of Foy sticks his nose into the room in which I am waiting for him and sniffs the air theatrically. ‘This place smells,’ he declares. And this, it seems, is my invitation to follow him through to his office — for an interview and some light admonishment. He is cross with Charles Moore for revealing in this magazine the details of an extraordinary shooting party at the Rothschilds’ manor. The cast of characters included Cherie Blair, Lord Mandelson and Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator. The noble lord is keen to set the record straight. ‘I never clapped eyes on Cherie Blair,’ he says, indignantly. ‘She was nowhere to be seen, unless she came afterwards.

Matthew Dennison

Big frocks, silk stockings and lissom ladies

Matthew Dennison on the life of Augustus Harris, the Victorian showman who invented the Christmas pantomime and pioneered sex, celebrity and excess as an art form Forget Lord Leighton and his fleshy goddesses forced to bare all in the interests of classical scholarship. Forget Wilkie Collins and Mary E. Braddon, and those sensational stories of exciting young women with a past. Foremost among 19th-century efforts to cloak titillation in the garb of respectability is the invention of the principal boy of pantomime. You know the scenario. The stage is set. Young boy is looking for love.

Sinclair McKay

Bring back Father Brown

G.K. Chesterton’s perspicacious priest is 100 next year. Sinclair McKay says that he is more colourful and insightful than any of today’s TV detectives A chap murdered by an invisible man? A decapitiated Scottish laird with the fillings stolen from his skull? A poet, hypnotised into committing suicide? Who could deal with such curious and baffling crimes? There’s only one possible answer: an amateur sleuth who specialised in the bizarre and diabolical long before Mulder and Scully; a detective long due for a comeback: G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Peter Oborne

Letter from Zimbabwe

There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. It would take a miracle for him to stand in the next presidential elections and if he did, everyone knows that — however much violence he employed — he would lose.

Toby Clements

Who’s afraid of Santa Claus?

Toby Clements says that there’s a good reason many children find Father Christmas an alarming figure — he’s an unresolved hotch-potch of different myths Last year in the run-up to Christmas I took my two-year-old son to get his hair cut in one of those strange hybrid toy-cum-barber shops that proliferate in north London. It was going as well as one could hope until they announced a surprise guest as a special treat, Father Christmas. In he came, roaring his ho ho hos and waggling his curly white beard. It didn’t matter to my son that it was just a local fatty wearing a lot of cotton wool and a velour hoodie. All that mattered was that he was strange.

Janine di Giovanni

La famille recomposée

It isn’t just the Sarkozys whose domestic affairs are complex, writes Janine di Giovanni. They’re all at it. Modern French life is a potage of wives, exes, new babies and grown-up kids The wan grey light at Gare du Nord at Christmastime always reminds me of my move to Paris six years ago. I was heavily pregnant, weeks away from birth in a foreign country. The train ride across the Channel with my new French husband was swift, but I was acutely aware of the 20 years of life I was leaving behind in London as we passed the wet, snowy flatlands of northern France. How naive I was. I truly believed, having spent most of my life outside the country of my birth, and even then, being the daughter of an Italian who immigrated to America, that I would adapt easily to a new culture.

Daniel Kalder

It’s the end of the world. Again

The Ancient Mayan ‘long calendar’ stops in 2012, suggesting we’re all doomed. Bring it on, says Daniel Kalder — we’ve been predicting the End for three millennia: why stop now? For two months now, Roland Emmerich’s wrathful CGI God has been killing billions in the name of the Holy Box Office in the film 2012. Having already caused carnage with aliens, an ice age and Godzilla, this time Emmerich took his cue from the Ancient Mayans, whose ‘long calendar’ purportedly stops in 2012. But not only is the End nigh, it’s hugely profitable — 2012 raked in £140 million globally in three days.

Jonathan Wynne-Evans

Short story: Black box

In March The Spectator Book Club launched its inaugural short story competition in association with Barclays Wealth. The topic was invisibility, and it seemed to appeal. We received over 500 stories, most of an excellent standard. Our judging panel comprised Mark Amory, Clare Asquith, Peter Hoskin, David Blackburn and Ravi Bulchandani from Barclays Wealth. After much heated debate, five finalists were selected: Jonathan Wynne Evans, Matthew Faulkener, K.G. Barrett, Max Dunbar and Henry Kolotas. You can read the panel’s comments on the finalists’ stories at Spectator.co.uk. All our panellists were agreed, though, that Jonathan Wynne Evans’s ‘Black Box’ should be the winner.

William Boyd

Christmas short story: The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, by William Boyd Illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy Bethany Mellmoth is in a quandary — and she doesn’t like quandaries. It’s December 20th. Five days until Christmas. The fact that this is a Christmas quandary makes it no more bearable. In truth she thinks that this fact makes it more unbearable. Her mother and father — nearly two decades divorced — both demand her presence on Christmas Day. The quandary will be resolved — Bethany is good at resolving things — but she hasn’t quite figured out how — yet. Her father — Zane Mellmoth — texted her from his home in California. ‘Coming to London. Must see you Christmas Day lunch. Big surprise. Lots to celebrate.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Don’t get so worked up — it’s only a blog

I’m not sure how many members of the London Labour party I’ve met over the last 20 years or so. A thousand? Must be something like that. Sitting in local authority buildings which smell slightly of gas, the night outside cold and damp, ploughing through an interminable agenda of candidate selections; or down the pub after canvassing. Nice people, largely — you’d be surprised. I’m not a member any more but a lot of my friends still are, so it’s a constituency I know very well. If you polled them on their views about the Royal Family, I suspect that somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent would declare themselves as monarchists.

Venetia Thompson

Lycra-clad assassins on wheels

Just the idea of the Copenhagen summit is enough to fill me with dread. Not because I’m frightened of global warming or enforced vegetarianism, or because I’m worried that environmental evangelists are leading us up the garden path. But, truthfully, in case all the eco-awareness encourages more cyclists. London is under siege. They can’t be seen until they’re on top of you, can’t be heard, and can kill you instantly: bicycles are taking over and it’s got to the point where just the squeal of a bike break can induce in me a moment of sudden, heart-stopping panic. It’s difficult to trace the origins of my cyclophobia.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Chutzpah, pizzazz and style — what Dave can learn from Boris

As the most powerful Conservative in Britain, Boris Johnson has plenty to teach his old schoolpal, David Cameron. But, says James Forsyth, the Cameroons are too busy criticising the Mayor’s ‘amateurish’ approach to see what they’re missing As a piece of political propaganda, the sticker issued by the Crisis housing charity at the last Tory conference came close to perfection. It had a picture of the Mayor of London in jogging gear, with the caption: ‘Boris is making the running on rough sleeping. Join the race, Cameron!’ This was how Crisis thought they could best get their message across: goading Team Cameron into action by comparison with Mr Johnson. It was a clever use of a fast-emerging narrative in Westminster: the great Boris v. Dave rivalry.

Irwin Stelzer

Who would lend to a bankrupt Britain?

Alistair Darling’s budget forecasts assume that Britain can keep borrowing all it wants for the foreseeable future.We may not be so lucky, says Irwin Stelzer Federico Sturzenegger and Jeromin Zettelmeyer are not exactly household names. They are, respectively, professor at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and an adviser to the International Monetary Fund. Some months ago, as I watched Britain roll up debts that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I moved their book, published in 2006, from a back shelf to the top of my desk. Where it sat, unmolested, until two things happened. First, rating agencies got nervous about the quality of the sovereign debt issued by the UK.

Brendan O’Neill

Call off the Tiger hunt

However he has behaved, Tiger Woods’s personal life just isn’t our business. Brendan O’Neill on the relentless erosion of the line between public and private Am I the only person who feels repelled by the naked glee with which Tiger Woods has been and is still being beaten to a pulp — no, not by his golf club-wielding wife, but by the world’s media? Ever since Woods crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home two weeks ago, his private life has been splashed across the front page of every tabloid from Tennessee to Timbuktu. It’s not over for poor Tiger. Earlier this week another clutch of girlfriends — or victims as they’re now portrayed — decided to spill the beans, including a porn star called Holly.

Stephen Bayley

Happy Kitschmas everyone

London is the creative capital of the planet. The city’s abundant talent — in design and media, in commercials and special effects, food, leisure, architecture, publishing, retailing and telly — will drive the economy from today’s precipice of the dark abyss to tomorrow’s sunkissed higher ground of recovery. Birds will sing and soft zephyrs will blow. So long dismissed as the visually illiterate of Europe, we are now known for our point and style. We are smart. And my own office is in the sturdy left ventricle of this powerfully pumping urban heart. Immediately, I am surrounded by the designers who work with me. Some of the world’s best restaurants are minutes from my door. There are even more film producers than baristas hereabouts.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Global warming: the truth

Last month, 1,000 emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The institution is more important than it sounds: for decades, it has been at the centre of the global warming debate, keeping in touch with the close-knit group of scientists who guard the various projections about global warming. Or, as the emails showed, the lack thereof. ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,’ said one scientist. Another said: ‘We can have a proper result — but only by including a load of garbage.’ As the world leaders gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto treaty it is unlikely the subject of these emails will be raised.