Features

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Balls’s god delusion

Ed Balls has had enough. He’s finally decided to haul in Britain’s absentee fathers and teach them a thing or two about parenthood. ‘All the evidence,’ says the Families minister, ‘is if fathers are properly engaged and involved, then they stay, they’re supportive to their children, they do all the things which lead to better child outcomes.’ Balls has fallen victim to two whopping fallacies here. One is statistical. Labour’s tax system encourages cohabiting parents to pretend to be living apart, so large numbers of invisible dads are absent only in Whitehall graphs. In fact they are at home already, exactly where the government is spending money urging them to be.

Rod Liddle

Would a terrorist really post a warning on Twitter?

This following is definitely in bad taste, isn’t it? I don’t always have a working moral compass when it comes to black humour, but I think this is just the wrong side of the line. Although I’m not sure. A disc jockey from Revolution Radio, in Manchester, played the song ‘Jump’, by Van Halen, as police attempted to coax a suicidal woman down from a nearby motorway bridge. The DJ, Steve Penk, had been inundated by complaints from motorists held up on the road while the police went about their delicate counselling work. Penk did not mention the woman when introducing the song. Somehow the case is not helped by the fact that the woman did indeed jump, although failed to hurt herself (I don’t know how. Maybe they had put mats out).

Ross Clark

China’s new political model

There has been one thing missing from the debate between Google and the People’s Republic of China. The decommunisation of the world was not supposed to happen this way. Countries which dismantled their systems of oppression and fear were supposed to prosper economically; while any who declined to do so would remain in economic permafrost. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that the former communist country which has prospered most in the past 20 years has been the one which crushed its revolution beneath the wheels of tanks. No matter that it continues to oppress its people, China is an economic powerhouse whose growth will dominate the global economy for the next decade.

Patrick Allitt

America the Miserable

Patrick Allitt says that the infuriating but reassuring can-do spirit that once defined the United States is finally dying out. But what will we all do when it’s gone? The first time I went to America, in 1977, I couldn’t believe how cheerful, peppy and purposeful everyone was. The late seventies were bad years by American standards, the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation and malaise, but to someone coming out of Jim Callaghan’s Britain the place seemed almost insanely upbeat. Strangers would greet you enthusiastically, with a ‘How ya doin?’ in New York and a ‘Have you taken Jesus as your personal saviour?’ in small Oklahoma towns, but always with a radiant goodwill.

Richard Villar

Haiti: a week after the earthquake

On Tuesday morning I looked down at the elderly woman lying in the corner of a hotel car park and suspected that my efforts would be futile. She was in a serious condition and obvious pain: intestinal paralysis caused by a broken pelvis and shoulder, the result of being trapped under tons of rubble. Her treatment should have been simple: not surgery necessarily, just careful nursing. But in Port-au-Prince, the hospitals are barely functioning. Wards and operating theatres are cracked and falling down. Most hospital staff are missing, dead, or too grief-stricken to function. My patient had nowhere to go. I could see her abdomen visibly distend. It was so tender that even a gentle touch caused her to scream.

Stephen Pollard

Why do we kowtow to the MCB?

Last week, the Department for Communities and Local Government announced that it was lifting its ban on Whitehall contact with the Muslim Council of Britain, the self-proclaimed umbrella group of British Muslims. Quite apart from the tactical mistake of such a move — far from being an ally in the fight against extremism, the MCB is part of the problem — the group’s return to the Whitehall fold is a story of breathtaking cynicism and mind-boggling incompetence. In March 2009, the then communities secretary, Hazel Blears, suspended relations with the MCB.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Meet the fantastic Mr Fox

Only a year ago the American right was in a state of cataleptic shock as the Democrats won the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency. Conservatism looked as though it was headed for the skids, while the left celebrated its startling comeback. No longer. A populist right-wing revolt against big-government liberalism has sent Obama’s poll ratings plummeting and left the Democrats fearing a battering in the midterm 2010 elections. The Republican Scott Brown’s surprise victory in the race for the late Ted Kennedy’s seat is just the latest blow for poor Obama. How did this all happen so quickly? Look no further than Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News, the notoriously right-wing, Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel.

Saturday

Max Hastings

The Tory defence policy will be simple: cut, brutally

The British military has been horribly overstretched by the wars of the Labour years, says Max Hastings. But the Tories’ only option will be to cut further still. Hideous decisions lie ahead Britain’s armed forces sometimes suppose that they get a better break from Conservative governments than Labour ones, but their recent experience suggests otherwise. After 11 years of Margaret Thatcher, it proved necessary to cannibalise the entire armoured resources of the Rhine Army to deploy a weak division for the First Gulf War. Today, the services welcome the prospect of a Tory government after a long period of policy paralysis. But they are also braced for bad news. They know the Tories intend brutally to reduce defence spending.

Rod Liddle

Iris Robinson could not live up to her own bigoted standards

Rod Liddle says that Northern Ireland’s First Minister and his wife held religious beliefs that made ordinary life — and marriage — impossible Help me out here — we need a wholesale supplier, and quickly. If we are to save the soul of Iris Robinson, we need huge vats of the blood of Christ, in which she might humbly immerse herself. I have tried eBay and — ironically, you might think — the Vatican, but there seems to be a run on the blood of Christ right now — we are all after a sprinkling, here or there, to assuage our multifarious sins. Total immersion — which would require gallons of the stuff — is thus out of the question for Iris.

Paul Wood

Yemen is a lesson in the limits of Western power

It is 3 a.m. in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, and the Horse Shoe nightclub is a tableau to inflame the Jihadi heart with rage. To thumping music, Yemeni prostitutes cavort with fat, thuggish-looking local men. The tables are dotted with bottles of single malt costing $500 each (almost a year’s wages for the average Yemeni). The hotel which houses the Horse Shoe, the Mövenpick, is assumed to be one of al-Qa’eda’s main targets, after the British and US embassies just across the road.Visiting journalists usually ask for rooms at the back, just in case a truck bomb makes it past the Yemeni army machine-gun emplacements at the entrance.

Ross Clark

Has Dave abandoned the self-made man?

Cameron’s inclinations are to help the rich and the ‘romantic’ poor and do little for those who’ve bettered themselves, says Ross Clark. But can he rely on the middle-class vote? There may be no big idea but there is an important concept lurking on the back page of the Conservatives’ draft manifesto on health. And if party strategists want to get through the election campaign without offending a large sector of its core vote, they had better make sure it stays there. The idea is worded thus: ‘we will weight public health funding so that extra resources go to the poorest areas with the worst health outcomes through a new health premium’.

Dennis Sewell

Michael Gove vs the Blob

Dennis Sewell says that the political cage fight between the Tories and the educational establishment will be the most thrilling contest of Cameron’s first hundred days The Russell Group, representing Britain’s top 20 universities, warned this week that Gordon Brown’s cuts would bring to its knees within six months a higher education system that has taken 800 years to create. The destruction of our schools system has been a slower, more drawn-out process. There is, fortunately, one last chance to save it.

Paul Johnson

When dons were still happy to be egregious

Before the advent of Political Correctness — the system of censorship which has settled over the English-speaking world like a dense cloud of phosgene gas — clever people were unashamed of being eccentric. This applied particularly to dons. I am reminded of this by browsing through a gigantic book, Magdalen College, Oxford: A History, edited by L.W.B. Brockliss. How lucky I was to go to that magical place when the people who ran it were still totally self-confident, and not afraid, as Belloc put it, ‘to shout the absolute across the hall’. This magnificent book, probably the finest college history ever put together, is a threnody for the weird personalities of the learned over more than four centuries.

Saturday

Ed Howker

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Inside the Chilcot Inquiry

Alastair Campbell emerged from that kind of shining silver limo more accustomed to transporting the likes of Jordan and Paris Hilton than former directors of communications. He got their entourage too: a vicious ‘pap’ scrum so tight that The Chilcot Inqury’s latest star witness required the assistance of four burly coppers to get to the doors of the QEII Conference Centre, temporarily affecting the exaggerated swagger of a TV detective as he did so.   Seven years after the UK first deployed troops in Iraq and more than a year, indeed, since we withdrew, Mr. Campbell is still answering questions about the preparations for war.

Fraser Nelson

A message to subscribers

One of the joys of living in Britain is watching the country fall apart when some snow falls. Trucks laden with your copies of The Spectator are, alas, no exception to this ­ and we gather that many of our readers could face delays before receiving their magazines. So we have decided to put the whole magazine online this week (7 January - 14 January)  ­making it free to everyone, not just our subscribers. It's no substitute for the whole thing, I know, and can only apologise as our trucks and postmen battle through the snow.

David Selbourne

There’s little comfort to be found on Cameron’s woolly centre ground

‘It’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign.  ‘It’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign. Why, so it is. He also has a ‘new politics’ on offer — new, new, new — but without a coherent philosophy, Tory or any other, to underpin it; no Disraeli, or Balfour, or Thatcher he.

James Forsyth

Cameron’s big idea is simple: he doesn’t need one

The Tories have opened the new year in a blaze of speeches and promises. But what does it all add up to? Nothing, says James Forsyth — and that’s deliberate. There will never be such a thing as Cameronism Once more, search parties are being sent out to look for David Cameron’s big idea. They will return empty-handed. For the truth is that there is no big idea. However much social responsibility, the post-bureaucratic age or progressive conservatism might be talked up as the ‘big idea’, they are not it. Rather, they are a set of classic conservative insights updated for the 21st century. Cameron is not an ideologue but rather that very English, very Tory thing: a principled pragmatist.

Neil O'Brien

Little platoons online

Cameron’s ‘big idea’ is for a ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’ enabled by the internet. Will it work? Peter Hoskin and Neil O’Brien aren’t sure The future: it’s all about computers. Anyone could tell you that. But not everyone gets quite as evangelical about it as David Cameron. Put the Conservative leader in a room full of tech-heads, web freaks and assorted blue-sky thinkers, and he soon starts to preach his gospel. Computers will catalyse our political evolution, he says. Armed with only an internet connection, the public will start seizing back control from an overreaching state. Everything will be cheaper, faster, better — and we’ll all be happier to boot. Burke’s Little Platoons have just gone digital.

Peter Oborne

Cameron is our Disraeli

There is a certain type of bovine political intelligence which hates David Cameron. It cannot forgive the Tory leader his popularity, his beautiful wife, his upper-middle-class ease —  and above all his astonishing success in rebuilding the Conservative party. The core criticism works like this: David Cameron is an empty and opportunistic former PR executive, interested only in power for its own sake, utterly devoid of ideas let alone principles, morally indistinguishable from Tony Blair, and in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch. And it must be acknowledged that this portrait contains some truth. He also lacks that visceral connection with ordinary voters that marked out Margaret Thatcher.

Iain Martin

Charlie Whelan’s war

Gordon Brown’s chief fixer is ensconced in Unite, the increasingly militant union. Iain Martin asks if the comrades can be persuaded to hold back a wave of strikes Where is Charlie Whelan these days? What’s the old rascal up to? The trade union fixer, spin-doctoring confidant and close friend of the Prime Minister was on my mind after I returned from a trip to my native Scotland for Christmas. I had booked a rail ticket to take me northwards in time for the big day — £112 first class with Virgin. My only choice, seeing as the Unite trade union had engineered a British Airways strike, rendering my £190 British Airways ticket bought months ago useless. That the industrial action was then cancelled, and that I had two tickets, was no consolation.