Features

Wednesday

David Selbourne

The Dark Hero’s last laugh

‘We are building an advanced socialist society,’ Czechoslovak communists claimed a couple of years before the regime’s collapse in December 1989. What did that mean? I asked Pavel Bratinka the other day. A former leading dissident, a devout Catholic and a physicist by training, from 1993 to 1996 he was deputy foreign minister of his restored country. ‘It meant,’ he replied, ‘an advanced form of misery. But communism’s furies and its mumbo-jumbo were fortunately prevented from conquering the whole world.’ From his student days onwards, Bratinka was victimised for his refusal to truckle to party authorities, eventually finding work in manual jobs.

Timothy Garton Ash

I was the man from Spekta

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was strictly optional. Most of the heroes of 1989 were middle-aged. The leaders of the velvet revolutions, the Vaclav Havels and Lech Walesas, had been through prison, tough times and many a defeat before this incredible victory. Sure, there were often students in the front line — blithe, unattached, unafraid; but what was most moving to me, as I talked to people in the crowds in Leipzig, Gdansk or Prague, were the older men and women who had endured so much and never believed they would see this day. Women who for 28 years had never even set foot on the other end of their own street, because the Berlin Wall cut across it. Men like the East Berlin porter who told me: ‘Now people are standing up straight...

Peter Oborne

A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945. Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National Union of Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. This strength survived long after the catastrophic Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Pavel Stroilov

Reaching through the Iron Curtain

In the pages of the Kremlin’s secret diary, Pavel Stroilov discovers what Labour’s Soviet sympathisers said when they thought no one was listening It is almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and still the truth keeps trickling out of Moscow. The Soviets, like the Nazis, were meticulous note-keepers and there is decades worth of material still to be uncovered. At first, only those who went through the filing cabinets could compile the untold stories of the USSR. But now that these records are being digitised, scrutinising them becomes a lot easier. And this is how I came across the extraordinary diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev. For years he was the Soviet Union’s contact man with the West.

Saturday

The Spectator

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009

The votes are in, and we now know which parliamentarian has won this year’s Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. The votes are in, and we now know which parliamentarian has won this year’s Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. Their name will be revealed at the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards lunch But here, first, we can announce which reader’s nomination most caught the judges’ collective eye. So congratulations, Sam Rice, whose impassioned support for Douglas Carswell has earned him a bottle of champagne and two tickets to the lunch at Claridges where the awards are announced. Here is Sam’s nomination: ‘I would like to nominate Douglas Carswell MP for Parliamentarian of the Year.

Wednesday

Dan Jones

It’s Gin Lane all over again

Hogarth’s satire is as appropriate now as it was 250 years ago, says Dan Jones. What we need is a new approach to our age-old drinking problem In 1751, as the great Gin Craze was winding down, William Hogarth produced a series of six prints. It included ‘Gin Lane’, his cruel masterpiece. In the foreground a syphilitic old slapper lolls across a dirty flight of steps, pinching from the snuffbox as her baby tumbles to its death in the cellar of a gin shop. Behind her kale-eyed rioters tear themselves and their surroundings to pieces. Brawlers wield furniture as weapons. As Hogarth later wrote, ‘In Gin Lane...

Allister Heath

Why is Osborne obsessed with bonuses?

It is hard to work out what the bankers did to George Osborne. Perhaps he was refused an overdraft at a formative age. Whatever it was, he is taking his revenge, saying that the large British banks should only be allowed to pay trivial cash bonuses. The plan has its political attractions — focus groups tell him no punishment is too harsh for the City of London — but also three significant economic drawbacks. It is vindictive, ineffective and it fails to address the true reason for the crash. Let us first examine this on a practical level.

Caroline Moore

RC v CofE

Charles Moore I wish the Pope’s new offer to Anglicans had been available when I became a Catholic 15 years ago. It would have helped avoid many misunderstandings. In modern times, most Anglicans converting to Roman Catholicism are not trying to repudiate their existing beliefs. Instead, they are recognising that the logic of those beliefs leads them to become Catholics. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for those close to them to see this. They can feel rejected. Conversion, a word now frowned on by the authorities, sounds sudden and absolute, when in fact the process is neither. The old phrase about ‘the parting of friends’ has a baleful ring.

Christina Lamb

More troops will just mean more targets

It was Bonfire Night last year in the Officers’ Mess of 2 Rifle and I was jokily explaining how fighting is such a national sport among Afghans that they fight with birds, kites and even boiled eggs, when I suddenly realised my heart had gone out of it. As one of the few journalists to have been reporting from Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet occupation, I had often been asked to visit regiments before they deploy and had always enjoyed talking to young soldiers about a land I love and hearing their expectations. But that grey November evening in Abercorn barracks in the Northern Irish town of Ballykinler was different. I had been in Helmand the previous month and was shocked at the lack of progress.

Anthony Daniels

Don’t believe in miracles

Irrationality, without which life cannot be lived, is profoundly irritating, especially in others. It is at its worst when those who are guilty of it try to sue those who, like Simon Singh, try to expose it. Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he wrote a book debunking several alternative ‘therapies’. A few weeks ago, thankfully, he was given leave to appeal but the affair nearly spelled victory for irrationality. Irrationality is also very bad when displayed by someone close to you. My late mother suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that naturally enough caused her great distress.

James Hannam

Did Al Farabi really invent sociology?

There is a subtle campaign on Wikipedia to overstate the contribution of Islamic sages to scientific scholarship. James Hannam says that the facts should be sacred As an author who craves all the publicity he can get for his work, I’m usually cock-a-hoop to receive invitations to pontificate on film. Even the lowliest producer can expect to have me eating out of her hand. But last week, when I received an email from a filmmaker who wanted to interview me for a programme about ‘the scientific evidence in the religious text of the Koran’, I thought I’d give it a miss.

Rod Liddle

It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died

But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball. Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Dancing on graves is what journalists do

There’s no need for Jan Moir to apologise for speculating about the death of the boy-band singer Stephen Gately says Rod Liddle. Why have we become so censorious and hysterical? I have to say that I don’t particularly like newspaper and magazine columnists, as people. Smug, not terribly bright, usually cowardly, lazy, always self-obsessed, self-important and narcissistic — forever brimming with themselves, a collection of mass-produced ornamental thimbles overflowing with foaming vomit. I don’t excuse myself from most of these character traits, by the way, so I suppose you can add self-loathing to the list as well.

Wednesday

Ludovic Kennedy

Wild birds and purple heather

There are two sorts of grouse-shooting, really; the one the papers favour, of the quality picnicking beside the butts, the men in deerstalkers or caps with sewn-up peaks, the women in tweeds and scarves, doling out baps and buttered gingerbread. At a respectful distance sit the beaters with their sandwiches: they will have walked some three miles that morning and will probably walk another three before the day is out. In the old days they were usually estate labourers: now they are more likely to be students on vacation, given a bothy to sleep in, a stack of provisions and beer, transport to visit the nearest pub or disco in the evening, and around £70 for the week.

Michael Henderson

What on earth is a ‘professional Northerner’?

Hear the one about the ‘professional Southerner’? Of course not, says Michael Henderson, so why does the media keep trotting out this tired old cliché about Northerners? John Prescott is at it again. Embold-ened by his first assault on television, an ‘examination’ of social class that was unaccountably aired by the BBC last year, the man we must refer to as the former deputy prime minister has been invited back, this time (yawn) to help viewers understand the differences between North and South. Having seen a bit of the first programme, which revealed rather more about Prescott’s notorious chippiness than the defects of his putative targets, I trust readers will not mark me down for missing the follow-up. Life is short.

Brian Carney

The godfather of Europe

First the Irish, then the Czechs. José Manuel Barroso is eliminating enemies of the Lisbon Treaty — setting things up for the arrival of President Blair, says Brian M. Carney At first, the European Union’s critics had high hopes for José Manuel Durão Barroso. If Jacques Delors represented Brussels’s unbridled ambition and Romano Prodi its weakness for buffoonery and bumbling incompetence, then this soft-spoken Portuguese lawyer seemed to bring some modesty to the post of president of the European Commission. His appointment, some fancied, showed the institution was finally come of age. And, just maybe, was scaling back its centralising, federalist ambitions. How naive that all seems now.

Interconnect

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009 | 21 October 2009

Big Ben strikes eleven, and time is running out for you to nominate a politician for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. Big Ben strikes eleven, and time is running out for you to nominate a politician for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. We’ve had an enthusiastic response so far, which just goes to show that our parliamentarians can’t be all bad. Look beyond the venal faces that are dominating newspaper coverage at the moment and you’ll find quieter, more hard-working, conscientious sorts. Our job is to celebrate them.

Douglas Davis

Who is Goldstone to judge?

When Israeli tanks and troops rolled into Gaza in December 2007, there was no doubt about the outcome of the conflict. Nor was there any doubt about who would be held responsible for using disproportionate force and deliberately harming civilians. Never mind that Israel was responding to years of rocket bombardments from Gaza on its civilian population; that it had long since pulled all its troops and settlers out of Gaza; that the ruling Hamas movement refused to recognise the Jewish state and was pledged to its destruction; and that Hamas was using its own population as human shields. The United Nations Human Rights Council, which had remained steadfastly silent about the human rights of Israelis suffering rocket attacks, quickly swung into action.

Melanie Phillips

The clash of uncivilisations

The BNP are using the public’s real fear of Islamism to attract support for their racist movement, says Melanie Phillips. If the political class wants to take on Griffin, it must first join the fight against Islamofascism The frenzy over the participation of BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time this week has been a classic case of failing to identify the real elephant in the room. By fixating on the ‘far right’ as the supremely evil force in British public life, the mainstream political class has failed to grasp that a half-baked neo-Nazi rabble is not the main issue. There is another more lethal type of fascism on the march in the form of Islamic supremacism.

Saturday

Matthew Lynn

The quiet agony of the recession generation

It’s easy to spot a member of the recession generation. They’re the sober, thoughtful young people. They’re our sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and friends aged between about 18 and 23 and beginning their adult lives at a time when six million are on benefits. Like the generation above, they love iPods and TopShop. But they’re not as brash or confident as their older siblings. And this is because they have just taken an almighty knock at an early stage in their young lives. They feel that someone has stolen their future. Generation Recession are confused and cross because they’ve been sold a pup by the government, their teachers and even their parents.