Features

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Will MI6 finally come in from the cold?

Sir John Sawers is not the Downing Street stooge some of the old guard say he is, writes Tim Shipman. And the new head of MI6 may focus the spooks’ gaze on the real enemy The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used. His latest amuse-bouche, The Wonder of Whiffling (Particular Books, £12.99), is a sort of reverse Call My Bluff, which groups the true meaning of English words according to themes.

Justin Marozzi

Riddle of the sands

Justin Marozzi explains why new archaeological finds from Egypt’s Western Desert show that Herodotus deserves his reputation as the Father of History I couldn’t help it. I whooped uncontrollably into my Jordans Country Crisp with strawberries when I heard the news last week, startling my wife and spilling milk and crispy clusters onto a bemused but grateful dog. An Italian team of archaeologists had made what looked like a hugely important discovery in Egypt’s Western Desert, apparently unearthing remains of the lost army of Cambyses which, according to Herodotus, was swallowed up by a ferocious sandstorm 2,500 years ago. Had they laid to rest one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Why is everyone determined to be outraged all the time?

There’s been a rather wonderful debate bubbling along at the Guardian, about the French minister Pierre Lellouche’s use of the word ‘autistic’ to describe the English Tories. Well, in fact that’s not quite what the debate has been about; everyone is agreed that Lellouche is beyond the pale. The debate has been about whether or not the Guardian was right to report what was said by the chap in a headline. Quite a lot of readers thought that it wasn’t. Elsa and John Wingad, for example, wrote: ‘We know that the use of “autistic” in your headline was a quote, however by choosing to repeat it in such prominence [sic] reinforces negative attitudes towards autism.’ Do you know Elsa and John Wingad?

John C-Hulsman

Sleepwalking into disaster in Afghanistan

John C. Hulsman says that America’s declining status will ultimately doom its Afghan campaign. Obama must learn from Britain how best to manage the decline of an empire I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward disaster in Afghanistan. The President, reminded by his domestic advisers of the fate of another domestically ambitious president, LBJ, has hesitated before going all-in to rescue the mission in Kabul. He is right to take his time before risking his presidency on a war whose outcome is clearly uncertain.

Wednesday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Yes to Bach, no to Debussy

The ‘poet of the piano’, Murray Perahia, talks to Igor Toronyi-Lalic about being championed by Horowitz, his rise to fame and how his injury taught him what to play Murray Perahia was 17 when Vladimir Horowitz, perhaps the finest pianist of the 20th century, knocked on the door of his family house in the Bronx. ‘Could I speak to Mr Perahia?’ the great man said through the door. ‘Hold on, I’ll get my father,’ said Murray. ‘No,’ said the voice. ‘I mean Murray Perahia. It’s Mr Horowitz here.’ Young Murray still had no idea who this visitor was. ‘In my Jewish neighbourhood, everyone was Mr Horowitz,’ he says. But once he opened the door, the penny dropped.

Sarah Standing

The ‘bovver birds’ are back

Sarah Standing’s daughter was attacked by a girl gang — but it wasn’t an isolated incident. Female thugs, of the sort who ran riot in the 1970s, are roaming the streets again It was a beautiful balmy evening when my youngest daughter finished school last summer. The A-level results had just arrived, and she was happily ambling home from supper with two girlfriends. They were in no rush. They’re 18 and were about to spread their wings, leave London for the first time and head off towards various universities. They were finally ‘grown up’ — with parental curfew lifted, able to judge risks for themselves. And walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea, they had little reason to anticipate what was about to befall them.

David Frum

Listen up, Dave: to care is not to do

David Frum on the lessons the Tories can learn from the original conservative moderniser: George W. Bush, whose progressive policies often just didn’t add up Political parties typically undergo a four-stage cycle after a major defeat. It goes something like this: 1. We didn’t really lose. (The other guys just happened to luck into an appealing candidate — but the people still really prefer us.) 2. OK, we lost — but only because the voters are idiots. 3. OK, we lost and maybe the voters are not idiots — but there is nothing we can do without betraying our sacred principles. 4. Hey, maybe there is something we can do. The British Conservative party has reached Stage 4. The US Republican party is stuck in Stage 1.

Pavel Stroilov

Kinnock and the Kremlin

In the second part of our investigation into Labour’s dealings with the USSR, Pavel Stroilov reveals the secret Soviet diplomacy behind one leader’s most famous victory Labour leaders, past and present, will be wishing this week that Anatoly Chernyaev had not been such an assiduous diarist. Along with thousands of documents left in the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the diplomat’s personal writings had lain forgotten for more than 20 years. Last week, extracts in The Spectator cast light on Labour’s ‘special relationship’ with the Kremlin and the various officials who begged for its help to fight the Conservatives.

Fraser Nelson

How the Tories can still win in Europe

A week after David Cameron ruled out a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, hardly a squeak of protest has been heard from Eurosceptics in his party. It’s not because they have accepted defeat, says Fraser Nelson, but because they are deadly serious about victory Anyone who believed last week’s talk of the death of Tory Euroscepticism should have booked a table at Bellamy’s restaurant in Mayfair on Monday. There, the No Turning Back group of Tories had gathered to discuss tactics, and how to continue the fight after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. They had also come to discuss what to make of David Cameron’s new European agenda. Was it sincere, or a decoy? Should they press for a referendum?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Do the Roma really need to improve their ‘resilience skills’?

Did you know that February in our schools has been designated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (sic) History Month? I’d get with it, if I were you, and send your 11-year-old child to school in a gimp mask, with some lube. Good parents make sure their kid is ahead of the curve. You can bet that there will be exercises on exploring multifaceted sexual preferences and maybe practical tests too. So tell your daughter to bin the Mary Seacole face mask she spent ages knocking up for Black History Month and get her dressed up as a boy, with a strap-on. They need those extra marks, the kids. I only know about this because of Jeanie.

Gerald Kaufman

How my party was betrayed by KGB boot-lickers

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. As leader, Michael Foot was wedded to policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the European Economic Community. The strategy, if there was one, seemed to be to lose as many votes as possible. The remarkable revelations published in the Chernyaev diaries make this attempted political suicide easier to understand.

Wednesday

Ben Freeth

The war against the whites is not over in Zimbabwe

Power-sharing has not loosened Mugabe’s iron grip, says Ben Freeth, a farmer whose home and livelihood were destroyed by Zanu-PF militants On Sunday 30 August last year, as we drove back from church to our home in Chegutu, northern Zimbabwe, my wife and I spotted a large swirl of white smoke in the distance. We soon realised, to our horror, that the thick fumes were coming from our property. Our farm was on fire. By the time we reached the drive, the flames were tearing across our land, heading towards our workers’ homes, the orchards and our own house. We needed water, and lots of it, fast. But we were at a major disadvantage.

Sarah Churchwell

The thrill of the chaste

Sarah Churchwell says the American craze for Amish romance novels — ‘bonnet-rippers’ — is just one part of a strange new fashion for conservatism and abstinence It has been 25 years since Peter Weir’s hit film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with an Amish woman while investigating a murder. In America the Amish existence has a romantic appeal, it’s a return to a simpler way of life, and Witness exemplified this in its most famous scene, when the detective and the Amish woman dance to Sam Cooke’s 1960 classic oldie ‘Wonderful World,’ a song that begins, appropriately enough, ‘Don’t know much about history’.

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.