Features

Saturday

James Forsyth

Parliamentarian of the Year | 26 September 2009

James Forsyth invites you to submit nominations for the Spectator Readers’ Representative in our Parliamentarian of the Year Awards ‘MP in Public Service Shock. Politician found to be honest and hard-working. Wife standing by him.’ As the MPs expenses scandal dominated the front pages for month after month, one half expected to see a headline like this. The reputation of MPs dropped further and further with every revelation about claims for duck houses, moat cleaning and phantom mortgage payments. By the end of the affair, 84 per cent of voters thought that MPs put their personal and their party interest ahead of the national interest. Restoring the public’s faith in parliament will require reversing these numbers.

Rod Liddle

Let’s give this family a degree of privacy and peace to heal the wounds

We need to guard against childish gloating when we read about the arrest of Patricia Hewitt’s son for possessing cocaine, says Rod Liddle. But first, a quick recap of her record There is something rotten with this country when people can take such base, spiteful pleasure from the arrest of a young lad simply because his mum was a former government minister and architect of New Labour. The sins of the father should not be visited upon the child; the sins of the child should not be used as a whip with which to beat the parents simply because, unaccountably, some people don’t like them. I find it terribly saddening that the case has even been reported: our press needs to learn a little restraint and a little morality.

Matt Ridley

The real origin of Darwin’s theory

Last week, snorkelling into a small bay on Chatham Island (San Cristobal), I looked up from watching a sea lion twist and turn underwater between a novelist and a neuroscientist to see a large man dressed in an incongruous overcoat standing with his back to us on a rocky outcrop. I wiped my goggles and realised I was looking at a statue. Of Darwin, naturally. Lots of other people visited these islands — Herman Melville, for one — and Darwin was just the captain’s companion on a small naval survey vessel, but it is Darwin everybody remembers. Bays, birds and bushes all bear his name. The oddness of the Galapagos creatures cry out for his theory.

Douglas Murray

‘A liberal mugged by reality’

Irving Kristol didn’t coin the term ‘neoconservative’ but he was the first person to run with it. Although it was originally intended as an insult towards those alleged to have abandoned their initial ‘liberalism’, Kristol wasn’t bothered with quibbling. ‘It usually makes no sense... to argue over nomenclature,’ he once said. ‘If you can, you take what people call you and run with it.’ Besides, ‘having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice’. Some of the best qualities of Kristol — who died last week — can be gleaned from such casual phrases.

The Spectator

How can Labour save itself?

Here at The Spectator, we take no pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Here at The Spectator, we take no pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Watching a once great political party flounder in this undignified manner is almost as painful to us as it must be to them. So in the spirit of comradely concern, we asked some of the country’s brightest minds to come up with one idea each to help Labour get back on its feet. Here are their suggestions: Tony Benn They must bring back into public ownership essential goods and services necessary for the development of a fair economy. Boris Johnson They are stuck with Gordon so they have no choice but to transform him in the public imagination.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

‘This job isn’t good for the soul’

Alistair Darling talks to Fraser Nelson about the importance of telling the truth, why Labour’s cuts are ‘kinder’, and the disheartening trudge between Number 11 and the Commons Is Scottish black pudding made from the blood of pig or sheep? Alistair Darling insists it’s sheep. ‘I don’t have any in at the moment, I’m afraid,’ he says, almost apologetically. But he gives me the name of the butcher in his beloved Isle of Lewis — Charley Barley — from whom he orders his supplies. It’s 50 minutes into our interview and a Treasury aide, who had hoped to keep the interview to 35 minutes, throws down his pen, declaring that he is ‘struggling to tune into this conversation’. But the Chancellor is in a talkative mood.

Melissa Kite

How far can Balls bounce?

As leadership hopefuls go, Ed Balls is not the most obvious candidate to win hearts and minds. A divisive figure behind the scenes and a stilted performer in front of the camera, he has — to put it politely — not always exhibited the qualities most closely associated with future prime ministers. But his reputation as a strategist is legendary, which is probably why there was a frisson of excitement last week when he made a foray into the Labour leadership debate by expressing a sudden enthusiasm for spending cuts. His swashbuckling pledge to find £2 billion worth of savings raised pulses, not least because Balls has been arguing privately with Lord Mandelson for a long time that matching the Tories on spending reductions is the wrong path to follow.

Martin Bright

It’s over. Labour’s only hope is the next generation

No one in the Labour party now believes the next election is winnable. Last year, there were a few who believed in an outside chance of victory. There are still some who hope that some unexpected catastrophe might yet befall David Cameron. There will be a collective brave face put on by delegates who gather in Brighton next week — but this falls well short of genuine conviction. There is a difference between loyalty and delusion. This time, no one is in any doubt about the defeat in prospect. A rabbit could, of course, be pulled out of the hat at conference. But there would be little point. The polls are even worse than they were before Peter Mandelson’s return to the Cabinet.

Daniel Finkelstein

Dear Peter, here’s how to revive the Labour party

To: Peter Mandelson From: Daniel Finkelstein Re: What Labour should do now I was, naturally, flattered to be informed that you would like me to provide you with a memo of advice on how Labour should cope with its predicament. As I explained to your assistant, I do not have much of a history of helping out the leadership of the Labour party. He said that this did not matter, as neither did the Prime Minister. As for you and me, we haven’t spoken much these past 20 years. So I am relieved to discover that you regard such long periods of silence as perfectly natural in a friendship. In 1997, as you may possibly recall, we were on opposite sides of a campaign. I was working for John Major, you for Tony Blair. You, ahem, won.

Saturday

Stephen Bayley

Thank you, Germaine, I’m enjoying all the breasts

Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one. Any week beginning with Germaine Greer inviting the nation’s women to crash my website by sending photos of their ‘unsupported breasts’ is bound to be an interesting one. Greer wrote a page of splenetic ‘comment’ on my new book, Woman as Design, in Monday’s Guardian. Her charge is that, like all knuckle-dragging males still emotionally located in the mastodon era, I fetishise and eroticise the female breast. This is said to be wicked.

Rod Liddle

Stick to buying perfume and forget about kids, Sir Elton

Rod Liddle says that celebrity adoption has become an unsavoury game of Top Trumps, and that the Ukraine would be right to turn down Elton John’s bid for a baby The world may indeed be shrinking and its people becoming an undifferentiated morass, but east of the Oder-Neisse line they are not quite the same as us just yet. There is a certain infelicity when dealing with sensitive social issues, the sort of thing you hear over here only when no one is listening. Take the response from a senior Ukrainian politician to Elton John’s request to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian baby called Lev. ‘You won’t be allowed because you’re too old and you’re a poof,’ is what Sir Elton was told, pretty much in those words.

Wednesday

Andrew Gilligan

Chucking millions down the Tube

Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in? At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings. George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Green Park tube station.

Fraser Nelson

How to spring the benefits trap

Fraser Nelson reports on how a revamp of the benefits system could finally end the scourge of Britain’s mass and hidden unemployment In the reception of The Spectator’s office stands a statuette of a Welsh miner, pick and shovel over his shoulder, above an inscription ‘from the townsfolk of Aberdare’. The town had been savagely hit during the collapse in demand for British coal in the 1920s, with almost half of its residents out of work. The magazine launched an appeal and our readers responded with £12,000 — equivalent to £580,000 today. It gave a taste of a mood of national solidarity that was to go on to create a welfare state, to cure what William Beveridge called the ‘giant evil’ of idleness.

Andrew Gimson

Cameron is not an enigma, he’s an Anglican

The reason why so many people cannot fathom David Cameron is that he is an Anglican. This gives him considerable (some would say contemptible) flexibility as far as dogma is concerned, while making him intent on upholding a strict (if unstated) code of behaviour. No wonder the Tory leader infuriates those in his own party who crave certainty. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Theirs is the predicament of Nigerian Christians who look to Canterbury for dogma, and find themselves fobbed off with liberalism.

Sam Kiley

Fixers are the unsung heroes of foreign wars

The black Mercedes lurched forward and sideways, a thick grey cloud erupted at its rear and its boot flew open. The thump of the detonating Israeli tank round reached me 300 yards away as I looked on from the Jewish settlement of Metulla. There was a cheer from local residents, who had gathered to watch the withdrawal of their army from southern Lebanon after 18 years, from the relative safety of Israeli territory. An Israeli army sniper directed the tank’s heavy machine-gun towards a building off to the left. I sat on the grass hitting the redial button on my phone. I was trying to get through to Abed Takoush, who was working with the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen. The Mercedes was the second car I’d seen hit by an Israeli tank that morning.

Saturday

Charlotte Appleyard

Should St Paul’s host a Hirst?

Charlotte Appleyard breaks the news that Britain’s most controversial artist has been commissioned by the nation’s favourite cathedral In early November we can expect, if not murder, then certainly uproar in the cathedral, when an ‘important’ new work by Damien Hirst is unveiled. St Paul’s, that great symbol of all that’s best about Britain, is set to play host to an artist many believe represents all that’s worst. Details of the work itself are not available yet — in fact even approaching the staff at St Paul’s provoked mild panic: how had I found out? What did I know? But one thing we can at least be certain about: Damien Hirst is unlikely to break his bonds with controversy.

Paul Bew

Terrorism is back in Northern Ireland

Even the dissidents have now spawned their own heavily armed dissidents. The bomb defused by army experts at Forkhill this week was the work not of the Real IRA but one of its own breakaway groups, Oglaigh na hEireann. The bomb was bigger than the Real IRA bomb in Omagh which killed unborn twins, six men, 12 women and 11 children. It brings into sharp relief the problems now facing the security services. Another illustration of these problems came last month.

Rod Liddle

Do we really need Hitler to warn us about Aids?

I haven’t seen much of my wife this week — she’s been camped out on the sofa, filling her boots with 9/11 porn. She loves it, can’t get enough of it, gagging for it. Sits there with a glass of pinot noir, shaking her head, knees tucked up into her chest. People falling from the windows, scary men on aeroplanes shouting in Arabic and waving box-cutters around, firemen covered in concrete dust; whole programmes about 9/11 text messages, doomed people telling their loved ones that everybody’s calm. And then a very long film culled exclusively from amateur footage — the double XX-rated Debbie Does Dallas of 9/11 porn; you got all the money shots — those planes hitting the towers, people jumping out, towers falling down, the lot.

Wednesday

Sinclair McKay

The battle to save Bletchley Park

Sinclair McKay attends the 70th anniversary reunion of the men and women who broke the Enigma code, and asks why the government won’t fund their museum ‘The turnout is very good,’ says eighty-something Ruth Bourne, glancing around at the tight, slow-moving mass of neat pink woolly cardigans, sensible skirts, pressed grey flannels and sports jackets. ‘More of us,’ she adds, ‘have come out of the woodwork.’ Ruth Bourne helped to shorten the second world war by two years, as did the 80 or so other elderly folk gathered here.

Trevor Kavanagh

The new politics of decline

Trevor Kavanagh says that Britain’s pitiful standing on the world stage is not just about al-Megrahi or the recession, but is the result of Labour’s disastrous mismanagement. Everything now depends on Cameron For the incurable optimist — of which there are no doubt several in the Downing Street bunker — there are signs that Britain is starting to recover. The stock market is booming once more, confidence is returning to the housing market and the recession may soon be over. Is it possible Gordon Brown really has saved the world — even if it is too late to save himself? Or, as Labour used to warble, might things only get better? If only. The bleak truth for UK plc is that after 12 years of stupefying Labour incompetence, the worst is yet to come.