Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

We should seize whatever opportunity we are given to be racist

Rod Liddle reflects on a recent poll which says that Russians are the world’s worst holidaymakers. Brits are just as bad, he says, leaving a trail of blood and vomit from Biarritz to Dolman Who are the worst people in the world, do you suppose, based upon your first-person contact with them? I always assumed it would be nigh on impossible to get any worse than a Somali — until, that is, I met a Saudi: woah, as they say. I ask the question because there was an opinion poll in the newspapers last week suggesting that Russians were the worst people in the world, or at least the worst people you meet while on holiday. They have evicted the Germans from the coveted number one position on account of their chav clothes, greed and appalling manners, it was reported.

Wednesday

Sinclair McKay

David Cameron can learn from The Avengers

Sinclair McKay says the Tory leader could do worse than emulate his fellow Old Etonian — the elegant, ruthless, cucumber-cool TV hero John Steed Who is David Cameron’s role model? No one quite knows. Of course Dave would like to be a British Obama, but that’s a little far-fetched (for obvious reasons), so here’s another candidate, just as cool as the President but more up Cameron’s street. Like Cameron he’s an Old Etonian but a social progressive; like Cameron he’s a fashionable man-about-town. Basically, Dave couldn’t have a better hero than John Steed of The Avengers. Steed’s an example of how an unabashed posh chap can win over the entire British nation — plus the US as well.

Martin Vander Weyer

Is Lord Turner ‘socially useful’ to business?

Probably not, says Martin Vander Weyer, but the banks do need reining in. We’ll all be better off when the Tories dismantle Brown’s disastrous ‘tripartite’ regulatory system The last time I argued politics with Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, he was firmly on the centre right and I was a rather confused proto-Will-Hutton of the left. But that was a lifetime ago, when we were fifth-formers on the eve of Ted Heath’s 1970 election victory. Not quite 40 years on, all has changed.

John C-Hulsman

Iraq will never have a happy ending

The famous ‘surge’ has proved a complete failure, says John C. Hulsman. Whatever Obama may say, nation-building is a luxury America can no longer afford With Britain now withdrawn from Basra and American troops gone from the streets of Baghdad, Iraq is no longer front-page news. While there are still intermittent reports of carnage, and obscure stories written about political rumblings there, the problem seems manageable, far away, forgotten. Americans worry about the great recession, healthcare reform, and a little bit about Afghanistan. But Iraq has been conveniently forgotten. This case of collective amnesia has been aided and abetted by a narrative that allows us to forget both Iraq’s frustrating intricacies and its horrors.

Tim Stanley

Ted Kennedy is no model for Obama

Barack Obama’s moving eulogy for Ted Kennedy has invited comparisons between the two men. In the wave of Kennedy nostalgia that is sweeping the US, it is tempting to dub Obama the Kennedy of his generation. The two certainly share glamour, charisma and the devotion of their party. Arguably, it was Ted who put Obama in the White House by endorsing him in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Obama has returned the favour by adopting his legislative agenda and is now trying to force through Congress Ted’s vision for a national health insurance programme. Given the moral impetus that Kennedy’s passing will give the bill, he may yet succeed.

Dennis Sewell

Dave can’t govern unless he destroys the quangos

The closer David Cameron gets to the election, the more he may come to realise how short-lived the elation following his victory may be. Defeating an exhausted Labour party will be the easy part. Winning real power will be a separate, longer battle — and one that requires him to outwit an enemy far more cunning and resilient than Gordon Brown. To transform Britain means seeing off the cronies, placemen and political stooges with whom the government has packed the boards of Britain’s quangos. Over the Labour years these groups have swelled from an irritant into a state within a state. With 700,000 employees and boards that read like a who-was-who of the Blair/Brown era, the quangos will represent Labour’s stay-behind fifth column.

Saturday

Interconnect

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Inside the Causeway Retreat

Just 44 miles from central London, there is a private island retreat.  400 acres of idyllic surroundings, lush green fields and beautiful wild beaches.  A registered bird sanctuary, it is the only place in the UK that has 5 different species of owl living together.  A designated place of natural beauty, a recognised place of scientific interest..... Welcome to The Causeway Retreat on Osea Island. A private mental health and addiction rehabilitation facility.   And this is just building on the legacy of Osea Island.  It has a history of helping people, it was also the site of the world’s first treatment centre from 1903 – 1917 when it was owned by Frederick Charrington of the Brewery family.

The Spectator

Should al-Megrahi have been released? A Spectator poll

Kenny MacAskill’s decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds has caused controversy around the world — in America and also in Britain. Kenny MacAskill’s decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, on compassionate grounds has caused controversy around the world — in America and also in Britain. But though he has deplored the rejoicing on the streets of Tripoli, at the time of writing Gordon Brown had still refused to comment on the affair other than to say that it was not his place to interfere. But while Downing Street maintained its silence, the British public was happy to speak out.

Wednesday

Ed Howker

The real price of true love

Ask any happily married couple about their wedding and they will say the same thing: ‘it is the best day of your life.’ Dear reader, I write today, as this year’s wedding season draws to a close, and on the eve of my own wedding, to expose this lie. Like the Easter Bunny or Gordon Brown’s iPod jam-packed with songs by the Arctic Monkeys, it is a noble myth, a disingenuous redaction, perpetrated to reassure an anxious populace. They don’t mean ‘best day’, these married folk, what they mean is: the wedding process will take an exhausting, shambolic, and ultimately paranoid two months of your life.

Canon Andrew-White

How religion could help save Iraq

Baghdad Not so many months ago we all heard a lot about Iraq. The terror and destruction here made the headlines. But then our troops came home and things seemed to be getting better. News of Iraq moved to the centre pages, then practically disappeared altogether. A few weeks ago, things seemed to change again when — to the despair of all those who hoped Iraq was on the road to recovery — there was another spasm of violence. More bombs, more fatalities. It was widely attributed to the diminishing number and reduced role of US troops, but was it simply that? My suspicion is that religion is at the root of these recent problems, and that it’s only religion that can really cure them.

Deborah Ross

What is it with women and handbags?

Deborah Ross meets Anya Hindmarch, Britain’s accessory queen, and finally gets to the bottom of our obsession with fashionable bags Look, can I be totally honest? I know, I know, it’s not usually my style, but today I’m going to be honest and what I want to honestly say is this: I may be a little in love with Anya Hindmarch, the handbag designer and creator of that ‘I am not a plastic bag’ canvas shopping bag. Now, am I as surprised by this turn of events as anyone? Christ, yes. I am not even into handbags and, as a rule, am wholly scornful of the women who are. Some days, sneering at women who are into handbags is actually all I do. (And it’s more tiring than you might think. I’m exhausted by the evening.

Huda Abuzeid

Why has my father’s murder gone unpunished?

There is a joke about Libya which goes something like this: why does Libya has a population of both six million and four million? The answer is that one million are abroad and the other million are in prison. It’s not a funny joke, but it’s a revealing one. As the country prepares to celebrate 40 years of Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, and despite various of our politicians desperately trying to tell us how much Libya has changed and the numerous Sunday supplement articles extolling the virtues of Libya as a holiday destination, Libya remains one of the most intolerant, totalitarian and repressive regimes in the world. Libyan citizens regularly ‘disappear’ — arrested by the authorities. Their loved ones are often left in the dark.

Rod Liddle

Cowards colluding with terrorists

Rod Liddle says the al-Megrahi affair has shown no one in a good light. American outrage is astonishingly hypocritical given their support of the IRA, and our own government is worryingly supplicant to Gaddafi’s truly evil regime What exactly was the point of the letter from our Prime Minister to the Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi? Apparently — according to Downing Street — Gordon Brown requested that the Libyan leader not make too much of a fuss of the return to Libya of the convicted terrorist Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Keep the whole business ‘low-key’, Brown reportedly pleaded — presumably in case people got upset.

Wednesday

Kate Williams

We are fast forgetting how to be guilty about the past

Kate Williams says that Tarantino’s reduction of Nazi atrocities to entertainment is part of a dangerous trend in which the great evils of history become show business One of this summer’s big screen openings is Quentin Tarantino’s hyperbolic battle movie, Inglourious Basterds. Featuring Brad Pitt demanding his men search for ‘100 Nazi scalps’, this ironic shootfest is bloody, explosive, rowdily entertaining — and a fantasy. ‘You haven’t seen war,’ screams the trailer, ‘until you have seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.

Bryan Forbes

It takes a vindictive mind to tax a view

Downloading the Valuation Office Agency’s no-longer-secret £13 million database, I find that having lived in my house for the past 50 years and having, for those five decades, diligently paid my income and council taxes, my home is about to become my misfortune because of so-called taxable amenities. Using the Freedom of Information Act I find that another 94,373 households are listed as having a view of sorts; a further, whopping 777,189 householders have been covertly assessed as having the gall to improve their property by adding on a conservatory and will be liable for a retrospective tax.

John Preston

The Booker favourite who dared to put on her armour

Hilary Mantel lives in a lunatic asylum. Admittedly it hasn’t been a lunatic asylum for a while — the site was converted into flats 20 years ago, and Mantel and her husband are up on the top floor in a scrupulously ordered apartment with views over the treetops of Woking. Nonetheless, there’s something apt about her choice of home. It’s not that Mantel herself comes over as remotely mad. With her china-blue eyes and her chalk-white skin, she looks like a figure from a Dutch painting, and exudes a similarly contained, watchful air. But just as some of the building’s grim history seems to seep up from below, so darkness is never far below the surface of her fiction.

Jonathan Foreman

The terrible price that is paid by the forgotten casualties of war

Jonathan Foreman says that the focus upon the death toll in the Afghan conflict obscures the high numbers of soldiers who have suffered catastrophic wounds — and the scandalously inadequate compensation they have been offered once home in a land unfit for such heroes It is not easy to measure success and failure in counter-insurgency warfare. Modern military establishments have all sorts of ‘metrics’, as they call statistics, but the politicians and the general public tend to focus on one measure alone: fatalities, and our fatalities at that. The deaths in Afghanistan of other Allied forces rarely make the headlines (though the loss of ten French troops in a single 2008 ambush did reach the front pages), and numbers of enemy dead are rarely mentioned at all.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The candidate from Kabul

Rory Stewart’s career to date reads like something from the heyday of the empire. Rory Stewart’s career to date reads like something from the heyday of the empire. Eton and Oxford- educated, he has been a tutor to royalty, an officer in the Black Watch, the deputy governor of an Iraqi province, has founded a charity in Afghanistan and has written two critically acclaimed books as well as walking across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Now he wants to be a Tory MP. With Brad Pitt having already bought the movie rights to Stewart’s life story, one would have thought that the Tories would be revelling in their new catch. Style and substance combined: what the modern Tory party so desperately wants.

Rod Liddle

Let’s hear it for the python that had the civic good sense to eat Wilbur the cat

Rod Liddle takes issue with Wilbur’s grieving owners who want a change in the law to impose restrictions upon creatures such as snakes. What we really need is a new citizen’s right to defend ourselves against the feline menace It’s been a grim summer for news, all things considered, what with Afghanistan and flying pig flu and the rain and now Harriet Harman squatting over us all like one of those terrifying smallpox deities the Hindus have. So I thought I’d share with you a story which, in the midst of this gloom, cheered me up enormously. It is the story of a little ginger and white pussycat called Wilbur, who lived in Bristol with his owners, Martin and Helen Wadey. Martin and Helen loved Wilbur a lot.

Wednesday

Quentin Willson

‘Strictly’ isn’t what it was in my day

Among my life’s achievements I treasure a rare and special honour. I have the lowest ever recorded score on Strictly Come Dancing. That quartet of steely-hearted judges awarded me a lamentable eight out of a possible 40 points for a Cha Cha routine that was hypnotically and hysterically hopeless. A record, I’m quietly proud to admit, that stands unbroken to this day. I danced with the poise of a prematurely opened deck-chair and made John Sergeant look like Tinkerbell. The evil Craig gave me a single miserable point and Bruno described my routine with the World Ballroom Champion Hazel Newberry (poor woman) as like watching a ‘Reliant Robin making love to a Ferrari’. Even dear old Len found it hard to hide his frowns. I was booted off in the first round.