Features

Saturday

Venetia Thompson

The market is flooded with single City boys

Venetia Thompson says that if you don’t mind slumming it for a bit, you can snap up an out-of-work banker or trader whose stock is sure to rise soon I’m back behind enemy lines in the Square Mile, thankfully nowhere near the trading floor I used to inhabit, but in a place nearly as terrifying: Coq d’Argent, the City restaurant synonymous with suicide attempts. Perfect backdrop then for a first date who, within five minutes, utters the immortal words: ‘You know, there is an upside to unemployment. Since being made redundant, I have finally been able to get around to focusing on my love life. This is my first date in years!

Rod Liddle

The British electorate prefers its toffs to act with chutzpah

We all know the truth about the wealth and privilege of the future Tory front bench, says Rod Liddle, but it’s better to brazen it out like Boris than try to seem apologetic The Labour party’s cynical attempt to target the opposition as a party of champagne-guzzling toffs, preening and loaded Hooray-Henrys and chinless, mewing, high-born upper-crust monkeys may well work. There are still quite a lot of people in this country who are sufficiently bitter and petty to hold the Tories’ background and upbringing against them and, as it happens, I’m one of them. I suspect there are another couple of million or so of us at large, mostly north of the Watford Gap services.

Interconnect

The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009

All is not lost. While the standing of parliament as a whole is at a low ebb, our readers have jumped at the chance to highlight those politicians who — whisper it — are a credit both to their exulted positions and to the country. All is not lost. While the standing of parliament as a whole is at a low ebb, our readers have jumped at the chance to highlight those politicians who — whisper it — are a credit both to their exulted positions and to the country. Yes, your nominations for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award have been pouring in for the past couple of weeks, and we’ve had figures from every major party represented. A popular figure in the early nominations is the Conservative MP Douglas Carswell.

Dan Hannan

We can trust Cameron on Europe

Eurosceptics are not ‘swivel-eyed’ or psychotic, says Daniel Hannan, and it’s only Labour propagandists who think the party is divided on this issue As the Conservative conference got underway, newspapers led with reports of a right-wing insurgency against David Cameron. For four successive days the story continued: there was, we kept being told, an almighty barney about whether the Conservatives would hold a referendum if the Lisbon Treaty were already in force. I was nonplussed and, to be honest, slightly miffed. If there really was a Eurosceptic rebellion, why hadn’t anyone told me? More to the point, what exactly was I supposed to be rebelling against?

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

Authoritarian? China’s not a patch on Britain

The People’s Republic of China seems to be morphing into a New Labour-style nanny state, says Brendan O’Neill. But at least the Chinese stand up to their regime The 60th birthday celebrations of the People’s Republic of China seemed to confirm that, for all its embrace of Western-style capitalism, China remains a faraway place where they do things differently. Can you imagine young female soldiers in powder-blue mini-skirts and go-go boots goose-stepping through the streets of London? Or 8,000 soldiers marching in military precision followed by 500 tanks and 18 vehicles showcasing brand-new giant nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles? Poor Brown can barely raise a smile among delegates at his annual party conference.

Con Coughlin

Whatever happened to Hillary?

What’s become of Hillary Clinton? At times of international crisis — and boy, do we have a few — it is customary for the American Secretary of State to take centre stage and work the phones until the early hours sorting out the latest threat to global security. Remember the legwork that James Baker put in to build a multinational coalition to boot out Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990? Or the air miles Madame Secretary Albright clocked up in her attempts to bring the tiresome Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic to heel during the Bosnian civil war? Even Condoleezza Rice managed to maintain a high-profile international presence during President George W.

Samir Shah

Race is not an issue in the UK anymore

For the past decade Samir Shah has been chair of the Runnymede Trust, devoted to studying ethnicity. Now, he says, the real problem in Britain isn’t so much racism, but "cultural cloning". I first arrived in this country from Bombay in January 1960. Harold Macmillan had yet to make his Winds of Change blowing through Africa speech. Coronation Street hadn’t appeared on our television screens. As an eight-year-old child, I recall looking up at a huge advertising hoarding in Notting Hill Gate showing an attractive blonde offering very smart chocolates. I loved chocolates and they looked fantastic, but I was depressed. Why? Because I genuinely believed that those chocolates were for white people only. Fast-forward 27 years and I was appointed head of current affairs at the BBC.

Wednesday

Bruce Anderson

Is David Cameron tough enough to be a Tory revolutionary?

A Pall Mall club: the members’ table at lunchtime: unease and discontent. Everyone wants rid of Gordon Brown. No one is sure about David Cameron. I am asked the questions that I have been asked a hundred times before. What does he believe in? Will he be up to it? The questioners think that their doubts arise from a shortage of policies. They are wrong. The problem is caused by an absence of conviction. After all, the Lib Dems have policies on everything from asparagus beds to xylophone-playing. Little good it does them, because few people believe that they stand for anything. No one thought that about Margaret Thatcher. Yet in 1978/79, Tory policy-making was at roughly the same level as it is now. There was a crucial difference.

Irwin Stelzer

Tips for the new US ambassador

Obama’s man in London needs to stop bashing Bush, immerse himself in domestic political discourse, and get out and meet some true Brits, says Irwin Stelzer ‘He is not even a diplomat,’ sniffed BBC News when Louis Susman took up his post as America’s ambassador to the Court of St James. An Obama Chicago crony, the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill rushed to point out from his perch in Washington — ‘a little bit of Chicago’s ruthless and combative political machine is soon to descend on the decorous calm of the Court of St James’.

Peter Oborne

A new jihad in the Philippines

Very few outsiders ever venture into the Liguasan marshes, the remote inland sea which stretches across hundreds of square miles of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. These marshes, for the most part approachable only by jungle tracks and navigable by shallow-bottomed boats, form the perfect hiding place for criminal gangs which make a good living by kidnapping businessmen from nearby towns and cities. The Liguasan marshes also provide a base for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an insurgency which claims to speak for the native Bangsamoro people who were living in the Philippines long before the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Despite repeated assaults, which have intensified in recent years, the Bangsamoro have never been conquered.

Rod Liddle

Is it more rude to ask if someone’s going whacko than blind?

Rod Liddle says the furore surrounding Andrew Marr’s questions to Gordon Brown is academic. These rumours are rife in the blogosphere Is our Prime Minister perpetually out of his brainbox on powerful psychotropic substances, as everybody now seems to believe? Dilaudid, crystal meth, that sort of thing? Does he stagger out of bed and say: ‘Aw, Sarah, I’ve got a meeting with Harman in half an hour. Light up the crack pipe, will you?’ Looking at the man, you would not think so. That strange, strangulated smile, the ever encroaching brow — this is not the demeanour of a man who, for example, mainlines camel tranquillisers every morning. If he is scoring regularly, then I suggest he changes his dealer, because he’s being ripped off.

Fraser Nelson

Cameron: ‘What you need is thoughtful radicalism’

Lord Mandelson is outside David Cameron’s office when I go in for my interview. Not in person, alas, but boxed in a small television set giving his speech to the Labour party conference, to heckling from those gathered around it. A few days ago, the noble lord had suggested he would serve in a Tory government, and Mr Cameron has already thought of a role. ‘He can chair a truth and reconciliation commission on New Labour,’ he says, laughing. ‘I think that would be a very good opening job. Perhaps when he has done that and atoned for all his past sins, we could find him another.’ If Mr Cameron wins the election, he will have no shortage of very bad jobs to offer.

Anders Hultin

Profit is the key to success in ‘Swedish schools’

Anders Hultin, an architect of the Swedish government’s voucher system, says the Tories’ plan to emulate it will fail unless they encourage a new breed of education entrepreneurs For us Swedes, it is gratifying to see David Cameron put our free schools model at the heart of his reform agenda. He has chosen well. In a few short years, the voucher system has transformed education in Sweden and led to the creation of almost a thousand new schools. But the Conservative leader has failed to grasp a key aspect of their success. To flourish, these schools must be allowed to make a profit. This isn’t just one of a long list of pessimistic predictions — it’s the only crucial criticism; he can ignore the rest.

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.