Features

Wednesday

Simon Hoggart

My dream of Mandelson as Labour leader

A semi-conscious Simon Hoggart attends a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in which the Prince of Darkness has replaced Gordon — and is cheered to the rafters It was one of those dreams we all have. It had its own internal logic: everything that occurs seems to make perfect sense, and it’s only when we wake up that we realise the whole thing was absurd and silly. The other night I dreamed I was a Labour MP and we were in the Grand Committee Room welcoming the new leader of our party. In my semi-conscious lucubrations, it seemed perfectly natural that this should be Peter Mandelson. The fact that no majority of the MPs, unions and party members who choose the new leader would find Mandelson acceptable was irrelevant.

Matthew Dancona

The spooks are squirming. But be careful what you wish for

As the controversy over torture gathers pace, it is ‘open season’ on the intelligence agencies — investigated by the police and challenged by MPs. Scrutiny is fine, says Matthew d’Ancona — but beware of making life impossible for those responsible for our security ‘One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

The ominous creep of Baby Chic

How can we expect our children to grow up, asks Harry Mount, when British culture is becoming increasingly babyish — full of primary colours and little letters It first struck me how babyish modern Britain has become when I got a flyer through my door about a new doctors’ surgery in Kentish Town, my patch of north London. I’d bicycled past it as it was being built — it’s your usual faceless ziggurat of undecorated, angular white concrete, with spindly, metal-framed windows half-blocked by lime-green steel grilles. No worse than the usual publicly funded horrors dumped on London’s pretty terraced streets; no better.

Alan Cochrane

We must fight to preserve the Union

Alan Cochrane says that it’s not just Alex Salmond who is agitating for Scottish independence. There are forces on both sides of the border who hope for the break-up of the UK If it’s August, it must be Scotland. Upwards of half a million people will descend on Edinburgh over the next month for the six festivals — International, Fringe, Book, Jazz/Blues, Television and now Politics — not to mention the ever successful Tattoo. Some will be other Scots but many will be from the rest of the United Kingdom, predominately England. It’s amusing for anyone living north of the Cheviots to record the comments of visitors to our homeland, especially those of the English persuasion.

Richard Sanders

The great football myth

Far from being invented and refined by toffs, Richard Sanders says that the world’s most popular sport was civilised and modernised by ordinary people As a new football season begins, and a sporting legend (Sir Bobby Robson) passes away, it seems the right time finally to expose the big lie at the heart of football. Though it’s universally assumed that the modern game was created by the upper classes, who took the rough-and-tumble kickabout beloved of common people and refined it into the world’s best-loved sport, in fact the opposite is true. The myth runs something like this. The game played by the common people from the Middle Ages onwards was wild and savage, little more than a village romp.

Rod Liddle

Harriet Harman is either thick or criminally disingenuous

Labour’s deputy leader is tipped to succeed Gordon Brown, says Rod Liddle. But her vacuous feminism, her reflex loathing of men, her lack of interest in real statistics and her worrying links with trade unions would spell disaster for the party So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober. The alcohol is sloshing around inside your brain, you’ve enjoyed a post-pub doner kebab together and maybe some grilled halloumi (a woman’s right to cheese) and she suggests, as you stand inside the frowsy minicab office: fancy going south, big boy? (I don’t know for sure that she’d use the term ‘big boy’; this is largely hypothetical stuff, you understand.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

If I had Trevor Phillips’s job, I’d already have signed up for Dignitas

Not so long ago, the National Consumer Council decided that some shops on railway stations were selling chocolate bars too cheaply and that the public should, for its own protection, pay more for them. This occurred at about the same time as the RSPB mulled over the possibility that it might start shooting or gassing or strangling parakeets (it has since denied it ever intended such a thing). All we needed was a short statement from the NSPCC to the effect that it was entirely in favour of the occasional child sacrifice from time to time and we would have been in an almost perfect upside-down world. But instead the NSPCC insisted that one in five children suffered from abuse, while one of the main disability lobby groups argued that one in three British people was disabled.

Hardeep Singh-Kohli

Welcome to Fight Club for foodies

Hardeep Singh Kohli lifts the veil on the new ‘underground kitchens’: confidential gatherings of gastronomes in secret locations, meals that are governed by the rules of omerta So there I am, in a stranger’s kitchen on a summer Saturday night, knee-deep in freshly cooked basmati rice, chutneys and pickles a go-go. And I’m ladling spoonfuls of smoked aubergine and pea curry on to the 24th of 25 expectant plates, wondering furiously if: 1) There will be enough to go round. 2) Each portion is roughly equal lest there be a disagreement. 3) The damned curry is still warm enough to taste palatable. I am a maelstrom of madness, an apoplexy of activity. And I must confess I’m not altogether sure why I have brought this upon myself.

Reihan Salam

The big glitch in Dave’s ‘post-bureaucratic’ vision

Reihan Salam is a fan of Cameron’s plan for shifting power to citizens. The trouble is — as the row over Obama’s healthcare reform shows — technocrats can often be right As neoconservatives pressed for the democratic transformation of the Middle East, curmudgeons on the right and left often wondered if the peoples of the region were in fact ready for democracy. Robust democracy is rooted in a flourishing civil society and a large and literate middle class that is capable of holding elected officials to account. Democracies also require mature and responsible leadership that is committed to the long-term survival of constitutional government. It was and is by no means obvious that Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran score particularly well on any of these metrics.

Wednesday

David Horspool

Ready to rebel? You are part of a glorious tradition

Angry disenchantment with the political and financial establishment has rarely been deeper. David Horspool says that the English rebel — culturally affronted rather than ideologically left-wing — is an honourable archetype of our nation’s history G.K. Chesterton’s famous line in The Secret People, ‘We are the people of England, that never have spoken yet’, still seems to appeal across the political spectrum. It is quoted by BNP bloggers, by socialist thinkers agonising over a nation without an identity, and it was famously invoked by Martin Bell, the white-suited independent.

Saturday

James Clappison

WEB EXCLUSIVE: When peace can be possible

As the Obama administration’s top diplomatic brass fly to the Middle East to resuscitate the peace process, they will be inspired that 15 years ago Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan shook hands at the White House and inaugurated a lasting peace. This week the Middle East will again take centre stage as an ‘airlift of American officials’, three of President Obama's most senior advisers, arrives in Israel instructed to breathe life back in to the negotiations with the Palestinians while simultaneously pushing for a regional peace plan. The difficulties and sticking points have been well documented and Obama, a man embarking on the most ambitious set of policies, will find the Middle East surely one of his most difficult challenges.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

There are lies, damned lies — and statistics about the housing queue

Rod Liddle says that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been well led by Trevor Phillips — all the more reason to play straight with figures about the treatment of immigrant applicants for housing There was a report out recently which said that men who marry much younger women tend to live rather longer than men who don’t. This cheered me up no end. I’ve always had the vague suspicion that I might be immortal, beyond the reach of the Reaper’s scythe, and I regularly scour the newspapers for scientific evidence that this suspicion of mine is indeed well founded. And there it was. I married a woman who was much younger than me, you see, so, as they say — get in there, back of the net.

Anne Mcelvoy

Will the Tories attack the ‘bloated’ BBC?

Does Cameron think the Beeb impedes fair competition? Will he cut the DG’s salary? The closer Cameron comes to power, the more the Corporation panics, says Anne McElvoy What does David Cameron really think of the BBC? A spectre (or several, perhaps) haunts the taupe corridors of White City, Television Centre and Broadcasting house as a likely Tory victory grows closer. Memories abound of Mrs Thatcher’s Peacock Report, which was intended to begin the dismantling of the licence fee, of Norman Tebbit’s 1986 broadside, unleashed by coverage of the Libyan embassy siege, but really a Kulturkampf against a perceived left-liberal bias.

Jan Morris

Mocking the Welsh is the last permitted bigotry

‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans’ went a sarcastic lyric of Nöel Coward’s at the end of the second world war, and nowadays nobody of civilised instinct is beastly to them. Quite right too. Political correctness, so often stultifying to free expression, has at least ensured that racial bigotry is recognised as the cruellest kind of yobbery, distantly but recognisably related to genocide. Few of us now blame ‘the Germans’ for the evils of the war, and generalised mockery of Jews, blacks, wogs, frogs, Micks, Poles or Eyeties, let alone Muslims, has to be witty indeed to raise even a guilty laugh. One class of person, though, one race, one nationality, is evidently exempt from this taboo.

Sarah Standing

The swine flu panic will turn into a national sickie

First, the good news. And we all need good news. According to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, the UK is no longer at a ‘critical’ level of threat from a terrorist attack. We’ve been downgraded to a ‘substantial’ level of alert against al-Qa’eda or other extremist groups. So we’ve gone from a ‘touch-and-go’, worst-case scenario to a merely ‘significant’ one. However, the bad news is that ‘the Fear’ has been replaced by the Big Bogey Man himself — Mr Piggy. Swine flu allegedly now poses a cataclysmic and ‘far greater’ immediate threat to our country’s heath and safety than anything else, and so far the government has spent over £100 million stockpiling Tamiflu.

Saturday

The Spectator

Top 50 Political Scandals: Part Two

Part Two of The Spectator’s Guide to the Top 50 Political Scandals — counting down from No. 25 to No. 1 There is one word that frightens politicians more than any other: scandal. They know that scandal can bring about personal ruin, cut short a promising career and even bring down a government. The power of scandal is that it imprints itself on the public mind. Some are about sex, others about money, drugs or espionage. But they are all about power: the corrupter, the ultimate aphrodisiac. This is your guide to the scandalous world of Westminster. Read on. And if you missed the first part, you can catch up on the countdown from 50 to 26.

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

The space age isn’t over. It hasn’t yet begun

The evening is laid out above the houses, behind Mr X’s head. Pinkish clouds collide then slide apart, exposing jigsaw shapes of darkening sky. A thumb smudge of moon appears over Westminster as Mr X gets to the point: ‘A new space age is about to begin,’ he says. ‘The question is not “will it happen?” — it will. The question is whether we want to be part of it.’ The light fades. The shadows on Mr X’s face deepen and his mood swings between elation and resignation. Mr X is a brilliant rocket scientist, excited about the dawning of a new era. But he also knows that there’s only a brief window of opportunity for us to get involved. ‘It’ll soon be too late,’ he says sadly. But we all love the moon landings, I say.

David Kilcullen

For answers to the Afghan-Pakistan conflict, ask: what would Curzon do?

David Kilcullen, the influential counter-insurgency strategist, seeks inspiration in Curzon’s experience as Viceroy of India to assess what Pakistan must do to deal with the extremist threat — and how Nato can help drive the ‘steamroller’ Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August.

Fraser Nelson

Political reform mustn’t be left to politicians

The House of Commons is not, technically, the ‘mother of all parliaments’. This phrase was coined in 1865 by the radical MP John Bright, who was referring to England. She was, he said, the ancient country of parliaments: men had held these august gatherings for 600 uninterrupted years, even before the Conquest. So of course, he argued, the vote should be extended to the urban working class: anything that took greater account of English opinion would necessarily enrich our political system. In this spirit, The Spectator has been asking readers over the past six weeks to make proposals for constitutional reform. It is, we have argued, too important an issue to leave to Gordon Brown or to any committee the Prime Minister might be tempted to convene.

Rod Liddle

It is the narcissistic middle-aged, not the young, who love Facebook and Twitter

I wonder what Stephen Fry would write on Twitter shortly after he’d been hit very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner? Most likely nothing: the dead don’t Twitter — they probably use Facebook instead. But what if the blow didn’t quite kill? Give him a couple of hours and he’d be back. ‘Head hurts. Strange viscous fluid leaking onto the carpet out of my ears. Can’t see anything. Hey ho, Stephen! The dinner gong has sounded! Must soldier on.’ Or something like that; certainly a sentence where he refers to himself in the third person and some whimsical exclamation or exhortation last used when Hilaire Belloc was in his prime.