Features

Wednesday

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.

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.