Features

Saturday

Iason Athanasiadis

Black-clad crowds and burning bridges

Tehran The past week of rioting in Tehran has left many strong images in my mind, but chief among them is the raw passion of thousands of angry Iranians the morning after the disputed presidential elections. Standing in public squares, or on the balconies and roofs overhanging them, they shouted the name of Mir Hossein Mousavi in a bristling staccato. Another image is of a burning pedestrian bridge arcing over a wilderness of highway and rocky wasteland. Hundreds of Mousavi supporters and riot police clashed on the bridge at midnight after the election result. Soaring luxury apartment blocks flanked the scene.

Brendan O’Neill

The gym where they teach you how to beat up chavs

Brendan O’Neill is not impressed by a class of paranoid white-collar workers learning how to head-butt imaginary assailants and defend themselves with their laptops Have you ever wanted to learn how to beat up a chav, those baseball-cap-wearing, bling-sporting youngsters who inhabit inner cities, drink copious amounts of cider, and say unintelligible things in ‘Blackney’ (a mixture of ‘blackspeak’ and Cockney)? Well, now’s your chance. Gymbox, a chain of in-your-face gyms in London, is offering lessons in ‘Chav Fighting’. ‘Don’t give moody, grunting chavs an ASBO, give them a kicking!’ invites the Gymbox website: ‘Welcome to Chav Fighting, a place where the punchbags gather dust and the world is put to rights.

Thursday

Matthew Dancona

The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films: Part One

Peter Hoskin and Matthew d’Ancona count down the first 25 of The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films The studio logo fades. The opening credits roll. And so we come to the main feature: The Spectator’s 50 Essential Films — a selection of the very best that cinema has to offer, and all in glorious Technicolor. This isn’t just a celebration of motion pictures — though it’s certainly that — but also a testament to The Spectator’s own passion for the medium. I’m certain that our offices on Old Queen Street contain a greater per capita proportion of film fans — crazed, honest-to-God, bleary-eyed film fans — than pretty much any other building in all London.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The race to stop Iran getting the bomb is what counts

The scenes from Tehran have been inspiring and show that democracy is changing the shape of the Middle East, says James Forsyth. But the immediate decision facing President Obama is what to do about Iran’s fast-moving nuclear programme It was what the West had long dreamed of seeing in Iran. The largest rally in Tehran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not demanding death to America but respect for the democratic process. Those who have long claimed that the Iranian people are the greatest threat to the theocrats of Tehran appeared to have been proved right as hundreds of thousands marched against the status quo. The much-talked-about liberalism of Iran’s youthful urban population was making itself shown.

Rod Liddle

I have come up with a way of disrupting all these mad employment tribunals

Rod Liddle says the case of Fata Lemes — a Muslim woman who claimed her dignity had been ‘violated’ by the dress she had to wear in a cocktail bar — is sadly typical of a crazy institutional structure that kowtows to every conceivable outraged sensibility A Bosnian Muslim woman, Fata Lemes, has just won £3,000 from an employment tribunal because the Mayfair cocktail bar in which she worked required her to wear a red dress in the summer months. She said this was humiliating and made her feel ‘like a prostitute’ and ‘violated her dignity’ and therefore she refused to wear the dress. She complained and won her appeal.

Toby Young

Fathers have become second-class citizens

Toby Young says that Father’s Day is nothing to celebrate: today’s neutered dads have become overworked assistants to their children rather than paternal role models I cannot say I am looking forward to Father’s Day — not if it is anything like last Sunday. I was woken at 5.45 a.m. when my wife Caroline delivered a sharp jab to my ribs. Charlie, our one-year-old, was crying and it was my turn to get up. I knew from experience that there was no prospect of getting him back to sleep. My best hope was to whisk him down to the kitchen before his howls woke up the other three. For a blissful few minutes I thought I’d got away with it. I dumped Charlie in his playpen and fished Saturday’s Telegraph out of the bin.

Saturday

James Forsyth

‘There must be a reckoning if Gordon is to survive’

Jon Cruddas, tribune of the left and foe of the BNP, tells James Forsyth his support for the PM is not unconditional, and praises James Purnell for being ‘true to himself’ Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, isn’t your typical 21st-century politician. He’s relaxed, unconcerned about his appearance: the amount of spare cloth in his suits would appal a Cameron or a Clegg, and his hair is more barber-shop than salon. When I meet him in his Westminster office it quickly becomes clear that his political worries aren’t those of your average ambitious MP either. His Labour colleagues are obsessing over the wave of resignations and how best to position themselves for the coming drama, but Cruddas is keenest to talk about the campaign against the BNP.

Wednesday

Martin Bright

Insanity has always been integral to New Labour

Martin Bright says that the party labels its enemies as ‘mad’ for Freudian reasons: ‘projecting’ its own collective and individual mental disorders upon foes and rebels alike What is it with New Labour and accusations of psychological weakness? No sooner had Hazel Blears announced her resignation from the Cabinet but dark murmurings bubbled up from Downing Street that the Salford MP ‘couldn’t handle it’. She had clearly cracked under the pressure following revelations about her expenses, it was suggested. Peter Mandelson appeared to be supportive when he told Sky News that Hazel Blears had a right to be angry that her career had ended in humiliation after doing such a ‘superb job’.

Ross Clark

There’s never been a better time to join Labour

Labour had a good night on Sunday. Not Gordon Brown, not Ed Balls, not the Milibands, nor any other of the other ministers who will have been bundled out of office within the next 12 months. They are, of course, doomed. For them ahead lies nothing but months of humiliation, followed, for many of them, by unemployment. But for the Labour party as an institution it is another matter. In spite of suffering an even heavier drubbing in the local and European elections than had been predicted, the Labour party on Sunday ensured its survival and recovery to power some time in the 2020s. I am so sure of this that I would advise anyone in their twenties who is contemplating a political career to join up at once.

Anne Mcelvoy

Dave has some special new Labour friends

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it. The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project Cameron and who won’t cross that line.

Melissa Kite

Gordon pleads for one last chance from the girls

Melissa Kite says that the PM is ill at ease with female colleagues. No surprise that it was the women — Blears, Flint, Kennedy — who rebelled while the men hid under the table Remember the Brown Bounce? Yes, there really was one. It was back in September 2007 and Gordon was riding high on a wave of popularity. Honestly, I’m not making this up. A YouGov poll gave the Prime Minister a commanding 11-point lead over the Tories after his appeal to traditional values at the Labour party conference. What’s more, among women voters the Labour lead was an astonishing 16 per cent — 16 per cent! Mr Brown must have fevered dreams about that now. Wavy graphs with red lines soaring above blue lines must drift past him in his sleep like Homer Simpson dreaming about beer.

Irwin Stelzer

This is how you should use your reprieve, Gordon

Irwin Stelzer says the PM should seize the opportunity presented by this stay of execution: plot a path to fiscal sanity, cut red tape and restore Britain’s stature on the world stage Now that Gordon Brown is determined to go down with the Labour ship, or to sink it, if you believe his harshest critics, he might want to consider a few things he can do in the short time left to him at Number 10 to enable historians to be kinder to him. Leave office he might be forced to do after the general election he has so long resisted. But it remains open to him to do so with a sense of satisfaction that, on present form, will be denied him. Of course, nothing is certain in politics.

Rod Liddle

If anything, this result understates the support for the BNP

So, why the great shock? Why the hand-wringing? It’s not as if they weren’t warned. Why all those metropolitan journos disembarking at Barnsley station on the 11.47 from King’s Cross and gingerly approaching the local Untermensch with a sort of disgusted awe: what is it about this ghastly place that resulted in 17 per cent of its benighted inhabitants voting for Hitler’s bastard offspring, the British National Party? It must be simply that they don’t like the local darkies, think that there are too many of them and, poor dumb creatures that they are, feel threatened. Not racist, as such; simply lacking an education. But this approach to explaining the BNP — the geographical anomaly/thick northerners paradigm — is running out of fuel.

Matthew Dancona

Tony, Gordon and Peter saved Labour: now they’ll destroy it

Matthew d’Ancona says that, by sticking with Brown, Labour has opted for a mad collective delusion. The party is still in thrall to the trio who invented New Labour and cannot think beyond the Blair-Brown era — an incapacity for which it will pay a terrible price In Westminster this week, I have felt like the boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. You remember the character and his famous line. ‘I see dead people,’ he tells his therapist, Bruce Willis, ‘walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.’ How often does the boy see these scary, deluded beings? ‘All the time. They’re everywhere.’ And they are, you know. Everywhere.

Saturday

Pablo Ganguli

Moscow Notebook

Before boarding the flight to Moscow, it dawned on me that I might have somehow contracted swine flu from Michael Nyman. What was I to do? This is not what I had in mind when I decided to bring a taste of Britain to Russia. I felt embarrassed. But stranger things have happened in my life. The reason behind my fear was my sudden ill health and an email from Nyman saying he wasn’t feeling his best due some kind of flu — apparently contracted in Mexico. Fortunately for us both and the rest of the British delegation to Russia, my health improved dramatically by the second day in the country. Mother Russia, so very caring.

Rod Liddle

If you want to see corruption, look at the party leaders’ response to the scandal

Which of the many MPs accused of defrauding the taxpayer by fiddling their expenses is the worst offender, do you think? We need some clarity on this issue. In the public mind I have a feeling that they are all beginning to merge as one composite beast drawn from ancient mythology — a hydra-headed pig emerging from its second duck island with a tampon in one claw and a porno flick in the other, whining piteously about inadvertent accountancy errors. How should we choose between them? Clearly, some have behaved worse than others. Some have cheerfully gone along with a corrupt system to trouser a few extra quid here or there — others have told lies, cheated and employed accountants to screw thousands upon thousands of pounds from the rest of us.

Wednesday

Tom Bower

A bracing walk through Vienna with Mr Opec

Tom Bower talks to Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, at Opec’s meeting and is struck by how this master manipulator escapes censure in the great oil blame game Speculators are back in favour, especially the fund managers bidding up the price of oil. Cursed last year for tipping the world into recession, the same traders are now praised by some for once again betting on rising prices. Last year’s sinners are now cast as the Good Samaritans. The conductor of that topsy-turvy world is Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister. Choosing his words carefully as he walked through the centre of Vienna towards last week’s Opec meeting, the 75-year-old geologist smiled enigmatically about the speculators: ‘I’m not concerned.’ The opposite is the truth.

Douglas Eden

We came close to losing our democracy in 1979

Douglas Eden reveals the extraordinary penetration of the 1970s Labour movement by pro-Soviet trade unionists and the extent of Callaghan’s toleration of the hard Left Thirtieth anniversaries have been in vogue this year. So far, there have been seminars and conferences to commemorate the notorious 1979 Winter of Discontent and the subsequent election of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Still missing is observance of the defeat of the Left’s project, led from the trade unions, to transfigure parliamentary demo-cracy into a form of soviet state. The project’s leading figure was the general secretary of Britain’s largest union, the Transport & General Workers Union (the T&G), and chairman of the TUC’s international committee, Jack Jones.

Daniel Collings

Apologise for torture? ‘That’s not appropriate’

In an exclusive interview, Dick Cheney tells Daniel Collings that Obama is wrong to say sorry for waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques. The former Vice-President turned critic-in-chief has no regrets: if he upset Blair, he was ‘just doing his job’ Richard B. Cheney, the 46th Vice-President of the United States, is back. Though he left the White House wheelchair-bound in January, looking for all the world like he just wanted to see out his days fishing in Wyoming, his retirement didn’t last long. Unwilling to settle into the traditional role of elder statesman, 68-year-old Cheney has emerged as a thorn in the side of the Obama administration.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

There is something comforting about North Korea’s nuclear weapons

Rod Liddle takes issue with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and otherdoom-mongers: Kim Jong-il’s nukes are quaintly amateurish Apparently it’s now five minutes to midnight. I am referring not to the actual time, but to the figurative clock of the apocalypse which tells us how long it will be until we are all annihilated. It was invented by something called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1947 when, gravely worried by international developments, not least those two nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had the hands of the clock positioned at seven minutes to midnight. Within a few years the hands had edged forward still further, to three minutes to midnight, as the Russkies did a spot of nuclear testing and the Korean war got underway.