Features

Saturday

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.

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.