Features

Saturday

William Hague

Labour has left Britain on the fringes of Europe

William Hague responds to David Miliband’s claim in The Spectator that the Tory EU policy is suicidal and says the government’s own strategy has been an abject failure Three weeks ago in these pages David Miliband bravely took up the challenge of defending Labour’s record on Europe and claimed that the Labour government has been shaping the European debate. Yet the reality is that this government has brought Britain no greater influence in EU affairs nor greater standing internationally, while its legacy will be to leave the EU more lowly regarded in this country than ever before. Take first the case of the renamed EU constitution, the Lisbon Treaty.

Wednesday

Interconnect

1843 and All That: murder and a ‘crooked’ parliament

A venal House of Commons, a time of economic dislocation, an unpopular PM: Siân Busby sees eerie resonances in the strange case of Daniel McNaughten When Daniel McNaughten, a young Glaswegian wood-turner, shot Edward Drummond Esq on a freezing January afternoon in 1843, the widespread reaction was dismay but not astonishment. Such atrocities were only to be expected at a time of economic depression, social dislocation, terrorists and spies around every corner (does that sound familiar?). The unfortunate Mr Drummond was not only a scion of the wealthy and influential Drummond banking family (half the world’s wealth was said to be stashed in their coffers beneath Charing Cross).

Fraser Nelson

The rise of British racism may be horribly close

Angela Wallace is one of a new breed of wavering voter. ‘I’m disgusted with all of the parties,’ she says, peering suspiciously at the men with clipboards on her doorstep. ‘MPs are not like they used to be. Now they’re all as bad as each other.’ The political activists I am accompanying have a ready response. ‘Well, why not make a protest vote?’ asks the candidate. ‘We’re the BNP.’ They have a leaflet ready: ‘Punish the Pigs’, it says. The BNP, it continues, is ‘the only party that makes them squeal. We’re NOT in it for the money.’ She promises to think about it. In these deliberations, she will be very far from alone.

Carol Sarler

The shameful truth is that we love our sex crimes

In Ireland, some 2,000 adults who gave evidence of assault at the hands of Roman Catholic priests and nuns are, probably correctly, spitting tacks. The inquiry into their treatment when in children’s institutions has ruled that, although they did indeed suffer, no charges may be brought, no names shamed and, for what it’s worth, no bank balances swollen by damages sucked from the Vatican’s already depleted coffers. The decision might not seem just; on the other hand, it was all a very long time ago — so why, do we think, in recent weeks has this been one of the few stories to knock duck islands off their moats at the top of the news?

Saturday

Stuart Wheeler

Why I’m voting for Ukip

I once gave the Conservatives their biggest ever donation, yet I recently took the difficult decision to support Ukip for the European elections on 4 June. So I have been expelled from the Tory party. I am not an observant person but I do not seem to have been cut by anyone since then; rather the opposite. Goodness knows how many people, ranging from a vicar to a pensioner, have told me that they have voted, and will vote this time, Conservative in all national elections but Ukip in the European elections. Lord Tebbit, while carefully avoiding specifically recommending Ukip, which would have been a catastrophe for the Tories as they would have had to expel him, suggested not voting for the three main parties or BNP. Spot the difference between that and recommending Ukip.

Wednesday

Douglas Hurd

Latvian Notebook

Monday morning, on the Baltic Air 137 to Riga. I finish a taut John Grisham thriller, dip into Kilcullen’s brilliant thesis on counter insurgency, The Accidental Guerrilla, then ponder my editor’s benevolent but searching comments yesterday on the book which I have written with Ed Young on British foreign secretaries. Nearly three hours well spent. Riga looks handsome in the evening sun, lilac and chestnuts a week behind London. In the economic crisis, Latvia is far ahead. The Latvian economy grew by 12 per cent last year and is scheduled to fall by 18 per cent in the next 12 months. No one in Europe, perhaps the world, faces anything like this plunge. It is a bungee jump. Will the rope hold? Is there a rope?

Martin Vander Weyer

Green shoots with shallow roots

It’s true there are signs of an economic recovery, says Martin Vander Weyer, but we should also beware a ‘third wave’ of destruction It’s springtime in North Yorkshire, which traditionally means lashing rain and temperatures like February. But however unseasonal the weather, nature knows when it’s time to wake up: in the first few days of May, my beech hedge always sheds its dead brown leaves and bursts into fresh green. And so it goes — with rather less certainty of timing — for the economic cycle.

Stephen Bayley

Happy birthday Big Ben

Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower Boing. That most familiar sound is now 150 years old. Because I am fortunate enough to live near Westminster, I often hear it during solitary moments at night in the bathroom. But, like the rest of the world, I know it even better from radio. At home or abroad, its sombre, magnificent melancholy is both reassuring and — somehow — a little bit disturbing, as time passing always is. In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf wrote ‘There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable’. In peace and war, trouble and strife, mourning and celebration, here and now, Big Ben reminds us of ourselves.

Rod Liddle

Even if the system’s to blame, no one forced MPs to milk it

Rod Liddle says that Sarah Teather, the righteous young Lib Dem MP who refused to claim for a second home, proves that it wasn’t mandatory for MPs to fleece us The worst case of expenses fraud I ever encountered as a journalist came when I worked for the BBC and a foreign correspondent claimed a few hundred quid for a lawnmower. This created a bit of a scandal and the chap was quite speedily sacked. Claiming for a lawnmower was considered not really on at the best of times, but especially so when you lived in a third-floor apartment.

David Kilcullen

If we lose hearts and minds, we will lose the war

Sir Olaf Caroe — a legendary figure of the Raj, ethnographer of the Pashtuns and last administrator of the North-West Frontier of British India — wrote in 1958 that ‘unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over; in British times at least they were apt to produce an after-crop of tribal unrest [and] constant intrigue among the border tribes.’ Western leaders would have been wise to consider his words after the ‘stunning defeat’ of the Taleban, whose ramshackle theocratic tyranny crumbled in less than ten weeks’ fighting after 9/11. On 7 December 2001, as the last Taleban stronghold fell at Kandahar, only 110 CIA and a few hundred Special Forces officers were inside Afghanistan.

Saturday

Simon Caldwell

This papal visit is a good time to reprieve Pius XII

Simon Caldwell says that the wartime Pope was no Nazi sympathiser: on the contrary, he was a thorn in Hitler’s side and a protector of persecuted Jews The Pope has done an impressive PR job this week, trying once and for all to scotch the suspicion that he and his Church are anti-Semitic. ‘Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world,’ he said as he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. ‘This is totally unacceptable. Every effort must be made to combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found.’ President Peres and Prime Minister Netanyahu watched approvingly as Benedict XVI laid a wreath on a stone covering the ashes of people killed in the Holocaust.

Rod Liddle

Why won’t my employer pay me to look after my castle while I’m in London?

Rod Liddle wants to know why the taxpayer has to pay for Douglas Hogg’s moat and Phil Woolas’s groceries, but nobody will subsidise his own extravagant needs — and is offended by MPs’ attempts to posture as the victims of an impersonal ‘system’ The thing that puzzles me is why did Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, need to buy a whole box of tampons? I can understand that he might wish to look at one, out of curiosity. But it seems profligate, if you’re the taxpayer, to shell out for a whole boxload. Couldn’t he have just borrowed one from his missus, if he was that interested? Apparently you are breaching the House of Commons rules if you claim for tampons for someone else — and so Phil is bang to rights.

Olivia Cole

Is Oxford voting for a celebrity or a poet?

People who wouldn’t dream of having anything so trashy as Grazia on the coffee table, who claim not to be the slightest bit interested in the state of Brad and Angelina’s marriage, are often gripped by the seamy, rowdy lives of our poets and writers. They’re a source of glamour and gossip for more high-minded readers. Little wonder then that the gay and confessional poet Carol Ann Duffy said that she thought ‘long and hard’ about stepping on to this crowded stage of literary Brangelinas.

James Forsyth

It could be worse, you know: not every MP is a Moran

Britain’s most popular political leader has been involved in a dodgy property deal with a fraudster. Britain’s most popular political leader has been involved in a dodgy property deal with a fraudster. On the same day that the politician bought his new home for £165,000 under the asking price, a regular campaign contributor purchased (via his wife) the adjacent plot of land from the same seller for the listed price of £350,000. The donor, a property developer who had a significant amount of business with the government, had been alerted by the politician to the availability of the land and to his intention to buy the house next door. The two men had even walked through the property together.

Wednesday

Rachel Johnson

Sorry, Liz, you’re wrong about sex in the country

Like all red-blooded members of the human race, there is nothing I like more than looking at pictures of Liz Hurley. So this month’s Tatler was a particular treat. There she was in wellies, accessorised by tulle and mousseline gowns in dusty baby-pink. The pictures ticked all the right boxes. Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, in ballgown and Wellingtons in the hen house at Chatsworth? Check! Muddy-hem-and-heaving-bodice costume dramas set in National Trust locations? Check! (The shoot was at Sezincote, Glos, a jewel of a mini stately modelled on a Rajasthan palace.

Fraser Nelson

This is a constitutional crisis. Dave dare not blow it

Fraser Nelson says that the scale of public disgust at the MPs’ expenses scandal presents the next Prime Minister with a huge challenge — and a huge opportunity. If Cameron devolves power to voters, he will be rewarded. But if he fails, the punishment will be swift It will be a brave parliamentary candidate who pins on a rosette, of any colour, and goes campaigning alone this weekend. There are just over two weeks until the European and local elections on 4 June, and what might be an historic defeat for Labour. But right now the safest place for any representative of a major political party is stockaded safely within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster.

Dan Jones

Only a mediaevalist can understand the present

‘It was an age of apocalypse. People across the world lived in fear of a new pandemic disease that leapt with ease from animals to humans, which spread on the breath and moved across borders with alarming freedom. Howls of protest carried through the smashed streets of Europe’s cities as they fell to popular rioting, the citizens and rabble alike provoked to violence by economic catastrophe and widespread political disenchantment. Long and wearisome wars weakened the finances of the world’s most powerful countries, their societies already threatened by global climate change and an unstable food supply. If people did not quite think they were living in the Last Days, there was at least a common feeling that the end of the world was not ever so far beyond the horizon.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

‘Solution Focused Therapy’ is only the worst of the delusions in the Baby P case

Rod Liddle says that the insane therapeutic methods used by Haringey Social Services typify the ideological determination of these ‘experts’ to accentuate the ‘positive’ and ignore social reality The Baby P case is still howling around us all, another gale of reproof hammering at the shutters of our liberal indulgence and at our fathomless respect for experts and institutions. We might all have harboured the suspicion that social workers were, in the main, absolutely useless, driven by an outdated and discredited discipline and ideology (that’s sociology and multiculturalism), and not especially bright. But it took Sharon Shoesmith, who was the boss of Haringey Social Services when Baby P was murdered, to drive home the point.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

Wales and the Welsh are no longer a dismal joke

In the hall at Aberglasney — a fine, classical country house, built in 1720, 20 miles north-west of Swansea — high up by the cornice, an elaborate chunk of plasterwork is missing. To give the full catalogue entry, it is a rococo console, carved with twirling honeysuckles, a motif dear to the ancient Greeks. I know, to my deep and lasting shame, where to find it. In fact I can see it now, on a mahogany stand next to my desk. Its protuberant plaster leaves provide a nice perch for my keys where I don’t forget them. For all its usefulness as a key perch, the console would look better glued back to the cornice in Aberglasney’s drawing room. And so I am returning it.

David Miliband

Hague’s EU policy would be suicidal for Britain

Next month’s European elections are unlikely to be decided on European issues. But as Europe is the one foreign policy area where William Hague has said he has major differences with the government it is important to clarify what is at stake. As Conservatives commemorate the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s election in 1979, they would do well to remember one reason it all ended in tears was Europe. The year ahead is crucial for the European Union. Can we strengthen the single market, despite the economic crisis, and so play our part in ensuring that there is no global slide towards protectionism? Will Europe lead the world to a deal on climate change to replace Kyoto? Can we make international supervision of the banking system more effective?