Features

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

The plotters mean business. But the Gordonator will survive

In a disastrous week for the PM, Matthew d’Ancona reveals the plot to mount a leadership challenge after the June elections. But Brown is absolutely determined to cling to power; and Labour has shabby psychological reasons for keeping him where he is Here is the plan: if the local and European elections on 4 June are terrible for Labour, a former Cabinet minister — probably Charles Clarke — will put himself forward as a candidate for the party leadership. Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and others will urge their parliamentary colleagues to face realities; mayhem, naturally, will ensue. To trigger a formal challenge to Gordon Brown, the candidate will need the backing of 20 per cent of Labour MPs: 70 names. None of the plotters expects to pull that off.

Saturday

Janice Warman

Cape Town notebook

As we circle out into Table Bay and back towards the mountain, the pilot welcomes us to Cape Town – and warns us about the burgeoning violence. For the first time, locals are talking about it too. ‘We all know people who have been raped and murdered,’ says one friend who delivers me to my guesthouse after a meal and watches until I am safely inside. She rings her security company and arranges for a guard to meet her at her door if she is coming home late. So do my other female friends. I’m staying at Kalk Bay, a seaside village a little way outside the town centre, where you can buy freshly caught fish on the quayside and which has the shabby chic of parts of Notting Hill.

Rod Liddle

It is child-rearing, not sexism, that explains the pay gap between men and women

Rod Liddle says that Harriet Harman’s notion of ‘structural pay discrimination’ is nonsense. It is women’s decision to have children that disrupts wage equality One government proposal which seems to have gone largely unnoticed as a consequence of the credit crunch, Susan Boyle’s triumph on Britain’s Got Talent and flying Mexican pigs spreading their lethal filth hither and thither is Harriet Harman’s plan to remove the wombs from all British women and force them to go to work as stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers in the City of London. How she intends to remove the wombs, and what she will do with 30 million of them when she is done, has not yet been decided. There will be ethical debates, one supposes.

Anne Mcelvoy

American Notebook

Travels in Obamaland: we take our two boys for their first holiday in the vast parish of St Barack, as his first 100 days come to an end. The wave of T-shirt wisdom unleashed during the election campaign hasn’t dried up: one favourite is a sepia image of a group of American Indians, being sold by native Americans in Union Square — and bearing the slogan ‘Homeland Security: fighting terrorism since 1492’. For more portable appeal, try ‘I love my country — it’s just the government that bothers me’.

James Hughesonslow

Confessions of a drink driver on a ‘rehab’ course

I blame Matthew d’Ancona, esteemed editor of this organ, for his over-generous hospitality. It was after one of The Spectator’s pre-Christmas celebrations that I was breathalysed and banned from driving for a year, later reduced to nine months if I underwent counselling. It all started when, as an occasional Spectator scribe since 1974, I received a last-minute invitation to a dinner for readers to meet contributors. It was 6 p.m. and I was in the Evening Standard’s offices in Kensington. The dinner was at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, at 7.15, and I had to get home to Camberwell six miles away to change into a dinner jacket.

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

‘Yes there is a problem. Yes we are correcting it’

In an exclusive interview, Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, talks to Matthew d’Ancona about the licence fee, the Ross-Brand affair — and hints at flexibility over funding If there is a stereotype of the BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons does not match it. Marmaduke Hussey, for instance, was the archetypal establishment patrician, while Gavyn Davies was one of the original New Labour cronies (felled by the Hutton Inquiry). Sir Michael, in contrast, has a beaming, technocratic countenance, the look of a brand manager at Sunshine Desserts who has good news for C.J. about tapioca sales. Which is probably a good thing, given the scale and the nature of the task that faces him, and the range of adversaries he confronts.

Brahma Chellaney

India is in peril. Obama is making it worse

Brahma Chellaney says that India is indeed ‘the sponge that protects us all’ from terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The new President’s strategy is compounding the Af-Pak problem New Delhi One of the most striking things about the larger Asian strategic landscape is that India is wedged in an arc of failing or troubled states. This harsh reality is India’s most glaring weakness; its neighbourhood is so combustible as to impose a tyranny of geography. Today, Pakistan’s rapid Talebanisation tops India’s concerns. After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

Fraser Nelson

A tale of two Gordons: why Gekko is right and Brown is wrong

The Eighties mantra ‘greed is good’ may be unfashionable, says Fraser Nelson, but it is still true. We have forgotten that wealth generates revenue, while high taxes crush prosperity and pauperise nations. Will the Conservatives have the guts to declare this economic truth? Before Gordon Brown was writing books about political courage, the subject that fascinated him most was greed. He detected plenty of it when the Thatcher revolution was in full bloom. In 1987 he wrote a polemical book entitled Where There’s Greed, denouncing both the Conservatives and the ‘sinister insights of Adam Smith’.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

From capering to caped crusader

Matthew Parris says Mayor Johnson must now focus obsessively on fixing London’s transport system In more ways than one, the suffix ‘ism’ is not easily appended to the word ‘Boris’. Indeed ‘Borisism’ sounds so ungainly that some may pray that no such phenomenon ever needs to be described. If so, the prayer has been answered. After his first year in power the most powerful Tory in contemporary British politics — the individual Conservative with the biggest personal mandate in history — has to his credit a solid list of plans actioned and things done. To this may be added a more colourful list: of poses struck and capers capered.

The Spectator

How is Boris doing?

We asked a distinguished panel to assess the Mayor’s progress — and what he should do next David Cameron Boris and his team have done a brilliant job in the last year. Under his leadership City Hall has become less extravagant, and more focused on the right priorities: making London a safer, greener and more affordable place to live. Boris has certainly confounded his detractors. In terms of the future (other than synchronising the traffic lights so those of us who cycle across Hyde Park Corner are less likely to be squashed by a bendy bus) he should carry on doing the excellent work that he is doing. Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of NYC During the election campaign, Boris’s detractors said that if he were elected, the world would fall apart.

Ross Clark

The only tax-cutting Tory in town

Ross Clark says that we mustn’t underestimate Boris’s greatest achievement: to have frozen the GLA precept without affecting services is a triumph It is hard to remember the horrors of the London inherited by new Mayor Boris Johnson a year ago. It was a city gridlocked with traffic, with unaffordable housing, and where you couldn’t get a table in a decent restaurant without booking six months in advance. Now, the roads run freely, property is much cheaper and a seat for this evening at London’s finest restaurants is only a phone call away. Admittedly, these improvements are less the work of the Mayor than a consolation for the deepest recession in living memory. What a time it was to take control of the world’s unofficial financial capital!

Rod Liddle

J.G. Ballard was a man of the Right — not that the Right really wanted him

‘I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel, in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel, watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.’ The drug-addled, leather-faced rock star from Detroit, Iggy Pop — né James Newell Osterberg — whose contribution to the canon of modern popular verse includes ‘Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, once wrote and performed a song called ‘I’m a Conservative’.

Wednesday

Andrew Gimson

Boris for Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson’s first year as Mayor of London has proved something of a shock, especially to his own side. His enemies, including the Tory parliamentary leadership as well as the sort of people who toil on the Guardian’s comment pages, find they have underestimated him. It suited them to write him off as a clown who would soon make a complete mess of things, if by some fluke he were to defeat Ken Livingstone in the election held on 1 May last year. This belief in Mr Johnson’s ineptitude became unsustainable last October when he sacked Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Mayor did not, in theory, have the power to sack Sir Ian: that prerogative belonged to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.

Toby Young

Boris Johnson’s art of war

‘The thing about Boris is that he really, really wants to be President,’ said an Old Etonian contemporary of his. This was back in 1984 when we were all at Oxford together. ‘Yes, I know,’ I replied. ‘He’s already announced his candidacy.’ ‘I don’t mean President of the Union,’ he said. ‘I mean President of the United States.’ Could that possibly be true? Boris was born in New York in 1964 so he isn’t disqualified on those grounds. But wasn’t it a tad ambitious to think he could become President of the United States? I checked with his sister, Rachel, who was then a fresher at New College. As expected, she pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Last time I checked he wanted to be World King,’ she said.

Mary Wakefield

‘Let’s melt down the railings to make bicycles’

I met Boris Johnson in his office in City Hall overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge. Our former editor seemed a more thoughtful and sensible character than the man who used to practise cycling with no hands down Doughty Street at lunchtime, but there were signs of the old Boris tucked around his mayoral office: ping pong bats (the Mayor likes to unwind by trying and failing to beat his personal assistant, Ann Sindall); a book of love poems by the late Woodrow Wyatt; a bust of Pericles in the corner, looking out over this 21st-century Athens. Do you identify with Pericles?


 It would be absurd to say that I identify with Pericles.

Alec Russell

Dinner at the club with the Zulu Mr Everyman

On a blustery southern winter’s night last year, Jacob Zuma hosted a small dinner in the Rand Club for a dozen sceptical guests. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the dark-panelled club in the centre of Johannesburg was in the old days the preserve of the white English-speaking business establishment. In the early years of majority rule, senior officials of the African National Congress were wary of admitting to membership, fearing headlines insinuating they had become the new ‘Randlords’, the old nickname for Rhodes and his peers. But 15 years into the new era the new guard are feeling rather surer of themselves.

Rachel Johnson

A bag of Monster Munch declares the spirit of the age

‘Nice car,’ said my host approvingly, as he saw me off after Sunday lunch last weekend, as the blossom hung heavy on the bough and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire chorused in the sunshine. I opened the door with pride. At this point I should boast that the vehicle in question is not some hybrid, some gleaming marque of prestige. It’s my husband’s R-reg VW Passat. I swept the litter off the seat on to the floor with a fine, careless gesture before taking the wheel and accepting the compliment with a smile.

Dan Jones

There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob

If political reality means we can’t tax the overweight, then at least let’s have tax breaks for those who bother to take exercise, writes unashamed metrosexual Dan Jones Hands up if you employ a personal trainer. Actually, that’s a trick question. If you can raise your arm without wincing in pain then either you don’t have a personal trainer, or yours is letting you slack off. (Get a new one.) For those of you with your arms pinned to the sides of your bodies from the sheer build-up of lactic acid — ask your trainer — well done. A few years ago your friends might have sneered at you and called you a metrosex-ual.

Bryan Forbes

Three women showed me how bad things have got

Over the last week I have been pondering the lives of three totally different women. The first was our dim, weasel-worded Home Secretary, adept at letting others fall on their sword but unwilling to follow suit. Second, the late Jade Goody with her sad, manufactured martyrdom, and last a hard-working NHS doctor responsible for the operation of a large A&E department. In recent television programmes all three revealed different aspects of our fractured society and, more and more, I found myself becoming ‘as mad as hell’, like the character in Chayefsky’s film Network. Jacqui Smith, inexplicably holder of one of the great offices of state, has proved herself totally incapable of admitting that she is truly shamed by her greed.

Saturday

Guido Fawkes

A Blogger’s Notebook

Having sat patiently on a barrel of digital dynamite for months — the emails from Gordon Brown’s chief spin doctor Damian McBride to Mandelson’s protégé Derek Draper, suggesting Tory smear stories — I light the fuse on Andrew Neil’s BBC Daily Politics show. In an unedifying squabble, I succeed in stitching up the once again infamous Draper on live TV, forcing him to deny that he takes briefings from McBride. Viewers at home may be baffled as to why I am determined to talk about Draper’s relationship with McBride. They may also be bemused by my unflattering Berkeley University T-shirt. The reason for this is to wind up Draper even more: Berkeley featured on his CV, despite him not graduating from that institution.