Features

Saturday

Tristram Hunt

Eat, drink and be communist

In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’ This was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.

Rod Liddle

Stop being sanctimonious about the McBride emails. Make your own minds up

There’s a UK-based internet site called Urban Dictionary and I’m lucky enough to warrant an entry on it. The text reads as follows: ‘Rod Liddle — an odious, untalented, bigoted, low-level Sunday Times journalist who engages in buggery with Nazis such as Nick Griffin.’ Or at least that’s some of it. Incredible, don’t you think? — all lies. Or mostly lies — God knows how they found out about the Nick Griffin stuff. Maybe Nick told them, hoping it would boost the profile of the BNP somehow. There’s some more stuff about how I don’t like the football team Crystal Palace, which makes me think it was written by a desolate, acne-ridden, suburban cybernerd who is himself a supporter of Surrey’s only league side.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The McBride affair is a portent of the coming struggle for Labour’s soul

One can only imagine what went through Alistair Darling’s mind last weekend, as the scale of the McBride affair became evident. In his Budget next Wednesday, the Chancellor faces a political mission which was already next to impossible before the email story broke. Now his task has become downright laughable in its scale. To produce a budget with the economy in freefall is hard enough. But to do so with the government disintegrating all around you is scarcely worth attempting. In theory, Damian McBride’s resignation was simply the departure of a spin doctor, already relegated to a ‘back-room’ role. But nobody with the slightest knowledge of the Brown court believes that for a second. This is a moment of deadly, perhaps terminal, peril for the Labour government.

Saturday

Charles Clover

A granny in the front line against New Labour

Elizabeth Pascoe, a granny in her sixties with a fondness for pink cardigans, is an unlikely heroine, but she is one to me. For when Liverpool city council and a government agency told her, four years ago, that they wanted to compulsorily purchase and demolish her fine Victorian home in the Edge Lane area for no particularly good reason, Ms Pascoe chose to fight. Sitting in her cardigan, surrounded by piles of paper, Elizabeth fought two public inquiries and two high court actions against compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), which are the battering ram of the Pathfinder regeneration schemes, the 1960s-style urban clearances reinvented by John Prescott. These still, astonishingly, grind on all over the Midlands and the North, consuming billions of public money.

Harry Mount

I half expected to see Welles run towards me

Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie Vienna Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said the polite young man behind the counter in perfect English, when I came along in the morning to see if there were any tickets for the 10.45 p.m. show on Friday night. ‘We sometimes get tour parties and the place is packed out.’ I needn’t have booked after all.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

The C of E has forgotten its purpose. Why, exactly, does it exist?

What did you give up for Lent? I gave up chives again. Forty-five days of deprivation. According to the ecclesiastical calendar I am allowed my first chive on Saturday — but do you know what? I’m going to say no. My willpower has become a marvel to myself; I’m saying no to chives all the way through to May. I might have one then, and then again, I might not. The power of my faith enables me to crush utterly any bodily craving for chives. I am on a spiritual plane beyond such temptations, although this does not stretch to other members of the alliaceae family, i.e. onions. I have had onions. Lent is another of those things which is not what it used to be. It lacks the rigour of, say, Ramadan.

Alexandra Starr

In New York, pregnancy is a form of tyranny

Even Sylvia Plath (though usually pretty downbeat about life) viewed pregnancy as an exalted state. In her diary she characterised gestation as ‘the Great Experience a [woman’s] body is formed to partake of, to nourish’, while in her poem ‘Morning Song’ she celebrated feeling ‘cow heavy and floral’. Bringing children into the world clearly fulfilled a profound need for Plath. But I suspect that even she would have felt differently about the joys of maternity had she experienced it not in London in the early 1960s, but in Manhattan circa 2009. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The real scandal is that we always, always end up paying

The Jacqui Smith case and the grotesque sight of her husband apologising for watching porn films at the taxpayer’s expense are just the latest symptoms of a well-advanced political disease, says Rod Liddle. They take the voters for a bunch of mugs At last the politicians have done the decent thing and called in the police over an issue which has enraged and outraged the public these last six months or so: the leaking of MPs’ expenses details to the press. One hopes that there will be a prosecution soon. Like you, I have been appalled at the regularity with which these selfless public servants have seen their privacy transgressed and have demanded something be done about it.

Victoria Floethe

How I became the ‘femme fatale’ of New York gossip

Several weeks ago I was awakened by a phone call from a man who, speaking in a loud and excited voice, demanded to know the fine details of my personal life. Was I in a relationship with the Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff — and under what circumstances? Who had introduced us? Who had I seen in the past? Where did I work? How much was I paid? He was, I gathered before I hung up, a man with a website. More puzzled than rattled by his aggressiveness and seeming rancour, I googled his site and, as I sat there, saw my name appear and myself go from a girl with no reputation in the city to a girl who, as my mother in Atlanta would soon point out, had lost her reputation.

Tom Leonard

What I heard at J.D. Salinger’s doorstep

J.D. Salinger is in the kitchen when I turn the corner of his farmhouse, his reported deafness probably explaining why he doesn’t hear me until I am a few feet from him and ringing the doorbell. His wife correctly guesses the identity of the caller and, apprised of the information out of my hearing, the author shouts something that sounds like ‘Oh, no!’ It may be succinct but it is the most he has said to the media for years. A tall but stooped figure in a blue tanktop, Salinger won’t even look at me as he sidles crab-like out of his small kitchen with his back to the window. His wife soon appears at the same window and opens it to talk, but the great man — who was 90 in January — has gone.

Daniel Hannan

Brussels Notebook

It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. It’s dawning on me that the Prime Minister can’t listen to criticism. I don’t just mean that he can’t respond to criticism; I mean that he literally can’t listen to it. When he came to the European Parliament to drum up support for his spending plans, I made a three-minute speech in favour of balanced budgets. As I talked, he pulled his face into what I think was meant to be a disdainful smirk, then ostentatiously chatted to his officials, then pretended to doodle on a piece of paper. I’ve never doubted Gordon Brown’s convictions: he seems genuinely actuated by a desire to help the poor.

Interconnect

Our society must be equal to the threats ahead

There seems to have been a view developing in recent years that defines peace simply as the absence of war. If only we can avoid armed conflict, the argument seems to say, then we will live in a more peaceful world. But peace is not simply the absence of war. Real peace is accompanied by an unavoidable set of values. Freedom from tyranny, freedom from oppression and freedom from fear are essential for real peace, and unfortunately we sometimes have to fight and even to die to defend these freedoms. This is where our social attitudes, our political direction and our national security converge — in the crucial question about the state of our national resilience.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The response to Jade’s death reminded me how puzzled I was by Diana mania

It was a badly timed death, a departure which, ironically, scorned the important press deadlines. The best time to die, if you are a celebrity, is at three o’clock in the afternoon of a weekday — in time for the early evening news bulletins and the next morning’s papers. This, however, was a Saturday into a Sunday, a time when even Christ might have died and there’d be nobody sentient around to pick up the story. I was a bit drunk, having spent the evening out drinking with my then girlfriend and a bunch of friends whose names I cannot subsequently recall. Temporary drink friends, I suppose. There had been loads of drink, gallons of the stuff, enough units to make the present chief medical officer Liam Donaldson suffer a sudden and possibly fatal embolism.

Michael Portillo

Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history

‘The past is the past. It is no longer important,’ says Brigadier Billal Saleh Shukur, commander of Iraq’s 21st army brigade now occupying a part of Basra. We have met on a warm March day at the airbase outside the city, at the start of a five-a-side football tournament between teams drawn from the Iraqi and British forces. I had expressed my profound regret that the American-British Coalition, which rightly reveres every one of its own casualties, has always refused to count how many Iraqi citizens have been killed in six years of violence; and indeed has invested considerable effort in discrediting any human rights organisation that estimated the death toll.

Mary Wakefield

Meet Gordon’s Pet Shop persecutors

Mary Wakefield meets the successful pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, and finds them eloquent critics of New Labour, staunch defenders of civil liberties — and fans of Vince Cable Through the woods, the trees And further on the sea We lived in the shadow of the war Sand in the sandwiches Wasps in the tea It was a free country In a West End town in a dead end world — OK, no: in a nice Georgian townhouse in central London, on the top floor where once boot boys bedded down, the Pet Shop Boys are revisiting their past. ‘The Britain of my childhood?’ Neil Tennant, the singing half of the most successful pop duo of all time reclines on a chaise longue and thinks his way back to North Shields (near Newcastle) in the late Fifties.

John Cleese

The real reason I had to join The Spectator

Over the past four decades I have received many reviews in The Spectator, all of them mixed (in the technical theatrical sense of ‘extremely bad’). For example, in 1976 The Spectator wrote about Fawlty Towers: I’ve been bellyaching, ever since I started writing this column, about the low standard of the programmes. I have been told by friends and acquaintances, ‘Ah! But have you seen Fawlty Towers? You’ll enjoy that!’... Well, last Sunday I finally watched the bally thing and I am gratified to report that I didn’t laugh once. What is more I found Fawlty Towers, like its predecessor Monty Python, rather nasty... When Cleese is involved I detect traces of sadism.

Matthew Dancona

‘In a global era, we need our roots more than ever’

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means ‘The problems will arise if you cannot say to a young person that there’s going to be a job after the training. We’ve got to make sure that we never return to the 1980s, when young people lost hope of ever getting jobs, and you had three-generation unemployment that created a situation where many people did become unemployable.

Saturday

Rory Sutherland

Leave capitalism to the Chinese and relax

Venetia Thompson and Rory Sutherland say that the era in which all graduates want to work in the financial sector is at a close: a splendid time to rebrand inactivity as ‘travel’ University careers fairs have always been a complete waste of time. In the old days students came away armed with nothing more than ABN-Amro highlighters and miniature alarm clocks (probably now collectable), some unusable minute RBS Post-it notes, and perhaps the odd snow-shaker. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and their cohorts quickly ran out of all paraphernalia — but no matter because everyone wanted to be a banker anyway.

Mary Wakefield

‘Those who’ve suffered least compromise least’

Mary Wakefield takes a postwar tour through Gaza and surveys a psychological landscape warped by conflict and suffering — and hear whispers of a further Israeli incursion The border control at Erez, separating Israel from Gaza, was built in a happier age. It looks more like an airport than a checkpoint, a vast glass hangar designed with streams of Palestinian commuters in mind. Only a handful have made it through in the two years since Hamas took over. Now, two months after Israel’s 22-day war (Operation Cast Lead), there’s barely a soul in sight. One vicar outside, perspiring in the car park; one girl soldier inside checking passports. After that, just an eerie unmanned security process. Wait. Proceed to a steel holding pen. Wait.

Rod Liddle

The smoking ban was always going to be the thin end of the wedge

Rod Liddle is appalled by Sir Liam Donaldson’s deployment of statistics in the hope of making it harder to have a drink. A surrealist would struggle to keep up with such campaigns against our human pleasures Iatrogenesis accounts for the deaths of an estimated 72,000 British people every year — or slightly more than the combined numbers of those feckless people dying from smoking, drinking and being very fat. I suppose you could call it the silent killer; there are no government campaigns to educate the public about its lethality. When lists are published showing the top killer diseases it is never present, although it is the third most common cause of death.