Features

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.

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.