Features

Saturday

David Cameron

It is not enough for Labour to lose this election

‘Sit back, keep quiet, let the government unravel and you will be in Number 10.’ If I had a pound for every time these words of advice have been uttered to me over the last year or so, I’d be able to make a sizeable contribution towards easing the pain of Labour’s debt crisis. But the advice — however well meaning — is plain wrong. The election is far from won and I still hold to the belief that governments don’t just lose elections; oppositions must deserve to win them with a positive mandate for change. And there is one central idea which shows clearly that we are not sitting back waiting for Labour to lose, nor backing off the changes that have been instrumental in the Conservative revival of recent years.

Ross Clark

The G20 summit is lousy value for money. Cancel it

Ross Clark looks ahead to Gordon Brown’s summit at which he will try to revive his own political fortunes, found a new global economic order and stage a Bretton Woods for our times. No chance: the whole thing is an expensive sham It is difficult to look at the photographs of the world’s finance ministers, bank chiefs and assorted hangers-on assembled at a hotel in West Sussex last weekend without thinking of those old BT ads with the slogan, ‘Why not change the way we work?’ Has anything come out of the meeting of G20 finance minsters in Horsham, or will come out of the follow-up heads-of-government summit in Docklands on 2 April, which could not have been achieved by phone, email or video-conference?

Saturday

Guy Wilkinson

Church of England Inter-Faith Relations

Guy Wilkinson responds to Melanie Philips' recent article in The Spectator We have seen in recent days in Northern Ireland just how deep antagonisms go and how long their poisonous roots remain in the ground, ready to spring to life like nettles to sting. And to continue the metaphor, we have seen in Luton how some kinds of words can be the means by which such roots are strengthened and enabled to spread. Anything that matters deeply to people – religion, politics, football, patriotism – gives rise to passion and to passionate words. And passionate words can make for good or for ill, for peace or for violence.

David Blackburn

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared event report – ‘Afghanistan: the future’

Yesterday’s Intelligence Squared / Spectator event was a discussion, rather than the usual debate. There was no motion, and panellists presented possible outcomes. Matthew Parris was mischievous, rejecting all analyses except that “Afghanistan is not Britain’s fight”. What was this “nearly third rate power doing there”? Fighting a war “we can’t afford” against a “cultural and religious identity we don’t understand is mad”. Britain was not fighting at the Afghans’ invitation. “Imagine the card: The Afghan people request and require your presence for a limited military occupation.

Olivia Cole

How to put the nation’s pupils off great art for ever

‘Bathers at Asnières’ is a dreamily double-edged impressionist painting: an idyll as tricksy as the tiny dots, instead of brushstrokes, that Seurat used to paint. Young Parisian workers are stretched out like cats in the sun, or swimming in water so cool that you can almost feel it, and yet in the background the chimneys puff away, calling them back to work. At the National Gallery the other day, I overheard an official gallery guide addressing a heap of near-comatose teenagers: ‘This is a very large painting,’ she said, ‘and it was painted about 100 years ago.

Rod Liddle

Julie and Jonathan Myerson personify the worst generation in history

This family’s very public angst is all about making cash, says Rod Liddle. And the parents were not showing ‘tough love’ when they kicked out their son, but washing their hands of a problem Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime juice minus gin, Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin. — John Betjeman, ‘Huxley Hall’ It’s the perpetual adolescent in me, I suppose, but I’ve always rather had a thing for public enemies — people whom the entire British public wish to see flayed alive, hanged or deported.

Jon Boone

Nato has serious supply problems in Afghanistan

Kabul Every morning, on Kandahar Air Field, the British, US, Canadian and Dutch troops like to start the day with a cappuccino from Green Beans, the US army’s answer to Starbucks. But a few weeks ago the soldiers had a nasty shock: a sign on the Green Beans door saying there would be no frothy coffee for the lads because of a ‘supply problem’ in Pakistan. War is hell, isn’t it? But the sign wasn’t just bad news for coffee-loving squaddies, it also revealed the Achilles’ heel for the entire international mission in Afghanistan: Nato’s supply roots, which are being steadily throttled by the Taleban.

David Selbourne

Blairism has destroyed the Labour party

David Selbourne says that New Labour won elections but eradicated all that was good in the party’s traditions. The Cameroons should learn from this terrible lesson The Thirties taught us that conditions of slump are a mixed blessing for the Left. But in today’s Weimar-like social and economic conditions, and with Toryism a shadow of its former self, it remains surprising that New Labour is in poor political shape. Other European left and social democratic parties are in a similar pickle. Why? In Britain, it is not the fault of any single individual, not even Gordon Brown. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a systemic failure which old leftists would say vindicates Marx — a crisis of world capitalism itself.

Dean Godson

We are not ready for an escalation of violence in Ulster

Dean Godson says that this week’s murders have yielded impressive displays of cross-party unity. But they also draw attention to Northern Ireland’s vulnerability to terrorist attack, and the risks that were always inherent in the dismantling of the Province’s security structure ‘After they die, they will be forgotten, just as the policemen and soldiers who died are forgotten after a while, except by those who loved them.’ So said Florence Cobb, widow of RUC Inspector Harry Cobb, murdered in Lurgan by the Provisional IRA in 1977. I recalled those simple but powerful words when I heard that Constable Stephen Paul Carroll had been murdered by dissident Republicans on Monday night — just five miles away in Craigavon, Co. Armagh.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Keith Joseph’s lesson to today’s political pygmies

Thirty-five years ago Sir Keith Joseph was the first politician to provide a coherent response to the collapse of the postwar economic settlement. Our ruling elite continued to analyse the financial and social catastrophe of the mid-1970s in traditional terms. But Sir Keith — in an act of quite astonishing courage for a front-rank politician — departed from the orthodox. This meant that he was misrepresented, he was insulted, and in career terms he may have paid a heavy price. In those lonely speeches made in those now far-off times, Sir Keith Joseph invented a revolutionary new political economy. In doing so, he changed British history and saved us from stagnation and disaster.

James Forsyth

Obama could be a great ally to a prime minister — but not this one

Gordon Brown has absurdly high expectations of the political boost he will get from this week’s trip to Washington and the G20 summit in London next month, says James Forsyth. It is David Cameron who stands to be the likely beneficiary of the special relationship The ‘legacy’ might be an extremely touchy subject in Downing Street these days, but the speech reflected how Gordon Brown wanted history to remember him: a consequential prime minister who helped steer the world through one of its great crises. When the senators and congressmen rose to applaud him, all the ambitions that Brown has nursed throughout his political career must have seemed within reach.

Freddy Gray

A cigarette and a chat with Joe the Plumber

Freddy Gray meets Middle America’s radicals of the Right at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering that is both bonkers and vitally important to the Republican party In the basement of Washington D.C.’s Omni Shoreham hotel, a friendly young Korean–American is showing off his ‘Enoch Powell was right’ lapel pin. ‘People are like: “Oh, is that the British National Party?”’ he says. ‘And I’m, like, duh — it’s Enoch Powell.’ He is trying to recruit like-minded controversialists to protest against the EU on behalf of Geert Wilders. Nobody seems interested. ‘Come on ...Come on,’ he urges, as rivers of sweat slosh down his face.

Kate Williams

History isn’t just about bodice-ripping, you know

Kate Williams, author of a book on the young Victoria, welcomes the new film on the early life of the queen, but says historical cinema should portray politics as well as romance  ‘Utterly gorgeous’, declares the advertising for the new film The Young Victoria. Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the world’s souls, and saw the world change immeasurably during her 64-year reign. As a biographer of Victoria’s young life, I relished the film’s investigation of the power struggles of her marriage with Albert and her battle for self-determination. But the review quoted might refer to a dress, not a film about the life of our longest-reigning monarch.

Melanie Phillips

Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists

Last weekend the Revd Stephen Sizer, vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water appeared at an anti-Israel meeting with an Islamist called Ismail Patel. Patel has not only accused Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘war crimes’ but considers Disney to be a Jewish plot and supports Hamas, Iran and Syria. Sizer is a virulent opponent of Christian Zionism and of Israel, which he has said he hopes will disappear just as did the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has also applauded Iranian President Ahmadinejad for having ‘looked forward to the day when Zionism ceased to exist’. Nevertheless, the appearance of an Anglican churchman on a pro-Islamist platform in Britain is a new and significant development.

Saturday

Hardeep Singh-Kohli

The lesson of The Long Good Friday

On the 30th anniversary of the release of Britain’s best gangster movie, Hardeep Singh Kohli celebrates its eerie prescience ‘I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman with a sense of history... our country is not an island any more...’ Harold Shand; gangster, visionary and entrepreneur. For many, The Long Good Friday is the finest British gangster film ever made. Much as I concur with that recommendation, to describe it as merely a gangster movie is to be excessively reductive. When I first watched The Long Good Friday a couple of decades ago, I too loved it as a gangster movie; a film bristling with brutality, suffocatingly suspenseful and fulfilling all the criteria for excellent storytelling.

Fraser Nelson

They wish we all could be Californian: the new Tory plan

Once every fortnight or so, David Cameron’s chief strategist lands at San Francisco airport and returns to his own version of Paradise. Steve Hilton has spent just six months living in this self-imposed exile — but his friends joke that, inside his head, he has always been in California. Look at it this way: this is the place on Earth which fuses everything the Cameroons most like in life, where hard-headed businessmen drink fruit smoothies and walk around in recycled trainers. It is where a dynamic economy meets the family-friendly workplace. And it is here, to an extent that is greatly underestimated, that the Conservative government-in-waiting is looking to find a new blueprint for Britain.

Matthew Dancona

A son who inspired only goodness and love

Matthew d’Ancona reflects on the death of Ivan Cameron and the transformative impact this little boy had upon the man who will probably be our next Prime Minister When people ask me about David Cameron’s character, and what sort of man he is, I always cite a very clear memory I have of sitting in the Commons with him in late 2003. He had been tasked by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, to prepare the opposition’s response to the Hutton Report on the death of Dr David Kelly — a massive forensic undertaking, as well as a thorny political challenge. It was a mark of Howard’s confidence in the young man who was to be his successor that he assigned this task to him, and not to a Commons veteran.

Rod Liddle

Thirteen, Alfie? I’d almost given up on sex by the age of 13

Rod Liddle recalls his own childhood fumblings and says that the case of Alfie Patten proves nothing much has changed. If Britain is ‘broken’, it always was I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if Julie’s parents had somehow stumbled in. Or mine, for that matter. They would have had to peer pretty hard, the lights being so low. Probably their annoyance would have focused first, as so often, on the music: ‘Turn that bloody row off!’ A confected teen-pap trio called the Arrows, if I remember rightly, emanating from a Dansette, grinding out their only real hit: ‘I wanna touch too much of your sweet sweet loving...’ Well, yes indeed, precisely.

Tim Shipman

Why the CIA has to spy on Britain

On the night of the Mumbai attacks I spoke to an old security source of mine, who has friends in SIS, MI5 and defence intelligence. There was only one thought on the minds of our security chiefs that night: ‘Are they British?’ In the bar of the Travellers Club and the pubs and tapas restaurants of Vauxhall Bridge Cross, drink was taken in double and treble measures amid grim assumption that the terrorists would turn out to have links to the UK. It was a fair assumption since, where international terrorism is concerned, Britain is no longer part of the solution; we are part of the problem. Where once we exported football hooligans, now we are among the world’s most prolific suppliers of Islamist extremists.

James Delingpole

Liberals are the true heirs of the Nazi spirit

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a conservative’s wet dream. No, it’s better than that. The moment you read it — presuming you’re right-wing, that is — you will experience not only a rush of ecstasy, but also a surge of revolutionary fervour and evangelical zeal. You’ll want to email all your friends and tell them the wonderful news: ‘I’m not an evil bastard, after all!’ What Goldberg very effectively does is to remove from the charge sheet the one possible reason any thinking person could have for not wanting to be right-wing: viz, that being on the right automatically makes you a closet fascist/Nazi scumbag.