Features

It is hard for me not to like James Lovelock. South London grammar-school boy, walker, mountain climber, scientist and admirer of Margaret Thatcher: what is not to like? But as the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, he is arguably one of the most influential and provocative radical thinkers of the last 50 years. Forty years ago he thought up the Gaia concept, and was attacked for what people misguidedly saw as a mystical idea, when it was a very scientific concept. He was described as a maverick, which he probably took as a compliment. He is doing it again, with his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia (Allen Lane, £20). In it he predicts that it is too late to reverse climate change. Worse, it is approaching a tipping-point, and will soon accelerate with cataclysmic consequences.

Rod Liddle parodies the nonsense that is the government’s approach to foreign visitors with unpleasant messages. It makes no sense to ban a critic of Islam but let in every homophobe with a passport Perhaps we should not let anyone into our lovely country, for fear of the mischief they might cause. Almost all foreigners I have met have been devious and malevolent, eaten up with jealousy about what it is to be British, none too bright and with filthy table manners. You would not leave them alone with your wife for ten minutes. Nor, indeed, with your children. A complete ban on these vile people would spare us a lot of moral wrangling over which of them should be allowed in and which condemned to remain in their overheated, squalid and dusty little redoubts.

There were few facts and plenty of fictions last night as Intelligence Squared debated whether the era of American dominance is over. Oliver Kamm, journalist and author, proposed the motion. He strode about the stage Cameron-style, with the sound bites to match. “America was on the wane because Americans had lost the appetite to lead.” US dominance rested on guaranteeing “public goods: international trade, currency reserves and collective security.” His vision of American decline owed nothing to the “tendentious deterministic theories of the milieu of anti-American Oxbridge educated Europhiles, such as Michael Moore and Harold Pinter”, (neither of who went to Oxbridge). Rather, Kamm’s vision was “rooted in indisputable facts”.

‘Well, I’ve got the lads an espresso machine — after all, none of us can afford coke anymore, how else are we going to stay awake?’ It was nice to hear that one City banker was putting his hand in his pocket and looking after his troops — they may not be getting bonuses, but at least his team were guaranteed a decent coffee. But even this little luxury may have to be confiscated. It simply doesn’t blend in with the new puritanical City landscape, where the amount of milk available in the canteen and what it can be used for is heavily restricted. Inter-dealer brokers — who spend their time schmoozing traders — are distraught.

By the time you read this I will have turned 40. Forty. Up until a few days ago, 40 was just a number, plain and simple — the sort of number that followed 39 and preceded 41; the sort of number that bands from Birmingham placed after the letters ‘UB’ before recording a few reggae-based songs; the sort of number that was occasionally mentioned on the Shipping Forecast, just before Cromarty, just after Viking and Dogger. My friends had emailed or called with concern, never quite broaching the subject directly, always skirting, dancing around the inevitability of my ageing, the ‘night follows day’ reliability of my mutability. I found myself quoting Wilde, when he suggested that youth was wasted on the young. (I was too wasted when I was young to enjoy my youth.

The Corporation has performed admirably during the conflict, says Rod Liddle. It is to Mark Thompson’s credit that he did not cave in to pressure on all sides to air the charity appeal Forgive me for turning into Dr Pangloss all of a sudden, but doesn’t the furore created over the BBC’s decision not to run the film begging for charitable donations for Gaza sort of justify its original decision, at least in part? The most voluble protestors have been drawn, in the main, from the anti-Israeli far left. On the radio phone-in shows the many callers demanding the BBC reverse its decision almost always gave the game away by screeching, at some point, ‘Genocide!’ and ‘Zionist oppressors!’, sort of involuntarily, rather in the manner of Dr Strangelove.