Features

Wednesday

Erica Grieder

Bush’s object lesson in gracious departure

In 2001, soon after George W. Bush’s inauguration, a bit of gossip surfaced from the White House: outgoing Clinton staffers had crept around the place taking the Ws off keyboards, phone wires had been snipped, furniture broken, glue placed on desk drawers and satirical signs hung up directing people to the ‘Office of Strategery’. Not bad as pranks go, but the country was not in the mood for laughing. The Bush presidency was already on the back foot after a botched election and protracted court battle. There was anger and resentment all around even though everyone’s official stance was grace, optimism and moving forward. The plundered Ws struck Republicans as a grave insult to the dignity of the office. The new White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was solemn.

David Tang

Heed the Chinese ghosts of Morecambe Bay

‘Since Dad went to work in England, Mum and I have been missing him all the time. Dad isn’t young anymore and he’s alone in a foreign country. It’s all because of me. What an unworthy daughter I am! Dad wants me to go to university and have a good life. He’s making money for me. We haven’t been in a photo together for five years. That’s how long he’s been gone. When the families have reunited over the New Year, we have only sorrow, and worries for Dad.’ This was written by a 17-year-old girl in China at the last Chinese New Year. A year later, nothing has changed. Her dad is still away and there is still no photo.

Ross Clark

Savers are Britain’s new underclass

While my remaining bank shares were plummeting last week I bought a copy of Socialist Worker to try to cheer myself up. At least somebody must be enjoying themselves, I reasoned, as I sat down to enjoy what I thought would be red-blooded demands for insurrection and the public execution of Sir Fred Goodwin. I cannot say how disappointed I was. I might just quote this less than revolutionary sentence from a leader: At the very least, the government could insist on an end to the threat of repossession and debt collectors. Doing so would mean we would get something in return for billions of pounds of our money. Could this be right: the vanguard of socialist thought demanding government support for the petty bourgeois in their struggle to keep up the mortgage repayments on their buy-to-lets?

Justin Cartwright

My memories of the American Dostoevsky

Justin Cartwright recalls his conversations over the years with John Updike, who died this week, and the master’s contention that the only excuse for reading is to steal I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone, because he was for me the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming and witty man. But above all he had a very rare quality in writing — absolute integrity. He never jumped on bandwagons, he never wrote down or pretentiously, he never pulled his punches, he never renounced his patriotism or his religious faith, as he applied himself diligently and sympathetically to his depiction of America in his time.

Fraser Nelson

The disgrace of the Lords is a parable for the end of New Labour

Fraser Nelson says that the ‘cash for amendments’ scandal dramatises the accelerating decay of the Brown regime — economic, political, constitutional. A saga that began in 1997 with grand promises of reform is entering its last bleak phase Even at the ripe old age of 79, Lord Taylor of Blackburn knows how to strike a bargain. ‘Some companies that I work with will pay me £100,000 a year,’ he told the undercover reporter posing as a lobbyist. ‘That’s cheap for what I do for them.’ What he claimed to do for them was help mould the law of the land for a fee — all, he later insisted, following the rules. And thus the final curse descended on Gordon Brown.

Joan Collins

Obama Notebook

As Obama-mania engulfs America, I feel that I’m living in the middle of a historical bubble. As Obama-mania engulfs America, I feel that I’m living in the middle of a historical bubble. The palpable excitement that began two months ago, when Obama was elected president, has grown into a great thumping worldwide lovefest. I have never seen such immense pride in a new president. His every move and those of his wife and kids is chronicled, yet amazingly he hasn’t (yet) apparently put a foot wrong, even when snapped chomping on a chilli-dog in a diner. Obama is awe-inspiring. On his train trip from Chicago to Washington, he descended at many stops to speak confidently and eruditely, as he always does, and every speech was different.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Brown hasn’t got much left to throw at the market

The Prime Minister’s latest measures to shore up the banking sector will not be his last, says Martin Vander Weyer. But the market is losing patience with the government’s interventions There is a passage in The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell’s novel about the Indian Mutiny, in which the defenders of the British residency, having exhausted conventional munitions, load their remaining cannon with anything sharp-edged that comes to hand. In a scene of surreal carnage, a last wave of mutinous sepoys are then mown down by a volley of fish knives, sugar tongs and marble fragments chipped from an allegorical statue called ‘The Spirit of Science’ — which had hitherto symbolised the senior British officers’ attachment to rationalism.

Douglas Davis

The terrible warning of a Holocaust survivor

At my dinner table on Friday night, a holocaust survivor admits that she is trying to persuade her son to take his family out of Europe to America, Canada, Australia, Canada, Australia, Israel...’They say they can’t leave me, but I tell them: “Go, get out. My parents left my grandparents behind in Berlin and brought me to safety in England. Now I want you to leave so that my grandchildren will be safe.”’ There is an unbearable desperation in her plea. But she has a point. As tens of thousands of demonstrators march through the streets of Europe, the chants are modified but the message remains substantially intact: ‘Hamas, Hamas, Hamas — Jews to the Gas’. Or, more simply: ‘Death to the Jews’.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 24 January 2009

We should always try to see ourselves as others see us, but not when the others are French. They are so biased against us that they can see nothing clearly: their animus obscures their view and makes it worthless. This was proved to me yet again when I arrived in Paris recently. I always stay in the same hotel in that city, where I have developed my little habits. In the morning, I go out and buy Le Monde, which I read at breakfast in the same cafe. This particular morning, Le Monde carried a short commentary on the economic situation of Britain. The satirical rogue who wrote it claimed that the fall in the value of the pound — 17 per cent against the euro in two months — was well justified by the economic situation of our tight little island.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The BBC can’t help loving Obama, just as it can’t help encouraging recession

Rod Liddle says that television news is intrinsically biased: it transforms what it reports. In the case of the economy, ministers are right to counteract this with a dose of optimism Excuse me for a moment; it’s all become a little too much for me and I need to sit down somewhere quiet, take a few deep breaths and dry my eyes. I feel all choked up inside. He came down for us, to wash away our sins. Sorry, sorry – forgive me, I’ve been watching the BBC’s coverage of Barack Obama’s coronation, live from Washington. It’s a sort of cross between Princess Diana’s funeral and Live Aid Concert, except happier and the black people aren’t covered in flies.

Olivia Cole

Meet the new eco-toffs: Champagne Swampies

Olivia Cole says that the row over Heathrow’s third runway has revealed that despite the credit crunch there is a resilient class of celebrities and toffs with expensive green tastes Do you remember Champagne Socialists? Well, there’s a new version of that old clique, with the same curious mix of self-importance and self-indulgence but with a 21st-century green agenda. I call them Champagne Swampies. Swampy was the environmental protestor who became a cult figure in the mid-1990s, huddled in a tunnel by the proposed Newbury bypass, never washing his hair. His 2009 variants, the Champagne Swampies, share his concern for the environment, and they’re out in force at the moment protesting about the proposal for a third runway at Heathrow.

Fraser Nelson

‘I read about my promotion in the Sun’

When I met Chris Grayling last week, he was about the only member of the shadow cabinet who looked relaxed rather than as though he was nervously awaiting news of the reshuffle. His work on welfare reform had been hailed widely enough for him to feel secure. ‘I’d like to stay in this department. I’m enjoying this job,’ said the then shadow work and pensions secretary. ‘Of course, the job you do is always at the whim of the party leader. Should David Cameron phone up tomorrow and say, “Right, you’re doing something else” — then fine.’ A few days later, Mr Cameron did precisely this. So it is a slightly stunned Mr Grayling whom I meet again just after he has been promoted to shadow home secretary.

James Forsyth

The new battle in British politics is how to be most like Obama

James Forsyth says that both Brown and Cameron are mesmerised by the new President, who will be the lodestar of political life in this country. The contest to lay claim to his policies and style has begun — the risk being that our leaders are found sorely wanting by comparison David Cameron and Gordon Brown would not be human if they had not felt a little jealous on Tuesday night. They will never give a speech like Barack Obama or draw a crowd as big as his. To rub salt in the wound, Obama had just achieved — without knowing it — what they have spent their adult lives trying to do: he had reorientated British politics. Obama is the new lodestar of our politics.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

If fat people can’t adopt, who’s to say that drinkers or blacks won’t be next?

Should blacks be allowed to adopt healthy children? Or should they be kept as an emergency reservoir of care for the damaged or ill children nobody else wants? It is time we got a little more rigorous about who we allow to adopt the kiddies, don’t you think? Black people are slightly less likely, on average, to abuse their children sexually than are white people — however, that’s pretty much their only plus point. They are slightly less likely to stay together as parents and disproportionately more likely to have been involved in some form of crime. Black fathers will be less well-educated, on average, than their white counterparts and black families are more likely to be wallowing in the lowest income quartile. None of these indicators bodes well for the adopted child.

James Forsyth

You think Abraham Lincoln had it tough?

James Forsyth says that Barack Obama will need all his remarkable talents to confront an extraordinary set of challenges — not only the economy, but global security Short of wearing a stove-pipe hat, Obama could not make his desire to be compared to Abraham Lincoln any more obvious. He plans to travel to his inauguration via the same route that Lincoln did, be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible and eat lunch off replicas of the Lincolns’ White House china. Michelle and the girls must have wondered if he was going to change their name when he took them to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday night. Obama has set a high bar for himself; comparisons with America’s greatest president are rarely favourable to an incumbent.

Con Coughlin

Don’t misunderestimate Bush’s record

Oh, the fun we’ve had. Not since the Reverend William Spooner dumbfounded Oxford undergraduates have we been so entertained by the garbled syntax and grammatical infelicities that have been one of the more diverting features of the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. ‘Tell me, was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?’, a question Spooner asked a former student after the first world war, could just have easily been posed by Dubya to an American soldier fresh back from fighting on one of the many front lines in the war on terror. The debate over the achievements and failings of the eight-year presidency of George W.

Wednesday

Salil Tripathi

If Rushdie deserves free speech, why not Harry?

Salil Tripathi says that the Prince’s remarks were ill chosen and regrettable but the deeper principle concerns freedom of expression and ever greater encroachments upon it First Prince Harry, and then his father, Prince Charles, discovered that last week was their septimana horribilis and that they had both made the kind of gaffes for which the Duke of Edinburgh has gained notoriety. First, a three-year-old home video surfaced in which Harry called a Pakistani cadet ‘our little Paki friend’. And then it was discovered that the heir to the throne routinely calls a polo-playing Asian friend ‘Sooty’.

James Delingpole

I have seen your future, America, and it doesn’t work

On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, James Delingpole says that the President-elect is horribly reminiscent of Tony Blair in 1997. He may be a fantastic guy, and look great, but he will bring a ragbag of scuzzballs, communists and eco-loons to power with him No matter how excited you may be about Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday, I bet you’re not as pleased as I am. Never have I wished more devoutly for a presidential victory than the one won by this mighty intellect-cum-healer-cum-fashion-model-cum-general-all-round-Messiah — a man so conscious of his own merit that, unlike any president before him, he plans to swear his inaugural oath on the Lincoln bible.

Saturday

Douglas Davis

Moderate Arab states need Israel to succeed

Pity the international diplomats. Hardly back from their Christmas break, they were plunged into yet another dizzying round of declamations and démarches over a fresh bout of Israeli misbehaviour, this time in Gaza. By midweek, diplomacy had achieved a partial success when Israel agreed to a daily pause for the distribution of humanitarian supplies. But it was not yet ready to end the war-fighting. Crocodiles apart, few would have shed tears for Hamas. All the parties understand that the outcome of the conflict could reverberate far beyond Gaza, with implications for the stability of the entire region.

Theodore Dalrymple

Withdrawal from heroin is a trivial matter

We live in Keynesian times: the answer to the economic problems created by a mountain of debt frittered away on trifles is clearly a whole mountain range of debt frittered away on trifles. In the circumstances it is good to know that a judge has done his bit to stimulate the general improvidence — sorry, the British economy. He has awarded £11,000 each to three prisoners in Winchester Prison who underwent withdrawal from heroin without benefit of further doses of heroin or of methadone and other heroin substitutes. It was against their human rights, he said. This is indeed odd. It is doubtful whether anyone ever dies from withdrawal of opiates alone.