Features

Saturday

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.

David Davis

A few thoughts on the apocalypse

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.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

If we are going to ban nasty foreigners, can we at least be consistent about it?

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.

Tim Walker

‘I was asked if I would wear Nicole Kidman’s breasts’

Geraldine James, recently notorious as the breast-feeding mother in Little Britain, talks to Tim Walker about her role in Howard Barker’s Victory Geraldine James’s agent telephoned one day and asked if she would care to play an over-protective mother. And he added there was something that she ought to know: it involved breast-feeding and, ah yes, the recipient would be a man in his thirties. The distinguished stage and screen actress has always liked surprising people and that was why, after she had seen the script, she agreed to appear in the ‘Bitty’ sketches in Little Britain — although not, she hastens to add, with her own breasts.

Quentin Willson

I have felt the unlikely zeal of the football convert

Quentin Willson goes to his first ever football match expecting to end up in A&E — and leaves a misty-eyed evangelist for a sport he now feels is grotesquely misrepresented There’s no easy way to confess this. You are the first people I’ve told. Until very recently I’d never, ever, been to a football match. For an alpha male this is a fairly damning admission I know, but I just never fancied all that shouting, that atavistic male tribalism. For me, football’s worst advertisement, like Christianity’s, was always its devotees.

Wednesday

Carol Sarler

There is no dignity in this Alzheimer’s parade

In the week that John Suchet made his wife’s dementia public, Carol Sarler questions this revelatory trend. Is it really what the sufferers would have wanted? Her end, when it came, was beyond ghastly. Iris Murdoch, one of our doughtier literary intellects, was reduced to screaming, drooling delirium at one end of her frail body and to defecation without any sense of suitable time or place at the other. All of this we know because, exactly 10 years ago, her husband told us, when he wrote of ‘the lady whom I sat on the loo this morning, wiped her bottom and scrubbed her hands and her brown fingernails’.

Ross Clark

Want a big bonus? Get yourself a public sector job

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling rail against bankers’ bonuses. But, says Ross Clark, the really appetising salaries, perks, expense packages and pensions are to be found in the public sector. A terrible reckoning lies ahead for the last fat cats Imagine for a moment that you are a banker in one of the bailed-out banks. You have seen a few of your colleagues disappear into the lift with a bin bag and every time you wander past a pub you have had to endure the thought that there may be drinkers inside demanding you be sentenced to cruel and more unusual punishments. Yet, for all the angst of the past year, you may be just beginning to wonder: will life in the public sector really be so bad after all?

Saturday

David Blackburn

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – ‘The era of American dominance is over’

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”.