Features

Saturday

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.

Robert Gorelangton

Sellotape and string pants

More than ever in the UK, fuel bills now resemble school fees and so, despite the bitter cold, few of us can afford full-on 24-hour heating. But, driven by desperation, I’ve been researching the matter and have discovered several ways of surviving this miserable weather. Forget about replacement double glazing: it looks nasty and it doesn’t pay for itself until you are over 100. But if you don’t mind living in a house that shrieks ‘credit crunch’ to visitors, there are ways of keeping the cold out and the bills down. First attend to your windows: attach cling film with double-sided tape (try your local DIY shop) to your window frames. Apply a hair dryer to get it taut as a drum. It lasts one winter.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Onward Christian Zionists

It being the new year and all, I thought I’d introduce you to some new mentalists, just in case you’re getting bored with the old mentalists. These new ones are the people watching the disquieting events unfold in Gaza with what might properly be called rapture. I use the word ‘rapture’ advisedly. As in ‘for yea, the rapture cometh’. And those shells landing on Gaza are to be welcomed, of course, for they are bringing the day ever closer. There was a trip to Jerusalem last week undertaken by a bunch of British Christian evangelicals — by coincidence, just as the Israelis began lobbing rockets into Gaza. They hadn’t planned it like that, although retrospectively they may claim to have seen it.

Matt Ridley

The natural order of things

Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a ‘bottom-up’ place.

Saturday

Elliot Wilson

Let India 2.0 rise from the ashes of Bombay

Elliot Wilson says that an energetic form of political activism — principally on the internet — is needed in India and there are encouraging signs on Facebook, MySpace and other sites If there is any good to come out of November’s bloody terror attacks in Bombay, it can be found not on the city’s angry streets, nor in the Lok Sabha, New Delhi’s lethargic lower house, but in a more nebulous place, dismissed by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain but embraced by US President-elect Barack Obama: the internet.

Monday

Douglas Murray

Studying Islam has made me an atheist

Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since.

Michael Henderson

Pinter told me his favourite line from literature

Michael Henderson remembers the passion for cricket that underpinned his friend’s genius as a playwright, and an unforgettable day at Lord’s The public face of Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve after a long illness, was rather daunting. At the Edinburgh Book Festival a few years ago he acknowledged as much when he admitted that he could sometimes be ‘a pain in the arse’. But those who knew him well, or came across him occasionally, saw a different man: intolerant of imprecision, of course, but also warm, amusing, and — this may surprise those critics who never met him — capable of self-mockery. ‘I once flew into New York,’ he told me over one bibulous lunch. ‘JFK. I’d just been to Nicaragua and had my passport stamped.

Paul Wood

Operation ‘Go Nuts’ is a success so far — but for how long?

Paul Wood says that Israel’s ‘shock and awe’ in Gaza caught Hamas off-guard and was a ferocious demonstration of willpower. But the Islamist organisation is far from finished A couple of months ago in Gaza, I found myself sitting across a table from a young Palestinian woman who had volunteered to become a suicide bomber. Umm Anas was 18 years old and wearing a niqab which revealed only her large brown eyes. She was full of implacable hatred for Israel and impatient for the ceasefire to end. ‘This is a gift from God,’ she said, talking about the opportunity to kill herself and as many Israelis as possible. ‘We were created to become martyrs.’ She went on: ‘If we just throw stones at the Jews they get scared.