Features

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Mary Poppins’s carpet bag in Deptford

Alice looks down from her perch on top of the rocking horse, bright-eyed behind big specs, says: ‘Catch me!’ then propels herself into the air. I catch, hug, then prop her back up again, ready for another go. ‘Ooh, she likes you,’ says Iris, director of the 999 Club and uncrowned queen of Deptford. ‘She doesn’t normally take to people that quick.’ I am ridiculously, disproportionately happy. Alice has a squint, is five but looks three. I love her. So where’s her mum? I ask Iris. Why isn’t she here? ‘Oh, her mum!’ Iris snorts. ‘She spends all day online chatting. She ignores Alice — leaves her sitting on her own, so her gran brings her here most days.

James Forsyth

The faith of Obama: a secular messiah

This Christmas is the last occasion when Barack Obama will have time to reflect and think at his own pace for the next four, and probably eight, years. It offers him a brief gap between the crazed schedule of the campaign — last year he was campaigning on Boxing Day — and the pressures of the presidency. As Obama relaxes in his native Hawaii, he will be preparing for a job that will make the challenges of the campaign insignificant in comparison. After he takes the Oath of Office he will find himself in the unique position of being both the most powerful man on earth and at the mercy of events. Problems anywhere in the world will have a tendency to become his problem very quickly. Obama will be sworn in with his hand on the Bible.

Monday

Tom Stacey

We need the occasional war or economic collapse

Tom Stacey says that there is a part of man’s collective soul that yearns for tribulations like the financial crisis and the philosophical and spiritual questions they force us to confront Amid all the doom and gloom, do you ever get the feeling we had it coming? I do. During all those balmy years of ever-rising property values, non-stop invitations to borrow more, to get-now-and-pay-tomorrow, wasn’t there a little bird telling us it can’t go on like this? And now that it’s all come to a stop, does anyone else get a whiff of relief, almost gratitude, that the bubble’s burst, we’ve all come back to earth, terra jolly firma, albeit with quite a jolt?

David Blanchard

Reasons to be cheerful | 15 December 2008

It may feel like the end of the world, perhaps it is, but even so, it’s still the season of goodwill, good cheer and good news for mankind. It seemed right then for The Spectator to ask a selection of Britain’s great and good to shed a little light on these gloomy times, and tell us why, despite our broken society and the plummeting pound, we should keep our spirits up. Boris Johnson It was the great Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now who said, ‘Some day this war’s gonna end.’ And some day this recession is going to end too. Confidence is going to come surging back with all the biological inevitability of the new infatuation that follows a broken heart. In the meantime, there’s always bicycle hire schemes and bacon sandwiches.

Joan Collins

Christmas in L.A.

Christmas always comes early to Los Angeles. In fact, the slightly tacky decorations hit the lamp-posts even before Thanksgiving. But the really good thing about this time of year in this part of the world is the abundance of new movies being released. They proliferate both in the cinemas, in private screening rooms and in the ‘screeners’, the DVDs that the various studios send to members of the Academy hoping they will vote for them at Oscar time. I’m lucky enough to be one of the 5,000 acting members so I try to see as many of the movies as possible. Happily this year there are some excellent ones and a few great performances. Angelina Jolie in Changeling, James Brolin in W. and Javier Bardem in Che. But the performance that blew me away is Sean Penn in Milk.

Matthew Dancona

Best of British: breakfast with Lily Allen

Matthew d’Ancona talks to the quintessentially English pop star about growing up, her longing to have children, celebrity culture, US politics and her new album I am sitting opposite a demure young Englishwoman, sipping on jasmine tea, who would like nothing more, she says, than to settle down and have children. Young people and their parties interest her less and less. She likes the company of older friends now, and more sophisticated conversation. She shows me her elegant new Smythson notepaper, and discusses US politics, academic life and her plan to take her mother to Jamaica for Christmas. In person, she looks more like a Jane Austen heroine than a party queen. Meet Lily Allen.

Murphy O'Connor

A season to relish language deeper than words

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor says that the heart of the Christian story is the word made flesh. Christ’s language is sacrificial love which took him to the cross One of my favourite accounts of a happy childhood is told by Laurie Lee in his delightful book Cider with Rosie. Early on, he describes his first day at school. As a new boy in the playground for the first time, he was nervous and frightened of the noise, the size and the numbers of his fellow pupils. Going into the classroom, the teacher was busy with the other pupils. She told him to ‘sit down there for the present’. The young Laurie duly obeyed and sat down quietly in his place. When he got home he was obviously upset and disappointed. His mother asked him whether he liked the school.

Emily Maitlis

I blame Jonathan Ross for all my troubles

Emily Maitlis looks back on her worst moments in 2008, the anxiety she has caused her fans and her part in a ‘YouTube classic’ Looking back, I suppose you could say the low point of 2008 was when I accused the Chief Rabbi of leaving lewd and abusive messages on people’s answerphones. That’s the trouble with live TV. You think you’re saying one thing and you end up saying quite another. I was talking to the Conservative MP John Whittingdale on the BBC News Channel about the Jonathan Ross/Andrew Sachs affair, when all of a sudden I found — by way of the speed reader’s elision — I had put those now infamous remarks into the mouth of a certain (Sir) Jonathan Sacks. I haven’t heard from the Chief Rabbi.

Rod Liddle

Come with me to Santa’s grotto to discover the state we’re in

Rod Liddle offers a festive tour of the world at Christmas 2008: irrational fear, ignorance, stupidity, vexatious litigation, a foolish longing to abolish ‘risk’, and Christmas parties that, we are warned, have ‘absolutely nothing to do with Jesus’ In Santa’s grotto at a top London department store, Santa in his big white friendly beard sits on a bench — and there is a large ‘X’ marked on the bench a couple of feet away where the child is firmly directed to sit, allowing a wide corridor of clear and unsullied air between the child and the potential kiddie-fiddler from the North Pole, with his red cheeks, strange reindeer and unaccountable affection for children. Santa is not allowed to touch the child.

Saturday

Alexandra Starr

The White House will be run like Chicago

Clinton brought Arkansas to Washington, and Texas followed Bush. Now, says Alexandra Starr, Obama is bringing the take-no-prisoners politics of Al Capone’s city to the Beltway Washington may not have had an architectural makeover in more than two centuries, but the city’s political culture has shown a chameleon-like ability to change with each incoming administration. When Bill Clinton arrived from Little Rock, Arkansas 16 years ago, for example, he brought a penchant for late-night rambling discussions and a Southern disregard for keeping to schedules. Most of his underlings emulated those attributes, imbuing the town with a swing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ethos. President George W.

Friday

Beryl Bainbridge

A Literary Life

The days leading up to Xmas are such fun, aren’t they? All those cards and presents to buy and all those charity requests reminding one of starving children, crippled adults and abandoned dogs. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to concentrate on more important things, such as Sight and Time. Obviously the two go together, for both determine a view of the world. In regard to Sight, my bathroom ceiling fell down because the house next door put up scaffolding and the chap in charge stepped on to my flat roof and put his foot through it. He denied doing so, of course. When I now get into the tub there’s a bloody big hole up above and the rain comes through.

Theo Hobson

The C of E should follow John Milton’s lead

It’s the debate of our day, the meta-debate if you like. It unites the issues of Muslim extremism, creationism, irritable atheism, faith schools, Britishness, the future of the monarchy, Sarah Palin, Ruth Kelly: all the juiciest talking points. The radio show The Moral Maze seems to return to it with increasing frequency: Michael Buerk has developed a special sort of quizzical-weary tone with which to pick at its entrails. I’m talking, of course, about the Place-of-Religion-in-Public-Life debate. This is a debate that’s gradually turning into a culture war: over the past few years we’ve seen both sides digging deeper in, and the middle ground becoming less habitable. How can this slide towards cultural division be halted?

Clare Lockhart

Afghanistan will thrive if only we let it

Increasingly the media reports Afghanistan as a disaster story. Casualty lists from Helmand and other provinces sit side by side with accounts of millions of pounds’ worth of aid wasted and booming opium crops. No wonder then that politicians and journalists have begun to debate the wisdom of remaining committed to Afghanistan. In turn, the Afghan population has begun to doubt the commitment of its international partners. But the accepted story is never the whole story, and that is especially true of Afghanistan. The real truth about the country is that despite the many missteps, there is good cause for hope, and reason to believe that the country can pull itself out of its current chaos.

Michael Gove

We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever. Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present. One of the grim everyday realities of life before the Berlin Wall came down was the grossly unjust way in which two parallel economies operated within one political system.

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Things we’ll really all be better off without

Most journalists have spoken of the financial crisis as evidence of a failure of capitalism. But is it? Or is this kind of reversal in fact necessary if capitalism is to work at all? After all, a free-market economy doesn’t do a perfect job of rewarding success. It may pick better winners than, say, governments, but it is still largely arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else. Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.

John Patten

The prospects for a proud Olympic legacy are bleak

John Patten, an Olympics adviser, warns that there is still much strategic thinking to be done for 2012 — not to mention the lax anti-terror measures at the construction sites I had to be forcibly persuaded on to the rugby field at school. Now, to my amazement, I find myself advising the British Olympic Association. I sympathise with friends who become quite hysterical at the idea of my rubbing shoulders with Sir Clive Woodward and the titans of track and field. But the BOA wanted at least one member of the semi-detached and sceptical classes to be around as a counterweight to unrealistic tendencies.

Daniel Hannan

The real lesson of this fiasco is that we need elected police chiefs

Perhaps now you’ll understand what we’ve been banging on about, we localists. For the better part of a decade, we’ve campaigned to place the police under elected sheriffs. Some of our chief constables, we contended, had cast off the cables that once attached them to public opinion. They were concentrating on speed cameras and hate crimes and community relations when the rest of us wanted them to concentrate on being unpleasant to scoundrels. The best way to align the police’s priorities with everyone else’s, we argued, was to place our constabularies under locally elected representatives. You disagreed — you, Spectator readers in particular. Our ideas, you felt, were downright un-British.

Oar Pali

Obama is just Bryan Adams without music

O’ar Pali talks to the ageing Canadian rocker and realises that the President-elect has merely emulated the pious pop-star rhetoric that has made Adams a global brand It would be no real surprise to pick up the first issue of The Spectator from 1828 and find a review of a Bryan Adams show: he is one of those performers who is just there, and (it seems) always has been. Unless you were on a different planet during the 1990s I guarantee that you heard, loved or hated his single ‘Everything I Do’, which was one of the best-selling records of the decade. Adams has picked up Grammy and Oscar nominations like confetti.

James Delingpole

I am ready to go to prison for hamster murder

RSPCA Press Office Dear James, I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that the RSPCA has received a complaint following your column dated 21 November. We were surprised, however, that it was felt appropriate to trivialise and broadcast a criminal act which may well have led to animal suffering. Can I remind you that whatever your personal ‘sliding scale of values’ may be it remains an offence to fail to meet an animals needs and/or cause it unnecessary suffering? Those found guilty face a maximum six-month prison sentence and/or a £20,000 fine. Obviously we urge everyone who buys a pet to be sure they have the resources and commitment to care for it for the rest of its life.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The law applies to Damian Green, too

Great news — grooming is now a criminal offence. I’ve always had problems with it, frankly. When about to go out somewhere special for the evening my personal grooming consists of hacking at my face with the blunt Bic razor my wife keeps by the side of the bath for when the waxing business hasn’t quite done the trick, and three strategic squirts of Lynx ‘Africa’ deodorant (a procedure known colloquially as a ‘Glasgow Shower’). I end up at functions heavily bandaged and smelling of Dr Milton Obote, but nobody seems to mind. Grooming, I always thought, was overrated. How nice that the police agree.