Features

Saturday

Elliot Wilson

Chasing dragons: the Chinese army takes up art collecting

In 2003, during a long night of swilling fine French wines in Beijing, talk turned to China’s rising economic fortunes. Old China hands at the table reminisced about camel trains clattering through the capital’s dim 1970s streets. Then a mysterious American chipped in with an extraordinary tale. Back in 1983, he said, China’s coffers were so low that starving officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were reduced to selling off the country’s heirlooms. One chilly winter evening he had backed a truck into the Forbidden City and quietly loaded it with priceless antiques. Ten minutes later he was on Chang’an Avenue, weighed down with art worth more than the average bank bail-out.

Wednesday

Tom Bower

Brown has come full circle since 1988

Tom Bower, the Prime Minister’s biographer, says that Gordon’s reinvention as the socialist who can save capitalism is just the latest in a series of convenient masks he has donned Gordon Brown would probably prefer to forget his magic moment in the crowded House of Commons exactly 20 years ago, on 1 November 1988. In the midst of a withering attack against Nigel Lawson’s management of the faltering economy, the Labour front bencher pierced the Tory’s façade with deadly accuracy: ‘This is a boom based on credit.’ Labour MPs frenziedly cheered as Brown artfully mocked the forlorn-looking Chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for offering consistently wrong forecasts.

Christopher Caldwell

Obama is on course for victory. But he isn’t ready for the White House

Two Sundays ago, I was sitting in the café in the Borders on L Street in Washington, a table away from a couple of middle-aged black men who were discussing politics over cups of coffee and great piles of books. One of them, wearing a black T-shirt with a Union logo on it and the kind of motley pillbox hat that was popular during the Afrocentric clothing fad of the early 1990s, raised his voice. ‘If they steal it,’ he said, ‘brothers is gonna riot.’ The ‘they’ were Republicans. It was the presidential election and the diagnosis was unsurprising. The belief is widespread among Democrats of all hues, views and regions that Republicans never win elections legitimately. They must either lie to the public or manipulate the vote.

Sinclair McKay

A quantum of respect for the forgotten master

Double-dealing female agents. Secret ciphers. Car chases. Now that we have all ingested rather more than a quantum of publicity for Ian Fleming’s gaudy fictions, it might be time for the true inventor of the modern spy novel — and the original purveyor of the above-named elements — to take his bow. The name was Le Queux. William Le Queux. He is almost totally forgotten now. But between the 1890s and the 1920s, he was one of Britain’s most phenomenally popular authors. In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, right up past the first world war, Le Queux turned out countless thrillers that gave us all the familiar leitmotifs of the spy genre.

David Tang

Kabul Notebook

The grandson of the King told my wife and me at dinner that we were ‘the only two tourists in Kabul’! In fact, we nearly did not arrive because on the eve of our flight, the aid-worker Gayle Williams was shot dead by the Taleban in broad daylight. The incident made world headlines and the Afghan capital suddenly more dangerous. I was at a shoot and all my fellow guns thought I would be mad to go. But I also knew that I would go mad if I did not. For assurance, I telephoned the inimitable Rory Stewart on the ground. He was too polite to insist on our visit, but sounded calm — not exactly unexpected from someone who had walked across the entire breadth of Afghanistan and was a deputy governor of an Iraqi province.

Rod Liddle

The real lesson is: the public don’t like Jonathan Ross or Russell Brand

Rod Liddle says that the row over their radio ‘prank’ has exposed the fact that these two smug, overpaid performers aren’t really that popular. There are no fans to defend them There’s this new deal being offered by the telephone inquiry service 118 118. If you answer a question correctly, you get to ask as many questions as you want all day, free of charge, and they will answer them. The test question they asked me was: ‘What pop star was born in Finchley on January 21, 1971?’ The answer, obviously, is Emma Bunton, also known as Baby Spice. I got a message of congratulations from 118 118 and the offer of unlimited free inquiries for the day. So I asked them what I should do next — every minute or so for the next eight hours.

Martin Vander Weyer

Probably the biggest financial crisis of all time

At this juncture, my best credit-crunch advice is to keep beside your armchair at all times an atlas of the world, a modern American dictionary and a bottle of whisky. If your constitution is strong, you might also want a copy of the Financial Times but do keep the television zapper handy, so you can hit the ‘mute’ button when the news comes on. You can tell from the order of the silent pictures whether markets have plunged or rallied, which is really as much as you want to know. If the first shots to appear are of Russell Brand or yachts at anchor off Corfu, it has been a relatively good day for your savings.

Celia Walden

Sarko’s voodoo doll hissy fit tells you everything

The French President’s strop is more eloquent than any policy or speech, says Celia Walden. He is a pint-sized de Gaulle regularly made to look a fool by his wife The truth, invariably, is in the detail. Theresa May’s leopard-print shoes, Jon Snow’s refusal to wear a poppy, Prince Andrew’s bedful of teddy bears, Nick Clegg’s arithmetic (he counted up the women all right but got the weekly pension wrong by two thirds, at 30 — wait for it — ‘quid’), and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s decision to take OK! to court ‘because they made it look as though all I did on my wedding day was eat’.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: debate report – “We were wrong to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence”

Motion: We were wrong to recognise Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Speakers For the motion Sir Ivor Roberts Misha Glenny Dragan Zupanjevac Against the motion Wolfgang Ischinger Paddy Ashdown Veton Surroi The voting tells the story. Before last Tuesday’s Kosovo debate most of the audience were unsure whether we were right to recognize Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17th 2008. BBC Balkans expert Alan Little introduced a ‘starry panel of commentators’ beginning with Sir Ivor Roberts, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia. Sir Ivor hoped that one day the people of the Balkans would ‘stop picking at the scabs of history – but the wounds are far too fresh for that.

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Howard Jacobson discusses his novel ‘The Act of Love’ with Peter Florence

No Jews. No hint of Jewishness anywhere. That was Howard Jacobson’s instruction to himself when he sat down to write his new novel, The Act of Love. ‘I took the restriction very seriously,’ he told Peter Florence in a discussion for Intelligence Squared on 22nd October. ‘I nearly set about writing the book without using any word containing the letter “J”. Then I realised that “Howard Jacobson” would appear on the cover.’ Jewishness defines Jacobson. It provokes, exhilarates and exasperates him but he can’t escape it. ‘I failed anyway,’ he shrugs with ironic pride.

Tim Congdon

There is nothing magic about this Keynesian fad

Mr Brown’s bank recapitalisation exercise has been portrayed in the British media as a financial and political coup. The Financial Times has been particularly enthusiastic, describing it as ‘a global template’. Mr Brown’s admirers apparently believe that the British government’s programme is both intellectually original and a real-world success, and is therefore being copied in other leading nations. The truth is very different. The government’s policy is not intellectually original, it will not be fully implemented in practice and, to the extent that it is implemented, it will be a disaster. Further, no other country is copying Brown’s plan or behaving as vindictively as Britain towards its financial system.

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

Osborne stumbles: but is there a bigger story about Mandelson?

Melissa Kite says that the shadow chancellor should have known better than to cross the most brutal spin-doctor in Westminster, or flout the conventions of the super-rich. But we should not be distracted from the Business Secretary’s true role in this saga If George Osborne survives the spectacular fallout of his now notorious Corfu adventure he may want to review the way he spends his holidays. If a bespoke travel agent arranged his recent sojourn he should be asking for his money back, because sunshine breaks don’t come much more disastrous than this one. Not since John Fowles’s character Nicholas in The Magus has a man stepped on to a Greek island and got himself into such a surreal muddle.

Patrick Macaskie

To muzzle the short-seller is to muzzle free speech

The market needs speculators who are willing to challenge the big battalions, says Patrick Macaskie. Don’t believe the hype: short-sellers were not the villains of this financial crisis People everywhere have been grappling with what has befallen them. Like the closing stages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream we are waking from a reverie and human folly at its most extreme is being revealed. It is harder to see the happy ending but some things will be for the better. When I think of my children I will be glad to see sensible house prices and society getting a bit more serious and self-critical. But the adjustment will come at a huge cost to many people and whether anyone has a job or not may depend in part on how honest we are with ourselves in the ensuing weeks and months.

Bryan Forbes

The market crashes, but the gravy train rolls on

It is difficult to think of anything more depressing than the recent photographs of a smirking Lord Mandy in his ermine drag flanked by two of yesterday’s major groupies, Lord Falconer and Baroness Jay, she who gleefully masterminded the removal of the hereditary peers, but couldn’t resist a title for herself. At the very moment the PM was berating the bonus culture, his new friend, Lord Mandy, was looking forward to trousering some serious dosh from Brussels, and senior executives of our self-congratulatory, ratings-obsessed BBC were awarding themselves £318,000 extra for doing nothing discernibly advantageous for the licence payers. A gravy train still leaves every hour for the fortunate few.

Rod Liddle

What Harman calls a ‘distraction’, the rest of us call debate

It’s very difficult to get one’s head around the moral and ethical implications of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill on a damp and frowsy October afternoon after perhaps one too many stiffeners. I came away from my research with a vague notion that the Roman Catholic Church wishes to prevent scientists from experimenting on dead lesbians, but that the House of Commons is determined to let this iniquity go ahead and that some progressive left-wing MPs wish to proceed further and allow scientists to monkey around with lesbians who are not yet dead, regardless of whether they give their consent.

Venetia Thompson

Eat, drink and play bingo. Red or white?

Bingo is a game that I have never really seen the point of — despite recent advertising campaigns attempting to market it as the new raucous ‘girls’ night out’ of choice. It was thus with trepidation that I climbed Home House’s grand staircase and entered one of their private rooms along with 30 other guests for a game of wine bingo. I was swiftly handed a glass of something light and fizzy, thankfully, and all images of fat, single, middle-aged Gala-dwelling women and their legs-11 disappeared. It was only when I reached for what from a distance looked like a macadamia nut in a round basket, but was in fact a bingo ball, that I remembered that I was there to play a game, and that I probably needed glasses.

Saturday

James Forsyth

That was the campaign that was

James Forsyth on how the two candidates earned their party’s nominations and how the final stages of the campaign are playing out It was on the eve of the Iowa caucus, 2 January, that it became clear that Barack Obama’s candidacy was more than just a form of political entertainment. Obama’s last speaking engagement was in a high school gym in Des Moines. It was the hot ticket of a cold night. This was the best orator in a generation giving the most important speech of his political career so far; the youthful crowd were expecting quite a show. But the star attraction had lost his voice. When he tried to hit the rhetorical high notes, nothing came out. The crowd didn’t desert or turn on him, though. Instead, they chanted his iconic slogans, carrying him through.

Dan Gilgoff

Getting closer to God

Dan Gilgoff on how Barack Obama has narrowed the ‘God gap’ Virtually no political experts saw it coming, but religion was one of the biggest factors in George W. Bush’s 2004 election victory. Bush, who had used evangelical Christian language and championed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — a cause pushed by the Christian Right — won 78 per cent of the evangelical vote, a group comprising almost a quarter of the American electorate. Republican presidential candidates had won the evangelical vote ever since Jerry Falwell launched his Moral Majority in the late 1970s, but no presidential candidate on record had ever achieved this level of support. John Kerry, the first Catholic nominee for president since John F.

Michael Steinberger

A good election to lose

Michael Steinberger says a hefty defeat might be the best result for the Republicans Political parties exist to fight elections, and with the presidential campaign now in its climatic weeks, Republicans are gamely battling to keep the White House. Barack Obama has opened a large, possibly insurmountable lead over John McCain, whose every gambit, not least his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, has failed amid the relentlessly dire news about the economy. But it is not just McCain who is facing possible humiliation on 4 November; the entire Republican party, weighed down by George Bush and beset with profound internal divisions, may be headed for electoral armageddon. As bleak as the party’s immediate prospects are, the long-term picture looks even worse.

The Spectator

The electoral map

States with their respective electoral college votes — 270 votes are needed to win Click here to download the map which featured in the US Election supplement. Nevada:This has been the fastest- growing state in the union since the second world war. McCain used to have a comfortable lead here but with almost half of voters saying that the economy is the most important issue, Obama has surged. McCain needs this state to come back into his column before election day. Colorado: The Rocky Mountain west is regarded as the emerging battleground of American politics. The Democrats cleverly decided to hold their convention in Denver, winning acres of positive local press coverage and since the convention, Obama has begun to pull away.