Features

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil Oh goody. He’s late. Every journalist wants the interviewee to miss the appointment, if possible by several hours. It gives us the advantage and obliges our subject to apologise or face being lacerated in print for the transgression. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrives 35 minutes after the agreed time and greets me with a disarming combination of lightly salted regret and a plausible excuse. In France, Lévy is so famous that he’s known by the simple acronym BHL, like a furniture superstore or a killer virus.

Stephen Schwartz

The global force behind Mumbai’s agony is in our midst

Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi say that LET — the Army of the Righteous — is a worldwide Islamist organisation which is well-established in Britain. The Mumbai atrocities are further proof that the march of Islamic extremism is the central fact of our time The usual suspects are declaring that the ‘cause’ of the Mumbai bombings was Kashmir or some other local grievance. But what happened in Mumbai was no more a local event than the 7 July 2005 attacks in London or the assault in Madrid on 11 March 2004. Pakistani propaganda about its claims in Kashmir is almost entirely phony rhetoric intended to justify the predatory instincts of the Pakistani army and intelligence bureaucrats.

Mary Wakefield

After Baby P: the crisis in child foster care

Mary Wakefield talks to a courageous woman who blew the whistle on the deep systemic failures in the foster care service — and whose only reward was to be hounded and vilified I spotted Sarah immediately, though I’d never seen her before and she was tucked in among the commuter crowds ebbing and flowing through Marylebone station. She walked differently from the rest, less preoccupied, more determined, and she carried, as she had said she would, a big black folder under her arm.

Gerald Kaufman

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown. Yet now, 14 years after Passion, Sondheim’s adaptation of an Italian film about an embarrassingly neurotic love affair, comes Road Show. I saw it a few days ago, shortly after its opening.

Aidan Hartley

What I learned from the Somali pirates

Aidan Hartley says that Somali piracy is very well-organised and efficient and is opposed publicly only by militant Muslims — who may yet seize power in Mogadishu The ceaseless piracy off Somalia’s shores — another, Singaporean tanker was hijacked last week — is giving rise to a modern, real-life version of the novel Scoop. Evelyn Waugh’s book is set in Africa’s troubled state of Ishmaelia, where one foreign correspondent breaks a big story from a place called Laku. As soon as it is published, Fleet Street editors begin clamouring for copy from Laku, so the press corps rush into the jungle where they become utterly lost. No wonder.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Brown has played into the hands of the Tory Bullingdon Boys he loathes

Conservative backbenchers were in  good voice on Monday, and by prearrangement. The whips had sent around the message that there was to be raucous heckling as Alistair Darling read out what used to be called the Autumn Statement. Duly, there were roars of indignation at the Chancellor’s claims that Britain was best-prepared for a downturn, howls of protest as he claimed to have reduced debt. But then this yielded to unexpected quiet as it slowly became clear that Mr Darling’s giveaways included something the Tories would never have dared dream of: the surrender of everything New Labour once stood for. David Cameron had been at George Osborne’s house the day before, nervously preparing for the surprise tax cut which they suspected was in store.

Wednesday

Irwin Stelzer

Sarkozy’s dream of taming America is doomed

The American model of lightly regulated capitalism may be in disrepute, says Irwin Stelzer. But the French President’s ambition is deluded French presidents/emperors are given to delusion. Napoleon thought he could conquer the Russian winter. Charles de Gaulle thought he heard voices anointing him the leader of the Free French, and later deluded himself into believing that he — not the British and the Americans, not Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt — liberated France from the Nazis, to whom the massive French army had quickly surrendered just a few years earlier. And now we have Nicolas Sarkozy. Taller than Napoleon, shorter than de Gaulle, but equally susceptible to delusions. And more than one.

Rod Liddle

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case Like me, you may well have received a text message or a spammed email recently providing you with the full names of the adults held to be responsible in the appalling case of ‘Baby P’, the small child subjected to the most dreadful physical abuse resulting in his death. The details of these phone messages are usually accompanied by a demand for ‘justice’ for ‘Baby P’, by which is meant the deafs of the vile scum what killed im.

Matthew Castray

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little Federal elections come around quickly in Australia. With a maximum term of three years, the average since 1975 has been about two years and nine months. So new Australian governments have an incentive to implement reforms in their first year — or do they? The one-year anniversary of the Rudd Labor government this week gives pause to consider another incentive — one probably familiar in the United Kingdom: to do very little for fear of jeopardising a second term, but maintain the mirage of reform.

Dylan Jones

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat To Sofia, then, on a ten-seater NetJet Falcon from Farnborough, accompanied by Bryan Ferry and a small coterie of GQ apparatchiks, including the best-dressed man in Shepherd’s Bush, Nick Foulkes. Some of my friends are big in Japan, some of them are big in America and some of the larger ones are big all over the world. Me, I’m big in Bulgaria. Not as big as government corruption or the drug cartels, but big enough to warrant a mention on the early evening news (bumping Prince Charles’s 60th birthday celebrations into second place, I kid you not).

Nancy Dell'Olio

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out. Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of Virginia Woolf and married to a ballerina (ballet is my passion), he became the darling of the Bloomsbury Group.

Michael Wolff

Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one

Michael Wolff reveals how he secured Rupert Murdoch’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this media titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a city editor There is, on the one hand, the unparalleled global dominance in media and politics that Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation have achieved. And yet, on the other, there’s an almost endearing attention-deficit lack of organisation and heedlessness that I witnessed in nine months of chatting with Murdoch and his executives. The fact that I was talking so often and so openly with Murdoch was as good an example as any of the absence of planning and strategy that backs up one of the world’s greatest control freaks.

Wednesday

Catherine Blyth

Don’t confuse conversation with dialogue or quips

Catherine Blyth says that conversation is an art: its essence is the acrobatic business of reading and changing minds — talking with people, not at them How would you feel if you arrived at a dinner party to find your plate garnished with a menu? Impressed, irritated or inspired to discover a new level in social intimidation? Imagine that menu listed not dishes, but conversation topics to wash down each course, such as, ‘Which of my ambitions is likely to remain unfulfilled?’ or ‘Is sex overrated?’ According to Alain de Botton, writing in Standpoint, topic menus promise the salvation of the art of conversation. Sartre reckoned hell is other people.

Christopher Lloyd

For a bit of perspective, try thinking Jurassic

Bees do democracy best. They vote, you know. Not that they bother with anything as trivial as electing a new president. Nor do they worry about the colour of their ruler’s stripes. In the natural world of a beehive there are no unnecessary arguments about popular succession, no expensive lobbying or financial fuss. When election season comes, the question they vote on is simply this: where on earth to site a new nest? Now what’s the most natural way of expressing an opinion? Let’s see… buzzing very loudly? But that might get a bit too noisy. Scribbling on a piece of paper?

Bryan Forbes

Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts? All across America, galvanised by an inspirational candidate, people stood in line for up to four hours in order to vote, many for the first time in their lives, and oh how I longed for an iota of that fervour and commitment to infect our own political scene. Instead, on our side of the pond, in our own hour of need, we were subjected to the same tired rhetoric that has long since been unfit for purpose.

Daniel Finkelstein

The great Tory tax and spend battle: seconds out…

In the wake of Cameron’s decision to drop his pledge to match Labour spending, Fraser Nelson and Daniel Fin kelstein of the Times trade rhetorical blows over the issue that is gripping and troubling the Conservative party as it adjusts to the transformed economic context Dear Fraser, I feel we really need to have a word about tax. It was something you said that set me off. Something you used to underpin your argument that the Tories need to start announcing tax cuts. Could I detain you for a moment, and ask for an explanation? Perhaps you remember your words. ‘The Tories were daft to focus so much on borrowing — it’s inevitable in a recession. The question is whether you use the deficit to spend or relieve taxes.

Rod Liddle

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

I missed the first three minutes of Oliver Stone’s film about the outgoing US President, W., because the indolent woman serving behind the counter took ages to give me my ticket. That’s because she was serving someone else with ice cream, a beaming fat cow who was ordering herself a bucket of cherry and vanilla and butterscotch, a vat of frozen animal fats in which she would immerse herself for the next seven hours. ‘Ooh, and I’ll have a scoop of rum and raisin too,’ she whinnied just when you thought she was finally done, the veins on her neck bulging out and saliva dribbling down her grey chin. What annoyed me most was the fact that she was not a paying customer, but the bloody cinema manageress.

Martin Vander Weyer

Thank goodness we can have a run on the pound when we need one

Martin Vander Weyer looks ahead to next week’s Pre-Budget Report and reflects on George Osborne’s contentious remarks about the devaluation of sterling. It looks like Gordon Brown is getting away with his borrowing binge — leaving the Tories isolated On Monday afternoon I rang a distinguished City economist and asked him a rather technical question about the relationship between issuance of gilt-edged stock and movements in the dollar-sterling exchange rate. ‘Not really my specialist field,’ he replied suavely. ‘But I’ll give you my overview: George Osborne is a prat.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’

It was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady proposed the motion by taking us on a graphic tour of Amsterdam’s red-light district which he’d visited ‘in an anthropological capacity’. The spectacle of hungry-eyed men sloping from door to door with their moist tongues lolling from their mouths had convinced him that buying sex was demeaning to all concerned. ‘Thinking about sex in the same way as buying a ticket degrades your humanity.’ Mutual desire should be the essence of sexual relationships. Anticipating his opponents’ arguments he examined the notion that courtship and marriage are morally identical to prostitution.

Emily Maitlis

Chicago Notebook

In the end, it really was a fairytale. A story of hope conquering belief. The journey few believed would be completed. One man — aided by the most advanced viral campaign in history, and carried along on a mantra breathtaking in both its simplicity and its boldness: ‘Never gonna give you up never gonna let you down never gonna run around, desert you’. With that one lyric — indeed I am hard pushed to think of a single other — Rick Astley ran off with the much coveted MTV award for Best Ever Act, sending his reputation as ‘naff Eighties pop crooner’ into the stratosphere. His loyal fan base admitted to ‘rickrolling’ — a practice whereby millions of internet users were duped into voting for him by the click of a mouse.