Features

Saturday

James Forsyth

The Republicans are where the Tories were in 1997

A week into the Obama honeymoon it is debatable who has the bigger headache, the Democrats, who have been celebrating every day like it’s election day, or the Republicans, who have to work out how to rebuild their party. How and how quickly the GOP rebuilds at both the state and federal level will have a profound impact on British politics as the Tories have, to an underappreciated extent, taken to leaning on the Republicans for policy ideas in recent years. The headline election numbers were bad enough for the Republicans — Obama 365 electoral college votes, McCain 173 — but the details were even worse.

Elliot Wilson

Britain cannot afford a failed Pakistan

Pakistan is a failing state, and barring a mammoth bail-out few can now afford, it will become the world’s first bankrupt nuclear power. Bowed down by our own financial crisis and an economy teetering on the edge of recession, should we care? In sovereign terms the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which last year celebrated its 60th birthday, is into its adolescent years, now something of a cross between a prodigal son and the family’s black sheep. A major exporter of fertiliser, potash and terrorists, it is also the world’s only Muslim nuclear power.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

There is something plainly suspect about Gordon Brown challenging David Cameron to a duel over tax cuts. The Prime Minister has never believed in the inherent worth of tax cuts, and has spent much of the last decade gradually persuading the Conservatives not to believe in them either: it has been an article of Cameroon faith that ‘upfront tax-cut proposals’ were a low priority. Yet now the old battle manual has been torn up, and the PM is fighting an unprincipled guerrilla war of stunning opportunism. As if reading out from a document he has found in the street, he is reciting some of the key arguments for tax cuts — and then waiting. If there is no Tory response, he will have the field to himself.

Venetia Thompson

Who put a sock full of cocaine in my drawer?

Venetia Thompson, who has never taken the drug, was shocked to discover a stash in her house. What to do? Her friends’ response was a collective shrug as if it were nothing unusual It is said that in London, you are never further than ten feet from the nearest rat. It seems that, these days, the same might just as easily be said of cocaine. Recently, while gathering up my washing, I discovered an unfamiliar sock. This was immediately bizarre, as I recognise all of my socks; there are not many of them, they very rarely travel in matching pairs, and can usually be found lurking in dark corners of drawers next to a forgotten flight sock that I keep, just in case I decide to opt to prevent a DVT in just one of my legs next time I fly. Yes: I know my socks.

Susan Hill

The loss of health visitors is a true scandal

Susan Hill recalls how much she relied on her health visitor and bemoans the decline of this once-universal service: the victim of bureaucratic ‘targeting’ and government ignorance You can be sure of one thing about government. If it ain’t broke, they will fix it and don’t worry about the breaking bit, they will do that for themselves. Rewind 15 years to the health visitor system which was so ‘not broke’ it was a model for best practice throughout the world. HVs originally looked after patients ‘from cradle to grave’, advising and supporting anyone who needed them, including the elderly, the chronically or terminally ill and the disabled, but gradually their remit narrowed to new mothers and babies and the under-fives.

Saturday

Irwin Stelzer

The Tory quest for a fiscal Holy Grail is doomed

Brown’s golden rules have been exposed as a sham, says Irwin Stelzer, but the Tory response has been feeble. Their target should be the PM’s feathering of Old Labour nests The good news is that Gordon Brown’s golden rules are no more. These rules did not stop the then chancellor from launching a spending binge. They did not stop him from spilling red ink all over the nation’s books at a time when the flow of cash into the Treasury was at record levels. They did not stop him from raising taxes, 60 times by some counts. They did not stop him from redistributing income from wealth-creators to wealth-consumers.

Lisa Hilton

I don’t miss Italy. The dolce vita is a myth

Mention to most people that you have recently quit Italy for London and you become an instant object of sympathy. ‘Oh, poor you,’ they coo, ‘don’t you mind?’ Cue effusions about that darling trattoria in Lucca, those hidden della Francescas in Arezzo and enthusiastic reiterations of the word ‘bella’ as last seen in Gregory’s Girl. Anyone I speak to is anxious to impress with the authenticity of their Italy, their cognoscento’s rejection of Chiantishire for that enchanting, mythical country where the logge are eternally dappled in sunshine and dusky peasant girls roll out exquisite ravioli on mediaeval doorsteps.

James Forsyth

Obama has changed the world just by being elected

Washington, D.C. In 1968, as Washington burned in the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, few would have predicted that in 40 years’ time America would elect a black president. But on Tuesday night, a diverse crowd gathered on the same street where the rioting had reached its height in 1968 to celebrate Obama’s election. Earlier in the day, in a heavily African-American neighbourhood in DC, I watched people who had been brought up under segregation cast their ballots for Barack Obama, and I thought back to a voter I met in South Carolina on the eve of the primary there. He was an elderly African-American man, a second world war veteran.

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Meet the real Joe Biden: Vice-President Plonker

It has become fashionable to blame Sarah Palin for John McCain’s election defeat. Sure, say Washington insiders, Palin invigorated the conservative base — add contemptuous sneer — but she alienated the independents and undecideds. The God-fearing mother-governor of Alaska was not fit for high office. Her television performances were an international embarrassment. In choosing Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, McCain proved that he was over-impulsive, cynical, foolhardy. All true to an extent. It should be recognised, however, that Senator Joseph Biden, the man who will now be sworn in as vice-president in January, is just as disastrous a public figure as Sarah Palin. In fact, he might be worse.

James Delingpole

Remembrance day salutes man’s ancient instincts

War has a fatal attraction for men, says James Delingpole. Those who fall in combat are indeed the best and the bravest — and we shall certainly need their like again Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, and I’m sorry to repeat such a hoary cliché, but the reason it’s so hoary is it’s true. There’s barely a chap I know who doesn’t wonder how he’d fare if forced to undergo the ultimate male test — combat. And the ones who claim not to wonder such things I find frankly a bit weird. Are they not in denial of almost everything it means to be a man? A boy’s childhood is — even now, in an era when we’re supposed to have evolved from all that militaristic nonsense — a preparation for war.

Brendan O’Neill

As Orwell warned, children now spy on adults

Brendan O’Neill says that New Labour is deploying Maoist tactics to use children’s ‘pester power’ to crack down on the ‘eco-crimes’ and alleged anti-social behaviour of their parents When I was a child, ‘pester power’ meant stamping one’s feet in a shop. It involved little more than begging one’s mum in an irritating voice for the latest He-Man action figure or for one of those unusually thick pink milkshakes from a place called ‘McDonald’s’. It was a feeble force, this alleged power of the pest, easily squished by a clip around the lughole or by that most ominous threat issued by mums-in-distress: ‘Just you wait until your dad gets home...’ How times have changed.

Rod Liddle

Is Barack Obama really black? Actually, I’m not so sure

We media monkeys will look very silly indeed if President Obama behaves in the manner predicted of him by one lady voter I saw interviewed on TV. She said that as soon as he got in the White House he would ‘put on a turban and start shooting the white folks’. She was a McCain supporter, I believe, from somewhere like Toilet Duck, Arkansas. You have to hope that she’s wrong. The TV news programmes came up with a dingbat like her pretty much every evening, a little spurt of racism from Hicksville which will have had the effect of flinging a few more white votes the way of Obama as people recoil instinctively from bigotry and crass stupidity. Race has not been a single factor in this election, it has been many factors.

Reihan Salam

Obama’s America will be more equal but less mighty

Reihan Salam says that the President-elect is no socialist and it was desperate of McCain to claim as much. Obama’s policies more closely resemble European social democracy — with the attendant risk of economic sclerosis in the face of Asian competition While walking to work on the morning of Election Day, I was struck by the number of times I encountered Barack Obama’s beaming countenance on posters and bumper stickers. To be sure, I live in a neighbourhood in the District of Columbia that is particularly thick with the politically obsessive, but I’ve also encountered striking portraits of America’s next president across the country. Will the Obama iconography fade away as voters grow disillusioned?

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.