Features

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

This charming man: an audience with the Gover

There are two reliable tricks which can fill the room at any Tory speaking event: offer free beer, or put Michael Gove on the panel. His fusion of almost comic politeness and intellectual ruthlessness have given him quite a following, whether he’s defending neoconservatism or David Cameron. In three short years he has been propelled to the Tory front bench, tasked with devising a supply-side revolution in education which would be the flagship reform for the next Tory government. When we meet he is full of tales about Sweden, where he had just been to visit schools that use the system he hopes to bring to England. His spectacles, which have grown progressively more fashionable as he edged from journalism to public life, have now vanished altogether.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

IQ2 debate — Paths to Peace: proposals to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In at the deep end. That’s how Intelligence Squared likes to kick off, and the first debate of the new season plunged straight into the perilous waters of the Israel–Palestine conflict. David Lindley, the chair, asked each speaker to present ideas for a workable peace. Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, opened on a note of gloomy optimism. There were dark signs on the horizon, yet he was encouraged because ‘never have so many parties been so desperate for a settlement’. Tehran is the key problem. And if we doubted his word, ‘just listen to Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust while planning the next one’.

Sarfraz Manzoor

I found an undiscovered country: Great Britain

This summer, as a consequence of the credit crunch, rising air fares and a strong euro, more than half of all Britons chose to spend their holidays in this country. Predictably this was also the summer that proved to be one of the dullest and wettest on record. August may have been, according to the Met Office, the UK’s seventh wettest since records began in 1929, but for me there was a silver lining to the rainclouds. Like many working-class British Asians of my generation, we never went on holidays during my childhood. In recent years I have attempted to make amends by travelling as much as possible, but this has invariably meant going abroad, the idea of holidaying in this country striking me as pointless and dull.

Prue Leith

Pay attention at the back of the class, Mr Balls

When I first met John Abbott 20 years ago he told me a story: as a young teacher at the prestigious Manchester Grammar School he had led several expeditions of boys to study agriculture in rural pre-revolutionary Iran. After a week the village headman felt he knew John well enough to ask him a difficult question: ‘These young men,’ he said, ‘they are so tall, so strong, so beautiful. But what use are they? They cannot reap, they cannot ride a donkey, they cannot make a fire, they cannot even sew or sweep or cook like our girls.’ This stopped young Abbott in his tracks. The Iranian headman had a point! Teenagers must be stretched, they need diverse experiences to jolt them out of apathy and into learning mode.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Labour’s behaviour reminds me of the blind football at the Paralympics

The party’s MPs are fatally conflicted over Gordon Brown’s leadership, says Rod Liddle. Their craven conduct reflects the awkward fact that they overwhelminglychose him in the first place There was an interesting story in the newspapers this week about an American dog which rang 911, the emergency services, when his owner had a seizure. The details were a little hazy; we know that the dog was a German shepherd, but we do not know his or her name. Nor was it clear whether the animal used a landline to summon assistance, or if it had its own mobile phone.

James Delingpole

‘You grow up with footballs. We grow up with kukris’

It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans. A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 ex-Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their un-mistakable crimson-ribboned bronze crosses stuck proudly on their chests.

Martin Vander Weyer

Reasons to be cheerful amid financial apocalypse

On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’ ‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For the half-second of that pause, I actually wondered whether he was serious. And that was just Monday: since then, things have got really frightening. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis is ‘a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event’, but he’s wrong.

Fraser Nelson

The great debt deceit: how Gordon Brown cooked the nation’s books

  A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking Hyde Park. The flat had been the scene of much recent political activity, used as a den by Gordon Brown who would invite his allies around and plot his personal strategy, pausing only to watch the football and eat pizzas. But that night the Labour guests had cleared off, and the then Tory Europe Minister was treated to the disorientating experience of being served supper by the butler of a Labour MP. As the conversation turned to the inevitable Labour victory, Mr Robinson said how much he was looking forward to turning the government spending tap on again, putting an end to what he saw as the years of Tory parsimony.

Saturday

Tom Parfitt

Moscow’s secret war in Ingushetia

Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt: the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and repression Among the first-class passengers who flew into Ingushetia’s Magas airport from Moscow on the afternoon of 31 August were two grey-haired men in suits. The pair avoided each other’s gaze. One was Murat Zyazikov, 50, a former KGB officer and president of Ingushetia, the small Muslim republic which borders Chechnya in southern Russia. The other was Magomed Yevloyev, 36, an outspoken critic of Russia’s brutal rule in Ingushetia, founder of the ingushetiya.ru website, and Zyazikov’s great nemesis.

Wednesday

Harry Mount

State education has outlawed difficulty

But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount. Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’ The decline of the British education system has been my gain, I’m only partly ashamed to confess. As somebody who has published a jokey book about a highbrow subject, I have profited from the proceeds of writing for a market that simply didn’t exist half a century ago. In 1958, the sort of people who are buying books about Latin today were learning Latin in school. I’ve lost count of the people in their forties who’ve told me, ‘I never learnt Latin, but my parents did. I wish my children did, too.

Clemency Burtonhill

The laureate of intractable conflicts

Looking every inch the Brit that he isn’t, American playwright Christopher Shinn takes a bite of a sandwich in a Shepherd’s Bush rehearsal room on a rainy summer afternoon and confesses that, although grateful, he still finds it ‘a mystery’ that it should have been London’s theatrical community, rather than New York’s, that made his career. For his latest play, Now or Later, recently opened at the Royal Court, will be his fifth to premiere in London before going anywhere near his own continent, about which he relentlessly writes. It’s not that Shinn, 32, is not successful in his native country.

Rod Liddle

Have we ever faced an enemy more stupid than Muslim terrorists?

Isn’t it about time Muslim terrorists rethought their strategy of recording glorious martyrdom videos, in advance of failing to blow anything up? Wouldn’t it be a bit less embarrassing for all concerned? Time after time we see these imbeciles on our television news promising all sorts of mayhem and misery, the righteous and cleansing fires of Allah poured down upon we imperialist decadent kafir scum, ‘body parts’ scattered in the streets, etc. And then they forget to take a cigarette lighter with them to the airport, or the detonator doesn’t work, or they’re arrested buying 5,000 bottles of hydrogen peroxide from the local hairdresser’s shop and thus somehow arousing suspicion (just how blond do you want to be, Mohammed?).

Matthew Dancona

How I became a world record holder

At a Google conference in Rhodes, Matthew d’Ancona finds himself part of a bid to break the world record for Zorba dancing — and to relive one of the greatest scenes in cinema ‘Teach me to dance. Will you?’ Few scenes in cinema have the emotional poignancy and magic of the last moments of Zorba the Greek (1964), as Basil, the young English writer played by Alan Bates, seeks his final lesson in life from Anthony Quinn’s majestic peasant-magus, on the Cretan shore.

Fraser Nelson

Brown has exploited immigration to hide from deep problems

The PM’s claim to have created three million British jobs is a grave deceit, says Fraser Nelson. Strip out immigrants from the picture, and Labour has barely dented the problem of British worklessness. Over to you, Mr Cameron If there were to be a British Statue of Liberty, it should be erected at Victoria coach station in London. For it is here that most of the tired, poor, huddled masses of Eastern Europeans have arrived seeking what Michael Howard once called the ‘British dream’. The influx of the last ten years has been the largest in Britain’s history, changing the country for ever. Immigrants now make up a ninth of our population, produce a fifth of our babies and fill (or create) most of our new jobs.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

What possessed McCain to take a punt on Palin?

Rod Liddle says that the appointment of an inexperienced, gun-toting formerbeauty queen as his running mate may well be John McCain’s undoing Ah, just when you pro-Republican monkeys were beginning to think that John McCain was looking a pretty good bet, he goes and chooses a backwoods polar-bear-strangling Britney Spears manqué as a running mate — a woman who appears to believe that the earth was created precisely 4,004 years ago and who, in earlier times, found the Republican Party inclined at far too shallow an angle to the right. A sort of Alaskan version of Pauline Hanson, except with a better embonpoint.

Theodore Dalrymple

In defence of David Southall

One of life’s difficulties, I have found, is that it keeps throwing up questions to which there is no indubitably correct answer. This means that the exercise of judgment is perennially necessary: and there is hardly a moment’s respite from this burdensome imperative. Alas, where there is judgment there is error, or the possibility of error. No one can be right all the time. Of nothing is this truer than the vexed question of child abuse. Not to see it where it exists has terrible consequences for the child; to see it where it does not exist has terrible consequences for the parents or the others accused of it.

Christina Lamb

‘Whoever killed Benazir wants to kill me’

Islamabad On the wall above Asif Ali Zardari’s dining table in Islamabad is a framed copy of a letter. The handwriting is small and neat and it looks nothing special but he frequently grabs it from the wall to show to visitors. For on this piece of paper rests the remarkable rise of the man for years vilified as Mr Ten Percent, who this weekend looks set to become Pakistan’s President. The letter is written by his late wife Benazir Bhutto, and dated 16 October 2007, two days before her return to Pakistan from exile, and 11 weeks before her assassination.

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

A pilgrim’s progress for the 21st century

Because I spoke to him on the phone, not in person, you’ll have to share my mental picture of William P. Young. There he is in a hotel room in Texas: 53, balding, with bright eyes and a greying goatee. He’s ironing as he talks (he says so), his sleeves rolled up (I reckon), with a snowy pile of pressed shirts beside him. On the table beside his bed is a photo of his wife, Kim, and the six young Youngs back home in Gresham, Oregon. On the floor: piles of his extraordinary book The Shack. It’s extraordinary because of the subject matter — a man called Mack meets God in a shed — and also because of its phenomenal, inexplicable success in the face of what should have been certain book death. Though it was much loved by his friends, William P.

Robert Hardman

Never mind the Olympics — get set for the Jubilee

Free and open to everyone, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 will eclipse the London Games, says Robert Hardman — an unforgettable tribute to the monarch Millions gathered on the streets; people of every generation from every background joining in the fun; all the corners of the kingdom united in one thoroughly British occasion... 2012 really is going to see one hell of a party. In fact, buy your Union flags now because there won’t be any left by then. And hang on to them. Because you might just need them for the follow-on event — the supporting gig otherwise known as the London Olympics. Yes, the Games will produce great scenes and big cheers for the endeavours of ‘Team GB’.

Ross Clark

Labour’s punishment freaks are hounding honest citizens

Ross Clark says that far from keeping our streets safer or cleaner, the government’s new force of amateur policemen are ignoring the worst offenders and pursuing law-abiding innocents instead Political brands are constantly changing. For years Liberal Democrats were the party of the environment; now the Conservatives appear to have taken that title. For decades, until Black Wednesday, the Tories were the party of sound money, a role then assumed by Labour until the credit crunch began to bite a year ago. Labour supporters may cite bad luck and international economic pressures in losing that revered mantle. But there is another unwelcome shift in political branding for which the party is wholly responsible: almost overnight, Labour has become the new nasty party.