Features

Saturday

Reihan Salam

McCain is in for a terrible shock if he wins

Reihan Salam says that most Republicans have no idea how much the American social landscape has changed. They should learn from Obama’s Google-like appeal Britain’s Conservatives might be plotting a triumphant return to power but America’s Republicans are in a state of utter collapse. And it’s not just because the tide is turning after two terms of George W. Bush. For better or for worse, the Cameron Conservatives have adapted to a more culturally liberal, urban, diverse society. They have reconciled themselves to the welfare state in a way that Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher never did. Republicans, in contrast, are labouring under the illusion that America remains the yeoman democracy of yesteryear, full of plucky individualists.

Leo McKinstry

Naked commercial greed meets Stalinist control

When Leo McKinstry objected to his neighbours’ plan to build two blocks of flats, he quickly discovered the limits of ‘community empowerment’ under New Labour There is an increasingly Orwellian tone about the language of the Labour government. The Ministry of Truth, the state propaganda machine in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, would have been only too pleased with the doublethink of the fashionable mantra ‘together in diversity’, endlessly repeated to justify the destructive creed of multiculturalism, or the inanity of the advertising slogan ‘the People’s Post Office’, launched at the very time when a mass cull of local post offices is underway against the wishes of the people.

Rod Liddle

An official no-go area for Christians? Excuse me: I need a drink

A week or so back, my two-year-old daughter said to me, apropos of nothing: ‘You have been sad since you lost Jesus.’ I didn’t really know what to do, so I looked at her open-mouthed for a bit and then fixed myself a stiff drink. Best not to get involved, I reckon. Later — again, out of the blue — she told me with great happiness that she was ‘covered with the blood of Jesus’, at which point I wondered if I should have a quiet word with her Sunday school teacher, or maybe her Gran, who is a fairly muscular born-again evangelical monkey and from whom this whacko stuff may have emanated. Sad since I lost Jesus? I’ve been sad since Douglas Alexander was made a Cabinet minister and even sadder since the pubs closed.

Henry Sands

I don’t think my mum has much to fear from ‘Emos’

Henry Sands meets a group of ‘Emos’ — ‘emotional’, black-clad teenagers — who claim to hate his mother for what she wrote about them in the Daily Mail. But they’re not very scary I was walking through Hyde Park with a friend on Saturday when I noticed some people dressed in black gathering on the other side of Round Pond. At first I thought it might be a school trip having a picnic, but the eclectic mix of young teenagers — many of them with their parents — and peculiarly dressed older people suggested otherwise. A few of these gothic-looking creatures were holding banners and signs. The first I saw read ‘free hugs’. It was being held by an attractive dark-haired girl.

Claire Fox

I have a basic human right to look at fag packets

Claire Fox says that plans to ‘denormalise’ smoking by removing cigarettes from display infantilises adults and imposes upon us a dubious official version of what is ‘normal’ Has your personal life been ‘denormalised’ yet? Mine is about to be, and believe me it’s not pleasant. The health ministries in Scotland and Westminster have just announced plans to make a perfectly legal habit seem as abnormal as possible. The SNP’s Public Health Minister Shona Robinson, quickly followed by England’s own health secretary Alan Johnson, tells us that public displays of cigarettes are hindering official ‘efforts to denormalise smoking’.

Saturday

Irwin Stelzer

Obama and McCain offer a choice, not an echo

In the Republican corner it is to be John Sidney McCain III, white, age 71. In the Democratic corner we have Barack Hussein Obama, black, age 46. No American election battle since the days of Franklin Roosevelt has attracted so much worldwide attention. A recent visitor to North Korea, a nation supposedly hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, tells me that the first question his ‘minder’ asked was: ‘Who will win the American elections?’ His concern is unsurprising: a President McCain would favour continuing existing multilateral pressure on North Korea to eliminate its nuclear weapons, and might even give some meaning to the phrase ‘or else’. President Obama would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to talk things over, no preconditions.

Fraser Nelson

‘Touch wood,’ Karzai said to me. You hear it all the time

There is something oddly soothing about going to sleep to the sound of gunfire in Kandahar airbase. The shots are fired by British troops, honing the night combat skills which achieved such success over the Taleban last winter. The fighting season was due to start four weeks ago, when the poppy harvest ended — but so far, nothing. British commanders are quietly optimistic that the Taleban has counted its 6,000 dead, learned it cannot win firefights and switched to guerrilla tactics instead. Only in Afghanistan could the rockets being fired into the Kandahar airbase be seen as a sign of progress. Much as the prospect may terrify visitors, the soldiers themselves are sanguine.

Anna Blundy

Sorry, but apologies really are the work of the Devil

Saying ‘sorry’ is mostly wicked and usually irrelevant, says Anna Blundy. People should not be allowed to dump their inner shame so easily There is no end, of course, to all this human erring. And we know forgiveness is divine — look at Nelson Mandela. But, for the non-divine of us, genuine forgiveness is largely impossible. This is, in my view, because most apologies are so insincere and self-serving. And it is to the, frankly, Satanic act of apologising that I would like to turn my attention. ‘Oh, I slept with someone else. Sorry.’ ‘I hit my sister over the head with a cello bow. Sorry.’ ‘I embezzled the Christmas club money. Sorry.’ ‘I hired five prostitutes and snorted loads of cocaine. Sorry.’ See?

Rod Liddle

I have worked out how we can win the Eurovision Song Contest next year

I watched the entirety of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, camped out on the sofa with acute sinusitis, dosed up on antibiotics and Sudafed. Every so often some hirsute Balkan hag would appear before me, gyrating and caterwauling as if her life depended upon it, and my ears would begin to bleed. I have never bled from the ears before; it’s a weird, discombobulating thing. The cushions were ruined. In case you missed this musical extravaganza, the winner was a chap called Dima Bilan from Russia with a song called ‘Believe’.

Bryan Forbes

Who decided that all motorists were criminals?

Bryan Forbes sees in the persecution of drivers a terrible metaphor for England’s decline: ministers hide in limousines while the police waste their time on minor road offences Do others like me wake every day angry that we are unwilling members of a persecuted majority? At the risk of becoming a serial whiner, it seems to me that the unholy trinity of the Treasury, local authorities and the police forces are intent on intimidating and fleecing anybody who has the effrontery to own and drive a car. So vindictive and petty are some of the laws framed specifically against motorists that I am resigned to the fact that any time now the Ministry of Transport will be renamed the Ministry of Fear.

Robin Harris

De Gaulle understood that only nations are real

Few may celebrate the half-century since Charles de Gaulle’s triumphs of 1958, says Robin Harris, but this realist genius understood that, in geopolitics, the nation-state was all Almost exactly half a century ago, on 1 June 1958, Charles de Gaulle became the last Prime Minister of the French Fourth Republic and immediately began the construction of the Fifth. The Fourth Republic, be it said, was not as bad as it was painted, not least by de Gaulle. The economy had grown, the communists were kept out, and France took the first steps to becoming a nuclear power. But the system was incestuous and unstable, a small group of small men swapping posts in nominally different governments — all incapable of decisive action.

Saturday

Dan Hannan

Ireland’s EU referendum will be no walkover

Daniel Hannan says that the vote on the Lisbon Treaty is not in the bag for the ‘Yes’ camp, which has no argument to offer. Meanwhile, the ‘No’ campaign is gaining ground every day In Brussels, even the smuggest fonctionnaires are starting to look uneasy. After the French and Dutch ‘No’ votes of 2005, EU leaders determined that there should be no more plebiscites. But there was one vote they couldn’t cancel: Ireland’s national constitution requires referendums on any cession of sovereignty. And so, in three weeks’ time, three million Irish voters will cast proxy ballots for 500 million unconsulted Europeans, determining whether the EU gets the Lisbon Treaty, née European Constitution.

Michael Bloomberg

The new ‘special relationship’: between London and New York

‘This is the Conservative party’s candidate for mayor of London?’ That was the first thought that ran through my head when I met Boris Johnson at the party’s annual conference last year in Blackpool, which I attended at the invitation of David Cameron. Boris certainly didn’t look or sound like a politician — but then again, neither did I when I first campaigned to become mayor of New York in 2001. Back then, the pundits had a field-day lampooning my campaign. They said I was inexperienced, which was true. They said I was a walking verbal gaffe, which was no less true. And they said I had no chance of winning, which certainly seemed true.

Mary Wakefield

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Gore Vidal tells Mary Wakefield that America has forgotten its constitutional roots, and explains why Bobby Kennedy was ‘the biggest son of a bitch in politics’ To kill time, as I wait for Gore Vidal by the reception desk in Claridge’s, I leaf through the pages of his memoirs, looking at the photographs. One in particular takes my fancy: Gore aged three, in the garden of his grandfather’s house in Washington DC — a dapper little chap in shorts and a smart round-collared shirt, tending what seem to be cabbages. He’s glancing up at the camera half-amused, entirely self-possessed. He’s so unusually composed for a toddler, that I squint at the pic up close, peering at his eyes. ‘Are you waiting for me?

Marianne Macdonald

Very few single girls actually have that much sex

The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of interviews. This meant that some 100 journalists, flown in to hear her thoughts on the movie, had in turn been cancelled. Maddened, they spent two days abusing the PR until, in a furious act of concession, she allocated some of them a far shorter slot with Ms Carrie Bradshaw the following day — seven and a half minutes, supplemented for the fortunate by a round table in which participants had 20 minutes, perched in groups of eight around a table, to ask SJP questions before she was hustled from the room.

Rod Liddle

A century from now, we will be appalled that we allowed abortions at all

Rod Liddle says the Commons vote securing the 24-week limit is no more than a craven politician’s fudge, designed to postpone the day when the law of the land finally catches up with the indisputable findings of science An awful lot of people we know are being laid off at the moment, or finding their incomes substantially decreased. This is the credit crunch, the cusp of a recession and its impact was felt first and most onerously upon those hard-working and resourceful young men in the City’s banking institutions. Many are looking to ship out and find jobs elsewhere; some, suddenly stricken with the need to feel socially useful, are downsizing into strange occupations such as teaching.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Gore Vidal at Intelligence Squared

Lloyd Evans reports on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event No debate this month at Intelligence Squared. Instead Gore Vidal is interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. The 800-strong crowd start to applaud even before Vidal reaches the rostrum. White-haired, frail and wheelchair-bound, he is modestly dressed in a dark suit but he exudes a dangerous alertness and grins hungrily as the questions begin. Bragg moves, scalpel-like, to the meatiest issue of the day. ‘Are you surprised by Obama’s success? Because you thought Hillary would win.’ ‘I wanted her to win,’ Vidal says, subtly re-aligning the question like a chess grand-master. He tells an anecdote about Hillary’s early campaign.

Joan Collins

An Actor’s Life

Joan Collins lives an actor's life Channel surfing on a rainy afternoon, I zeroed in on an old black-and-white movie that looked quite interesting, and with a wonderful cast too — Stanley Baker, Gloria Grahame, Laurence Harvey, Robert Morley, Margaret Leighton, John Ireland, Freda Jackson and Richard Basehart — a veritable Who’s Who of wonderful 1950s movie actors. Then on sashayed a zaftig teenager in a tight sweater and a bun — both on her head and in the oven (in the film). ‘My God, it’s me!’ I squealed, then settled down to watch the long forgotten The Good Die Young.

Fraser Nelson

Meet James Purnell: the best hope Labour has of avoiding disaster

Fraser Nelson says that the 38-year-old Work and Pensions Secretary is the best candidate to succeed Gordon Brown. Already surging ahead at his department, he has the gift of sounding like an ordinary human being — and he understands the Cameron Conservative party These days, it is scarcely possible to talk politics with a member of the government for more than ten minutes — if that — without The Question cropping up. Gordon Brown is doomed, runs the premise: he has hit rock bottom and carried on drilling. This cannot be allowed to go on. So what to do? Who is the successor? The job description is easy: someone hungry for power, undaunted by the odds, someone who could reassemble the New Labour electoral coalition. Finding the candidate is not so straightforward.

Tim Walker

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic Instinct Greta Scacchi is lying in bed beside Laurence Olivier. His head is resting against her shoulder. Suddenly it feels damp. She looks at the old man and sees that he is crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. He looks back at her imploringly. ‘Oh, Greta, I haven’t got any more work after this for six months. Nobody wants me any more...’. The bedroom scene in the television drama The Ebony Tower took a whole day to shoot and so there was plenty of time for confidences with the man she always addressed as ‘Sir’.