Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Shouting abuse at fat people is not just fun. It’s socially useful

Rod Liddle is impressed by David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow and the Tory leader’s call for greater personal responsibility. Antisocial behaviour needs to be stigmatised, not treated as an illness to be cured Good for David Cameron. There was a grotesquely fat woman in front of me in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s this week, so fat I couldn’t see the car park; she looked like 26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach and gelatine and then allowed the result to set for 38 years in the fridge.

Wednesday

Charlotte Metcalf

The Establishment paedophile: how a monster hid in high society

The five-year-old girl cowers naked and crying in a corner. She is so frightened that she urinates. One of the men in the room hits her repeatedly. The others laugh. Another man picks her up and throws her face down on the bed. Then the men rape her. She dies soon afterwards of atrocious injuries. This is the scenario that the respected art historian and curator, Roger Took, boasted repeatedly about in internet ‘chat rooms’ to fellow paedophiles. In the chat rooms, Took relates how a Dutch man bought the child in Cambodia, kept her for a week and how Took was part of the group who enjoyed ‘splitting her apart’ one night.

Irfan Al-Alawi-S-Schwartz

Our survey shows British Muslims don’t want sharia

Don’t believe the Lord Chief Justice any more than the Archbishop of Canterbury, say Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi A senior establishment figure has once more raised the question of whether sharia law should be introduced as a parallel system of justice for British Muslims. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Lord Chief Justice, was following in the footsteps of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who in February suggested that the institutionalisation of unspecified aspects of sharia law is ‘unavoidable’. Rowan Williams gave the appearance of mere cluelessness; discussing sharia in a vague, multiculturalist manner apparently intended to project warm feelings toward British Muslims.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

How to get stabbed: you, too, can be knifed in a public place

Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing, people. From the pictures I’ve seen, if you’ve bought a cat skinner with which to stab somebody, you’ve bought the wrong tool for the job. No use complaining later. In the last year for which figures are available there were 64,000 knife crimes committed in Britain — the figures have been rising with great vigour over the last eight or nine years.

Lord Lloyd-Of-Berwick

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties On 18 June 2008 the Law Lords gave judgment in the case of R. v. Davis. The defendant was charged with murder. The prosecution case was that he had shot and killed two men after an all-night party. There were three witnesses — and three only — who identified the defendant as the gunman. All three gave their evidence behind screens under pseudonyms. Their voices were artificially distorted so that they could not be recognised by the defendant.

Wednesday

Theo Hobson

A very English coup — and the end of our national church

On the eve of the General Synod and the Lambeth Conference, Theo Hobson says that the sleeping giant of evangelical and orthodox Anglicanism has been awoken by liberal agitation and Rowan Williams’s failed leadership. The church is damaged beyond repair Some years ago a vicar gave a sermon in which he tried to explain the latest developments in the Anglican Communion to his congregation. Afterwards an old lady came up to him, a bit bemused. ‘How does all this stuff about Anglicans affect us?’, she asked. ‘Well,’ he replied, smiling warmly at the old biddy, ‘we’re all part of the global Anglican Communion, aren’t we?’ She looked still more bemused: ‘I thought we were Church of England.’ She had a point.

David Davis

Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlessly As shadow home secretary for five years, it became an office joke that, faced with difficult policy questions, I would demand ‘get me the evidence!’ I am a scientist by training and, while 69 per cent of the public believe I took a principled stance in resigning from Parliament, that decision was also based on a rigorous empirical assessment of the evidence. The reality is that the relentless stream of repressive measures taken by this government over the last eleven years — whether 42 days pre-charge detention or any other — has not made us any safer. In many cases, they have jeopardised our security.

Steven Berkoff

I was starstuck by David Cameron

It was a large thickish card. ‘180th anniversary of the Spectator’, to be celebrated at the Churchill Hotel in elegant Portman Square. It looked to be an event not to miss and I’m quite partial to a little schmoozing from the ‘Right’ since it is from within my domain on the Left that I have been the most scourged. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but I conclude that the Left is not quite so left as it would like to pretend it is. The traffic was horrendous, and like the maze of Theseus, each turn I took sadistically led me back via one-way streets to my start position. Thus have London streets been turned into a lunatic’s worst nightmare. Get it sorted Boris! At last Portman Square.

James Forsyth

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked on the presidential campaign and then moved to the White House where he rose to become White House press secretary, the public face of the administration. But with the publication of his memoirs he has broken spectacularly with his old boss. The title of Scott McClellan’s book tells you where he is coming from: What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.

Melissa Kite

A portrait of the artist as a tennis champion

Melissa Kite meets Martina Navratilova, nine times Wimbledon singles champion and now pioneer of ‘tennising’ — an artistic technique that creates Jackson Pollock-style patterns The jet set are strolling across the manicured lawns of corporate Wimbledon. Glistening white marquees filled with champagne and canapés await them at the Fairway Village and Wimbledon Club, just over the road from the All England Club where the tennis championship is taking place. Inside the tents, amid water sculptures and flowers and wine glasses lined up on trays, are some unusual paintings.

Saturday

Edie G-Lush

City Life | 28 June 2008

Life in America’s prisons is famously tough, but at least it allows one inmate, Jonathan Lee Riches, plenty of time to spend filing lawsuits. In his latest legal complaint, Riches — who happens to be a resident of Williamsburg federal correctional institution in West Virginia — has turned his sights on legendary San Francisco-based venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and is attempting to sue him for $43 million. The complaint, in its entirety, reads: ‘Khosla’s fund invests in prison buildings. I’m suffering from no medical treatment. This is a conspiracy. Bhutto was killed on my birthday. I can’t see outside, this is unconstitutional. I seek $43 million.

Gerald Kaufman

What Cyd Charisse told me about Singin’ in the Rain

Gerald Kaufman on the late, great dancer and film star ‘who could stop a man by just sticking up her leg’, and the accidents that led her to a role that became a movie sensation When I discussed Singin’ in the Rain with Cyd Charisse, who died last week, she was of course aware that this was the film that propelled her to instant stardom. She knew less, however, about the series of accidents that brought about this opportunity. Charisse was scarcely a novice to MGM musicals before her big chance came along, but when MGM’s iconic producer of musicals, Arthur Freed, decided to make Singin’ in the Rain, with a score consisting almost entirely of songs written by Freed himself, not the tiniest thought was given to including her in the cast.

Wednesday

Danny Kruger

I wrote ‘hug a hoodie’ and I’m proud of it

Danny Kruger, who was David Cameron’s speechwriter, defends his most notorious piece of work for the Tory leader and says that love is a neglected crime-fighting device It happened to be the day that Boris Johnson took office as Mayor of London with a mandate to tackle youth crime. My wife and I were coming out of a house in Camden where we had been viewing a flat to rent. Standing on the steps with us, the owner of the flat suddenly saw the retreating rear of his moped, two boys aboard and half a dozen of their friends pelting along behind. Like the pair of prats we were, the owner and I tackled youth crime. When we caught up with the pedestrians, we received between us a black eye (owner) and cut lip (me), and no moped.

Martin Rowson

‘Yes! Ha! I’d have been up to the top job’

For over a decade and a half Ann Widdecombe has been a cartoonist’s dream come true. On top of the way she looks, she’s an avowed virgin endlessly pontificating about sexual morality, a woman politician self-consciously eschewing image self-consciousness and with a voice that could crack a font at 50 paces. For all those reasons and many more, she seemed to be the perfect choice as the first subject for this series of ‘Cartoon Interviews’, in which I’m hoping to pull off a kind of ‘double whammy’ by interviewing the victims of satire while drawing them at the same time. What I’m after is an understanding of how it feels to be on the receiving end of all that mockery, and then compounding it with another nasty cartoon.

Rod Liddle

Cummins may be part of the green ink brigade, but he was right about Islam

Rod Liddle looks back at the case of the British Council employee who dared to speak the truth about Islamic ideology — and notes that what was heretical in 2004 is now almost orthodox A madman has been bombarding Fleet Street journalists with extremely long emails, asking for redress, for a hearing. He feels traduced. Nothing new there, then. Lunatics write to me every day, long handwritten scrawls of bitter psychosis — and it really is true that the maddest are written in green ink, or a similarly unnatural hue. I imagine these woebegone people wandering into WH Smith’s and saying to some babe at the counter: ‘Excuse me, I would like to buy a pen, for I need to write a long letter.’ And the girl narrowing her eyes and saying: ‘Certainly, sir.

Mark Mason

Trivia really is very important, you know

But it’s a boy thing, admits Mark Mason. Women are just too sensible to watch Spinal Tap 35 times — but they don’t know what connects Ringo Starr and Shane Warne For years I thought it was just me and my friends. Merrily we dotted our conversations with random facts — Carlsberg Special Brew was invented for Winston Churchill, the M2 is the only British motorway that connects with no other motorway, a Rubik’s Cube has more combinations than light travels inches in a century... Never did we stop to think that this trait might actually say anything about us. But then along came Schott’s Miscellany, Does Anything Eat Wasps? and QI. All of a sudden trivia is trendy.

Fraser Nelson

Very discreetly, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech

At 9 p.m. on the night before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he was lying alone on his bed staring at the ceiling. He didn’t want to join his family, watching television, but was eventually dragged down for the News at Ten. ‘No,’ he said, when he heard its exit poll. ‘I accept that we’re going to win, but a landslide? It’s ridiculous.’ This anecdote, recounted in his wife’s autobiography, dramatises what those around David Cameron consider Blair’s worst mistake: a failure to prepare (in Labour’s case, for the sheer scale of victory). It is an error they are determined not to repeat. Not that Mr Cameron expects a landslide. And he, too, has a near-superstitious aversion to the merest whiff of triumphalism.

Venetia Thompson

Princely homes that hold their value in every sense

Venetia Thompson says that the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment does work that nobody else can and constructs homes that buck current property market trends Robin Hood famously robbed from the rich to give to the poor, but I am certain that he never suggested that the poor should then be crammed into tower blocks like battery chickens in the name of Modernist architecture until they were finally stabbed to death in a deserted stairwell. There is nothing truly egalitarian about the ironically named Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London — except the equality of squalor. It is no surprise that most of its 400 residents want the 1972 monstrosity torn down and replaced with something vaguely inhabitable. However — wouldn’t you know it?

Saturday

James Forsyth

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Tax the rich (more) – Intelligence Squared debate report

James Forsyth on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared debate There was a particular buzz of anticipation before the latest Spectator / Intelligence2  debate - perhaps because the motion would materially affect the audience. Judging by appearances, I’d wager that almost all of them paid the top rate of tax and that north of 90 percent of them earned £100,000 a year, putting them in the sights of all those who think that the rich should pay more. If nothing else, the evening was going to settle whether or not Turkeys ever do vote for Christmas. Evan Davis, the BBC’s former economics editor and now a presenter on the Today programme, was in the chair.

Daniel Hannan

EU leaders will never consult us again

Daniel Hannan, who predicted the Irish ‘No’ vote in this magazine, now says that the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty and never risk a referendum again By ten o’clock on Friday morning, it was clear that the ‘No’s had it. Ireland’s Europhiles were struggling even in their affluent strongholds within the Pale. In the rest of the country, they were being pulverised. A jubilant ‘No’ campaigner rang me from Galway, his words tumbling over each other. ‘It looks like a high turnout, too,’ he exulted. ‘The Eurocrats won’t be able to just carry on as if nothing has happened.’ Oh yes they will, I told him, sadly. They did when the Danes voted ‘No’ to Maastricht.