Features

Saturday

Reihan Salam

The new Woodstock generation

In late May, New York magazine noted a highly unusual advertisement that appeared on Craigslist. A young Brooklyn couple had decided to sell virtually everything they owned, from electronics to furniture to designer shoes, for $8,500. As it turns out, the couple was planning on taking their two young children and setting out for the open road. Two weeks earlier, the New York Times profiled several other couples who had made a similar choice — to surrender their accumulated possessions and, with toddlers in tow, to leave a dreary, consumption-driven urban existence behind for something nobler and more environmentally sound.

Talk of ‘excellence for all’ is just Balls

David Green responds to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families: Ed Balls claims that the Tories want excellence for the few, whereas he wants excellence for everyone. Worse still, the Tories want schools to select parents, while he wants parents to select schools. And the Tories are complacent. Balls will ‘intervene and drive change in the system’ while the Tories will merely ‘stand back and hope for the best’. Let’s take him at his word: ‘parents and pupils should choose schools not the other way round’. A policy-maker genuinely committed to parents choosing schools would carry out an honest evaluation of places where it has already been tried, such as Sweden. Instead, the Swedish system is dismissed.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

An innocent at Home

Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary, tells James Forsyth that he won’t ‘resort to soundbites’. But is this a sensible approach for a modern-day politician? Dominic Grieve’s office answerphone is struggling to keep up with events - the caller has reached ‘the office of the shadow attorney general and the Conservative spokesman on community cohesion,’ it says. No mention of his new role as shadow home secretary. Some Conservatives wish the answerphone was right. Even normally loyal Cameroons struggle to envisage going into the next election with Grieve as shadow home secretary. They’d rather he was a stopgap measure. Certainly, few would have named Grieve as part of the Tory’s strongest bowling attack a fortnight ago.

Peter Oborne

We have a duty to protect Zimbabwe

Ten years ago the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out a new international doctrine. Annan declared that the world was looking forward to what he called ‘a new century of human rights’. For the United Nations, declared Annan, this meant an entirely new way of doing things. ‘No government,’ he declared, ‘has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate the human rights or fundamental freedoms of its peoples. ‘Whether a person belongs to the minority or the majority, that person’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are sacred.’ This statement was revolutionary. Inter-national relations, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, have been conducted on the basis of formal respect for national boundaries.

Damian Thompson

Is the Catholic Church sliding towards civil war?

Damian Thompson on the bitter feud between the new young defenders of the recently reinstated Latin Mass, and Britain’s ‘magic circle’ of liberal bishops While Church of England bishops recoil from the prospect of gay ‘weddings’ with no precedent in Christian history, their Catholic counterparts are wringing their hands at the growing popularity of services that are too traditional for their tastes. On Saturday 14 June Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, one of the most senior figures in the Roman Curia and an ally of the Holy Father, celebrated a Pontifical High Mass at Westminster Cathedral. The bishop of the diocese, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, did not attend; nor did any of his four auxiliary bishops.

Rod Liddle

‘I hope the entire tribunal becomes infested with lice’

Rod Liddle on the case of Bushra Noah, the headscarf-wearing Muslim who has just won £4,000 from the Wedge hair salon I used to dye my hair — Midnight Auburn, from Clairol. Yes, because I’m worth it. I did it myself, once every three or four months or so, always ruining several perfectly good towels in the process. I don’t dye it any more because my girlfriend says that if I do, she’ll bin me. This is because a man dyeing his hair is both undignified and vain, she says: however, I think her opposition stems from the fact that if I got rid of all the grey, I would be irresistible to all women. She would suddenly have intense competition.

Saturday

Ed Balls

No child left behind

The Conservatives think that education is about selecting the lucky few, says Ed Balls. But there is no reason why excellence and opportunity shouldn’t be for all It’s just over a year since David Willetts made his thoughtful but ultimately fatal pronouncement: ‘academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it’. Those nine words — anathema to most Conservatives — led to a civil war inside the party, a messy U-turn and the reshuffling of Mr Willetts to a new job. The issue of whether the Tories would change the law and support new grammar schools being built — such as the one being proposed in Buckinghamshire — remains unresolved.

David Bosco

‘If we die today, you will be responsible’

David Bosco accompanies the UN Security Council on its visit to Darfur and finds that even meeting the victims of the conflict can’t stiffen the Council’s resolve Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem was holding court last Thursday in the VIP lounge at Khartoum International Airport. Sudan’s voluble United Nations ambassador was accompanying the UN Security Council as it prepared for the short flight to northern Darfur. Many hoped that the Council’s visit to the war-torn region would bring diplomats of the member states face to face with the suffering, and so provoke a strong condemnation of Sudanese war crimes. Instead, all our mission really served to highlight was the lack of resolve among UN officials and the lack of contrition from the Sudanese.

Rachel Johnson

Even middle-class children are suffering from neglect

And when did you last see your children? Before you both left at the crack for the office? When they were already in bed? Or do you only see them — let’s be brutally realistic here, given our divorce rate — at alternate weekends? So we don’t need to ask any more who tucks them up at night, takes them to school, listens to their Homeric summaries of Harry Potter books, buys them Start-rites, takes them to the dentist, finds out they’re upset, do we? Because it’s not you two, the parents, who gave them life. No, it’s more likely to be Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s.

James Delingpole

‘Global warming is not our most urgent priority’

Bjørn Lomborg, the controversial Danish economist, tells James Delingpole that it is better to spend our limited funds on saving lives than on saving the planet Gosh, I do hope Bjørn Lomborg doesn’t think I was trying to pick him up. I’ve only just learned from his Wikipedia entry that he’s ‘openly gay’ which, with hindsight, probably made my dogged insistence that we conduct our interview in his cramped hotel bedroom look like a cheap come-on. Not to mention the way I sat there throughout, mesmerised and sometimes lost for words under the gaze of the handsome, trim 43-year-old blond’s intensely sincere Danish blue eyes which never leave yours for one second. But it’s OK, Bjørn. You were safe all along, I promise.

Rod Liddle

Grow up, girls — those stranded dolphins don’t deserve your tears

A few years ago I had to take my pet rat, Heydrich, to the vet’s after my youngest son threw him head first at the bedroom wall. After that, Heydrich walked oddly and began acting in an unpredictable manner, certainly not in a fit state to, say, quell unrest in Czechoslovakia. The vet prescribed a course of antibiotics and some painkillers — total cost about 50 quid — and said even then Heydrich might not regain his former glory. And then he fixed me levelly and added: ‘But, um, he is just... you know, a rat. For five quid I could...’ I paid for the treatment and Heydrich spazzed around for another week or so before pegging out, a look of relief evident on his little rat face.

Wednesday

Gerald Warner

Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms

Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry ‘Do you have the new novel by Alexandre Dumas?’ Who ever imagined going into the local branch of Waterstone’s and asking that question, in the 21st century? Yet the unexpected — the impossible — has happened and an authentically new historical novel by the legendary author of The Three Musketeers has recently been published for the first time in Britain. Its classically Dumas title in French, Le chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, has been changed for an Anglophone readership to The Last Cavalier.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

‘If there’s a vote of no confidence on 42 days, we’ll win’

In her only print interview, Jacqui Smith tells Matthew d’Ancona that her proposal for the detention of terror suspects does not undermine Magna Carta, that she is ‘frustrated’ by Lord Goldsmith, and that the ‘West Midlands housewife’ is a better judge of the threat than MPs In a government stuffed with malfunctioning robots, nervous wrecks and preening Fauntleroys, Jacqui Smith shows every sign of being a fully paid-up member of the human race. Which, as it happens, is the first lucky break Gordon Brown has had in months. It is a slight exaggeration to say that the Home Secretary holds her boss’s future in her hands — but only slight.

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.