Features

Wednesday

Vassi Chamberlain

Taki is right: we are all still snobs

I was recently upbraided in this magazine by your High Life columnist, a person I’ve liked and admired for many years, regarding a piece I’d written for Tatler on the ski resort of Gstaad. Taki can sometimes get painfully close to the bone, but he let me off lightly. His point was that I hadn’t understood what made the place tick because only the new-money arrivistes had spoken, as opposed to the chic old lot who had run for the hills. This was an interesting point. I’d assumed that we, not just as a nation but as human beings, had grown out of or at least softened our attitude to snobbery. I thought that we had stopped instinctively revering the old and rubbishing the new.

Emily Maitlis

The soft diplomacy of Belgian chocolates

Emily Maitlis reports from Libya on a land newly entranced by our brands — even M&S — where the West tolerates Gaddafi for fear of the insurgent alternative Strange things happen to countries hermetically sealed by their dictators. Under Hoxha, Albanians fell in love with Norman Wisdom. Under Lukashenko, the Belarusians have seen mandatory beauty contests nationwide, and as I arrive at the customs desk of Tripoli airport I realise that under Gaddafi, mirrored aviator sunglasses and big hair have become the de rigueur fashion statement among immigration officials. This is not the cool hand of viral marketing, but the unmistakable grip of a leader who believes imitation is the sincerest — indeed only — form of flattery.

David Selbourne

We live in a state of emergency: and we are getting angrier

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, says David Selbourne. The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher. The ills of Western democracies are afflicting the most liberal societies known to history. Among other things, Britain suffers from growing inequality, housing shortage, a falling quality of health provision, rising rates of many types of crime, a failing pedagogy, agricultural impoverishment and a huge scale of ‘consumer debt’.

Rod Liddle

I know why the government wants to send homosexuals back to Iran to be hanged

Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country Should we afford Iranian homosexuals political asylum in this country, or send them back to be hanged in their home country? I suppose there is a certain, dwindling, lobby in Great Britain which would argue we could hang them here and then bill Iran for the cost. Surely not many people still cleave to such a view — although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain. This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and our own country — see, we persecuted the poofs too.

Fraser Nelson

Milburn: What’s it all about, Gordon?

On the floor of Alan Milburn’s office is a scroll signed by the Queen offering her ‘well-beloved councillor’ £2,000 to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It is a souvenir of his battles in the Blair–Brown days. He was appointed to this position to co-ordinate the last general election campaign, and was briefly seen as the favoured candidate to succeed Tony Blair. This lasted a few weeks: he resigned on election night and has kept an almost suspiciously low profile ever since. ‘I thought the most helpful thing would be for me to keep quiet,’ he says, gazing at Big Ben out of the window of his rooftop office. ‘But now, I feel I’ve earned my passage.

Adam Holloway

To bring peace to the Afghans, talk to the Taleban

Adam Holloway says that Britain’s strategy in Afghanistan is misconceived. Nato’s military presence should be reduced and the battle for hearts and minds fought more imaginatively They do not like the F-word in Whitehall, but failure stares us in the face in southern Afghanistan. For three years we have deluded ourselves that we can defeat the insurgency in the Pashtun tribal belt through our much talked-about plan for a ‘comprehensive approach’ — security, governance and development. But in Helmand province and across the Pashtun lands, violence is greatly increased, governance is distinctly patchy and development is barely noticeable. The government tells us that we are there to stop it becoming a failed state in which our enemies can regroup.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – “The West is provoking a new Cold War with Russia”

Motion: The West is provoking a new cold war with Russia Chair: Jonathan Freedland For the motion: Alexei Pushkov Anatole Kaletsky Professor Norman Stone Against the motion: Edward Lucas Dr Lilia Shevtsova Ronald D. Asmus Russia and the West came head-to-head at Intelligence Squared on Tuesday night. Chairman Jonathan Freedland hailed the aptness of the subject. ‘Just after a new Russian president has been democratically elected. Although some might feel,’ he added, ‘that two of those words aren’t entirely accurate.’ First into the bear-pit, a super-smooth Muscovite with silvery hair and piercing blue eyes. Alexei Pushkov is both a professor of international relations and the presenter of Russian TV’s most popular current affairs show.

A.S.H. Smyth

Pullman gives God a break for Easter

The author of His Dark Materials talks to A.S.H. Smyth about the latest episode in the saga in which he turns towards politics — with a nod to The Magnificent Seven along the way Several years ago, Philip Pullman wrote that ‘“Thou shalt not” might reach the head, but it takes “Once upon a time” to reach the heart.’ Now, the prizewinning author and self-appointed scourge of God is preparing to unveil the latest episode from the universe of His Dark Materials, called Once Upon a Time in the North. With Easter upon us, the Church might be relieved to hear that God doesn’t get a look in. The writer whom Peter Hitchens once called ‘the one the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed’ is leaving Him alone for now.

Marian L. Tupy

Mugabe is the Mobutu of our time

‘Nice shoes,’ said a young Zimbabwean looking wistfully at my $40 Nike tennis shoes that I wore when I encountered him sitting on the floor of a completely barren Bata shoe store in the town of Victoria Falls. It was last November and I was in Zimbabwe having crossed the border from Botswana earlier that day. The once charming town that used to teem with travellers from around the globe was more derelict and much emptier than I remembered it from my visit in the early 1990s. About half of the shops were either empty or closed altogether. The main shopping centre looked more like a warehouse and offered a few strategically placed products in an attempt to mask the widespread shortages of consumer goods.

Charles Moore

The miners’ strike and the fight against Islamism

The huge defeat of the Conservative party in the election of 1997 drove the party back into its rural and suburban redoubts and so cut it off from many things which were happening in Britain. It did not want to think about the rise of political Islam. This opting out was part of a wider demoralisation in conservative culture in recent years. In the time of the Millennium, the death of Diana and all that, many conservative-minded people started to say things like, ‘I don’t recognise my own country.’ They felt so alienated, particularly from their own cities, that they wanted to avoid thinking about problems of multiculturalism, and of terrorism.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Al-Qa’eda’s secret UK gangs: terror as a ‘playground dare’

As Brown unveils his National Security Strategy, Fraser Nelson talks to those in the front line against Islamic extremism. MI5 has expanded successfully, but faces in al-Qa’eda an enemy that is organic, elusive and constantly mutating: gangs built on deadly bravado To defeat an enemy, one must first understand him — and this, for years, has been Britain’s principal problem in the war on terror. The identity and profile of the typical British jihadi was a mystery. Many argued he did not exist at all — until the July 2005 London bombings spectacularly proved otherwise. In those days, MI5 was tracking just 400 terror suspects. Now the figure is 2,000, and rising.

Rod Liddle

Pity the monks of Tibet who dare to hope that anyone will come to their aid

I can’t remember what sort of foreign policy we have right now. When New Labour was elected we were told it would be an ‘ethical foreign policy’. A year or so later, Robin Cook altered this to a ‘foreign policy with an ethical dimension’, which is a rather different thing. I assume it is now something like ‘a foreign policy with no ethical dimension whatsoever’ or maybe, since about five years ago, ‘a vigorously unethical foreign policy’. In this, I don’t suppose we are very different to most other nations and one should at least be glad that the pretence otherwise has been long dropped.

Mary Wakefield

A holy man tipped to lead the nation’s Catholics

Mary Wakefield meets Dom Hugh Gilbert, the Benedictine Abbot of Pluscarden — said to be the Pope’s ‘dark horse’ candidate to succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor What is holiness? How do you spot it? I’ve come to Worth Abbey in Sussex to meet a monk often described as ‘holy’ — Dom Hugh Gilbert, OSB, Abbot of Pluscarden in Scotland — and I wonder as I wander around in search of him, what form his sanctity will take. What is a holy man, and where is this holy man? Worth seems deserted. Puddles lie low in sleeves of ice; clouds hang motionless over what looks like a spaceship but must be the church. The air is full of a curious, attentive silence. On further investigation, the spaceship, too, is empty.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The BBC White Season only shows how little Auntie has really changed

I hope you are enjoying ‘White Season’ on the BBC — a brave and groundbreaking attempt by the corporation to devote 0.003 per cent of its airtime to issues which bother 92 per cent of its licence payers. One of the senior commissioning monkeys at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted that white people — some of whom he has met — have been underserved by the corporation, and especially ‘working-class’ white people. Mind you, it is surely difficult to serve such a hidden and secretive tranche of the population, especially when they live beneath stones and only venture out to get drunk and shout ‘darkie!’ at passers-by. But at least the BBC has tried to understand these awful people and shown them where they are going wrong.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

A film-maker who lives in the shadow of a fatwa

Debate about Geert Wilders and his anti-Koran film Fitna is everywhere in Holland. Newspapers, television shows and private conversations are awash with apprehension. Since the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the hounding into exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders is the most prominent critic of Islam in Holland. With his shock of blond hair and startlingly frank language, the MP and leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom is instantly recognisable. But what about Fitna — the movie that no one has seen, but everyone, including the Dutch government, has already condemned for being likely to kick off the next round in the violent confrontation between radical Islam and European liberalism?

Venetia Thompson

‘They have guns’: a Sloane at large in gangsta land

Tired of Euro-Sloane bores in Chelsea, Venetia Thompson tours the clubs of Harlesden, the UK’s ‘gun capital’, and experiences a world where a firearm is as normal a status symbol as a Chanel handbag or a Rolex watch would be in SW3 I am dancing slowly with a Portuguese friend to beautiful Zouk music from Cape Verde, sung in Creole. He suddenly throws me against the wall behind him and shoves me down towards the ground. One of my pearl earrings flies across the dance floor. The music has stopped, people are scrambling towards the safety of the now deserted DJ booth or running to get out of the club. There are screams and shouts of ‘Get down!’ Fights in clubs are scarcely unusual, alcohol-fuelled more often than not.

Irwin Stelzer

Go nuclear, but keep your hand on your wallet

John Hutton, the energetic Secretary of State for Business and a few other things, has reason to be pleased with the expressions of ‘significant interest’ in constructing new nuclear power plants that he has received from British Energy, EDF Energy, E.ON UK and Iberdrola — the British, French, German and Spanish utilities — respectively. These are among the handful of companies in the world with the knowhow and financial resources to build and then successfully operate these capital-intensive and complicated plants. The government’s case for the need for new nuclear plants is straightforward. The nation’s ten existing plants will be shut down by 2023, reducing this low-carbon source of energy from 19 per cent of the nation’s total to 6 per cent.

Charles Glass

Farewell, my father: the sun sets on my horizon

When the sun lowers itself into the Pacific Ocean, west of California, it has a way of lingering on the horizon that makes you imagine it will stay for ever. It is perhaps less bright than at its zenith, but more beautiful. You don’t want to let it go. Then, just as you are sure it won’t disappear, it does. The other day, my older son and I walked along the beach near my father’s house between Los Angeles and San Diego. We did not talk much, and I forgot to tell him that in that same briney wash north of us my father taught me to body-surf and to fish. My son is 30 years old, a year older than my father was when I was born. My father was always the measure. He finished school at 17, as did I. I studied philosophy at university, as he did.

Tessa Keswick

Next time you need a doctor, go to China

On a recent visit to Henan Province in China I hurt my back and had the good fortune to come across the best doctor in the country. This is Doctor Wang Daifu. Being the top medical student in the most rigorously elitist and competitive system in the world is serious. Just as there are 20 million people studying the violin or engineering in China there are also tens of millions studying medicine — Eastern or Western, or both. Wang Daifu studied Western medicine in the People’s Liberation Army for seven years and Chinese traditional medicine for six. And he came out top of the class. Tall, angular, handsome and aged 42, he operates from his private surgery in the Chaoyang district of Beijing where he looks after anyone who can afford to pay. He also teaches two days a week.

Tim Walker

A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama

‘I am and always have been an activist,’ says Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner to South Africa. ‘As a lawyer, a Methodist lay preacher and now as a diplomat, that is what I am. It is how I have been brought up and I can’t imagine ever being anything other than that.’ Boateng’s posting comes to an end next May and somehow one can’t quite see this Hackney-born, one-time firebrand of the Greater London Council allowing himself to be quietly packed off to the Lords.