Features

Saturday

Christopher Booker

Beware the politician posing as a scientist

One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery, with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue,,however far removed it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. In 2000, when he was appointed just before the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface chemistry’. Yet almost immediately top of his agenda was the need to fight an animal disease.

Martin Rowson

If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him

Martin Rowson just doesn’t buy the ideology that comes with God. Even a personal appearance by the Almighty wouldn’t do the trick, he says The syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn’t stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing itself to stand in God’s place. I don’t quite see it like that. Despite the best efforts of warring religions to stake a claim to a universalist monopoly, each one of them has always been part of a teeming multitude of rival ideologies, which include the kind of atheism I believe in and the kind Richard Dawkins subscribes to.

Nick Broomfield

It is not US Marines who should be on trial

After 9/11, the United States had the sympathy of the world on its side. Yet as we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this sympathy and trust has been entirely eroded, and during the making of my film, Battle for Haditha, I saw exactly how and why this change of heart and mind has taken place. Many of the ex-Marines that took part in the film enlisted aged 17, believing they were fighting in a just cause to protect democracy and the integrity of the United States. Five years later, they feel very differently. And the Iraqis I spoke to have suffered the same disillusionment. Initially, they were pleased to be rid of Saddam and welcomed the Americans as liberators.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

No sleep till Denver: Hillary, the unlikely underdog, takes it to the wire

It was meant to be the night that Barack Obama sealed the deal. The presidency seemed almost within his reach. Then, against the odds, like the villain in a horror movie, Hillary came back from the near-dead. And by the end of Tuesday night — with a thumping win in Ohio and a victory in the popular vote in Texas — she had earned the right to take this contest to Pennsylvania on 22 April and, maybe, all the way to the convention in Denver in August. Obama remains the favourite to win the nomination but for the first time Clinton has a credible reason why she should be the nominee even if she does not win the most delegates. The result in Texas, where she won the popular vote but trails heavily in the caucus, provides her with a terrific argument.

Rod Liddle

Water, Prozac, management consultants: all completely useless

According to one serious front-page newspaper report, all those bones found on the site of that former children’s home in Jersey were actually left-over props from an edition of Bergerac. The whole place is taped off, they’ve had the floppy-eared sniffer dogs in and the supposedly grisly, horrible revelations have been leading our news programmes for a week or more. Now it may well be not multiple murders after all, but merely fake stuff left for John Nettles to find many years ago, before he forsook the Channel Islands for the scarcely gentler parish of Midsomer. This revelation surprised me less than you might imagine.

Saturday

Robert Shepherd

The real tributaries of Enoch’s ‘rivers of blood’

What was in Enoch Powell’s mind when he made his explosive ‘rivers of blood’ speech on immigration 40 years ago this spring? His repetition of wild allegations against immigrants made by his constituents and his apocalyptic warnings of bloody racial conflict ended his front-bench career. Overnight Powell was transformed into a folk-hero for many and a hate-figure for others. Four decades later, the fallout from his outburst is still toxic, as a Tory parliamentary candidate, Nigel Hastilow, discovered to his cost last autumn when he echoed the view sometimes muttered outside polite society and stated that Enoch had been right. Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking recently about sharia law, Powell deliberately set out to shock.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Boris’s most brilliant wheeze to date was the letter to the Guardian attacking him

Rod Liddle salutes the genius of the Tory mayoral candidate in sending a spoof petition condemning himself and praising Livingstone to the skies to the Left’s in-house newspaper The battle to become Mayor of London is getting dirty. Someone from Boris Johnson’s campaign team — or maybe Boris himself — put a hilarious spoof letter in the Guardian this week. It purported to be from 100 ‘academics’, luvvies, lesbians and professional agitators, all of them aghast at the notion that the ‘right-wing and reactionary’ Boris might actually win. It was a quite brilliant work of parody — long-winded, witless, sanctimonious and marvellously self-important.

Fraser Nelson

Made in Sweden: the new Tory education revolution

Fraser Nelson reports on the radical Swedish system of independent state schools, financed by vouchers, that has transformed the country’s education performance and is now inspiring the Conservative party’s dramatic blueprint for British schools: to set them free This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.

Matthew Dancona

Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web

Charles Leadbeater tells Matthew d’Ancona about the riches to be mined from online collaboration — and says that the Conservatives have a chance to launch a new form of politics The man who brought you Bridget Jones is, you might think, an unlikely guide to the deeper philosophical and cultural meaning of the web. But, as he sips his tea in the kitchen of his Highbury mews home, Charles Leadbeater makes an extremely convincing magus of the online revolution and the new world of Web 2.0. ‘The thing that interests me is not the technology, but what people try to do with it,’ he says, ‘and why they want to participate — they don’t just want to consume.

Saturday

Venetia Thompson

Obama is an Othello for our times

Sitting watching Chiwetel Ejiofor recently in the Donmar’s production of Othello, I was struck by the face of the man sitting next to me during Othello’s legendary ‘Her father loved me, oft invited me’ speech of the first act. He was clearly mesmerised by Ejiofor’s portrayal of the Moor. But more interesting was his look of slight bewilderment; unwittingly mirroring the faces of the Venetians onstage. The Othello of the first act is a figure that captivates, intrigues and inspires white Venetian society and the soldiers serving under him.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

A scholar who dares to look terror in the face

Michael Burleigh is riding a career high. The author of the 2000 bestseller The Third Reich: A New History has just published the last of a gargantuan trilogy of books on religion and politics in Europe since the French revolution. Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes took us up to the war on terror. Now, with Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, Burleigh comes right up to date. Not that Blood and Rage is only about Islamic fundamentalism. As the 52-year-old former academic tells me when we meet at his home in south London, the new book is about terrorism as a culture — as a way of life, and death.

Rod Liddle

The biggest tent of the lot: to stop Blair becoming EU President

Rod Liddle says that the former Prime Minister has pulled off an astonishing feat: uniting Left and Right, Europhiles and Eurosceptics, people of all nations and creeds, online and in print, in their glorious campaign to prevent him becoming President of Europe This is shaping up to be the greatest expression of European unanimity and togetherness since Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974. From Gdansk in the Baltic to the Straits of Cadiz, the citizens of this fractious and culturally disparate continent are at last united. It is a remarkable achievement, when you think about it. What other politician in living memory would be able to bring together, in fervent opposition, a German Green, a Flemish supporter of Vlaams Beland, an Italian Christian Democrat and a French Socialist?

Neil Clark

Castro’s Cuba was no place for a socialist like me

It’s a country where the vast majority live in poverty, while a tiny, corrupt elite live in luxury. It’s a place where, 14 years after South Africa abolished apartheid, a form of it still operates. And it’s a country where you can be threatened with prison not just for criticising the country’s leadership, but also for querying a medical bill. Welcome to Cuba, the ‘socialist’ paradise built by that great egalitarian Fidel Castro, who after 49 years at the helm has finally decided to hand over power — in the manner of a true democrat — to his brother Raúl. My wife and I, as unreconstructed paleo-lefties who support Clause Four, free school meals and NHS dental provision, had long wanted to visit Castro’s Cuba.

Lorna Fitzsimons

Israel is getting ready to invade Gaza

Lorna Fitzsimons talks to senior sources and concludes that, with heavy hearts, the Israelis are set to mount a military takeover of Gaza — a step that will leave the talks nowhere This is not the way things were meant to happen. When Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of all Israelis from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leaders from around the world applauded. It was a clear message that Israel was willing to do almost everything it could to resolve the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians — including returning land without any assurances of peace and security.

Saturday

Anne Mcelvoy

Britain just got Weller: meet the Jam Generation

What do David Cameron, David Miliband, Nick Clegg, Yvette Cooper, Michael Gove and (just about) George Osborne have in common? They are part of the Jam Generation: a powerful cross-party phenomenon laying the foundations of our political futures. The soundtrack to their formative years is Paul Weller’s tuneful, raucous songs of the 1980s: ‘The public gets what the public wants/ But I don’t get what this society wants/ I’m going underground . . .’ Now they are at, or near, the top of politics: two party leaders and the foreign secretary are sons of the Weller years. So are the fast risers in Gordon Brown’s latest Cabinet reshuffle. Some, like James Purnell and Andy Burnham, are really the little brothers of the Weller era and coming up fast behind.

Rod Liddle

The Archbishop is little more than a posh John Prescott in a black dress

Rod Liddle is infuriated by a church leader who refuses to confront the inhumanity perpetrated in the name of Islam or the consequences — visible in Malaysia — of legal apartheid I assume it is simply Dr Rowan Williams’s impressive beard which has persuaded everybody that he is an ‘intellectual’; certainly, it cannot be anything he has ever said or written. His latest contribution to the national reservoir of stupidity was the business about sharia law, of course. It was both inevitable and indeed desirable that the state would, somehow, devolve to our Muslim communities jurisdiction over certain — largely domestic — disputes, he opined. Cue a justifiable outrage.

Lloyd Evans

A morning cigar and a glass of wine with Sir John

At 84, John Mortimer is still thrilled by his latest theatrical success, appalled by the cult of ‘health and fitness’ and sorry that the Labour party he loved has vanished. At 84, John Mortimer is still thrilled by his latest theatrical success, appalled by the cult of ‘health and fitness’ and sorry that the Labour party he loved has vanished. By Lloyd Evans The pubs in Paddington open at 8 a.m. It was a glorious winter’s morning and though I was tempted I decided against a pick-me-up. I was on my way to interview John Mortimer, the socialist bon viveur who famously enjoys a glass of champagne at sunrise, and it seemed disrespectful to arrive with a sullied palate. Climbing soberly aboard the 8.30 for Henley, I sped towards Oxfordshire.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Meet the minister for selling the unsellable

Fraser Nelson warms to Jim Murphy, the Minister for Europe, who is steering the Lisbon Treaty through parliament — and now promises that he would help Blair become EU President Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first tip for stardom. Throughout his twenties, Jim Murphy suffered this affliction. Before Tony Blair led the Labour party he was starting a Blairite revolution in the National Union of Students. His slogan, ‘realism, not revolution’, made a cover story in the Sunday Times magazine. No list of young talent in the mid-1990s was complete without him. Yet only now, 11 years after his election to parliament, has he reappeared on the national radar.

Stephen Schwartz

Pakistan needs more than elections. Only a new political class will do

Stephen Schwartz says that, in this failing state, the ballot box is also a tinderbox. Even if Monday’s election goes ahead, Pakistan might well end up in a worse state than before: exporting terror, spawning confrontation, at war with itself The most important country in the world right now faces the most dangerous election in recent times. The country is Pakistan, not America, and the elections for parliament take place this coming Monday. Policy experts speak of ‘failed states’, and Pakistan is just about as close to failure as it is possible for a state to be. That’s one reason the world will be watching on Monday.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Reasons for Barack Obama to be cheerful

Super Tuesday was meant to be the decisive day in the Obama–Clinton contest. Instead it was an indecisive super-muddle. Both candidates did only what they needed to do and no more. After California was called for Clinton, Missouri ended up going for Obama — a turnaround which ensured that the evening ended in a score draw but with Obama leading on away goals. It was meant to be the night that Hillary Clinton was anointed as the Democratic nominee presumptive. The Clintonite establishment — which played such a crucial role in setting up a schedule where more than 20 states voted on one day — did not believe that any challenger could survive what was effectively a national primary against a candidate with 100 per cent name-recognition.