Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression. Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma’s story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta. Mae Sot, Thai-Burma borderThe family had come from one of the villages along the border and their story of
A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved. Even more curious is
At 7.40 a.m. on 2 April the Solomon Islands were struck by a major earthquake and a large tsunami. At least 52 people were killed, more than 900 homes were destroyed, and thousands of people were left homeless. Little attention was paid to this at the time and not much more since. After all, they
A light rain drifts down over Kintbury village, blurring the surface of the Kennet and Avon canal. It gleams on the railway tracks, pools into fat drops under the roof of the station shelter on the London-bound platform and drips on to Robert Harris’s new suede shoes. Look, I say again, please don’t wait. I’ll
Before sidling off into history last month, the Commission for Racial Equality published a final report. Decades of multiculturalism, it revealed, had left Britain a fractured and unequal nation at risk of splitting up. The Commission’s chairman Trevor Phillips stated several years ago that multiculturalism had failed. His commission waited till its final hours to
The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish
Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. ‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look,’ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’
Just six weeks ago, David Cameron was enthusing to friends about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech to the Conservative party conference. The governor of California had been on the phone, saying how much he was looking forward to visiting Blackpool. It turned out that Schwarzenegger knew what he was in for, having toured England’s seaside towns during
With our overstretched army bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent crime on the streets out of control, a run on a high street bank, teachers assaulted in their classrooms, bullying by pupils over the internet, illiteracy growing, the NHS shambles in which young British doctors are left jobless while thousands of foreigners are imported
A new map hangs in George Osborne’s office, showing the latest parliamentary boundaries for the next general election. It could have been designed to soothe the nerves of a Conservative party election co-ordinator, for it is dominated by Tory blue. A few tricks have been used to achieve this optical illusion. There is no Scotland,
It’s been two years since I sat down with 30 potential Conservative voters for BBC2’s Newsnight and asked them whom they’d like to follow into the next election. Their answer was nearly unanimous: the heretofore unknown and obscure David Cameron. And it’s been a year since I sat down with 30 potential Labour voters and
There are two reasons why Jim Murphy, the Europe minister, is wrong and The Spectator right about the question of a referendum on the European Union Reform Treaty (‘The Spectator is wrong to call for an EU referendum’, 22 September). The first is that the government gave the people a solemn pledge that it would
Ian Gilmour was not the only proprietor of The Spectator also to be its editor, but he was unquestionably the best. Patrician, wealthy, high-minded, unassuming, the 28-year-old Etonian ex-Grenadier Guardsman raised a number of eyebrows when he bought the magazine in 1954 and took over the editorial reins himself. However, the five years of his
The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with
A warm invitation to The Spectator’s new website The Spectator has a new website — redesigned, easier to use, with new features and writers. The online magazine will continue to do what the print magazine has always done on paper: inspire debate, stir up controversy and have some fun, with the added advantage that you
It will be, for Gordon Brown, a sweet irony. For years he has longed to address Labour conference as its leader. Now, when it is finally his turn, he can no longer do so — at least not in the way that he had foreseen. His mission is to stand at the podium in Bournemouth
Not even his severest critics doubt Gordon Brown’s intelligence. They might object to the causes in which it has been enlisted, but they knew that it is both formidable and restless. Nor do the Prime Minister’s critics doubt that he has a coherent vision of where he wants to take Great Britain, what sort of
An interview with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as 44th President of the United States in January 2009, the man sitting opposite me in the bar of the Dorchester will become one of the most powerful people in the world. Mark Penn, pollster extraordinaire, adviser to Tony Blair
It’s Sunday evening, and John Hutton has just come back from one of his regular weekend in Ypres. The Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise is an enthusiastic first world war amateur historian and is currently writing a play based on one of the stories he’s unearthed. It’s about John Elkington, a British colonel
‘If someone in the UK is calling for a referendum, that is not because the text we have in front of us is a Constitution.’ Not my words. They belong to Giuliano Amato, vice chairman of the Convention that drafted the old Constitutional Treaty. Last week in the Spectator the government was accused of being