Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Europe returns to the Commons — and, this time, nobody is safe

Both Brown and Cameron face separate backbench mutinies as the revived EU Constitution — now called the Lisbon Treaty — comes before the Commons, says Fraser Nelson. Which of them will end up looking like John Major in the ghastly Maastricht era? Only one thought has consoled Gordon Brown throughout the horrors of the European Union Reform Treaty. He had always expected a mauling for agreeing it, and had no choice but to sign the wretched document in Lisbon. He could not hold a referendum he was certain to lose. So the Prime Minister knew he would have to put his head in a pillory and wait for Fleet Street’s rotten vegetables to fly.

Wednesday

Irwin Stelzer

The economic consequences of Mr Brown

Gordon Brown might be overstating his case when he ignores his Thatcherite inheritance and a benign global economic environment, and takes sole credit for Britain’s rather good economic performance during his tenure at No. 11. But, asked whether they are better off now than a decade ago, most Britons would have to agree that in material terms their lives have improved during Brown’s tenure at the Treasury, and that his decisions to keep Britain out of the euro and to grant a sort of independence to the Bank of England (Brown still selects the Bank’s inflation target, and decides whether the Governor is to be reappointed or let out to pasture) were good policies indeed.

James Hughesonslow

It helps if the doctor actually looks at the X-ray

It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to stay where we were, where staff knew about broken bones and where there was a comfortable hostel for patients’ relatives, rather than return to the bosom of the NHS where we might catch MRSA. Well, now I’ve broken my left ankle and this time I had no choice. My motor scooter skidded on slippery cobbles outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and crushed my foot. No one else was involved. Indeed, passers-by were extremely helpful.

Rod Liddle

In the unlikely event that anyone wants my organs, it should be up to me

Rod Liddle says that the notion of ‘compulsory donations’ is oxymoronic and the pinnacle of the medical profession’s zeal to get its hands on our corpses The question is, I suppose, hypothetical in my case. Or beyond even hypothetical. They are not going to want the liver of someone who opens a bottle of Rioja just as Naughtie announces it’s time for Thought for the Day. I find it impossible to listen to that vapid, platitudinous drivel without some form of sustenance close to hand. When it’s that endlessly emollient Sikh bloke, or Anne Atkins, I make it a large Jack Daniels.

Saturday

Alice Thomson

Birth order means more than school or faith

Kirkcaldy High School vs Eton, Highland Scot vs Newbury toff, Edinburgh University vs Oxford. If you are choosing between Gordon Brown and David Cameron that’s what the next election may come down to. Or is there another factor? No one ever mentions birth order. Mr Brown is the classic case. With a younger brother, as well as an older one, he genuinely feels a strong moral duty to do his best for his father (son of the manse as he is) and to compete with his elder brother, who preceded him to Edinburgh University. He wants order and precision, he is conscientious and hard-working, nervous of making decisions and less open to new experiences. He is weighed down by the burden of expectation he carries on his shoulders.

Bryan Forbes

In less than a fortnight I turned down £2 million

Bryan Forbes is drawn into a cyberspace scam by an indignant ‘happily married’ woman who invites him to Madrid to arrange a princely payout It all began when an email greeted me one morning with ‘Dear Esteemed Winner, we are pleased to inform you of the result of the Fatelgordo International Promotions Program. Your email address was attached to the winning number 08 15 30 31 34 43 40 and you have therefore been approved for a lump-sum payout of £685,000.’ The shock of the amount almost started me smoking again. The message included the name and email address of the claims officer, a Mrs Helen Illic, at Teal Consulting Limited, London.

Wednesday

Aidan Hartley

When elephants fight, the grass suffers

As I write this, the crackle of gunfire is audible from the veranda of our farmhouse. Warriors of the Pokot and Samburu are fighting a mile away. A bushfire engulfs the horizon. I hear the tally in blood so far is three Samburu warriors killed, and the Pokot have rustled 750 cattle. Today I hope our farm and the people who live here will be spared the violence. They were not on Boxing Day, the eve of Kenya’s elections, when Samburu rustlers armed with AK-47s hit our place and made off with 22 steers. That afternoon the police were unable to respond as they were busy guarding ballot boxes. Our neighbours rushed to help instead, and my friend Charles saved our cattle by bravely charging his car at the raiders in a hail of bullets. The raiders ran for it.

Denis Macshane

Putin’s Tories: welcome to the Vlad and Dave Show

Denis MacShane says that the Conservatives’ refusal to align themselves with other centre-right parties on the Council of Europe has driven them into a shabby alliance with Russia As Vladimir Putin moves seamlessly from being president to prime minister of Russia, amid mounting worry that Russia is slipping its democratic moorings, there is a group of 21st-century fellow-travellers the Kremlin can count on: the Conservative party. Tory MPs are now toeing the Russian line in the new battlefield for democratic rights located in Strasbourg.

James Forsyth

On to South Carolina: Hillary gets back on track

But it’s all still to play for, says James Forsyth. Senator Clinton’s astonishing comeback does not mean that Obama is finished by any means -— and John McCain has injected much-needed energy into the Republican primaries, too Hillary Clinton has now done something that her husband never managed: she has won a contested New Hampshire primary. In doing so, she has revived her presidential campaign and ensured that the 2008 Democratic presidential primary will be an epic and drawn-out contest. Her recovery from near political death is up there with Truman’s defeat of Dewey as the greatest comeback story in the history of American politics.

Saturday

The Spectator

This week’s magazine – An Apology

An apology Yesterday the Spectator experienced production problems with this week’s issue. This has unfortunately resulted in some errors: namely that the last two words ‘Middle East’ are missing from the William Shawcross article and the Michael Gove article, as featured on the front cover, was not included. Please click on this link to view the Michael Gove essay. Please accept our sincere apologies for these errors that have occurred.

William Shawcross

We are at war with hatred, fanaticism and despair

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, points out that with Benazir Bhutto, they killed ‘a spectacularly visible woman’ who, whatever her flaws as a political leader, was astonishingly brave in fighting — uncovered, unveiled — for politics ‘and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists [the jihadists], floats over the human face of women’.Lévy suggests that Benazir’s name should now become another password ‘for those who still believe that the good genius of Enlightenment will win out over the evil genius of fanaticism and crime’. But the Enlightenment will be lost unless we all realise that we have to fight for it.

Michael Gove

An act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS

Seldom can a New Year have dawned so bleakly as 2008 and rarely can a news story have spoken of evil so starkly as the New Year’s Day report from Kenya of children being deliberately burnt alive inside a church. The calculated, heartless wickedness of the act recalls one of the most notorious atrocities of the second world war, when the SS herded the women and children of Oradour in France into the village church and then set the building alight. And there are more recent echoes from another genocide. The principle that the Church should provide a sanctuary from violence and hatred was breached by the actions of individuals during the Rwandan horrors of 1994.

Con Coughlin

Musharraf may now be the last best hope of Pakistan

Forget Iran, forget North Korea, forget the emerging Chinese superpower and forget the resurgent nationalism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Even before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Pakistan was the country that arguably posed the greatest challenge to the West’s security. Now it is an even greater challenge. Pakistan is the first Muslim country to have acquired nuclear weapons. Her nuclear arsenal was developed in the 1970s by Benazir’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to protect the country from the possibility of attack by India.

Clemency Burtonhill

Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog. To the cast and crew, such reports were flabbergasting, not least because those talking so authoritatively about the television series in question were yet to see an episode. We wondered if this hatchet job might be some sort of publicity stunt (it bore similarities to some of our storylines, after all) — before it became obvious that no, it was simply that we had dared to stray into sacrosanct territory.

Christina Lamb

Pakistanis now fear that anyone who speaks out will be silenced

Benazir Bhutto’s son has none of his mother’s glamour, says Christina Lamb, but he must now do his dynastic duty in a country cruelly deprived of its only pro-Western, liberal leader and in which no one feels it is safe to criticise the establishment On top of the bus carrying Benazir Bhutto from Karachi airport last October, at the start of the journey that had been planned as her triumphant return from exile but was to end so tragically, I fell into conversation with her amiable cousin Tariq, who told me his wife had begged him not to board. As we waved at the cheering crowds holding banners of Bhutto and her late father, I asked if he had ever been tempted to give up farming and go into the family business. He laughed grimly. ‘No way’, he said.

Saturday

Boris Johnson

How, as Mayor, I would help our brave troops

Even if the story is exaggerated, the underlying psychology is convincing. It is reliably reported that last month a woman in her thirties was doing her daily laps of the pool in Leatherhead, Surrey, when she became aware of an obstacle. A section of the swimming-pool had been roped off to allow 15 wounded soldiers to receive the therapy needed for their rehabilitation. It is hard to know what went through the young woman’s mind, but she must have grasped that these disfigurements had been incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. She understood in a flash that she was not only being inconvenienced; she was being inconvenienced by the British military, the people who (as she no doubt instinctively conceived it) had brought havoc to the innocent civilians of Third World countries.

Theodore Dalrymple

My goose was cooked — and it wasn’t very good

Unlike Wagner’s music, which is better than it sounds, roast goose is less good than it sounds. For a reason that I have not been able quite to fathom, it is really delicious only in Germany. Or so I, at any rate, have found. Whether this is because the Germans cook it better, or whether it is because it is a dish that is appropriate to the country, I am not sure. Perhaps you need to be near dense and dark pine forests, with clearings for witches and wicked stepmothers who either devour small children or send them out to find strawberries in the snow, to appreciate the comforts of roast goose.

Tony Parsons

It is will, not greed, that makes you write a bestseller

When Ernest Hemingway met Harold Robbins, the grand old man of American literature asked the alpha male of the bestseller list why he wrote. ‘Wealth,’ said Harold Robbins. ‘And I got it.’ Of all the lies that Harold Robbins told in his life — the fantasy most often repeated as fact is that his first wife was a Chinese dancer who died of a parrot bite — this was the most outrageous. Harold Robbins — who liked to boast that he was the only author ‘with his own goddamn yacht’ — did not write for money. Nobody on the bestseller list writes for money. The people who write for money never make it to the bestseller list.

Celia Walden

The reason we drink is that we think it’s naughty

As we become ever more steeped in Protestant guilt over the next week or so, each additional glass of wine swelling the self-loathing, redemption is in sight. New Year’s Day looms in all its stark innocence, symbolising enforced abstinence, a return to purity and, for a few weeks at least, the weight of our sinfulness will be lifted. Only then, as we all know, around 7 January, when virtue becomes boring, a friend offers us a glass, we accept, and the whole contorted mindset starts again. There is a single explanation for Britain’s problem with alcohol: we think it’s naughty. Why that theatrical pause before accepting a drink? The bitten bottom lip and, ‘Well I shouldn’t . . .’? For the pure delight of giving in.

Barry Humphries

Christmas notebook

The trouble with living in London is that apoplexy is always just around the corner. A few weeks ago my telephone developed a funny sub-aqueous rustling noise sufficient to drown all conversations, so after a few stiff cups of tea, and setting aside several hours for the task, I phoned BT to have it fixed. The next day a nice man appeared with a name a bit like a Sudanese teddy bear, and within a mere hour had found and fixed the problem — a corroded wire outside the house. He departed smiling into the sunset, having refused a £10 tip. The next day we realised that in fixing the problem he had cut off all extensions within the house: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, all except the sitting room.