Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Blair may be about to convert, but will that make him a Catholic?

Tony Blair’s coming conversion to the Catholic faith will not be welcomed by all Catholics. There are many in the Vatican, and the Catholic church in this country, who wonder how a politician with his voting record can be admitted to the church. ‘My First Confession’ would be a great title for Tony Blair’s memoirs. At any rate, though the book may be years away, Tony Blair will soon confess his sins to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and later (no one is sure, but the Vatican has heard it will be after Christmas) Mr Blair will be received into the Roman Catholic Church. And in true Blair style, his decision to ‘Pope’ is creating a political storm. In the robustly secular world of Westminster, few care what Mr Blair does with his Sundays.

Brendan O’Neill

Help! I’m a Marxist who defends capitalism

As one of the Marxists named in James Delingpole’s recent Spectator article (3 November) on his alleged conversion to the commie cause, I really should be angrier about reckless, risk-hungry, overambitious bankers. Yet I find myself in the curious position today of thinking capitalism isn’t risk-hungry enough, certainly in areas where it matters: developing the forces of production and creating new wealth. I also find myself shaking my head in violent disagreement whenever I hear so-called radicals put the boot into capitalism. They seem to loathe the very parts of the capitalist system that Marx quite liked. Delingpole’s crisis of Tory/commie identity is nothing compared with mine: Help! I’m a Marxist who sometimes feels the urge to defend capitalism.

Andrey Slivka

‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’

Kiev Well, this was a fine one — the story of my fellow Yank Robert Fletcher, who’d been making a living hiring himself out in Ukraine, where I live, as a ‘millionaire mentor’ — that is, someone who could teach strivers from Sumy and Dniprodzerzhinsk how to get rich, for a reported fee of about $3,000 a head. Fletcher, I read in the news here, had been arrested trying to cross into Russia using a fraudulent passport, and he was the greatest thing I’d seen in a while: a massive hillbilly of early middle age, his hot-curled blond locks flowing around the crumb-eyed head of the rustic who rips you for another 80 bucks after he adjusts your muffler. He was magnificent.

Ross Clark

Too much security makes us all a lot less secure

Here is a little paradox. For 30 years during the Troubles you have been taking the Belfast to Stranraer ferry. No one asked you for identification: you just bought your ticket and off you went, even though it is quite possible that among your fellow passengers on one of those journeys was a terrorist smuggling bomb-making equipment into mainland Britain. Eventually, peace is restored to Northern Ireland. And what happens? Suddenly you can’t travel without a passport or ID card, and all your luggage is scanned. Once in Belfast you decide to take a train to Dublin, a journey you have been making unhindered for 30 years.

Mary Wakefield

‘We are at war with all Islam’

Last Tuesday at nightfall, as the servants of democracy fled SW1, a young Somali woman stood spotlit on a stage in Westminster. Behind her was the illuminated logo for the Centre for Social Cohesion: a white hand reaching down across England to help a brown one up; in front, an audience of some of Britain’s biggest brains — politicians, editors, academics. She drew her shawl a little closer round her shoulders, looked up and said: ‘We are not at war with “terror”, that would make no sense.’ ‘Hear, hear,’ said a voice at the back. ‘Terror is just a tactic used by Islam,’ she continued. ‘We are actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself.’ Out in the dark began a great wobbling of heads.

Leo McKinstry

How to waste £2.3 billion of public money

In these times of green awareness, waste management has become an increasingly fashionable issue for the public sector, always keen to find new excuses for bureaucratic intervention. The South East England Development Agency (Seeda), one of the many quangos created by Labour over the past decade, has certainly latched on to this cause in a big way. It has drawn up a ‘Waste Strategy’, set up a ‘Waste Market Development Group’, established a ‘Business Resource Efficiency and Waste Programme’, and convened ‘stakeholder workshops’ to promote ‘sustainable waste management’. As if this frenzy were not enough, the agency also organised the grandly titled ‘Regional Waste Summit’ last year.

Rod Liddle

No one should be prohibited from questioning our past

Tarnow, Poland (maybe) I’m hungry, stuck here with a tube of flavoured pork fat, a bottle of bison grass vodka and 400 cut-price English cigarettes. This is the sleeper train from Krakow to Bucharest, via Budapest, at the bad, cold hour of midnight — and there’s no dining car. Just pork fat and vodka for dinner — and lunch was a hastily taken affair at the Auschwitz burger bar ’n’ grill, just down from Crematorium No. 1, a fairly joyless place, frankly, and the food not up to much. In the next berth along the commie-era carriage a Brazilian man is hopping up and down in delight because he’s never seen snow before; he’s got enough here to last a lifetime.

Denis Macshane

The importance of being serious about France

There is a new French ambassador arriving in London this week. He is Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, known as — what else? — MGM in Quai d’Orsay. It is fashionable to downplay the role of the ambassador in the modern world. Has not instant communication made the profession of diplomacy redundant? When the president of France and the prime minister of the United Kingdom see each other at EU, G8 or other meetings with more regularity than they talk to their ministers, who needs ambassadors? Moreover, with so much of the common business between France and Britain conducted at European level, surely it is in Brussels, not London and Paris, that problems between the two countries are resolved? Nothing could be further from the truth.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

The mighty should quake before the Wiki man

As Robert Lindsay demonstrated unforgettably as Wolfie, leader of the Tooting Popular Front in Citizen Smith, anyone who shouts ‘Power to the People!’ can end up looking a prize idiot. So let me throw caution to the wind and say that this is precisely what the web, new media and mobile technology offer us, if we choose to seize the opportunity: democratisation on a new and unprecedented scale. This, at least, is the conclusion I have drawn making two Radio Four programmes on politics and the internet. First, there is what you might call the direct impact of new media upon political practice: its basic instrumentality. As D-J Collins, one of the rising stars in the Google firmament, told me: ‘We’re at the cusp of very profound change.

Lloyd Evans

The Intelligence2 Debate

The motion: Britain Doesn’t Need Trident Harrowing stuff. Helena Kennedy QC began by invoking the memory of Hiroshima. ‘Peeling skin, melting eyeballs. People on pavements vomiting and waiting for death.’ Though she made the pacifist argument Lady Kennedy wasn’t suggesting that to scrap Trident was ‘some wild left-wing peacenik plan’. She cited conservative figures like Simon Jenkins and Lord Bramall, a former defence chief of staff, who both oppose renewing the nuclear deterrent. The opposition was led by Sir Michael Quinlan, former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. The lovable mandarin elaborated his urbane arguments in a rapid, fluting delivery.

Martin Gayford

There is a great deal to be said for living in a tip

In 1864 a Talmudist named Jacob Saphir arrived at Cairo. He made his way to the district confusingly named ‘Babylon’ after a Roman fort. There he visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra, and after complex negotiations he gained access to the Geniza, or treasury. The keepers provided him with a ladder and he climbed up to the roof of a room, two and a half storeys high. Wriggling through a hole, he landed on an enormous mound of parchment, papyrus and leather bindings. He was sitting, as it later turned out, on the greatest archive surviving from any mediaeval society — letters, petitions, contracts, accounts. The Jews of Old Cairo had thrown nothing away because by tradition any document written in Hebrew letters or which might contain the name of God should be saved.

Irwin Stelzer

Brown has outsourced British foreign policy

Now we know. Until now, we Americans have been wondering whether we were witnessing from the new boy on the foreign policy stage a cock-up or a considered change in Britain’s policy towards the United States. When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American president and the neoconservatives as ‘a badge of honour’ had he known how offensive Malloch Brown would be to George Bush and the Americans, there was an inclination to believe him, even though it taxed credulity to think the Prime Minister had been so badly briefed.

James Forsyth

This Middle East summit is a distraction that will achieve little

The Annapolis Middle East summit won’t produce anything more than a commitment to hold another meeting. But the real worry is that Condoleezza Rice’s intense focus on the Israel Palestine question could distract her from more pressing matters in Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea. It must all have been so different in their dreams. Scroll back to January 2005, the aftermath of the Iraqi elections and the beginning of President George W. Bush’s second term: if, back then, Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice had contemplated a Middle East peace summit to be held in late November 2007, they would surely have dared to imagine a Thanksgiving Peace to match the Good Friday Agreement.

Fraser Nelson

‘The largest thorn in the side of Gordon Brown’

Alex Salmond is excitedly brandishing his new House of Commons security pass. ‘Look at the expiry date,’ he says. ‘May 2010. That’s the latest date for a general election.’ By then, on his calculations, Scotland will be seven years away from independence. Each MP has to choose a four-digit security code for the card, and I ask if he chose 2017, his new deadline to end the Union. ‘Could be,’ he smiles, as if to hint that his real timetable is even shorter. The First Minister of Scotland is sitting in his old Westminster office, looking very happy to be back.

Hywel Williams

Beowulf: a digital hero from England’s lost culture

‘Beowulf! How’s your father?’ shouts Anthony Hopkins as Ray Winstone steps out of the boat which has brought the Geats’ tribal leader from Sweden to Denmark. As a way of grabbing attention it probably works better than ‘Hwaet!’ — the narrator’s initial injunction to sit up and listen in the original text. This may be English literature’s first epic, but even its admirers concede that the multiple plots recounted in 3,182 lines can confuse. These are shaggy dog stories of a somewhat bloody kind rather than Virgil or Homer, and in the absence of a unifying artistic vision we need to be kept engaged.

Chris Patten

Westminster politics has nothing on Oxford’s battles

In the last month, another respected international survey placed Oxford and Cambridge joint second to Harvard in the league table of world-class universities. This confirms what others have suggested in recent years. Moreover, other British universities — most notably London’s Imperial College and University College — came out high on the list. There are, alas, too few areas of our national life — the armed forces, the City of London, our diplomatic service — where we do as well in global comparisons. And it matters. There is quite a lot of clichéd nonsense talked about the knowledge economy. But there’s some truth in it as well. There really is a relationship between the quality of education and research and future economic wellbeing.

The Spectator

The Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards

The Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards Last Thursday the 24th annual Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch was held in front of a roomful of the great and good at Claridges, and — this being the first ever live ‘vodcast’ award ceremony — in front of thousands of web-watchers worldwide as well. Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, welcomed the Rt Hon John Reid MP to present the awards, saying: ‘As Home Secretary, he showed that the spirit of The Sweeney is not dead, metaphorically hurling substandard officials on to the bonnet of his Cortina, investing the words “not fit for purpose” with new and chilling meaning.

Rod Liddle

The 28 days debate is a red herring compared to this attack on free speech

Samina Malik may be cretinous, but shouldn’t be criminalised Eeny meeny miny mo Catch a kafir by the toe, If he hollers, chop his head off, And put the video on YouTube. I’d better be quick, because I assume the Old Bill will be around any moment now. The little verse quoted above is my poetry debut for The Spectator and before you point out its many deficiencies of feet, metre, scansion, rhyme — not to mention its strictly limited breadth, semantically speaking — let me assure you it was intended as a pastiche. You shouldn’t take it at face value. With any luck, that will get me off the incitement to racial and religious hatred charges and also the solicitation of murder rap.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

An audience with the wise woman of Whitehall

You may not have heard of Janet Paraskeva, but she is one of the most important people in Whitehall and also one of the most highly regarded. She is private both by temperament and by design, enjoying the freedom this gives her to get on with her job as First Civil Service Commissioner: head of the independent body that reports directly to the Queen to ensure open and fair recruitment to the Civil Service and investigate appeals from officials. This week, however, her term of office was extended to the end of 2010 and, with a Constitution Bill in preparation that will have huge implications for Whitehall, she has decided to make a rare foray into the limelight and grant her first major interview to The Spectator.

Amelia Torode

New York comes to London in a nursery queue

New York is a city of superlatives. It’s a point of pride. New Yorkers believe that their city and their city alone holds the mantle for being the place with ‘the most. . . ’ â” the most crazy folks, the most intense lifestyle, the most fashionable restaurants â” you get the picture. There’s a belief that nothing can compete. Nowhere else on earth could possibly come close. Cindy Adams, the famous New York Post gossip columnist, always ends her articles with the celebrated phrase: ‘Only in New York, kids, only in New York’, and people believe it. I’m just not so sure that this is true any more. It strikes me that London is actually becoming more and more like New York with every passing year.