Features

Saturday

Rod Liddle

I am angrier with the government about the smoking ban than the Iraq war

This week we have been bombarded with statistics about how the smoking ban, introduced exactly six months ago, has not remotely damaged the pub trade, but has resulted in millions upon millions of people giving up smoking — so that cancer is now a thing of the past. The shovel-faced government minister Dawn Primarolo will have been on your television news spouting these transparent lies and adding, for good effect, that the battle is not yet entirely won: an estimated nine million people in Britain still smoke and the government intends to sort them out, in the fullness of time.

Stanley Johnson

Forty years on from Tet: how the US won Vietnam

For the last few days they have been putting the flags and bunting up in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in preparation for the nationwide celebrations which will mark the Lunar New Year or Tet. Forty years ago, on the night of 30–31 January 1968, the Liberation Army, as it is now known here, launched its famous Tet offensive with a series of co-ordinated surprise attacks on a wide range of targets south of the 17th parallel. In and around Saigon, mortars pounded the US airbase at Tan Son Nhut, as well as the US embassy, the Presidential Palace, the General Staff Headquarters of the South Vietnamese Army and the Navy Command. In the United States, the Tet offensive had a devastating impact on public opinion.

Wednesday

Christopher Booker

No better way to turn 70 than in the Darjeeling hills

Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt, bureaucratically hamstrung state of their economy. ‘The problem with India,’ he said despairingly, ‘is the problem of want creation.’ If he could return to India today, he would rub his eyes in disbelief. From the ubiquitous roadside hoardings proclaiming ‘Making a billion dreams come true’ to the shiny new shopping malls and business parks springing up round every city, the world has rarely seen such an explosion of ‘want creation’.

Marianne Macdonald

The wages of beauty are loneliness

I am always struck, interviewing the planet’s most beautiful women, by the disconnection between their difficult love lives and dazzling looks. Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Elle Macpherson, Helena Christensen, Emmanuelle Béart, Inés Sastre, Diane Kruger, Sienna Miller — in my decade as an interviewer I have met dozens of these stars and supermodels, and almost invariably they are single or struggling with divorce or some dubious relationship. These women can often seem to have everything — stunning looks, amazing figures, to-die-for wardrobes, killer charm, fame, money — except happiness with men. It is a small, unacknowledged tragedy that I discussed with the supermodel Helena Christensen, who knew all about it.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Intelligence Squared debate report – “Britain should have a referendum on the EU Treaty”

Motion: Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty. Chair: Andrew Neil   For the motion: Neil O’Brien Andrew Roberts Rt Hon Lord Lamont of Lerwick   Against the motion :  Sir Stephen Wall Vernon Bogdanor CBE David Aaronovitch.  It was like an eclipse. Wednesday’s debate on the EU referendum exactly coincided with a parliamentary vote on the same issue. ‘Over at the Palace of Varieties,’ prophesied Andrew Neil, in the chair, ‘the debate will be dull, predictable and whipped. But here at Intelligence Squared it’ll be lively, wild, and with no foregone conclusion.’ So it proved. This was the rowdiest debate of the season. At one point punches were almost exchanged.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global Warning | 26 January 2008

Theodore Dalrymple issues a global warning Thank goodness I retired in time from the National Health Service: it has cut down enormously the number of forms I have to fill in. The latest proto-genocidal form sent out to employees by my erstwhile employers was called ‘a data cleanse’, though it soon became known as ‘an ethnic cleanse’ since it related, inter alia, to the staff’s ethnic group. Each member of staff was asked to choose one of 17 ethnic groups to which they belonged, one of six marital statuses, five sexual orientations and nine religious affiliations. Oh for the simple, clean lines of apartheid, when there were only blacks, whites and coloureds!

Dan Collings

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Will the special relationship prevail?

As the US presidential race gathers steam, Westminster is abuzz.  Like the Derby Trials, MPs across the political spectrum are watching their horses anxiously.  Some are seasoned observers.  They know the trainers and even the thoroughbreds themselves.  Others are more recent spectators, but with no less passion.  The outcome of the presidential election matters in Westminster, for the course of US policy certainly, but also for UK domestic politics. As the US presidential race gathers steam, Westminster is abuzz.  Like the Derby Trials, MPs across the political spectrum are watching their horses anxiously.  Some are seasoned observers.  They know the trainers and even the thoroughbreds themselves.

Rod Liddle

In one sentence, Jacqui Smith became the Gerald Ratner of the Home Office

There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved into nothing in 1991 when he cheerfully pronounced that his products were ‘crap’. Matt Barrett, the chief executive of Barclays, did a Ratner too, when he told a bunch of MPs that he would not let his daughters anywhere near a Barclaycard and did not use one himself because they were too expensive.

Bryan Forbes

Get your hands off my light bulbs, Big Brother

Call me old-fashioned, as Dame Edna says, but I don’t fancy spending my remaining years in semi-darkness because this poxy government has performed yet another knee-jerk reaction and decreed that all incandescent light bulbs will be phased out, whether we like it or not. A warning bulletin from Defra informs us that should we be careless enough to break a long-life bulb, we must immediately vacate the room in which the tragedy occurs for at least 15 minutes. Then we are not allowed to vacuum up the broken glass because that will spread mercury droplets around the entire house. Instead we must don rubber gloves, sweep up the glass and place it in a sealed bag while making sure not to inhale any dust (does glass make dust?) before disposing of the toxic waste in a proper container.

Lloyd Evans

Intelligence2 debate report: should we bomb Iran?

Iran was in the cross hairs last Tuesday. At the Intelligence Squared debate the mellifluously worded motion, ‘It’s better to bomb Iran than risk Iran getting the bomb,’ was proposed by Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, a distinguished Italian political scientist. He argued that letting Tehran acquire nukes would create turmoil in the Middle East — and beyond. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin, which currently operate as a sort of all-night Texaco garage to the world’s economies, would fall under the spell of a dangerous anti-Western regime. If neighbouring Turkey went nuclear, proliferation might spread Greece-wards and even into the Balkans. Against the motion, Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Tehran, applied three criteria to the military option.

Wednesday

Allister Heath

Fleecing non-doms is the thin end of a bad wedge

Allister Heath says that Brown’s poll tax on Britain’s 114,000 non-domiciled residents will drive away talent when our economy most needs it. Shame the Tories would do the same You would have thought that with the economy weakening, the stock market sliding, house prices tanking and Northern Rock’s botched rescue a daily humiliation, Gordon Brown would be doing all in his powers to help the City of London weather the gathering storm. Instead, he appears intent on making life even more difficult for it. His reckless plan to crack down on Britain’s 114,000 non-domiciled residents, including many of the City’s most important financiers, will be the most damaging in a long list of spectacularly ill-timed tax hikes due this year.

Con Coughlin

Gordon Brown has a new plan to beat terror. This is what he should do

Do you feel safe? Every time you go to the airport do you worry that you might be blown up by Islamist militants? Do you avoid using public transport, or frequenting louche nightclubs, for fear of being targeted by fanatical suicide bombers? While the 7 July bomb attacks against London’s transportation system in 2005 have rightly dominated the public’s consciousness in terms of the tangible threat posed by Muslim terror groups, there have been many more foiled attacks that would have created far more carnage had they succeeded with their deadly designs. Just imagine the appalling loss of life that would have occurred if the plot to blow up a number of transatlantic flights departing from Heathrow in the summer of 2006 had not been foiled.

Rani Singh

The schmoozer of Davos prepares to bare his teeth

In the week of the World Economic Forum Rani Singh talks to Angel Gurría, head of the OECD, who has sharp words on capitalist ‘schizophrenia’ and a coded warning for Gordon ‘Because of the miners’ strike we were all asked to have only one light bulb on. My wife and I had to take baths together in order to economise on heating the water and since then we’ve always taken baths together, for 35 years,’ booms Angel Gurría in a surprising aside, recalling Ted Heath’s premiership. The 57-year-old was then an MA Economics student at Leeds University. He is now secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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.