Features

Saturday

Simon Thurley

Wake up: Britain is being demolished under our very noses

Something very important is going on out there, and I’m not sure that anyone has really noticed. Just look out of your window and you are likely to see fundamental changes happening to the place where you live. Cranes are out in force, a great metallic forest of them; our roads are populated by concrete mixers and lorries full of demolition waste; white vans full of electricians, plumbers and carpenters clog the streets, and their skips are two-deep on the roadsides. Everywhere you look there is scaffolding. This is not just the Olympics â” although the size of the construction programme there is breathtaking â” nor just the construction of more skyscraping offices in the City: it affects every town and city and a fair few villages too.

Leo McKinstry

How labour unrest nearly lost us the Battle of Britain

‘The nation had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to give the roar,’ Winston Churchill said of his role in achieving victory in the second world war. The idea that the British people were united, steadfast and resolute in the face of adversity is one of the enduring themes of our island story, still cherished more than 60 years after the war ended. A central figure in this narrative of wartime glory is the Spitfire fighter, which became a much-loved symbol of national defiance through its heroic exploits in the Battle of Britain in 1940. Yet the Spitfire saga is no tale of unbroken success. The early years of the aircraft were traumatic, beset by production problems and political doubts.

Paul Johnson

Toys that are too good for children and only for the rich

‘Prayer books are the toys of age,’ wrote Pope. Maybe so. But it’s surprising how many old people â” grown-ups â” like children’s toys as well. This Christmas West End shops have stocked up with expensive toys to attract the Russian new rich, what is called the Fabergé Trade. It was always thus. In the New York Metropolitan Museum there is a beautiful dog, carved from ivory, shown running and with a bouncy strip underneath it so it can be made to move â” a mechanical toy in short â” which dates from the Egyptian 18th Dynasty (1554-1305 bc).

Rod Liddle

The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour - almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The implication being that back then committing murder, and thus risking a possible death sentence from the courts, was preferable to some sordid secret leaking out. The English murders, the ones the public liked, were those committed in desperation by the deeply ashamed - a consequence, as Orwell saw it, of a hypocritical society. We have changed as a nation.

Rachel Johnson

If a rat can cook, can anyone be a writer now?

So this is how my average weekday morning goes. Give briefing to a telly researcher on a subject I have written sum total of one article about, complete long Q&A for self-publicity purposes for a magazine (which will appear under someone else’s byline), supply a written quote to help a reporter on a daily broadsheet fill space, update my website in case the one person who to my certain knowledge has checked it out ever visits it again, post blog for this magazine’s Coffee House, then break for lunch, hopefully somewhere nice and near like Rowley Leigh’s new Le Café Anglais (plug, plug), where the Parmesan custard and anchovy toast is not merely vaut le voyage, but possibly worth Eurostarring over from Paris for.

Paul Wood

The Sunni side of Tikrit: progress in Iraq

A little after 2 a.m., in the small town of ad Dawr, south of Tikrit, Captain Ahmed of the Iraqi army was leading his troops on one of their regular arrest raids. Half a dozen men from one particular house were dragged out, hands bound with plastic flexi-cuffs, and lined up. But the man they’d come for wasn’t there. ‘Listen, donkey-f---”,’ said Captain Ahmed, addressing the head of the household, ‘I know your eldest son is with the terrorists because he keeps sniping at my men.’ Pointing his Kalashnikov at the abject row of detainees, he continued: ‘And if you don’t bring him down to the JSC [Joint Command Centre], I’ll be back here tomorrow night and I’ll shoot every last one of you fâ”s.’ The US officer relating this story gave a wry smile.

Bryan Forbes

I have earned the right to shout at my television

My wife tells me that my present state reminds her of the famous Thurber cartoon of a woman crouched on top of a wardrobe with the watching man captioned as saying: ‘For ten years I’ve known peace with you, Mildred, and now you say you’re going mad.’ If you substitute the genders, and the fact we have been together more than ten years, my wife is right: I used to be such a benign, adorable character and now, apparently, I have developed into a cantankerous old man who shouts at the television every night. Yes, let me anticipate the inevitable reaction: of course I could switch off, but I feel I have paid my dues in licence fees over the decades and I am now entitled to my madness.

Saturday

Con Coughlin

The big Russian bear just wants to be loved

Moscow There’s no reason to be afraid. The growl of the Russian bear is worse than its bite. Forget the new generation of ballistic missiles that can punch a gaping hole in Washington’s defensive shield before it’s even been built. Ignore all those creaking Tupolev-95 Bear nuclear bombers testing the response times of the RAF’s Typhoon interceptors over the North Sea. And fret not about plucky little Putin’s heroic foray into darkest Persia, where he defied an assassination plot so that he could scheme with that crafty Iranian apocalyptist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Christina Lamb

Soon we’ll see if Musharraf is a man of his word

When their TV screens suddenly went fuzzy on Saturday afternoon, most Pakistanis felt they had seen it all before. Their country has, after all, spent 33 of its 60 years under military rule. The troops surrounding the TV and radio stations, the phone networks down, the round-up of opponents, the concertina wire across Constitution Avenue blocking off the Presidency, Parliament and Supreme Court . . . all these have been a periodic feature of Pakistan’s politics. But this time the army chief imposing what amounted to martial law was himself already the President.

Boris Johnson

James Michie, gentle genius

It is a measure of James Michie’s extreme modesty that most of the younger people who bumped into him in the offices of The Spectator probably hadn’t the foggiest idea who he really was. They might see him reading in the afternoon, sitting with a glass of wine and a half-smile, in the room that led out to the garden. They might have met him on the stair, bearing a sheaf of scrupulously emended proofs. They would have heard him addressed only as ‘James’, and the hordes of young thrusting proto-journalists who passed through the offices of The Spectator would have concluded that this was some kind of landmark of literary London. He was plainly a man of great gifts. His headlines were lapidary, and swiftly produced. He seemed to be full of quips.

Charlotte Metcalf

John, Paul, George, Ringo — and John Paul II

Coming to a music store near you: Santo Subito!, the first ever papal music DVD. Featuring the late John Paul II, it is to be launched in Britain by Universal — better known for Amy Winehouse and the Sugababes — on 19 November. By Christmas, if the prayers of the PR people are answered, it will be a worldwide number one hit. Santo Subito! (‘sainthood immediately!’) is what crowds outside the Vatican traditionally chant when they want someone canonised without delay. Anyone who watched John Paul II’s funeral will remember the numerous banners in the crowds displaying the slogan. The DVD is a 60-minute compilation of footage of the late Pope cut to music and it includes Vatican archive of his visits to Africa, Auschwitz, Brazil, Britain and the Middle East.

Paul Barker

The Stalinists have taken over the London Library

The lights blazed out across St James’s Square from the high, first-floor Reading Room of the London Library as members crowded up the handsome staircase, last Thursday evening, to take part in the fiercest row the library has seen for many years, or maybe ever. Some members had to squeeze on to narrow upper galleries, where you search out dusty dictionaries in obscure languages. From there, they intervened in the to-and-fro of hot argument down below, like shabby cherubs in a Raphael painting. This wasn’t some minor fluttering in a dovecot for eggheads. The London Library is one of the capital’s most discreet but most valuable adornments.

Douglas Murray

A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm

Tom DeLay has a slightly deflated air about him in the London club in which we meet. It might be the financial accusations and personal attacks made on him for 11 years before his indictment and consequent stand-down from Congress last year. ‘I was pretty much burnt out, exhausted,’ he admits. Or it could be the inevitable attitude of a former Republican majority leader observing Washington once more in the grip of the Democratic party — he is over here to speak at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion ‘This house looks forward to seeing a Democrat in the White House’ in a debate with the Rev’d Al Sharpton. But even observing Nancy Pelosi, Dennis Kucinich and co. jollying off to Damascus, Tom DeLay cannot get that enraged any more.

Rod Liddle

Nigel Hastilow’s real crime was to dare to mention Enoch Powell at all

A policeman once told me, over lunch in the House of Commons canteen just off Westminster Hall, that the problem of immigration would be sorted for good and for all, very soon. ‘The chill north wind, from Odin’s Land, will exterminate the scum we have brought to our shores,’ he said, equably enough, and then went and queued up for some pudding behind Michael Meacher. I was left to muse upon his words. I don’t think he meant that the immigrants would all succumb to hypothermia. The invocation of Nordic mythology suggested to me that my lunch companion was a shade to the right of centre, indeed a cross between the Travis Bickle character from Taxi Driver and, oh, I don’t know, maybe Julius Streicher.

David Tang

My Chinese week with Elle Macpherson, the Prince of Wales and Tony Blair

Peking In Peking, I took Elle Macpherson to dinner at the ridiculous Lan Club — ridiculous because it is entered from the fluorescent lobby of a nondescript office block, and its owner, a very rich Chinese woman, had spent US$23 million on it — paying Philippe Starck for his signature designs. It is also ridiculous because the massive space is so ostentatiously and extravagantly decked out that it jars in communist China. And lest any Kissingeresque character should repeat his canard that China is no longer communist, they should try standing at Tiananmen Square and just mumbling something derogatory about the Chinese leadership, or loving about the Falun Gong gang. Then they will see if China is still communist or not.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron means business on welfare: the Tories are the radicals again

There is something about impending doom which focuses the mind. That is why the Tory conference in Blackpool was perhaps the most effective brainstorming session in the party’s history — albeit inadvertently. David Cameron arrived facing an election. He left the northern seaside resort having scared Gordon Brown away from going to the polls — and, in the process, launched a policy strategy more radical than he had ever dreamt he would be pursuing. The proposal to raise the inheritance-tax threshold to £1 million grabbed all the headlines and seems to have struck a chord in the Labour marginals that worried the PM very much.

Irfan Alalawi

The Saudis are in the global saddle

The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom. The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan (the Nation) on 7 October.

Tim Walker

‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades — Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay’s prospective father-in-law in Citizen Smith, among many others — but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his face. His performance as the Alzheimer’s sufferer Felix Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North and his wonderful turn as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day were the parts that finally did it for him. ‘They were my favourites,’ says the 84-year-old actor. He adds, however, that he has another film now that is every bit as special to him — Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, which opens this week.

James Delingpole

I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist

It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’ And she wasn’t asking it as a glib, meaningless flourish, in the way a Tory MP trying to impress might ask, ‘Why we can’t make our NHS system be the envy of the world?’ Claire Fox genuinely believes that a traditional, liberal arts education of the sort offered by Eton — Latin, Greek, rigour, dates — is best.

Lloyd Evans

Intelligence2 debate report

‘It’s about my cappuccino.’ No one expected the great environmental debate — Capitalism can save the Planet — to be reduced to mere refreshments, but Tim Harford, leading for the motion, used the coffee he buys outside his FT office as a symbol of the global challenge. Our survival depends on consumer decisions at every level of industrial production. Let capital decide, he said. Keep government out of it. Otherwise we’ll end up, as we do now, with excellent biofuels like Brazilian sugarcane being taxed at 25 per cent. Nigel Lawson, against the motion, made a subtle, thoughtful, somewhat donnish and completely captivating speech examining ‘the disconnect’ between politicians’ promises and their actual effect on climate change.