Features

Saturday

John Osullivan

Republicans must heed the voters to beat Hillary

Washington After almost a year of the candidates manoeuvring for position in the national and state polls, one aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign remains as constant as the North Star: Hillary Clinton is the favourite. She is backed by most party regulars, supported by a national machine, advised by the most brilliant politician of her generation and perched on a consistent lead in the national opinion polls. Almost the only thing that could lose her the election is her personality. Behind their hands, observers compare her to Richard Nixon in 1968. Like Nixon, Clinton has a withdrawn, cool and calculating personality. The comparison does not end there.

Joan Collins

A star at Christmas

In Los Angeles last month we were wined and dined and mulligan-souped up to our eyeballs. Los Angelenos love entertaining their visitors and even though I’ve lived on and off in the hills of Beverly since I was 21, I’m still welcomed happily by the natives. I started Christmas shopping early in LA and New York, but it doesn’t seem that early as the decorations go up immediately after Hallowe’en. I’ve never quite understood why our American cousins like Hallowe’en so much. Certainly it is an exciting event for children, but why several of my acquaintances (who should know better) delight in attending parties dressed up as hookers beats me.

Beryl Bainbridge

The Liverpool that I loved has gone for ever

In June of 2003 Tessa Jowell, the then culture secretary, announced that in 2008 Liverpool would become the European Capital of Culture. The city beat five other hopefuls — Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Newcastle and Oxford. In welcoming the result, the head of the judges, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, declared that it was Liverpool’s stunning dockside development, its city centre and ‘strong visual arts’ that had boosted its chances. Council chief executive David Henshaw described the win as staggering, although not surprising, as the whole city had been behind the bid. Liverpool, he said, is growing up. We’ve got history and we should be proud of our history, but in the past we’ve been prisoners of our history. He was, of course, referring to the slave trade.

Steven Berkoff

I’m like a nervous schoolgirl with my stuntman

The stunt double does all the hard stuff that you the actor either cannot do or should not do lest you injure yourself, and are out of the movie. I have a very pleasant stunt double, a ‘Berliner’, he confides to me proudly, a real one, he adds. I am running from my tormentor and leap from the balcony on to some scaffolding but there is a gap of about four feet and a drop of about 20 feet, so real injury should he slip, and I sweat just at the thought of it. I ask him how he will leap off the narrow ledge since he has to leap up to the ledge and then a further leap to the scaffold. He says he’s not sure yet, in a nonchalant way and with no sense of the slightest danger. He is used to this. He is a stuntman. The stuntman faces danger and does not blink.

Christopher Caldwell

An American conservative who loves the Constitution

A Republican debate in Florida in late November marked this electoral season’s debut of Adolf Hitler, that reliable presence in American presidential campaigns. The Arizona senator John McCain, struggling to draw even with the garrulous ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the Mormon technocrat (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney, decided to burnish his pro-war credentials. The problem was, there was almost nobody to burnish them against. Seven of the eight candidates on stage had vied for months to outdo one another in their lock-stock-and-barrel support for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. That left Ron Paul, the 72-year-old, ten-term congressman from Texas, to bear the brunt of McCain’s wrath.

Geoffrey Willans

How To Be Topp: Ding-dong Farely Merily For Xmas

Xmas all grown ups sa is the season for the kiddies but this do not prevent them from taking a tot or 2 from the bot and having, it may seme, a beter time than us. For children in fact Xmas is often a bit of a strane wot with pretending that everything is a surprise. Above all father xmas is a strane. You canot so much as mention that there is no father xmas when some grown-up sa Hush not in front of wee tim. So far as i am concerned if father xmas use langwage like that when he tripped over the bolster last time we had beter get a replacement. In fact, it is a proper SHAMBLES. Pop drop the hamer on the cat in the kitchen the xmas puding xplode with a huge crash and the cat spring up the curtains. Outside the sno lie deep and crisp and ect.

William Boyd

Humiliation

London is the first city of humiliation: London does it better than anywhere else. I should know, its latest victim. First my divorce — you would think, what with war in Korea and the death of King George — that the Times would have more newsworthy events to report than my decree absolute from my wife of 18 months. ‘Novelist Yves Hill divorces, confesses to adultery’. Of course I confessed — only to spare myself the further wounds, the death by a thousand cuts, of admitting to Felicity’s adultery with that zero, that nul, that parvenu nonentity Gerald Laing-Turner.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Labour would get rid of Gordon — if the plotters had a real candidate

There is conspiring in the corridors once again in Westminster. Who could replace Gordon, they ask. Labour’s problem is that the young pretenders are too young and the idea of caretaker leader seems slightly ridiculous, it would look absurd for the government to change Prime Minister twice in the same Parliament. So, Brown will solider on while the battle of succession rages just beneath the surface.  After ten tedious years of firm party discipline, life is finally returning to the corridors of the House of Commons. A lobby journalist on patrol can once again gather intelligence, whether it be from ministers colluding behind the Speaker’s chair or clusters of Labour MPs holding impromptu crisis meetings.

Irwin Stelzer

Guess what? Gordon has done something right

Spare a moment for a story in which Gordon Brown is the good guy. Not as exciting as tales of the money trail from David Abrahams to the Labour party’s coffers; nor as bloodcurdling as tales of crimes committed by untold numbers of illegal immigrants; nor as nervous-making as the possibility of identity theft from tens of millions of lost HM Revenue and Customs files; nor as economically immediate as tales of a busted bank. But of more enduring consequence for Britain’s economy and its social structure. Soon, very soon if City rumours are correct, some top executives will face criminal charges — not from overzealous American cops, but from Britain’s very own cartel busters.

James Forsyth

‘The Arab world with its own European union’

The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ war, the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world war and the Cold War. Explaining why is the task that Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has set himself in his new book God and Gold. Mead is a chronicler of American power and one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers of the post-9/11 era.

Robert Hardman

The older the Queen gets, the more she changes

In a fortnight the Queen will set a remarkable record. On 21 December, she will overtake Queen Victoria (81 years and 243 days) to become the oldest British monarch in history. Do not expect any fanfares, not from royal quarters at any rate. The Queen will be at Sandringham and there will be no official recognition of this milestone. As far as she is concerned, last month’s Diamond Wedding anniversary was quite enough celebration for one year. In any case, she is not one for getting competitive with the ancestors. But the rest of us are entitled to ruminate on this achievement. Of Britain’s three octogenarian monarchs, the other two — Victoria and George III — were barely capable of standing up.

Rod Liddle

The teddy bear teacher was released from prison too soon

So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers — Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement — had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to festoon lots of railings with yellow ribbons and bouquets from the local garage. The world, you might think, never changes. The Sudanese government — arguably the worst administration on earth — can now bask in the knowledge that they are deemed by the West to be compassionate and conciliatory.

Christopher Thompson

‘Zimbabwe is like a flipped coin in the air’

It’s summer and the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees have begun to bloom, but they’re little comfort to Zimbabweans in the middle of a dire economic crisis. You can tell it’s bad here because even the death of Ian Smith last month did not arouse much hostile comment. The domestic consensus is that Mugabe has managed both to follow in Smith’s tyrannical footsteps and to wreck the formal economy at the same time. This is Africa’s breadbasket turned basket-case and though the first EU-Africa summit in seven years starts this week and there are presidential elections in March next year, no one sees much prospect for change.

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.