Features

Saturday

Lauren Booth

All Hezbollah lacks is a group on Facebook

A tour of Beirut with the militia’s PR division Beirut A year after Israel’s failed attempt to bomb Hezbollah into the Middle Ages, the ‘war’ of 2006 is now known as the ‘Divine Victory’ in these parts. With November’s general election on hold, politics in Lebanon is as complicated as it ever has been. Druze, Christian groups, Muslim parties and a smattering of Marxists are all vying for a say in a government led by a hugely unpopular prime minister. Fouad Siniora lost the public’s support last July when he was filmed warmly hugging Condoleezza Rice as US-made cluster bombs fell on voters’ homes. Not a great PR move. Meanwhile Hezbollah continues winning hearts and minds nationwide.

Rod Liddle

The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage

I suppose there must be someone left in Britain who is surprised or shocked that a minor member of the royal family has alleged homosexual tendencies and is partial to the odd snort of cocaine. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, for example — formerly the Queen’s private secretary — would at least have pretended to be appalled, but he’s been dead for seven long years. Frankly, I suspect most British people would shrug their shoulders with resignation and boredom even if it were reported that a fairly important royal had been photographed mainlining anthrax spores while fellating a pine marten.

Patrick West

The nightmare of ‘pre-crime’ is already with us

Those who express concern about the onset of a dystopian surveillance society in Britain, in which the boundary between public and private is being erased, and in which the state malignly uses new methods of monitoring, usually invoke the spectre of Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘Orwellian’ is the customary adjective denoting the kind of cruel, maladjusted authoritarian state that spies on us, that knows everything about us — one, it is feared, that will soon be upon us. Such allusions have some credibility, as Britain has in some respects been transformed into that which George Orwell feared it might: we have detention without trial, armed police and the widespread use of CCTV cameras.

Tessa Mayes

Has the smoking ban reduced heart attacks?

It’s four months since the smoking ban was imposed in England, and most smokers I’ve met in that time seem to be quietly adapting. A friend wants to buy Suck UK’s unisex Smoking Mittens. If you have not come across them before, they are gloves that have a metal hole in them for your cigarette so you can keep warm when smoking outside in the winter. They cost £15 and, as my friend says cheerfully, ‘You never know, if it gets really cold, Silk Cut may sponsor white and purple balaclavas with silver puff holes.’ But if many smokers seem to be adapting to the ban, there is still plenty of strong opposition. Groups like Forest continue to campaign for the right to smoke.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past. You could have spent the whole week at Labour’s conference in Bournemouth without realising somebody called Tony Blair had ever existed. His face, his ideas, his legacy had all but vanished from the official and fringe literature. He may have been briefly mentioned in speeches, as a play’s director might ritualistically thank the janitor.

Norman Stone

Turkey is right to fight for an end to the PKK

Istanbul Turkey at the moment is being swept by a great wave of patriotic rage. In the past several weeks a dozen or more young soldiers have been killed in the borderlands of Iraq, and even the most sober television channels again and again show their faces, their funerals, their weeping mothers and sisters. There have been vast demonstrations in Ankara and even in provincial towns, bringing the traffic to a stop for hours on end, and there is enormous pressure on the government for something to be done. The problem is a Kurdish terrorist organisation, the PKK, which had been dormant for several years.

Christina Lamb

‘If assassination is the price I must pay …’

An eyewitness report of the bombing of Benazir Bhutto’s bus It’s Saturday night on Clifton beach and men in shalwar kameez are selling rides on short white horses or camels decorated with coloured bobbles. Stalls lit up by halogen lights offer roasted cobs of corn and cups of sugarcane juice ground from a large wheel. A noisy crowd gathers to place bets for a fight between a snake and a mongoose. Everywhere there are people — rich Karachi-ites out in their gold-threaded finery and conspicuous designer watches; the poor in plastic sandals. Pakistan doesn’t look like a country at war with itself or a people living in fear of extremists.

Tim Walker

A child of the Troubles with a smile on his face

Patrick Kielty says that there are three ages in a comedian’s life. ‘He starts off as the young Turk who is angry about the state of the world and wants to put it right. Then comes the age of hypocrisy — when he is still quite angry and still quite young, but quietly goes home after the show is over and puts his feet up at his nice pad in Chelsea. Then there is the final age when he is well into middle-age and making jokes about the goo-goo noises his children make. That is when he should, if he has any sense at all, give it all up.’ At 36, the man who hosted the BBC’s Fame Academy and ITV’s Celebrity Love Island admits that he is halfway there. He is talking to me in a fashionable club in Chelsea just around the corner from his home.

William Dalrymple

Ignore the hype: Syria shouldn’t be demonised

In the autumn of 1994 I was looking at Byzantine churches on the Syrian-Israeli border for my book From the Holy Mountain. Tele­phoning home, I heard that one of the broadsheets had run a series of prominent stories claiming that Syria was mobilising its troops for an invasion of Israel. The paper described the roads jammed with Soviet-built tanks heading for the Golan Heights. As I happened to be in the area concerned, I could see that the story was completely false: the only movements I could see were of donkeys carrying olives from the harvest to their villages. Yet the story continued to run for several issues, before being dropped without explanation.

Harry Mount

Better always to be late than selectively so

‘Mr White Man’s Time’ would be a pretty racist nickname if it hadn’t been invented by black Africans. In Ivory Coast, though, it’s a term of some distinction. The nickname belongs to Narcisse Aka, a legal adviser aged 40, who has just won the country’s hallowed Punctuality Night competition — and a £30,000 villa — after he consistently turned up for work on time while his compatriots took a more relaxed attitude to punctuality. As the slogan of the competition goes, ‘African time is killing Africa; let’s fight it.’ Mr White Man’s Time might be a little surprised, then, if he came over to Britain for an urgent appointment — British time, white or black, is not so great any more.

Martyn Gregory

Of course there was no ‘flash before the crash’

The heavyweight legal collision between the coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker’s evidence-driven inquests into Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s deaths, and Planet Fayed’s evidence-free legal and media circus, had always threatened to be messy. Last week was the first full week of witness evidence from Paris and London, and it produced ominous signs. Planet Fayed’s three QCs are his performing elephants — already dubbed ‘Hugefee QCs’ by Private Eye. Three heavyweight legal teams support the Hugefees — representing Fayed, his hotel and his dead driver’s parents. Planet Fayed’s objective is to secure an ‘open’ verdict from the inquest jury; any other outcome would see the eclipse of Mohamed’s fantasies.

Rod Liddle

The good news is, we’re all living longer; the bad news is, we’ll be miserable

Notable people who are quite right-wing live a lot longer than notable people who are decidedly left of centre. This discovery of mine is, you might argue, counter-intuitive; you would expect right-wingers to be eaten away with dyspepsia and choler, the blood vessels on their foreheads popping open every time they read of a mosque about to open, or a wildcat strike about to take place. Whereas lefties, traditionally, possess a communal ethos and are tolerant of the many and diverse ways in which our society expresses itself. Not so, however. They die younger. Of cancer.

Malcolm Rifkind

Brown has set a trap into which Tory Eurosceptics must not march

Gordon Brown looks like a moth-eaten Prime Minister nowadays. His botched handling of a general election and his help in unifying the Conservatives have been the unexpected hallmarks of an amateur, not a consummate professional. If one adds to this his unpopular protestations that the European Treaty does not require the promised referendum, it would seem that never again will it be glad confident morn for his tenure in Downing Street. But with Gordon Brown one should always read the small print before getting too excited. He has promised more than 20 days’ debate in the House of Commons before the Treaty is ratified.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Once again, Europe threatens to devour another British PM

In British politics, the Europe question always comes to embody the problems that a Prime Minister faces. So Gordon Brown will fly back from Lisbon with a treaty that emphasises that he is scared of putting things to the country and that he spins just as much as his predecessor ever did. With the ratification process expected to run for six months, Mr. Brown faces prolonged trouble over this document and maybe even his first large scale Labour rebellion.  Only last month, the European Union Reform Treaty seemed to pose little problem for Gordon Brown. He had enough political capital to sign and dispose of this unwanted inheritance from Tony Blair. He’d face a few protests, rude newspaper editorials and captious opinion polls.

Irwin Stelzer

Listen to Adam Smith: inheritance tax is good

Politics trumps economics. That’s the best summary of the Tory and Labour competition to pander to those who until now have been threatened with paying to the Treasury a portion of the money they receive for just ‘being there’. Let’s de-emotionalise this issue. An inheritance tax is not a death duty. The slogan ‘No taxation without respiration’ is too clever by half. Even a Chancellor of the Exchequer as powerful as the previous occupant of the office could not get a corpse to sign a cheque. It is a tax paid by the recipient of this income, the inheritor, the lucky winner in the sperm lottery. Nor, finally, is it a tax on a lifetime of thrift.

Matthew Dancona

Brick Lane’s queen strikes gold on the silver screen

Four years ago I published a book set in the East End, about a troubled young woman who lives and works in the vibrant multiethnic community of Bethnal Green. It was fun to write, and reasonably well-reviewed. But just before publication I turned around and saw a magnificent tidal wave filling the literary horizon, and approaching fast. ‘Another book about the East End,’ I thought to myself. ‘Wow, that looks rather impressive. I wonder what it is? . . . Glug. Glug. Glug.’ The tidal wave was a debut novel of stunning confidence and elegance called Brick Lane and, four years on, I am sitting in a Dulwich bistro with its author, Monica Ali, to discuss the film of the book, which is about to be released.

Piers Paul-Read

The Muslims’ letter to the Pope is not all it seems

The Muslims’ letter to the Pope is not all it seems At first sight the letter from 138 prominent Muslim scholars and imams to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders published last week, ‘A Common Word Between Us and You’, is a welcome statement of a number of obvious truths — that Christianity and Islam worship one God; that both religions enjoin truth, justice and love of neighbour; and that if these two great monotheistic religions fight one another, then there is little chance of peace in the world. The letter, issued by the Royal Aaal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan, had among its signatories grand muftis with tens of millions of followers, and pointed out that Muslims and Christians make up more than half the world’s population.

Norman Stone

What has this ‘genocide’ to do with Congress?

Istanbul Two elderly shoe-shiners were shouting with rage outside my local in Istanbul. The subject was America, and they ranted on and on — first about the disaster in Iraq, then about the stirring up of the Kurds, and then about the latest effort in Congress to ‘recognise the Armenian genocide’. What is so very strange about all of this is that American relations with Turkey have generally been very good. In a sense, modern Turkey belongs with Germany and Japan as the most successful creation of the United States after the second world war. In any year, there are 25,000 Turks at American universities, some of them sprigs of the Istanbul rich, many on scholarships, with which the Americans have been generous.

Christopher Hope

The auditor general and Saudi arms deals

To date there have been no indications of ministerial disquiet with Sir John Bourn, Britain’s comptroller and auditor general. Ministers speak of him in glowing terms, insisting that he is the embodiment of rectitude. Conservative front-bench spokesmen take the same favourable view. This is very striking in view of the stream of revelations concerning this guardian of our public finances. Embarrassing details emerged last week, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, concerning Sir John’s personal extravagance. To put it mildly, they showed that he does not manifest the same hair-shirt attitude to taxpayers’ money that his National Audit Office demands of other public bodies.

Rod Liddle

Why living near my old friend Michael Gove can seriously damage your health

People living within a 25-mile radius of Michael Gove, MP, are more likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver and alcohol-related tumours than anywhere else in the country. There is a direct correlation between (fairly) close proximity to Michael and very high levels of alcohol consumption. A study carried out by researchers from the Liverpool John Moores University discovered that five of Britain’s most alcohol-saturated areas were congregated around Michael’s constituency in Surrey Heath. The only one that wasn’t nearby was Harrogate, in North Yorkshire — and just a cursory check through the clippings shows that Michael delivered a speech there to the Chartered Institute of Housing, in which he was critical of the government’s house-building policy.