Features

Saturday

Sinclair McKay

Hammer’s Dracula is now a beloved British institution

Hammer’s 1958 Dracula is being re-released To some, the spectacle of heaving bosoms, goblets and hideous bloodshot eyes might simply signify an average night out in Boujis. For the rest of us, however, these are the amusingly persistent leitmotifs of Hammer Horror — together with brightly lit Transylvanian inns, horses clattering through Home Counties woodlands, huge fangs and glass paintings of distant castles. Cinema horror these days is largely to do with gruellingly repulsive scenes of realistic torture — from the Hostel films to the Saw series. So how is it that the now-antiquated scare devices of a gimcrack British outfit of the 1950s and 1960s remain so extraordinarily pervasive?

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The election sprint has turned into a marathon. Can Dave keep the lead?

For a man whose economic policies had once again been stolen by the government, George Osborne looked unusually cheery as he delivered the opposition response to the pre-Budget report on Tuesday. Alistair Darling had brazenly claimed as his own the Tories’ new ideas: raising the inheritance tax threshold, an airline levy and taxing foreign financiers. But to the shadow chancellor, this theft represented victory. ‘From this day on,’ he declared, ‘let there be no doubt who is winning the battle of ideas.’ It was a fair point. Mr Darling had spent the first half of his speech denouncing Conservative policy and the second half aping it.

Con Coughlin

Meet the next Saddam – minus the torture

Basra No one’s elected him, he flourished as an army officer under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and by the strict standards set by Washington’s neoconservative ideologues for turning Iraq into a beacon of Western democracy, General Mohan al-Furayji, the Iraqi commander in charge of Basra, should have no role to play in the country’s reconstruction after decades of misrule. Yet talk to anyone in Basra, whether Shia militiamen, Sunni tradesmen or British infantrymen, and all you hear is praise for the uncompromising way in which the new strongman of Basra has managed to impose something approaching order on a city that until recently was a byword for inter-factional Shia strife.

Aidan Hartley

The terrible secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’

The author’s arrest while investigating Chinese prisons A crowd of faeces-stained, starving figures with haunted eyes stared at us from behind the bars. Some looked cold and wet, as if they had been hosed down with water. Most of them were old, and some handicapped. They began wailing and pleading with us. ‘Let us out!’ they sobbed. ‘This is a prison!’ They showed us one ragged woman. ‘Look at this. She was beaten!’ They carried another elderly woman towards the bars who appeared to be paralysed. Guarding the inmates were young men in black jumpsuits. I knew they would stop us filming any second now, but at first the guards reacted slowly. ‘Those are the thugs that beat us!’ yelled one of the inmates, pointing.

Hywel Williams

Democracy can’t compete with the history of kings

Archaeology in north-eastern Syria was once a poor relation to the great sites that lie to the south and over the Iraqi border. Southern Mesopotamia is long established as the area that shows the urban roots of advanced civilisation. Ur may or may not be Abraham’s birthplace but by the 3rd millennium bc it was certainly the centre of a sophisticated court society. Nineveh, lying adjacent to modern Mosul, rivals — and may surpass — Ur in antiquity and was an Assyrian centre by the end of the 2nd millennium bc. Widespread looting and military action now make archaeological investigation next to impossible at such centres.

Fergal Keane

‘They come at two or three in the morning’

Rangoon The first few rows were taken up by the more ostentatiously pious of the congregation, elderly women mostly and a few schoolgirls wearing last year’s Holy Communion dresses. To their left, sitting in front of a statue of the Virgin, was a phalanx of nuns wearing the starched and forbidding habits long ago abandoned by their trendier sisters in the Western world. Behind them sat middle-aged husbands and wives, the latecomers and the doubters, and your correspondent, sweaty and portly and dressed unbecomingly in T-shirt and shorts, the necessary uniform of the foreign reporter posing as a tourist in totalitarian Burma.

Lloyd Evans

Intelligence2

The great thing about the Intelligence2 debates is their vitality, pace and compression. A week-long seminar couldn’t have covered as much ground as we traversed in 100 minutes on Tuesday night. The motion ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West’s openness and flexibility with the ossified ‘closed book’ culture of Islam. ‘Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne,’ he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal.

Freddie Sayers

Monaco’s man with a plan takes his place centre stage

Last week Prince Albert II, ruler of the tiny Mediterranean state of Monaco since his father’s death in 2005, came to London to unveil his vision for the principality. The playboy of the gossip columns was nowhere to be seen: on display at a press conference at the Ritz hotel was a softly spoken, Amherst-educated, 49-year-old man with a plan. Using words such as ‘turnover’ rather than ‘GDP’, the Prince made it quite clear that the oldest luxury brand in Europe is under new ownership, and that its new CEO plans to develop it with all the skill and science of the private equity generation. ‘Monaco,’ he says, ‘is open for business.’ Prince Albert’s plan can be seen as a model five-point case study of a post-buyout company relaunch.

Robin Lee

Memories of the Venetian palace where I lived

Last week Prince Albert II, ruler of the tiny Mediterranean state of Monaco since his father’s death in 2005, came to London to unveil his vision for the principality. The playboy of the gossip columns was nowhere to be seen: on display at a press conference at the Ritz hotel was a softly spoken, Amherst-educated, 49-year-old man with a plan. Using words such as ‘turnover’ rather than ‘GDP’, the Prince made it quite clear that the oldest luxury brand in Europe is under new ownership, and that its new CEO plans to develop it with all the skill and science of the private equity generation. ‘Monaco,’ he says, ‘is open for business.’ Prince Albert’s plan can be seen as a model five-point case study of a post-buyout company relaunch.

Rod Liddle

Laws that constrain free speech bring out the childish bigot in me

There was a strange non sequitur in Jack Straw’s latest policy announcement. The Justice Secretary revealed that inciting hatred of homosexuals would soon be a crime punishable by seven years in prison. And justifying the legislation, he said this: ‘It is a measure of how far we have come as a society in the last ten years that we are now appalled by hatred and invective directed at people on the basis of their sexuality. It is time for the law to recognise this.’ The logic of this quite defeats me. It seems to be saying that because homosexuals are no longer loathed or despised, it should be against the law to loathe or despise them.

Saturday

Fergal Keane

The sweet contagion of freedom will outlast the bloodshed in Burma

Burma is awakening from a nightmare of greed and repression.  Fergal Keane meets a family on the Thai-Burma border whose tragic story is Burma's story but remains optimistic about the chances of the Burmese desire for freedom ultimately triumphing over the junta.  Mae Sot, Thai-Burma borderThe family had come from one of the villages along the border and their story of life and death came from the heart of Burma’s tragedy. They had crossed to Thailand because they did not have the money to buy medicine in Burma. Under the Generals’ rule healthcare in Burma exists only for the rich or the friends of the regime. The country has more malaria deaths than India, whose population is 20 times bigger.

Douglas Davis

We came so close to World War Three that day

A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved. Even more curious is that far from pushing the Syrians and Israelis to war, both seem determined to put a lid on the affair. One month after the event, the absence of hard information leads inexorably to the conclusion that the implications must have been enormous. That was confirmed to The Spectator by a very senior British ministerial source: ‘If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic.

Michael Howard

Lessons of the tsunami the world forgot

At 7.40 a.m. on 2 April the Solomon Islands were struck by a major earthquake and a large tsunami. At least 52 people were killed, more than 900 homes were destroyed, and thousands of people were left homeless. Little attention was paid to this at the time and not much more since. After all, they are a remote string of tropical islands far away in the South Pacific, hundreds of miles away even from Australia. However exotic and romantic they sound, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that they do not rate very highly on our list of priorities. Yet the fate of the Solomon Islands is important. Not just because its people share the planet with us and so have claims on our common humanity.

Mary Wakefield

Blair said to me: ‘Let’s not talk about the war’

A light rain drifts down over Kintbury village, blurring the surface of the Kennet and Avon canal. It gleams on the railway tracks, pools into fat drops under the roof of the station shelter on the London-bound platform and drips on to Robert Harris’s new suede shoes. Look, I say again, please don’t wait. I’ll be fine. You’ve been more than kind enough already. ‘No, no.’ Harris says firmly. ‘I’ll see you on to the train. I hope you’re not too cold, though.’ This is advanced niceness of a sort you don’t find very often.

Douglas Murray

I am not afraid to say the West’s values are better

Before sidling off into history last month, the Commission for Racial Equality published a final report. Decades of multiculturalism, it revealed, had left Britain a fractured and unequal nation at risk of splitting up. The Commission’s chairman Trevor Phillips stated several years ago that multiculturalism had failed. His commission waited till its final hours to admit as much. It was impossible not to feel saddened by this confession. Even as left-wing experiments go, multiculturalism was an especially costly failure. Principally it blighted the lives of immigrants who escaped their own countries only to be told not to integrate into ours. But its victims also included those who refused to remain silent before their era’s craze.

Amelia Torode

A final farewell to the dating game in New York

The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish and contemporary guide to social and sexual mores in the Big Apple, teaching a generation about such concepts as exclusive dating and non-exclusive dating, A-list nights and B-list nights, and the three-day rule (as in the ‘always wait three days after the date to phone him otherwise you come across as too keen’ rule).

Rod Liddle

It isn’t only rabbits who will suffer from the new surge of myxomatosis

Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. ‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look,’ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’ But even as I said the words, I knew that this would be a problematic encounter. The rabbit just sat there, its usual hair-trigger response to approaching danger apparently nullified. ‘A fairly stupid bunny,’ my oldest son pronounced, as we clumped closer to the creature and it still declined to bolt. ‘A very ill bunny,’ I told him.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

This will be Cameron’s finest hour — or the scene of a lynching

Just six weeks ago, David Cameron was enthusing to friends about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech to the Conservative party conference. The governor of California had been on the phone, saying how much he was looking forward to visiting Blackpool. It turned out that Schwarzenegger knew what he was in for, having toured England’s seaside towns during the bodybuilding pageants of his youth. Then, a fortnight later, he had mysteriously become too busy, and the supposedly relished visit was — well — terminated. It is a fair bet that a British opinion poll found its way to Sacramento. When Mr Cameron first wrote to the governor, the Tories were ten points ahead.

Norman Tebbit

Cameron should heed St. Paul, not his advisers

With our overstretched army bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent crime on the streets out of control, a run on a high street bank, teachers assaulted in their classrooms, bullying by pupils over the internet, illiteracy growing, the NHS shambles in which young British doctors are left jobless while thousands of foreigners are imported to take their jobs, house prices soaring way beyond the reach of ordinary families, even the Commission for Racial Equality admitting that uncontrolled immigration and multiculturalism — those totems of New Labour — are threatening the stability of society, there should be a spring in David Cameron’s feet as he pedals north to Blackpool.

Fraser Nelson

‘Now we have got to have something to say’

A new map hangs in George Osborne’s office, showing the latest parliamentary boundaries for the next general election. It could have been designed to soothe the nerves of a Conservative party election co-ordinator, for it is dominated by Tory blue. A few tricks have been used to achieve this optical illusion. There is no Scotland, for example, and marginal Labour seats are painted a faint red. But overall the picture is of a Conservative country, and an election which is eminently winnable. This is how Mr Osborne sees it — and not, he insists, just to keep morale up. ‘Although I never said so at the time, I went into previous general elections I was involved in — 1997, 2001 and 2005 — with a sense of foreboding,’ he says.