Features

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.

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.