Features

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Clarissa Dixon Wright: ‘I was healed by a holy relic’

I’m tempted, just for a second, to feel sorry for Clarissa Dickson Wright. There she is, with her back to me, 15 feet away, at a table in Valvona & Crolla — a refined little deli/café full of focaccia and Parmigiano Reggiano tucked in beside the lager shops on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. There she sits, waiting for me: the last of the Two Fat Ladies, all alone: no fat husband to cook cakes for, no fat children to lick the icing from the bowl. I’ve read her memoirs, so I know that she’s been through the mill: alcoholism, homelessness, the death by drink of the love of her life. But I also know, as I begin my approach, that to pity Clarissa would be idiotic.

Matthew Dancona

A chat with the man who invented the internet

Imagine actually meeting Thomas Edison, or the Wright Brothers, or Newton, or Archimedes, or whichever Sumerian it was who invented the wheel in the fifth millennium bc. That, when you think about it, is what it’s like to have a conversation with Vint Cerf. Few people in the history of humanity can say with confidence that they invented or discovered something that has changed the trajectory of the species, but this genial Connecticut-born 64-year-old is among their number. Cerf is none other than the joint Father of the Internet (Robert E. Kahn being the other proud parent), which means that if you are reading this article on the Spectator website, or plan to send any emails today, or expect to use Google, or order a book on Amazon, you are doing so thanks to him.

Rod Liddle

The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true. It wouldn’t surprise me if John Logie Baird was gripped by a feeling of revulsion and self-disgust shortly after transmitting images of his fingers wiggling up and down back in the 1920s, the first ever TV show — and, you have to say, a suitably banal and metaphorically appropriate debut for the medium. Television: a sleight of hand, which will tell you nothing. It’s just fingers wiggling.

James Forsyth

If Bush doesn’t force Iran to back down, then his successors will

To many, 20 January 2009, George W. Bush’s last day in office, can’t come soon enough. The President’s pugnacious speech to the American Legion summed up why: not content with vigorously defending two wars, he seemed to start banging the drum for another with his statement that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons threatened to put the Middle East ‘under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust’ and pledge that America ‘will confront this danger before it is too late’. It is tempting to dismiss Bush’s remarks as mere sabre-rattling from an increasingly irrelevant and isolated President.

Saturday

Steven Berkoff

‘Kill him, Jimmy!’ A night at the cage fight

So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called ‘cage fighting’. So we went to Wembley Arena to witness for the first time what is called ‘cage fighting’. The reason for this being, of course, that the combatants go to war in a rather large cage. The cage is bound in with a net of the kind of wire you might use for a chicken coop. There are no seats for the weary gladiators to rest on between their violent bouts, and so they stand or lean against the wire. Their seconds come into the cage through an opening in one of the sides and check them out or wave a towel to attempt to cool them down between rounds.

David Tang

Mark Birley: a man who was right in everything

We had arranged to see Mark Birley at noon on the day he died. But my wife Lucy and I were just too late. He had suffered a stroke that morning. We missed him by a couple of hours and now, forever. I heard confirmation of the terrible news as I boarded a plane for Hong Kong. Not a good time to be pensive, as stewardess after stewardess interrupted my memories of the man with silly patters and wash-bags and pyjamas. Mark would have appreciated the incongruities. He had a Saharan sense of humour, especially when travelling on commercial. Even when he was confined to a converted bedroom on the ground floor of his divine house opposite the Brompton Oratory, he remained funny. I had asked him where he was going for Christmas. ‘I am going home,’ he announced.

Rod Liddle

Who really knows how much crime goes on at the Notting Hill Carnival?

I hope you enjoyed the Notting Hill Carnival and made it back home in one piece, maybe with a becoming scar of some sort — gunshot wound to the gut, stab wound in the throat, that sort of thing. Or perhaps just short of a few quid from your wallet, and maybe your wallet itself. Something, anyway, to display your commitment to this celebration of diversity; to show you are down with the kids on the street. It is Britain’s most iconic festival, immediately signified by a number of iconic, not to say stereotypical, images: uncomfortable honky police officer, his hat slightly askew, held in the lascivious embrace of a fat black mama who is clearly intent on ‘getting jiggy’.

Wednesday

Sarah Churchwell

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. Naturally, I can’t begin to; they’re the same people who voted for Bush, after all, which I find a far more mind-boggling proposition. But before British readers get too cocky, let it also be remembered that last year a poll showed that 22 per cent of Britons believe in creationism; 43 per cent believe in telepathy and 36 per cent believe in ghosts.

James Forsyth

Meet the shadow minister for militant Islam

The biggest risk to David Cameron’s leadership to date has been his appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as the shadow minister for community cohesion. Warsi’s rise makes Cameron’s ascent from freshman MP to leader in four years look almost sedate. In just two years she has gone from failed parliamentary candidate to being responsible for, perhaps, the most sensitive portfolio in opposition politics. Add in her history of making injudicious statements about anti-terror laws, talking to extremists, and Iraq — combined with some distinctly unCameroon views on homosexuality — and you have a pretty volatile cocktail. Especially as having staked his reputation on her judgment, Cameron cannot sack her.

Theodore Dalrymple

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Some things don’t change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is shot accidentally-on-purpose and you can’t open a newspaper without seeing a photograph with a teddy bear in the foreground among the gladioli. The legitimate grief of the people most directly involved is swamped by the maudlin tears of strangers who muscle in on it; and the stuffed toy becomes for us what black-plumed horses were for the Victorians. I look forward to the day when the lions in Trafalgar Square are replaced by teddy bears, as being more consonant with the new, improved British national character.

Saturday

Irwin Stelzer

No more Mr Nice Guy

Smile and shoeshine get you only so far in any business, says Irwin Stelzer. But Labour is still vulnerable if the Tory leader produces solid conservative policies David Cameron is confused. Understandably. For two reasons. First, those who are urging him to abandon policy-lite in favour of more heft are the very same who favour policies that would lead to disaster at the polls. The result is confusion between the need to reject the specific policies they propose, and the need to offer voters something more than a smile and shoeshine, to borrow from Arthur Miller. There are, after all, policies and there are policies. There are policies based on Euro- paranoia, and policies that reflect a healthy scepticism of the emerging European superstate.

William Shawcross

Now, more than ever, Britain must stay in Iraq

William Shawcross denounces those who say we must stand firm in Afghanistan but flee the country we liberated from Saddam Hussein. The US ‘surge’ is beginning to work, and Gordon Brown must grasp that the war against Islamism is indivisible The new comfort zone for many politicians and leader-writers appears to be the notion that if Britain withdraws its troops from Iraq and sends all the freed-up forces to Afghanistan, then all will be well. Siren voices are insisting that honour would be satisfied by such a move and we would still be pulling our weight in what Gordon Brown refuses to call ‘the war on terror’ or ‘the war against Islamist extremism’. Afghanistan, say those voices, is the crucial place to be engaging al-Qa’eda. Iraq is a sideshow.

Anna Blundy

We blondes face prejudice every day of our lives

It is time someone spoke out against the vicious discrimination casually meted out to blonde women in all areas of life. Attractive blonde women are especially liable to be subject to open and unapologetic abuse in the most ordinary of circumstances. Somehow, in this dark corner where the exposing floodlight of feminism has yet to shine, it is still acceptable to make sexist ‘jokes’ and it is still acceptable to state that a person’s appearance makes them unsuitable for the job. Blonde humour is the last bastion of the Bernard Manning (may he rest in peace) –style sexism that women have fought against for so long. Anyone so much as dimly aware of the work of Sigmund Freud knows that there is no such thing as ‘just a joke’.

Carol Sarler

Don’t waste time courting ‘moderate’ Muslims

Enlisting the help of ‘moderate’ Muslims is pointless Funny the difference a few weeks can make. When I went away for an extended holiday, the subtle but unmistakable consensus on the threat to life and limb was more or less as it had been for some years: that jihadists are rotten fellows, but only small in number when compared with the ‘vast majority’ of ‘moderate Muslims’ who are, of course, not culpable. At all. Of anything. Ever. When I came back, the consensus had shifted. Now, it appears, they might be a teeny bit worthy of blame after all — not for the violence itself, but for failing to keep their hotheads in line.

Rod Liddle

I want three years’ paternity leave for each of my children — backdated

I am presently mulling over the idea of taking the next three years off from this journalism lark and spending the time instead on ‘paternity leave’. This is a new proposal by some Tory think tank so I am assuming that a) Cameron will win the next election and b) adopt the idea and c) have the grace to backdate it to the birth of my daughter, Emmeline, two years ago. Better still, he could backdate it to cover the birth of my two sons as well, thus giving me a total of nine years’ paid leave, which should comfortably see me through until the old liver packs up.

Samantha Weinberg

Climate camp: next year we’ll go for longer

It is 11 p.m. on Saturday night and I am way out of my comfort zone. With my husband, two young children and dog, I have spent the day with 1,300 climate campaigners, none of whom I knew before, in a sodden field near Heathrow’s second runway. Now the five of us are squeezed into a three-man tent, rain seeping through the sides, listening to the roar of planes taking off and landing. It’s not exactly summer camp. And yet I feel strangely elated. The irony is that we nearly didn’t come to climate camp — because of the weather. At home in Wiltshire on Saturday morning, with a nice dry house full of chores and entertainments, the idea of camping in the rain seemed particularly unappealing. Like eating cold baked beans, or stepping barefoot on worms.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

What the courtiers saw: the inside story of the great royal fightback

It is almost exactly a decade since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, transformed the country into what Private Eye would call a ‘cellotaph’: grottos everywhere, great and small, full of cellophane-wrapped bunches of flowers, teddy bears, candles, the scenes of unrestrained emotion and group trauma the like of which had never been seen before. The mood of the week preceding the Princess’s funeral shook the ancient institution of monarchy to its foundations. Ten years on, it is easy to forget how volatile and eerie those days seemed. And yet the institution and the royal family have endured and prospered. Charles and Camilla, so vilified in the immediate aftermath of the Princess’s death, are now happily married.

Patrick Jephson

The real Diana was our future Queen

‘Oh God, not more Diana.’ We’ve all heard it this summer and Di-fatigue is unlikely to be reversed by the official programme of remembrance. The Wembley concert was truly moving in parts, especially the video inserts which recalled Diana at her spontaneous, compassionate best. I’ll admit they reduced me to tears, and not just because here and there I caught glimpses in the background of a younger, slimmer, more idealistic me. Tears may also be shed in the relatively modest surroundings of the Guards Chapel when on Friday 31 August the Princess is remembered by a carefully vetted congregation. Another cocktail of sentiment, though probably of a brand more acceptable to royal traditionalists.

James Forsyth

The curious case of the spy who fell to his death

When a man falls to his death from a balcony, some cynics wonder: was he pushed? When that man happens to be the most infamous spy in the history of the modern Middle East, it’s the first question on everyone’s lips. On 27 June the body of Ashraf Marwan was found on the pavement below his flat in Carlton House Terrace, one of London’s most expensive streets, which overlooks the Mall and St James’s Park. Marwan was an astonishingly well-connected Egyptian, the son-in-law of the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president and hero of pan-Arabism, and the consigliere of Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat.

James Delingpole

The last Tommy says: ‘It was a waste of time’

Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army Two years ago, when he was a mere spring chicken of 106, the last surviving Tommy, Harry Patch, was invited to inspect the Lewis guns at the museum of his old regiment, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, in Bodmin, Cornwall. To help jog his memory, a young major in his party fumblingly demonstrated how to change the magazine. ‘I said: “Major, you’d have to be quicker than that in action,”’ recalls Harry in his soft Somerset burr. ‘I said: “Here. Give me the Lewis gun and set your watch.” So I took the magazine off and put a new one on. “There. Now how long was that?” I said. “Two seconds,” they said.