Features

Saturday

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.

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.