Features

Saturday

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.

Frank Luntz

Don’t go greener or get meaner, Mr Cameron

It’s been two years since I sat down with 30 potential Conservative voters for BBC2’s Newsnight and asked them whom they’d like to follow into the next election. Their answer was nearly unanimous: the heretofore unknown and obscure David Cameron. And it’s been a year since I sat down with 30 potential Labour voters and asked whom they wanted to follow Tony Blair. Their answer: the colourful and avuncular John Reid. Apparently the party wasn’t listening. A few days ago, with a new Prime Minister approaching his 100th day, I once again started a Newsnight conversation with the elusive but essential swing voters to ask whether it was time for a change (yes) and time for a snap election (perhaps).

Nigel Lawson

Sorry, minister: The Spectator is right about the EU Treaty

There are two reasons why Jim Murphy, the Europe minister, is wrong and The Spectator right about the question of a referendum on the European Union Reform Treaty (‘The Spectator is wrong to call for an EU referendum’, 22 September). The first is that the government gave the people a solemn pledge that it would hold one before there was any question of ratifying the European Union Constitutional Treaty, and anyone who takes the trouble (and it does involve a wearisome amount of trouble) to study both documents will find that, to all intents and purposes, the content is the same. While different politicians from different countries state, for their own doubtless high-minded reasons, different views about the matter, I know of no dispassionate analyst who denies this.

Simon Courtauld

Farewell to a noble figure in Spectator history

Ian Gilmour was not the only proprietor of The Spectator also to be its editor, but he was unquestionably the best. Patrician, wealthy, high-minded, unassuming, the 28-year-old Etonian ex-Grenadier Guardsman raised a number of eyebrows when he bought the magazine in 1954 and took over the editorial reins himself. However, the five years of his editorship were to cause a lot more surprise when, in fostering The Spectator’s libertarian tradition, he not only espoused radical causes but frequently opposed the Eden and Macmillan governments. In some important respects The Spectator under Gilmour’s direction anticipated the free-thinking mood of the 1960s.

Rod Liddle

I blame Mandelson and the EU for propping up Burma’s wicked regime

The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with tear gas and bunged them in the back of paddy wagons to be taken God knows where and for God knows how long, the EU Trade Commissioner’s spectral form once again swam towards me from inside my television set. We are all worked up and worried about Burma, quite rightly, because of its appalling record on human rights.

James Forsyth

Welcome to the liveliest of coffee houses — online

A warm invitation to The Spectator’s new website The Spectator has a new website — redesigned, easier to use, with new features and writers. The online magazine will continue to do what the print magazine has always done on paper: inspire debate, stir up controversy and have some fun, with the added advantage that you can add your thoughts to ours. In expanding our web presence we are being true to the traditions of the magazine. The original Spectator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele arose from the free-wheeling intellectual sparring of the 18th-century coffee house, and if there’s a modern version of this — a space where people can comment and squabble about the issues of the day — it’s surely online.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

This will not be a Labour conference. It is Gordon’s one-man show

It will be, for Gordon Brown, a sweet irony. For years he has longed to address Labour conference as its leader. Now, when it is finally his turn, he can no longer do so — at least not in the way that he had foreseen. His mission is to stand at the podium in Bournemouth as a national leader, a statesman who has transcended tribalism and soars above party political divides. He no longer wants to be simply chieftain of the tribe gathered in front of him but a kind of father figure encompassing Labour, Tory and everyone else. His aim is also to stage the most choreographed party conference for years. Just as the Dorset police will check every drain for a bomb, the Prime Minister has been meticulously sweeping the political landscape for any hidden explosive devices.

Irwin Stelzer

Brown and his critics must admit their errors

Not even his severest critics doubt Gordon Brown’s intelligence. They might object to the causes in which it has been enlisted, but they knew that it is both formidable and restless. Nor do the Prime Minister’s critics doubt that he has a coherent vision of where he wants to take Great Britain, what sort of society he would like to create (the assumption being that it is in his power to do just that). Again, they might disagree on the consequences of striving for greater equality of income and wealth distribution, or the efficacy of stuffing an unreformed public sector with cash. But they have no doubt that Gordon Brown knows where he is going. Nor, in their quieter moments, should his critics disagree with some of the policies he brought with him to No. 11.