Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

If not Dave, then who? The parlour game that might get serious

It is horrible to imagine. It would be a tragedy, for party and country. Even contemplating it seems lurid and, given recent events, deeply mischievous. It is certainly not something for loyal Tories to discuss in public. But, in their darker moments, few Conservative politicians will have not asked themselves the question in the past turbulent week: if David Cameron were to be run over by a bus tomorrow, who would lead the Conservative party?At Westminster, it is amazing how quickly today’s parlour game can become tomorrow’s leadership battle. For those who prepare properly (as the Blairites did in 1994) the rewards can be immense. In Mr Cameron’s case, what is striking is the fact that there is leadership speculation at all.

Saturday

Stanley Johnson

Some advice for Boris from a proud father

Stanley Johnson says that his son is no buffoon, that his ability to make people laugh doesn’t mean he’s a lightweight, and that he should not get bogged down in ‘consultation’ Boris was born in New York on 19 June 1964. I missed the birth since I had slipped outside for a moment to buy a pizza. When I first saw him he was bundled up in the hospital nursery with only the soles of his feet showing. These were completely black. This puzzled me. Had his mother, I wondered, somehow managed to give birth to the wrong baby? I later discovered that in New York, for reasons of security, newborn babies’ feet are dipped in black ink and an imprint taken for the record.

Toby Young

Boris defines the ‘new Conservatism’ by being a real human being

Toby Young, our campaign correspondent, says that the candidate’s prospects in the London mayoral election hinge on his appeal as a great communicator, and on the hysteria of the Left, which completely misunderstands him ‘Boris is going to be standing here,’ announced a member of his campaign staff, pointing at a red handbag that she had just placed on the ground in front of City Hall. This was on Monday, the day Boris formally announced he’d be running for Mayor, and the assembled hacks looked on in bemusement. Who was this woman? And what planet was she on? Didn’t she realise that the moment the Blond Bombshell appeared he’d be surrounded by a screaming mob of journalists, all clamouring for his attention?

James Forsyth

Brown’s stand on Russia is a welcome correction

When a British citizen is killed on British soil and a foreign government refuses to hand over the suspected killer for trial, then the British government must act. It was imperative that David Miliband demonstrated to the Russian government that their failure to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the suspected killer of Alexander Litvinenko, would have consequences. If Miliband had confined himself to the usual diplomatic mutterings, as his critics think he should, he would have been effectively declaring open season on British citizens; inviting KGB alumni to knock off any turbulent priests who’ve settled in London. Litvinenko’s murder late last year was designed to send the message that critics of the Russian security state were not safe anywhere.

Sarah Churchwell

Sex and the City has nothing on screwball comedy

You can learn a great deal about a culture from its fantasies. If Sex and the City is anything to go by, ours are pretty impoverished. The first film version of the HBO series is going into production and will be released next year, guaranteed to offer its trademark view that femininity today is defined by shoes, shopping and sex. I like all three as much as the next girl — unless the next girl is a character on Sex and the City — but my fantasies are rather more ambitious. They were formed years ago by a passionate devotion to the peerless romantic comedies of the 1930s, known as screwballs.

Saturday

Stephen Pollard

Campbell holds a mirror up to shallow Britain

Stephen Pollard, who as David Blunkett’s biographer longed to see Alastair Campbell’s journal, says it tells us as much about the nation as it does about New Labour Alastair Campbell may be no Chips Channon or Alan Clark, but his diaries are at least readable. Very readable. And that is not something one can take for granted with New Labour diarists. The last set, from David Blunkett, managed to turn one of the most melodramatic political stories of all time into a turgid cure for insomnia. The Campbell diaries’ importance lies not in any great revelations but as the final part of a New Labour Trilogy. More than just telling us about modern politics, however, they act as a guide to modern Britain. Two previous books have been essential reading about The Project.

Drew Westen

If you want power, be emotional, not rational

Drew Westen’s book on the political brain is the talk of Washington. Here, he explains why the path to electoral victory is not governed by reason In the last 40 years, only one Democrat has been elected and re-elected to the American presidency: Bill Clinton. And during the same period, only one Republican has failed to win re-election: George H.W. Bush. These are astounding facts, given that during those same years, whenever registered Democrats and Republicans were not in roughly equal numbers in the United States, Democrats were in the majority, as they are today. Democratic voters are confused and frustrated. What’s the matter with Kansas, they ask?

Ross Clark

London matches the glory of Venice in its prime

Ross Clark says that our capital has the geographical, economic and social conditions that made the Venetian city-state of the 14th century — but all this is vulnerable When Tony Blair secured the agreement of the Scots and — only just — the Welsh for devolution in the referendums of 1998, it was supposed to herald a great revival of the regions. Britain was to be reborn as a kind of West Germany, whose constitution included a reference to ironing out the economic disparities between Hamburg and Munich, Frankfurt and Hanover. Instead, the opposite seems to have occurred.

Rod Liddle

Boris is the kind of Tory I’d vote for: which means he can win

Rod Liddle urges his friend to stand for Mayor of London and demonstrate what modern Conservatism can do — if you let it I’ve voted Conservative only once in my life — during elections to the London School of Economics students’ union 23 years ago, when the Tory manifesto pledged to spend all of the union money on buying a racehorse, rather than giving it to the bloody miners, or Robert Mugabe, or Pol Pot, as Labour wished to do. A lot of my fellow lefties voted similarly, sick to the back teeth of the posturing, grand-standing, attitudinalising antics of these awful little gobby public schoolboys from Tunbridge Wells and Berkhamsted in their interminable Che Guevara berets and Coal Not Dole! badges.

Tim Walker

‘Being famous has become rather common’

Rupert Everett tells Tim Walker that there is nothing wrong with being a bimbo, that political correctness has been ‘a disaster for everyone’ and that gay adoption is wrong Rupert Everett has just done Richard & Judy, or maybe, he concedes, Richard and Judy have just done him. ‘It is hard to work out who is using who on these occasions,’ he says. ‘I suppose ultimately we are all just hustlers.’ The actor is proud of his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and, now that it has come out in paperback, he is throwing himself at the promotional tour with professional gusto. He can’t, however, disguise the fact that the chat show circuit now seems to him a trifle infra dig.

Saturday

Saira Khan

We are up against 20 years of planning

Saira Khan recalls the moment she met relatives in  the hijab for the first time and one of them told her:  ‘We are not British, we are Muslim In July 1989 I had an experience that scared and alienated me, but also made me realise who I was and, more importantly, who I was not — and would never be. I was 18 and in my first year at Brighton University, where I was studying for a BA in Humanities. I was meeting new people — people of different religions, cultures, ages, sexual orientation, experiences and interests. I was growing up, realising for the first time that there was a world other than the one my parents talked about constantly — the world of Long Eaton (where I lived) and Pakistan.

Rod Liddle

The public know how these attacks happen — unlike the politicians

Rod Liddle says that the car-bomb plot was the predictable consequence of multiculturalism, lax immigration, mad human rights laws and neocon aggression. Shame the government can’t see this ‘Al-Qa’eda brain surgeons fail to blow up large car full of petrol’ has an agreeable ring to it, as a sort of taunt at our enemies and as a comfort blanket while we’re standing in the mile-long queue at Heathrow with a sniffer-dog’s snout in our groins. There is a certain truth to it, too — and one not yet remarked upon, in public at least, perhaps for superstitious reasons: they’re pretty useless, aren’t they? And have been for some time, now.

Hywel Williams

Please can we have our Enlightenment back?

It must be odd being God these days. Revealed religion generally — and the Christian God in particular — are often in the dock, screamed at by literary types with a name to make or a reputation to uphold. Christopher Hitchens, in the latest of a series of pamphlets presented in book form, thunders in his title that God Is Not Great. For Richard Dawkins, rather famously, He is delusional. While A.C. Grayling ventures in What Is Good? that ‘religious morality is . . . anti-moral’ as well as being, apparently, ‘inimical to modern interpersonal relations’. The modern apostles of ‘reason’ constitute a thriving business, and it’s the war on terror that gave them a chance, with its talk of fanaticism that has to be extirpated.

Katharine Witty

A letter from Planet Fayed

In 1986 a BBC producer approached Mohamed Al Fayed and asked him to contribute to a programme called The Uncrowned Jewels. Mr Al Fayed had recently acquired Harrods as well as a dilapidated villa in Paris that had belonged to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. After a few discussions, it was decided that Martyn Gregory could film at the villa, and interview the Duke’s former valet, Sidney Johnson, and Mr Al Fayed himself. Unfortunately, Mr Gregory did not fulfil his side of the bargain: the hour-long documentary that was promised was chopped to half an hour, and the interviews were dropped. Mr Al Fayed would consequently have been perfectly entitled to withdraw his permission for the footage to be screened. But he did not do so.

Saturday

Clemency Burtonhill

‘All because of The Spectator’

Chinua Achebe is chuckling as he attempts to describe how much it means to him to have won the Man Booker International Prize. ‘How do I answer that?’ he wonders, in his soft, sing-song voice. ‘It means I am appreciated in certain quarters, that my work means something to people. When I started writing all those years ago, I wasn’t even aware there were such rewards. All I had in mind was to write a true story, in the way that fiction can be true. I had to be honest. I was not going to be pushed around. And so, to have appreciation of any kind is wonderful.’ Many would argue that such appreciation is long overdue.

Fraser Nelson

All bets are off

Fraser Nelson says that the new Prime Minister has positioned himself in territory that the Tories have left vacant, and is ready to fight a cultural battle to defend the ‘British way of life’ and win over the C1 voters who decide elections It was a phrase that David Cameron would never dare to utter. As Gordon Brown was giving his first speech as Labour party leader in Manchester, he repeatedly pledged to defend the ‘British way of life’. This dog whistle may have been missed by his audience, and was certainly neglected by the press, but resonated in Conservative headquarters. Immigration, an issue which the Tories have dropped as a frontline issue, is now firmly on Labour’s agenda.

David Tang

Thatcher, me and Hong Kong

It’s not enough, if you wanted a rare interview with Lady T, just to cosy up to her. This would only, in the parlance of formal logic, be a necessary but not sufficient condition. So first I took her out to lunch — at Scott’s. As we entered the restaurant, I observed to Lady T: ‘I am sorry there are so many men!’ ‘But you seem to forget that I spent a lot of time in Parliament,’ she retorted, quick as a flash. It was a jolly lunch. Lady T had a wonderful appetite and finished all three of her courses and a large coffee. We talked about a lot of things, including The Spectator. When we got up to leave, every table applauded spontaneously. It was an affectionate gesture that filled the room and the great lady with considerable warmth.

Andrew Neil

It’s the Broken Society, stupid

British politics used to be dominated by the country’s relentless economic decline. Long before James Carville’s mantra for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election bid — ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ — it was the economy which determined British general elections and alternative economic policies which most divided the parties. I spent most of my early career as a journalist chronicling this economic decline and commenting on it. I travelled to Germany, Scandinavia, even Italy to bring back stories of how Continental companies were more efficient, their bosses more impressive, their unions more reasonable, their products, from cars to fridges, far superior.

Fraser Nelson

New New Labour’s Mr Aspirational

A Job Centre machine had been installed right outside James Purnell’s office. It’s one of the Department of Work and Pensions’s new toys, matching up some of Britain’s 1.6 million unemployed with its 638,000 vacancies. But why this device should be outside the desk of the Minister for Pensions is unclear. ‘It is rather ominous,’ he says, patting it. ‘This wasn’t there last week.’ Ask anyone in Westminster to name the rising stars under Prime Minister Brown, and Mr Purnell’s name is routinely offered. He is young, articulate, laid-back and relatively unknown. The last point is especially important.

Martyn Gregory

Stranded on Planet Fayed

‘Bastard’! hissed Mohamed Fayed when he saw me in the Royal Courts of Justice during the pre-hearings for the inquests into Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed’s deaths. This was my welcome to Planet Fayed — the parallel universe currently dominating the inquest pre-hearings. I had never seen my quest for evidence into how Diana died in personal terms, but Mohamed clearly begs to differ. I have often asked Fayed for an interview in the past ten years to quiz him about the Paris crash, but I have only heard two words in response; his salutation when he saw me in court the following week was identical.