Features

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

Hillary’s guru has some tips for Gordon

An interview with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as 44th President of the United States in January 2009, the man sitting opposite me in the bar of the Dorchester will become one of the most powerful people in the world. Mark Penn, pollster extraordinaire, adviser to Tony Blair in the 2005 election, and legendary number-cruncher to Bill Clinton is now chief strategist to the Democrat frontrunner and, it is widely believed, Hillary’s alter ego, the man she calls at 7 a.m. wherever she is in the world. In her memoirs, she calls him ‘brilliant and intense’ and ‘shrewd and insightful’.

Fraser Nelson

‘Gordon has not been an effing disaster’

It’s Sunday evening, and John Hutton has just come back from one of his regular weekend in Ypres. The Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise is an enthusiastic first world war amateur historian and is currently writing a play based on one of the stories he’s unearthed. It’s about John Elkington, a British colonel who surrendered without permission in the Somme in chaotic circumstances. He was court-marshalled and cashiered, but was so determined to keep fighting he joined the French Foreign Legion. His bravery eventually earned him a royal pardon. It is the type of diehard martial spirit which many of Mr Hutton’s supporters once fancied they saw in him. This time last year, he was tipped as the ‘dark horse’ candidate to challenge Gordon Brown.

Jim Murphy

The Spectator is wrong to call for an EU referendum

‘If someone in the UK is calling for a referendum, that is not because the text we have in front of us is a Constitution.’ Not my words. They belong to Giuliano Amato, vice chairman of the Convention that drafted the old Constitutional Treaty. Last week in the Spectator the government was accused of being dishonest regarding the European Reform Treaty (‘Vote for honesty’, 15 September). We are not. We did indeed promise a referendum on the old Constitutional Treaty. But the Reform Treaty is not a Constitution. In June, all 27 leaders of the Member States of the European Union took the same view, declaring ‘the Constitutional concept has been abandoned’.

Rod Liddle

A fond farewell to the Commission for Racial Equality

Less a rage against the dying of the light, more a prolonged, high-pitched whine of complaint and self-justification, the sound of a swarm of badly earthed strimmers, heard from a distance on an early autumn morning. The Commission for Racial Equality has issued its valedictory press release before its duties are acquired by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights next month. The new organisation, headed by Trevor Phillips, will co-ordinate all manner of whining on behalf of absolutely anybody who considers him- or herself to be oppressed and victimised and discriminated against by the vindictive white male hegemony. Good luck to it.

Sarah Vine

Scared of sexists? Try upsetting the feminists

As a study published the other day showed, the equality gap is far from sewn up. Despite the fact that women managers climb the career ladder faster than men and reach positions of responsibility five years earlier than their male counterparts, they are still paid less ...an average of 12 per cent less, rising to 23 per cent at senior level. Are you still there? Because if I were you I would have wandered off by now, perhaps to tidy my sock drawer, or empty the bins — or perform any number of more fascinating tasks; anything apart from listening to yet another whingeing career woman bleating on about the unfairness of it all.

Saturday

Hywel Williams

The Tories will need more national fear to win

Only national insecurity will swing it for the Conservatives Ten years ago this autumn I started to write a history of Conservative government in the 1990s. Guilty Men was designedly satirical and cynical — qualities which seem Tory to many. Some readers liked the jokes. Others, burdened by conviction, thought it too laconic by half — especially since I had been a Cabinet adviser (to John Redwood). Nonetheless the book had a reasonably serious aim: it wished to demythologise much of the stuff Tories believed about themselves and Britain. Conservatives, I thought, had embraced a myth of their own invincibility. This was not just a question of their personal conceit.

Leo McKinstry

Why the kid should have gone to the chair

Towards the end of the classic 1957 American courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men, the toughest juror turns bitterly on his colleagues: ‘Brother, I’ve seen all kinds of dishonesty in my day, but this little display really takes the cake.’ Furious that the rest of the jury now seem to be inclined towards a ‘not guilty’ verdict in a murder case, despite a wealth of evidence against the defendant, he protests, ‘You all come in here with your hearts bleeding all over the floor about slum kids and injustice ...What’s the matter with you guys?’ It is a question that could be addressed to those who now run the British criminal justice system.

Rod Liddle

We have treated the McCanns as if they were Big Brother contestants

Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or hazard. The McCanns are back in England but they are now — exotically — ‘arguidos’, which means that the Portuguese cops suspect they may have a case to answer. One or both of them may yet be charged, so far as we understand the machinations of the Portuguese legal system.

Peter Oborne

The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it

The Spectator political commentator Henry Fairlie, in his column of 23 September 1955, famously identified the Establishment as the mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. His analysis, though at once recognised as authentic, was written as the British Establishment was about to collapse. Today it enjoys some residual notoriety (manifest through former ruling-class institutions such as White’s Club) but no political significance. Though the eclipse of the Establishment is well-documented, the Political Class which replaced it is so far poorly understood. This is regrettable because the Political Class has come to occupy the same public space that the Establishment was supposed to until the end of the 20th century.

Matthew Dancona

Join us in the great Intelligence2 debate

The Spectator’s new partnership with the debating forum Civilised debate is the essence of The Spectator: it is what animated ‘the little Committee of Politicks’ that Joseph Addison encountered in the St James’s Coffee-house and described in the magazine in March 1711. Three centuries on, it is the desire for a cheerful rhetorical punch-up, in print or in person, that still excites us most at 22 Old Queen Street. Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarke, Deborah Ross, Taki, Fraser Nelson: these are only some of the verbal pugilists who form the ‘little Committee’ in our own happy, cacophonous republic of letters.

James Forsyth

Petraeus’s true message: we must be patient

There was a single, unmistakable message emerging from the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in Washington this week: the Iraq war may have started on President George W. Bush’s watch, but it will not end on it. Petraeus was as impressive as you would expect a four-star general with a Princeton PhD to be. But his timetable for the withdrawal of US troops was revealing — consisting merely of a series of question marks after March 2008. Anyone who thinks that the US military will be out of Iraq by 20 January 2009, when the next president takes the oath of office, or even inside the next administration’s first 100 days, is as deluded as those who believed that democracy would follow dictatorship in Iraq as night follows day.

Saturday

Henry Sands

How I was saved from Mongolian torture

My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online form immediately. The programme was Last Man Standing and involved six contestants travelling the world to live with tribes for two weeks. At the end of each show they fought members of the tribe using the tribes’ traditional form of combat. They had stick fighting with Zulu warriors in South Africa and wrestling with nomads in Mongolia. I told my girlfriend that the appeal was not so much the physical conflict as the overall cultural and aesthetic experience.

Damian Thompson

This is a true Catholic revolution

Next Friday, 14 September, the worldwide restrictions on the celebration of the ancient Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church will be swept away. With a stroke of his pen, Pope Benedict XVI has ended a 40-year campaign to eradicate the Tridentine Mass, whose solemn rubrics are regarded with contempt by liberal bishops. In doing so, he has indicated that the entire worship of the Church — which has become tired and dreary since the Second Vatican Council — is on the brink of reformation. This is an exciting time to be a Catholic. Unless, that is, you are a diehard ‘go-ahead’ 1970s trendy, in which case you are probably hoping that the Good Lord will call Joseph Ratzinger to his reward as soon as possible. First, let us get some terminology out of the way.

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’.