Features

Saturday

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.

Saturday

Tessa Mayes

Stars in their eyes

To download a podcast about Tessa Mayes's experiences with the celebrity Scientologists, click here. ‘A culture is only as great as its dreams and its dreams are dreamed by artists,’ wrote L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre in 1969, 15 years after he formed the church itself. So, in a sense, the Scientologists have only been true to their founder’s intentions in the ever greater emphasis they now put on the famous. If you’ve seen the ordinary-looking Scientology shopfront on the Tottenham Court Road, the London Celebrity Centre comes as a pleasant contrast: it is an impressive, six-storey, cream Victorian building in Bayswater, adorned with balustrades.

Richard Sanders

Hello, sailor!

Richard Sanders recalls the exploits of Bartholomew Roberts, a swashbuckling 18th-century buccaneer to match Johnny Depp — except that he drank tea, and was probably gay The Pirates of the Caribbean films, the third of which has just been released, have revived the age-old interest in all things piratical. But the average Victorian schoolboy would probably have choked on his porridge if he’d known the real nature of the men whose adventures he so avidly devoured. If anyone deserves the title ‘the real pirate of the Caribbean’ it was the Welshman Bartholomew Roberts, who captured an astonishing 400 ships in a brief two-and-a-half-year career between 1719 and 1722 — a figure that dwarfs that of any of his contemporaries.

Rod Liddle

No one deserves a knighthood more

At last an issue to unite all of us — right, left, Muslim, Christian and Hindu, liberal and conservative. The decision to knight the author Salman Rushdie has brought together, in angry concordat, almost the entire world. There are those who, even now, may be strapping on the semtex to deliver to Rushdie the righteous vengeance of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH). And there are others who will merely write nasty stuff about him for the Guardian and the Evening Standard and maybe cheer quietly if he is, in the end, blown to smithereens by an altogether more proactive and engaged opponent. Rushdie is loathed — and not just by the mediaevally minded bigots of Islamabad, Tehran and the Finsbury Park mosque. He seems to be loathed by everyone else, too.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The final Blair–Brown battle

Fraser Nelson says that Tony Blair’s swansong summit next week is fraught with danger for Gordon Brown. The last thing the next Prime Minister wants in his in-tray is a new EU constitution that he has to sell to the British public For what must surely be the last time, war has broken out between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The surreal calm of the handover period has been fractured by a return to the bitterness, acrimony and threats that have been the dominant feature of government in the past decade. The Prime Minister has been told, rather than asked, to come back from next week’s European Union summit having agreed a treaty which the Chancellor can plausibly sell to the British public without being forced into calling a referendum.

Rod Liddle

Gordon Brown should apologise

At last: an admission from a senior member of the government that it lied through its teeth and misled the public in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, back in the early spring of 2003. Or at least that’s how I read Gordon Brown’s comments about the way in which New Labour used intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s military threat to the West. Perhaps I am misinterpreting our next Prime Minister, or simply overstating the case, as usual. I’ve rung Gordon to clarify but neither he nor any of his monkeys have got back to me yet. Brown is widely reported to have said the following: ‘I would like to see all security and intelligence analysis independent of the political process and I have asked the Cabinet Secretary to do that.

Saturday

Freddie Sayers

The Tories should be backing Hillary

The Blair-Bush partnership, so awkward for the Labour party, has come to an end and everyone is speculating about how Gordon Brown will recalibrate the Special Relationship. But what about the Tories? Marginalised for years by Tony Blair’s diagonal alliance with the Republican President, they have struggled to know who their real friends are in Washington. This is a chance for them to think again. Instead of allowing Gordon to go creeping back to the ascendant Democrats, leaving the Tories to make peace with a shattered Republican party, this could be the moment to admit that during those years of opposition the Tories and the Democrats have become rather well suited.

Ross Clark

Hatred of the rich is back in fashion

Ross Clark says that the anti-globalisation rioters protesting at the G8 summit in Germany and Labour’s deputy leadership contenders are part of a new and dangerous trend towards wealth-bashing One of the little-remarked side effects of 9/11 was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement. It is not easy to remember that in the summer of 2001, the year in which protestor Carlo Giuliani died during rioting at the G8 summit in Genoa, the growing venom of anti-capitalism protestors was seen as such a threat to society that, briefly, on the afternoon of 11 September commentators on the live radio and television coverage discussed the possibility that the attacks could have been carried out by enemies of globalisation. After 9/11, however, the movement suffered a precipitous decline.