Features

Saturday

Martin Gilbert

Churchill was ‘too fond of the Jews’

In a press release announcing a book by Richard Toye on Churchill and Lloyd George, Cambridge University Press put its main emphasis on the discovery of a previously unknown article written by Winston Churchill in 1937, containing considerable anti-Semitic imagery. In fact, not one word of this article was written by Churchill. Nor did the article ever appear in print, either under his name or that of any other. The article was written in its entirety by a British journalist, Adam Marshall Diston. Churchill, who was then writing on average an article a week, paid Diston, a journalist and would-be Labour party parliamentary candidate, to draft these articles. Some of Diston’s drafts were amended by Churchill and published with his amendments; a few were published unamended.

Michael Moorcock

How I learned to love the Lords

Lost Pines, Texas When I first moved to America in the early 1990s I arrived as a republican, full of a furious rhetoric about the end of monarchy and the abolition of hereditary privilege. I’d sent a hefty donation to Charter 88, who wanted to see PR, a written constitution and an elected second house. Social justice could not be improved by traditional methods and all the Lords Temporal were good for was raising prize pigs and holding the hands of serial killers whom they visited in jug. The Lords Spiritual were the symbol of an Anglicanism reduced to giving a home to the WI and holding the odd carol service on Christmas Eve.

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Who wants to buy our old office?

‘A unique opportunity to purchase the home of a famous weekly magazine.’ Thus might an estate agent market No. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1, now up for sale after more than 30 years as the offices of The Spectator. But an estate agent cannot know how des a res is this early-19th-century house in Bloomsbury. It should be sold not so much for its fabric — handsome as it is, if slightly worn — as for its recent history, for the rich variety of people who have passed through its doors and the voices which may come out of the now possibly rotting woodwork.

Michael White

John Yates has previous

When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much. By some mysterious process of osmosis between detectives and the leading crime correspondents, details of that dramatic armed robbery in Croydon would be all over the front pages while the Yard’s official spokesmen were still confined to talking lamely about ‘an incident on Purley Way which required police attendance’. I do not know how much has changed. In our 24/7 media world everything is sharper and faster. Dawn raids have TV crews primed to film the drama, sometimes to the anger of innocent communities.

Toby Young

Punching power of a veteran champ

Sitting in one of the green rooms at Yorkshire Television on a Saturday afternoon in Leeds, it’s difficult to reconcile the man I’m watching on the monitor with the David Frost of legend. He’s recording four back-to-back episodes of Through the Keyhole to be broadcast on BBC2 later this year and he’s finding it difficult to muster much interest in his current guest, a former soap star called Lee Otway. ‘So, Lee, is Celebrity Love Island the biggest thing you’ve ever done?’ Could this really be Sir David Frost, OBE, the man who has interviewed the last six British prime ministers and the last seven American presidents? The man whose annual garden party at his house in Chelsea attracts a dazzling array of senior politicians and A-list celebrities?

Saturday

Tessa Mayes

Big Brother is coming

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair told the road-toll petitioners by email that his government was not trying to impose ‘Big Brother surveillance’. That was accurate, if disingenuous. The real Big Brother doesn’t announce himself. He comes creeping up on you, by stages, until you realise that you are being snooped on, scrutinised and spied upon in all sorts of ways that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. Take the powers of the taxman.

Lloyd Evans

A taste of gun crime

Crack crack crack. Three shots, really close, from a car-park just across the road. Everyone in the crowded street stopped. No doubt what this was — gun crime erupting under our noses. Two more shots. Crack crack. Then another. Crack! My eight-month-old son was in a buggy and I shoved him into a gap between two parked cars. What next? Run for it? But I might charge into the line of fire. I paused, terrified. Around me everyone stared in shock and bewilderment. At the end of the street a young black guy came running round the corner, both hands under his sweatshirt, hiding something. He looked wired and frantic and was clearly fleeing danger but he was also trying to be unobtrusive. He ran a bit, then stopped, ran a bit more and stopped, looking over his shoulder anxiously. I froze.

Rod Liddle

Blame it on Rory Bremner

It is always cheering to encounter a politician who refuses to offer up the easy answer to challenging questions but instead delves beneath the surface and, with candour, delivers himself of an opinion which runs counter to the popularly held belief. So let’s hear it this week for Peter Hain, the agreeably tanned candidate for the post of deputy leader of the Labour party. The question in this particular case was this: why does the British public view politicians, and especially leading members of the current administration, with cynicism and bitterness? The easy, glib answer for Peter would have been: ‘Because of the opportunistic and cynical behaviour of people such as myself.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor

Remembering Lord Jellicoe

George Jellicoe, who died last week, was an early member of David Stirling’s SAS, and soon became commander of the Special Boat Service. We first met in pitch darkness soon after midnight on 24 June 1942 in a cove off southern Crete, both of us in rubber boats, one of them taking off Jellicoe and his comrades — most of them French — back to Mersa Matruh, the other landing me on the island for a SOE mission. We exchanged shadowy greetings. On landing, I soon learnt from the Cretans of the success of their long, strung-out series of raids, and the number of enemy aircraft and the stockpiles of ammunition and fuel they had destroyed.

Irwin Stelzer

America: you’ll miss it when it’s gone

Don’t say Tony Blair didn’t warn you that you won’t like a world in which America has decided to become a self-centred spectator rather than a player. That day seems to be approaching, a response to the self-indulgent anti-Americanism that has become so fashionable in Britain and Europe. The American presidential election campaign is about to get serious, and sooner than usual, since about half of all the delegates to the nominating conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties will have been chosen less than a year from now.

Jeff Randall

The Clunking Fist

Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little list’ of those who are for the chop. Among the joys of W.S. Gilbert’s libretto is its invitation for a contemporary version of victims. Who better to identify them than the Clunking Fist?

Michael Meacher

Why you should vote for me

A leadership election opens up, uniquely, the opportunity to debate and decide on the future course of a government. I am standing because I believe there are several areas of policy where a fundamental change of direction is now needed. And though Spectator readers may initially be sceptical about the relevance of my policies to them, I believe that if they read on with an open mind, they’ll find much that they agree with. I’m sure they’ll agree, for instance, that New Labour and Tory policies have become similar, almost overlapping, which means that politics has become increasingly fixated on personalities, as though a blanket consensus on policy had been achieved. This is ridiculous.

Saturday

Frank Luntz

Cameron’s political language

The US pollster Frank Luntz has made a huge impact on recent British political conference seasons. Here he explains why the Tory leader is pulling ahead of the Chancellor — and what the American political scene has to teach them both Washington My Labour friends insist that the public just doesn’t know Gordon Brown the way Labour insiders do — that when the public gets to see Brown as leader, which could come any day now, they will warm to him. I expect the opposite — on the basis of many hours spent researching the thinking of voters on both sides of the Atlantic. Successive telephone polls and focus groups have shown that voters trust him but don’t like him.

Fraser Nelson

Making life difficult for Gordon

Frank Field has been up to mischief. Since leaving government in 1998, he has not been a fan of Gordon Brown, but last week he declared all-out political war against the Chancellor. In an article for the Guardian he outlined exactly why Mr Brown should not become party leader, arguing that he is too associated with past failings to offer hope for the future. He concluded his attack with four words which caused even more havoc, ‘Step forward, David Miliband.’ If Mr Field were an ordinary maverick Labour backbencher, no one would much care what he thought. But he has been proved right too often in the past to be written off as a crank.

Dean Godson

A tribute to Ulster’s A.J.P. Taylor

Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots’ successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, had been elevated to the peerage. Far from being the cue for an orgy of resentment, the news was greeted with almost universal pleasure. Until 15 years ago, Bew was an obscure Marxist historian at a provincial university. Today, he is the A.J.P. Taylor of the Northern Ireland peace process. He has become well-nigh ubiquitous on the airwaves and in the corridors of power — on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Saturday

John Gray

The best we can hope for is tolerance

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that  Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world The only thing that can be known with reasonable certainty about Ruth Kelly’s new programme of engagement with Muslim communities, which the Prime Minister told the House of Commons at last week’s meeting of the liaison committee will tackle Islamist extremism ‘head-on’, is that it will be muddled and ineffective. Nothing the government has done suggests it is ready to examine why extremism is gaining ground.

Alasdair Palmer

Meeting Professor Torture

Guantanamo Bay has just marked its fifth anniversary. John Yoo was instrumental in setting up the prison camp which the normally solidly pro-American Daily Mail has called ‘the sort of show that once only dictators like Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao knew how to put on’. Yet Yoo’s infamy in America derives less from clearing the legal way for Guantanamo than from being the author of the ‘Torture Memo’, a legal opinion filed on 2 August 2002 by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a section of the Department of Justice. It examined what methods of inflicting pain and suffering constitute torture, and whether the President can order torture if he thinks it necessary.

Rod Liddle

We deserve Gillian McKeith

A couple of years ago an over-confident Scottish woman called Dr Gillian McKeith made history by being the first person ever to examine human stools on primetime television. A nutritionist — whatever that is — by trade, her shtick was to induce indolent and feckless working-class people to defecate into a tube and then — holding the tube aloft for the benefit of the viewing audience — berate them for the spineless quality of their product. From this unique vantage point she would then castigate the working-class people about their diets and force them to eat mung beans, lentils and chard, with ‘hilarious’ results. Someone somewhere obviously thought this would provide compelling television.

Alan Johnson

We have not betrayed a generation

Impatience for improvements in education is something I share. It is not a new phenomenon: in 1439 William Bingham, a London rector, petitioned Henry VI about the ‘great scarcity of masters of grammar’. What amazes me in the modern age is our collective complacency on education since the war. The independent National Foundation for Educational Research pointed out in the early 1990s that reading results in primary schools scarcely budged for almost 50 years. Staggeringly, this appeared to placate governments of both colours who were simply concerned with ensuring that things didn’t get worse. In 1997 we rejected that quiet life.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Will you have a place in the bio-bunker?

Ross Clark investigates the government’s plans to deal with a human flu pandemic, and finds that the preparations for mass drug treatment are in a scandalous mess — unless, that is, you are on the right list In its early days, New Labour was likened to a ‘big tent’, in which there was room not just for the party’s traditional supporters but just about anybody else too. There is one government tent, however, in which there is certainly not yet room for everyone: the tent which offers some protection in the event of an influenza pandemic caused by a human strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus.