Features

Saturday

Douglas Hurd

Peel is the model for Cameron

The balance between style and substance varies sharply with each Prime Minister. In a few weeks, we will see yet another swing of the pendulum. But never has the contrast been greater than in Queen Victoria’s reign. Disraeli was the man for style — an exception rather than a model, for his combination of gifts could not be copied. The sallow, expressionless face, matched with a substantial wit and a novelist’s imagination, enabled him to destroy Peel and keep Gladstone at bay. His fame stays evergreen. Each Conservative leader sends a research assistant bustling to the dictionary or internet to find some shining phrase of Disraeli to decorate his or her own speeches. But on substance — how can one put it respectfully? — the record may be a little thin.

Irwin Stelzer

Go west to discover the true America

‘Go West, young man, go West,’ newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised ambitious 19th-century Americans as the nation pursued its Manifest Destiny. Well, it might have been Greeley, or perhaps John Babson Lane Soule, editor of the Terre Haute (Indiana) Daily Express. No matter the author: the advice is as applicable today as it was 150 years ago — and not only for young men. After a stint in the rancorous atmosphere of our nation’s capital, where resurgent Democrats are out to prove that another surge, this one in Iraq, is doomed to failure, I headed west on a business trip. America’s Manifest Destiny, of course, has already been fulfilled. We long ago ‘overspread the continent allotted by Providence’, to borrow from John L.

Andrei Navozov

Farewell to clubland

Palermo In the disheartening post a friend has brought to the tranquillity of Sicily from the wilds of London I see that my name has been placed on the Front Morning Room mantelpiece, in accordance with Rule 15 of our Club, as my annual subscription has not been settled. Yet paying it would mean remaining in the Club. When I first asked to become a member of Brooks’s, I did so at the insistence of my wife, who had given me to understand that joining an historic St James’s club and obtaining British citizenship were the displays of enterprise and fidelity she would require of a slothful and errant husband.

Rod Liddle

You get the Olympic logo you deserve

‘We’re fearless. We challenge everything, especially ourselves. We seek the truth relentlessly. We believe in we not me. And we mean it.’Wolff-Olins mission statement There’s been quite a fuss about the official new logo for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. People are aghast at the fact that it is a) hideous and b) cost £400,000. A child, a blind man, an ape let loose with a paintbrush could all have done better, the argument goes. Well yes, of course. The jarring amalgamation of irregular shapes does indeed bring to mind the sort of graffiti one finds on walls near a home for the educationally sub-normal — and there is the faint aftertaste of Adolf Hitler, too.

Saturday

James Forsyth

‘If Brown pulls a stunt over Iraq…’

James Forsyth talks to insiders in Washington and London about the biggest dilemma facing the next Prime Minister — and finds that, as much as Brown might like to break free of an unpopular conflict, his options are severely limited Gordon Brown could administer the coup de grâce to George W. Bush’s presidency. If, following the expected visits to Iraq and Washington in the first weeks of his premiership, Brown were to announce that British forces would be pulled out of Iraq by March 2008, then the already fragile support for the war in the US Congress would finally snap. Brown’s 100 days would be off to the blockbuster start that his acolytes have long dreamed of.

Tim Walker

‘I enjoy being an ousider’

At the Prince of Wales’s 50th birthday party at Buckingham Palace, Sir Geoffrey Cass, who was then the chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company, presented Antony Sher to the Queen. ‘He is one of our leading actors, ma’am,’ Sir Geoffrey whispered into her ear. Her Majesty frowned, paused for a very long time and finally said, ‘Oh, are you?’ A string of words, mercifully unuttered, formed in Sher’s head. ‘No, of course not, Your Majesty, you’ve seen through me. I’m just a little gay Yid from somewhere called Sea Point on the other side of the world. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know why I am. I am an impostor.

Leo McKinstry

Rosebery: the other waiting Scot

Since the late Victorian age there have been two prime ministers who have come close to nervous breakdowns while in Downing Street. The first was Anthony Eden, dosing himself on mind-altering drugs so that he could relieve the gnawing pressures of his own insecurities and the pressures of the Suez crisis in 1956. Last year diligent research by the former foreign secretary and medical doctor David Owen found that Eden during his spell as premier was taking the powerful narcotic drinamyl, a combination of amphetamines and barbiturates, which badly undermined his judgment, reduced his coherence and made him paranoid. ‘He was in such a bad way that he didn’t make sense,’ wrote one contemporary. Eden’s health was so shattered that he was forced to resign in January 1957.

Mary Wakefield

The charm of Ed Miliband

Sitting opposite Ed Miliband MP in a large and airy office, the sort of office that befits the Minister for the Third Sector, I suddenly have the surreal impression that I’m at the doctor’s. It’s the medicinal green of the carpet but, more than that, it’s Ed’s demeanour. There he is on the sofa, all clean and healthy-looking, like a man who jogs and who knows how important it is to stay hydrated, and concerned too — leaning forward, his eyes bright with eagerness to fix things.

Rod Liddle

A VC won’t get you into Britain

Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun then seized the Bren gun, and firing from the hip as he went, continued the charge on this heavily bunkered position alone, in the face of the most shattering concentration of automatic fire, directed straight at him.... Despite ...overwhelming odds, he reached the Red House and closed with the Japanese occupants. He killed three and put five more to flight and captured two light machineguns and much ammunition. He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker to the remainder of his platoon which enabled them to reach their objective.His outstanding courage and superb gallantry in the face of odds which meant almost certain death were most inspiring to all ranks and beyond praise.

Saturday

Boris Johnson

The pursuit of happiness

You’ve got to realise they would have done it. They would have gone right ahead and swept another priceless heirloom from the mantelpiece of history. They were revving up their bulldozers, ready to roar into the ancient and irreplaceable ecosystem. Another great tree would have been felled in the forest of knowledge, and the owl of Minerva would have fled in terror from her roost. Had it not been for a few romantic reactionaries, then the technicians who run our reductionist system of education — with the complaisance of the Labour government — would by now be halfway to the demolition of the ancient history A-Level.

Greg Clark

The only way is up

Whatever happened to social mobility? One of the most disturbing themes to emerge from the grammar schools debate and the current rash of Blair retrospectives is the discovery that even under a supposedly progressive Prime Minister, our society is holding too many people back rather than propelling them forward. And the reasons behind this reveal many deep-seated differences between the thinking of Cameron’s Conservatives and that of Brown’s Labour party. Social mobility is falling. Someone born into the poorest quarter of society 50 years ago had a greater chance of working their way up to a higher economic group than a young person today. And it’s getting worse. We have expanded the number of people in higher education.

Heidi Kingstone

Nato’s Commander in Kabul

Dan McNeill, Nato’s commander in Kabul, tells Heidi Kingstone that even a ‘hard-bitten dude’ faces a struggle to make the liberated country function as an orderly society Dan McNeill used to give his briefings from a rocking-chair. Today, as he opens the door to his Kabul office, there is no rocking-chair in sight. As the Commander of the coalition International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, he is arguably, next to President Karzai, the most powerful man in the country. With his grey crew-cut, blue eyes and sangfroid, he epitomises a US military man. Reserved, considered, he is not instantly friendly, rather more professional than personable.

Iain Johnstone

Happy birthday John Wayne

Iain Johnstone celebrates the centenary of the ‘Duke’ and recalls a memorable holiday off the Mexican coast with the toupee-less Hollywood legend Had he lived, John Wayne would have been 100 on Saturday. I knew him. In the spring of 1976 he invited me to go on holiday with him on the Wild Goose, his converted minesweeper. The plan was to cruise up the Pacific coast of Mexico. He told me to go to the Acapulco Hilton and he would call me when the ship was ready to sail. It was a heady time in Acapulco: Howard Hughes, who had been bed-ridden in the penthouse of the Princess Hotel, was rumoured to be dying and there was a chase on as to whether the Mexican police could get the body and the death duties or whether Hughes’s henchmen could smuggle it out of town. They did.

Rod Liddle

The BBC should be less opinionated

Rod Liddle says that the Corporation has no right to adopt a position on an issue such as David Maclean’s private member’s bill, and should stick to reporting the facts A BBC foreign correspondent was once sacked by the Corporation for claiming expenses fraudulently. What alerted the BBC accountants to a possible transgression was this chap’s claim for the cost of a lawnmower and the services of a gardener, given the fact that he lived in a fourth-floor apartment. I don’t know what he’s doing now, the journalist. Perhaps he’s your MP.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Milburn: how I can help Brown

Alan Milburn was nine years old when he arrived home to find the front door of his council house had been painted bright yellow. His mother, who looked after him on her own, was perplexed. In the morning it had been red, but men with brushes had come and gone. This was to have a radicalising effect on the young Tynesider. Some 40 years later, reclining in the chair of his rooftop office opposite the House of Commons, his outrage still seems fresh. ‘I can remember the emotion of being slightly freaked by the whole affair,’ he said. ‘The colour wasn’t chosen by my mum. Nor by my granddad. It was chosen by the council: but they didn’t live in that house, and we did.’ From then on, he has had a dislike of state control.

Mark Leonard

Yuschenko: historical times

I had almost given up. The time of our appointment had changed six times in 24 hours. The presidential palace was — as it still is — in full crisis, and my interview seemed to be receding out of reach. When he finally showed up, the man at the centre of the political storm seemed perfectly calm. Victor Yuschenko was wearing a well-cut suit and a bright red tie, but it was his face that captivated my attention. This was the famous face that had shocked the world and launched a revolution. Disfigured by pocks and carbuncles, it tells the story of Yuschenko’s near-death and of his country’s bitter struggle for democracy.

Rian Malan

Shame on Mugabe’s stooges

Rian Malan is appalled that Zimbabwe has been put in charge of Sustainable Development by the UN — and says it is symptomatic of the way in which Mugabe is indulged by foolish go-gooders from New York to South Africa Johannesburg On the day that Bob Mugabe’s genocidal regime acceded to the chair of the UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development, I found myself in the lovely Cape village of Franschhoek, once a Boer farming town but now more French and precious than Provence. Even as bitter debate broke out in the distant UN, I was checking into a luxurious hostelry and trimming my nostril hairs in preparation for meeting such luminaries as Liz Calder, publisher of the Harry Potter books, and the glamorous American novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of Things I Loved.

Rod Liddle

Sweeney’s rant at the Scientologists

Ah, now, this is what we pay our licence fee for. A maniac screaming at a maniac. I hope you caught the latest edition of the BBC’s Panorama, during which the presenter, John Sweeney, went berserk at a spokesman for the Church of Scientology — bellowing in his face at full volume in the manner of an inmate at Rampton being told that his pornography allowance has been stopped. If you didn’t see the show itself, then check out the incident on YouTube on the internet — it’s been posted there by the Scientologists as if to say look, everybody, this is what we have to put up with, abuse and harrassment. The clip is quite wonderful — perhaps the most arresting moment of TV this year and utterly hilarious.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Alastair Campbell told the crowd: ‘Unite behind Gordon to win’. But can they?

When John Reid was asked if he’d stand for Labour party leader, he would always give the same sort of reply. ‘I have a life outside politics,’ he told me at the last Labour conference. ‘I play the guitar, I play piano. I have a house in France. I could walk away from all this tomorrow, and my life would not collapse. Now you may believe me, or you may not believe me: I don’t give a ...’. At the time, I didn’t believe him. Not for a second. Mr Reid seemed to be the classic political animal. Ministerial red boxes from his many government posts are lined up in his parliamentary office like hunting trophies.

Steve King

African wildlife is newly endangered

Richard Leakey never looked like he was going to mellow much with age. For the past 40 years he has been one of the most vital, energetic, tenacious and inflammatory figures on the African scene. When barely out of his teens, he made his name as an archaeological prodigy — a sort of Mozart of Lake Rudolph — and in the process very nearly beat his parents, Louis and Mary, at their own game. When he ran the Kenya Wildlife Service in the late 1980s he famously torched a 12-tonne pile of poached ivory. It was a typically unsubtle but effective gesture. The images were beamed out on network TV; the world sat up and paid attention; poaching, for a while, was stopped in its tracks.