Features

Saturday

Anne Mcelvoy

Opportunity has stopped knocking: who will be its new champion?

Here’s a conundrum as we leave the Blair years behind us. Never has so much faith been placed in the idea of a society open to social mobility; never have so many politicians’ speeches been delivered in praise of a more classless society and the need to promote ability, regardless of background. Yet their rhetoric isn’t matched by the facts. Britain is becoming far less socially mobile. On the present indicators, we can only argue about whether it has stalled or is going backwards. What no one can convincingly argue is that it is going forwards. One of the oft-cited pieces of evidence is that of a celebrated study of children born in 1958 and children born in 1970. Those born in 1970 are more likely to have ended up poor themselves than the children born in 1958.

Dean Godson

‘They know the extent of our reach’

John Grieve, the long-time head of the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, observed shortly after the conviction of the IRA men who bombed South Quay in 1996: ‘It’s great — but every time we have one of these long trials, we give the men of violence a free masterclass on how we go about protecting the public and how they can try to get around us next time.’ On the day after the triumphant conclusion to the ‘Crevice’ trial, I asked Peter Clarke — Grieve’s lineal successor — about this in his 15th-floor office at New Scotland Yard. Clarke takes the point. But the pluses of taking this case through the courts still massively outweigh the minuses.

Lloyd Evans

A slum for half a million

It was pretty barmy ten years ago but now it’s downright insane. When I last dabbled in the London property market, prices were rocketing and there were half a dozen buyers for every property. These days it’s a whole lot worse but I’ve got no choice. My wife and I have a toddler nearing his first birthday and it’s becoming impossible to lug everything up the 58 steps to our top-floor flat: baby, toys, pushchair, Cow & Gate formula, books, food, wine, beer. And it’s really not healthy. I could easily have a heart attack watching her doing all that carrying. Our home, in which I’m writing this piece, went on sale just after Christmas.

Clemency Burtonhill

Cameron is taking on Brown

Nothing much is certain in British politics these days, but assuming that the next general election will pit Gordon Brown against David Cameron, we can be sure of one thing: its result will be a referendum on rebranding. Can the slick young pretender convince the cynics out there that the Conservatives are no longer a party of posh toffs with nasty views on immigration and labour markets? Can the dour old Scot loosen up a bit and stop making the electorate feel so very uncomfortable?

Patrick Marnham

A Parisian interlude

Paris, 1 May Between two rounds of a presidential election, the city seems untypically calm. But from my observatory, two floors above the campaign headquarters of Ségolène Royal, there is a clear view of the frantic efforts underway. I have been staying in this building, with my host, a celebrated surrealist sculptor, on occasional visits for over five years. Until now its chief claim to fame has been that it was here that French Military Intelligence brought the lovely Mata Hari to be questioned in 1917 before she was taken out to be shot on trumped-up charges of espionage.

Clarissa Tan

The visit

I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different. It is called, of course, Home — not the Home where you now live, but the Home where you were born and in which all things must start. I used to live in Kuala Lumpur. That is, until I was 15 and my mother rode the Ekspres Rakyat with me to Singapore, where I was to continue my studies. ‘Be careful,’ were her last words to me as she got ready to hop on the next train back to Malaysia. My mother asks you to be careful about everything. You could be sitting, quietly reading a book, and she would say: Be careful. Nowadays, I fly.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

New Labour’s final collapse

Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power? When locals give chase in a deprived Glasgow housing estate, it is normally a signal to run. The woman who started coming towards the Scottish National Party campaigners I was with on Tuesday certainly seemed angry: perhaps we’d blocked her driveway, or sullied her carpet with separatist literature. But her gripe was with Labour. ‘I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the Health Service really suffer under them,’ she said, demanding various SNP pamphlets. ‘I’m never voting for them again.

Christopher Howse

The pangolin and al-Qa’eda

Christopher Howse meets Mary Douglas, Britain’s foremost anthropologist, and learns the connection between ritual taboos and al-Qa’eda’s cells ‘It’s no good attacking enclaves,’ Mary Douglas said, dissecting a piece of guinea fowl on her plate. ‘It just makes them more firmly enclaves.’ When I had lunch with her, she sat upright in her chair, not leaning on its back, a slight woman of 86 now, her bright dark eyes set off by silver hair. She was talking about Islamist terrorists, as classified in her own cultural theory, for she is an anthropologist, the greatest anthropologist, some say, that Britain has produced in the past half century. She was made a dame in the New Year’s honours. Her sharp mind is still teeming with ideas.

Hywel Williams

A Tory–Plaid Cymru pact?

Liam Byrne says the English must be less apathetic about  the United Kingdom, and about the threat of Scottish independence that looms in next week’s elections One party rule sums up the history of Welsh politics from 1945 onwards. Labour’s hegemony here has been both cultural and political with its tribal elders portraying any alternative as at best eccentric and at worst downright unnatural. This is the party of the Welsh establishment and its position has been bolstered by an accomplished grasp of the powers of patronage. Tory governments at Westminster have recognised that hegemony and governed through it. New Labour in the post-devolution era could by and large afford to forget Wales — a country in which it had rarely shown any interest.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Democracy may die

A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar; Putin’s a practical politician.’ But who, I asked was the more lovable? ‘Putin,’ he replied, ‘because he’s always direct and he keeps his word.’ His words returned to me when I heard on Monday that Yeltsin had died. Yeltsin’s style of tsardom — impulsive, bombastic, secretive, drunken — meant inconsistency and insecurity for even his closest aides, never mind his own people.

Saturday

Anne Applebaum

Putin will stop at nothing

Anne Applebaum says that dissidents against the authoritarian regime, many of them in London, are raising the stakes. The President’s response is to get even tougher — and to target Britain in his new propaganda war About two years ago, Mikhail Kasyanov, ex-prime minister of Russia, made a private visit to Washington. Off the record, he told a handful of journalists that he was disturbed by the authoritarianism of President Putin. Then, in maybe a dozen or so more ‘off the record’ meetings, he told more journalists, several politicians and a lot of other people in Washington that he was disturbed by the authoritarianism of President Putin.

Matt Frei

‘Dusty Bibles, Dirty Thoughts’

Matt Frei reports from the scene of the US campus  killings, listens to the survivors and concludes that  the only question worth asking is: where next? Blacksburg, Virginia The last school shooting I covered also happened in the morning. It was October 2006 and a middle-aged milkman finished his night shift, got a few hours’ sleep, kissed his wife and children and then walked into an Amish village school half a mile away in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was a glorious late summer day. Armed with ropes, rubber gloves and gaffer tape, he let the boys go and tied the girls together. He then shot ten of them execution-style. Five died. On Monday this week, Cho Seung-hui began his killing spree at Virginia Tech at 7.15 in the morning.

Rod Liddle

Kate was too posh for William

Rod Liddle says that young princes in their twenties will always prefer a peroxide blonde  with a non-U name to a fragrant, well-spoken English rose This has been a difficult week. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that I was responsible for the traumatic break-up between Prince William and Kate Middleton. It is a terrible thing to have on one’s conscience, the dashing of young love and the hope and expectation of a nation. It’s not, of course, that I’ve been spotted dancing the night away and canoodling in Chinawhite with Kate, or Wills for that matter. I’ve never, ever, pawed a royal or a wannabe royal in a nightclub, not even Princess Michael of Kent.

Saturday

David Selbourne

No more Pax Americana

David Selbourne says that George Bush is losing the war in Iraq as surely  as George III lost the war against the American colonists — and that  the US imperium has entered on its decline after only six decades With both houses of the US Congress set to maintain their challenge to President Bush’s conduct of the conflict in Iraq — and being accused in turn of ‘meddling in military strategy’ and of wanting to ‘set a date for surrender’ — America’s problems in its so-called ‘war on terror’ are deepening.

Theodore Dalrymple

Our enemies are right to mock us

A taxi driver in Mexico City, who in my presence had just paid la mordida (the bite) to a traffic cop, taught me some lines by the 17th-century Creole nun and poetess, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz:     O who is more to blame,    He who sins for pay    Or he who pays for sin? The application of this particular moral conundrum to the recent events in our own country is all too obvious.

Matthew Dancona

A world bursting at the seams

New York As I ascend the solemn steps of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, a Parthenon transplanted to Broadway, the early spring snow crunches underfoot and the woes of Africa and the developing world seem very distant. Yet that is what I am here to discuss with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the university’s Earth Institute and this year’s Reith Lecturer. For his five Radio 4 programmes, the first of which was broadcast this week, Sachs has chosen the title ‘Bursting at the Seams’, which is how he sees the 21st-century world and its afflictions: extreme poverty, environmental crisis, terrorism, disease, bad governance.

Irwin Stelzer

Brown’s premiership will be short

In guessing at the shape of Gordon Brown’s premiership, we have to ignore two groups. First, there are the idolaters, the inner clique that believes, really believes, that application of the Brown intellect to the social and foreign policy problems facing Britain will cause those problems to crumble under the pounding of that clunking fist. More of what has been on offer from No. 11 is all that is needed at No. 10. Then there are the critics so blinded by their hatred of Gordon Brown for his stealth taxes, his pension raid, his redistributionist proclivities, his secrecy, his clannishness, his Scottishness, his unpressed clothes — or their exclusion from his circle — that they are unable to recognise his virtues and accomplishments.

Rod Liddle

The C of E must make up its mind

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has suggested that the Church of England has become obsessed by homosexuals. His implication seems to be that Jesus Christ didn’t go on about them too much and so, really, neither should we. The term ‘obsessed’ is a strong one, but I think justified. If Dr Sentamu had been less tactful, he might have suggested that one half of the Church of England clergy believes homosexuals will burn forever in the fires of Hell and wishes fervently to be on hand in order to help poke down the sodomites with those famous pitchforks, while the other half is more camp than Brownsea Island. That’s a sweeping statement, I admit, but not a million miles from the truth. Sentamu, however, is a tactful man and also careful.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Revealed: the Tories’ plan to separate

The slide towards extinction in Scotland has persuaded the Tories to draw up a blueprint for separation, says Fraser Nelson. The Scottish Tories would split off — and Cameron’s Conservatives would become the English party For the son of an Aberdonian stockbroker, David Cameron has had an uneasy relationship with Scotland. It is a land of massacred Conservatives, even less hospitable to his party today than it was during the great Tory wipe-out ten years ago. In his visits north of the border, the Tory leader has not so much tried to lead the remaining Scottish Tories to victory, but to check their pulse. In London, there is serious concern that the patient is not responding.

Matthew Dancona

The magus of Fitzrovia

I meet Ian McEwan for lunch at Elena’s L’Etoile near his Fitzrovia home. He is greeted like a member of the family, and he tells me with relish that the restaurant features in The Dean’s December by one of his literary heroes, Saul Bellow. McEwan’s last book, Saturday, was explicitly influenced by Bellow, and in many ways a homage to the American master. But his new and eleventh novel, On Chesil Beach (a short masterwork), explores different terrain. Set in 1962, it takes as its narrative focus the wedding night of a virginal couple, Edward and Florence, at a hotel on the Dorset coast, and, more specifically, their first, disastrous sexual encounter.