Features

Saturday

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.

Rod Liddle

Not all faith schools are the same

At last, a British school where pupils are inculcated in a strict moral code, but also taught to think for themselves. Get your kids’ names down for the King Fahad Academy in Acton, west London, quick. It’s a Muslim faith school, as you might have guessed from its title, but don’t let that put you off. The pupils, from the age of five, are taught that Christians are ‘pigs’ and Jewish people are ‘apes’ — none of that dripping-wet equivocation you get from the national curriculum. And crucially, while the teaching is strict, the children are rewarded for ingenuity and inventiveness. For example, they are asked to think up ‘some repugnant characteristics of Jews’.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Look back in anger

Let us take the man at his word. ‘We should start saying what we do mean,’ Tony Blair told his party in 1994. New Labour should promise only what it was sure it could deliver. And at the heart of those promises was education, education, education. ‘I would like,’ he said six months before his election, ‘to be able to look back and recognise that in the late 1990s my Labour government began the process of establishing the creative, vibrant, successful education service our country desperately needs.’ Now, as his premiership draws to its close, and as the Blair government sinks deeper into the quagmire of Iraq and cash-for-honours, it is time to hold this audit of practical policy.

Toby Young

I met Harvey Weinstein at Sundance

I’d been in Park City less than 24 hours when I spotted the man himself. I was standing on Main Street talking to one of American television’s most distinguished comedy directors when Mr Sundance happened to walk past. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ asked the director. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ‘Follow me.’ Unfortunately, as soon as we’d taken a step towards this Hollywood legend, his mobile phone rang. I was ready to give up at this point, but the director insisted we follow him down the street. Provided we kept a discreet distance, he’d be none the wiser and when he ended his call we’d be in a position to pounce.

Michael Kennedy

A new home rich in history

With its move into 22 Old Queen Street, The Spectator will occupy a house full of friendly ghosts and memories of grand occasions in the world of the arts in the first quarter of the 20th century. For this elegant mansion in Westminster was for over 30 years the London home of Leo Frank Schuster, known to all his circle as Frankie, a patron of the arts and friend of the composers Edward Elgar and Gabriel Fauré and of the conductor Adrian Boult and the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He was homosexual and very rich. Born in 1852, as a youth he had worked for a spell in his father’s bank in the City but decided that his share of the family inheritance was all he needed and he could not waste his life making any more money.

Tessa Mayes

Sex offenders in schools: old news

Scandals have anniversaries, too, and another has just passed. In January 2006, it emerged that the Education Department (DfES) had authorised Paul Reeve — a man who had a police caution for viewing child pornography and was on the Sex Offenders Register — to be employed as a PE teacher in a school in Norwich. In May 2005, civil servants advised Kim Howells, an education minister at the time, that the man should be given only a warning, was not a risk to children, had not been convicted of an offence and that no child had been harmed. Reeve had not been put on what is still called ‘List 99’, the department’s blacklist, even though he was on the Sex Offenders Register. More cases were quickly uncovered.

David Puttnam

Memo to the new BBC chair

I find it hard to overstate the importance of the BBC in ensuring a sense of continuity and cohesion in our national life. As an institution it is far from perfect, but it does continue to offer the possibility of an eventual victory for sanity over nihilism in the evolution of the nation’s media output. That may sound a little ‘over the top’, but having lived through a couple of weeks of Big Brother media excess it doesn’t feel all that much of an overstatement. What’s certain is that the incoming chair of the BBC Trust will have a very great deal to think about.

Saturday

Interconnect

Born-again bodegas of the Rioja

After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain's best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta and Marqués de Riscal (as they became) changed the face of the wine in the 1850s, everybody involved in the industry has brought new thinking with every passing generation.