Features

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

‘We should have been bolder’

It is 7.30 a.m. and I am the first to arrive at Harris City Technology College in south London, where Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to meet for breakfast. The building is shut, the weather is freezing and a kindly cleaner asks me inside to wait. ‘Are you here for an interview?’ she asks. I nod, and she offers me a cup of tea. ‘What position are you applying for?’ I almost spit out the tea and explain I’m interviewing Lord Adonis. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Him again.’ Most schools would go into overdrive before a ministerial visit, but this particular establishment is used to seeing the lanky figure of Lord Adonis showing guests around. When we meet, he admits his strategy.

Aidan Hartley

Horribly close to a holy war

Kiunga, on the Kenya–Somali border  He was a quiet American, and an oddity in Kiunga. For 20 hours I had rammed the Range Rover through tsetse fly-infested jungles teeming with buffalo. When earlier this month I limped into this Indian Ocean village, within earshot of US air strikes against Islamists across the frontier in Somalia, astonished Swahili fishermen said mine was the first vehicle to arrive for three months. Soon afterwards, the American — let’s call him ‘Carter’ — appeared out of nowhere.  Two US Navy warships bobbed on the horizon and we could hear fighter jets hunting for Islamic militants a few miles to the north. Carter said he worked for US Civil Affairs.

Clemency Burtonhill

Blood Diamond should help

Diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend. You may have heard that it’s ‘girls’ who share a special relationship with the little sparklers, but don’t be fooled; females have simply had a rather more sophisticated advertising campaign working for them over the years. Drug-addled soldiers, morally lobotomised mercenaries and bloodthirsty terrorists are more appreciative of the potential contained in those chalky-white carbon stones than any dewy-eyed fiancée could ever hope to be. Since the late 1990s, thanks to relentless lobbying by organisations such as Global Witness and Amnesty International, Western fiancées have become more conscious that these expensive symbols of eternal love may not have had the most loving of journeys to their left hand.

James Forsyth

Hillary v. Obama is the real race

James Forsyth says that the mighty race between the two Senators — the first serious black contender against the first serious female contender — will be the main event, as the Republicans’ fate is decided in Baghdad Clinton’s in, Obama’s in, everybody’s in. Last week the 2008 presidential contest got serious, as the Democratic heavyweights Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama entered the race. Obama announced on Tuesday, Hillary followed on Saturday. Already 16 candidates have launched bids for the White House with as many as eight others expected to join the race soon.

Saturday

Daniel Hannan

Last hours of a monster

Amid fresh reports that Fidel Castro is at death’s door, Daniel Hannan says that the Cuban dictator was the beneficiary of Western hypocrisy about left-wing tyrants, and of the strategic errors of the 44-year US blockade Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Sixteen years ago, he looked finished. The USSR had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the Cuban economy for 30 years had been abruptly terminated. Around the world, statues of Lenin were being melted down or sold off to collectors of kitsch. But Castro never wavered in his revolutionary fervour.

Alistair Horne

Recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust — the blackest day of a horrendous week. It was an incredibly beautiful autumn day. There was an almost sinister tranquillity in London. I recall walking across Hyde Park, almost deserted, and thinking ‘this is my last walk, the last day I shall spend with my tiny children, the end of all hopes for their future ...it’s the end’. And yet a still small voice within me, of belief in the fundamental humanistic values of Americans, and their good sense, told me that it wasn’t going to be the end. JFK would not allow it....

Fraser Nelson

‘No one has the last word’

Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’. What a difference a year makes. The man I meet in the Treasury office has been transformed into a towering figure in the global warming debate. His report, The Economics of Climate Change, has had a huge impact in Britain and around the world. It is billed as hard proof of the compelling economic case to tackle global warming. It is hard to imagine a less likely evangelist than the quiet, bespectacled man who apologises for being late.

Andrew Geddes

Being with John Betjeman

Andrew Geddes recounts the long affair between his  mother Margie and the great poet, and the passion of  his letters to her over many decades My mother first met John Betjeman in the summer of 1929. She was 20 and he was a master at Heddon Court prep school in Potters Bar where her brothers Dick and John Addis were pupils. Together with her parents, she had driven over from Primrose Hill in an open landau (my grandparents did not seem to be aware of the invention of the motor car) to attend the school sports day. It was a hot summer’s day and they sat in deck chairs on the edge of the games field watching the sports. A slim young master with large brown eyes and sticky-out teeth caught my mother’s attention.

Rod Liddle

Get rich with unethical investment

Rod Liddle says that it is not only entertaining to put your money into companies that  behave naughtily. It is also economically lucrative: so buy more stocks today Are you worried about the size of the footprint you are leaving on this earth? More specifically, are you worried that it might not be big enough? I may have the solution. The Spectator Unethical Investment Fund (SUIF) is a chance for all those decent, God-fearing, rather right-of-centre citizens to put their money where their mouths are, for once. Sick of politicians whining about corporate responsibility?

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Only the Tories are election-ready

The Byron Consort Choir of Harrow School is exacting in its choice of audience. It has sung for popes and for royalty — and the setting for its performance at Blenheim Palace one night last month was grand enough for either. Trumpeters manned the gates and candles led the way to the Long Library where one long table was set for 175. Pol Roger’s Winston Churchill champagne was served and a Churchill descendant, Nicholas Soames MP, was supplied to speak about his grandfather. But guests had paid their £5,000-a-head ticket not for the music, the Churchillian speeches or even the dazzling setting but for an even more exclusive experience: an audience with David and Samantha Cameron. Never was so much donated by so few.

Saturday

Douglas Davis

Israel will do whatever it takes

Douglas Davis says that the Israelis are considering the nuclear option in response to President Ahmadinejad’s threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. An attack could be launched early this year Within the next 12 months, the Americans or the Israelis, possibly both, are likely to launch military strikes aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those strikes may come sooner rather than later. And they will probably be nuclear. Israeli military analysts say intervention is essential before Iran’s scientists are able to complete the nuclear cycle — some time during 2007 — and start producing weapons-grade uranium.

Saturday

Patrick Jephson

What Kate should know

Kate Middleton and Prince William are widely expected to announce their engagement in 2007. Patrick Jephson, who was Diana’s private secretary, says there is much the original ‘People’s Princess’ could tell the next queen-in-waiting ‘Perhaps Miss Middleton ... will be our future queen,’ I speculated in a Sunday newspaper nearly three years ago. The editor was more cautious. ‘More likely, she will not,’ he made me add. I wish I’d stuck to my guns — and stuck on a bet too. The smart money now says that brand Windsor is about to get a much-needed injection of fresh young glamour to complement its established octogenarian market leader.

Tim Walker

‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is her trademark. ‘I bowed and then I just got on with it.’ The story is a perfect metaphor for the actress’s eventful life. Even after her worst falls — one thinks of the end of her youthful, passionate relationship with a married Richard Burton (‘my greatest love’), and the more recent, acrimonious divorce from the novelist Philip Roth — she has always managed not merely to get up again but to do so with aplomb.

Charles Moore

The smart boy thrilled by the story

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch ‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank. First, it places him in his social milieu. He was an upper-working-class East End boy born during the war. He remembered the present Queen’s Coronation, with everyone crowding into his parents’ front-room to join in the first mass televisual occasion in British history. This was the last age of working-class respectability: Frank had such a fear of debt that, he told me, he had never had a mortgage.

Rod Liddle

Blair hasn’t got the hang of democracy

Rod Liddle says that the Prime Minister’s Christmas jaunt to the Middle East epitomised his confusion about what happens when people who hate you get the chance to say so in elections As our Prime Minister is someone whose confused political instincts stretch little further than a belief in democracy and freedom of choice, it is heartening to enter a new year knowing that he is, if anything, even more deeply committed to such fundamental — but fragile and tenuous — concepts. On his annual Christmas trip, in a one-horse sleigh, to the Middle East, Tony Blair insisted that the Palestinian people be afforded another general election as soon as possible. This is a commitment to the democratic principle which easily exceeds my own.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The English Bible has made us

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national culture is a dangerous and divisive thing. And during the course of filming a two-hour documentary for Channel 4 about the translation of the Bible into English, I was struck by the strange, almost perverse nature of this debate. It seems to be polarised: you are either for faith schools or you are against them. It is almost a given that if you oppose Muslim faith schools, you must, with even-handedness, oppose Church of England faith schools.

Irwin Stelzer

Here’s what to do in 2007, Mr President

Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. One would think that the turmoil in Iraq is all President Bush must think about when planning his last two years in the Oval Office. Yes, the manner in which he extricates himself and America from Iraq will affect his legacy. But it need not determine it, or his place in history. There is little he can do to affect the outcome in Iraq, short of giving his generals the 30,000 additional troops they now confess they need, and which the President is unlikely to commit. That portion of his legacy is already writ in stone: Iraq was a noble adventure that could have succeeded in creating a democracy, Middle East-style, had the President been prepared, as we say in New York, to put his money where his mouth is.

Cormac Murphyoconnor

My parish church in Rome

One of the great joys of my life has been to spend nearly 14 years living in Rome, first as a student and then as Rector of the Venerable English College. I suppose the best way to know a strange city is to walk everywhere. As a student, I rarely took public transport and would remember at night my day’s walk, piazza by piazza, church by church, from Pantheon to Forum to Colosseum. Those years were in many ways a delight and I can honestly say, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that I learnt nearly as much from viewing the city of Rome as from my studies in the Gregorian University.

Fraser Nelson

‘The voters feel no one is on their side’

Jon Cruddas belongs to a rare breed of politicians who believe the best view of the House of Commons is through the rear-view mirror. He glances at it as we head to his Dagenham constituency in his non-ecologically friendly Land-Rover. ‘Gordon Brown will be taxing you for this soon,’ I say. He replies with a look that suggests 1,000 expletives. Reverence for the Labour hierarchy is not his strong point, yet it is on this very platform that he is staking his claim to be the party’s deputy leader. Since being elected as an MP five years ago he has pursued an unusual career path. He was a No. 10 Downing Street adviser, brought in to bridge the gap with the trade unions. Elected at the age of 39, he was well placed to climb the greasy pole.

Fergal Keane

Ireland’s laureate of Christmas

Paddy Kavanagh died with Christmas only a few weeks away. The poet was taken down by a virulent bout of pneumonia, aided and abetted by his addiction to strong drink. He had once cuttingly remarked that the ‘standing army of Irish poets never fell below 20,000’. His death robbed the country of one of the very best of them. Kavanagh had battled alcoholism all his adult life. But by the end of November 1967 he had lost any strength for the fight. He died at home in County Monaghan, among the little hills of the Irish borderlands, in the very place where he had written his magnificent ‘A Christmas Childhood’. It is the finest poem ever written about Christmas, a hymn to simple faith, conjured from the memories of his childhood on a small farm.