Features

Saturday

James Forsyth

Iran could tear the Tories to pieces

Washington All you need to know about the effectiveness of Labour’s official attacks on David Cameron is that Siôn Simon’s toe-curling spoof video doesn’t look so bad in comparison. Labour has so far failed to land a killer blow on Cameron, suggesting that the next election will be a genuine contest. There is, though, one issue that could resuscitate the Tory Wars, and set Cameroon against Cameroon. The issue isn’t Europe, crime, immigration or even tax. It’s Iran. In Westminster, all attention might be on Iraq following General Sir Richard Dannatt’s ill-advised outburst. But the question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear programme is about to race on to the agenda.

Denis Macshane

Cameron is the heir to Heath

As David Cameron enjoys his Oedipal role in killing off any remnant of Thatcherism in today’s Conservative party, is he slowly revealing himself as the grandson Ted Heath never had? Mr Cameron seems happy with 1970s levels of taxation. He calls American policy against jihadi terrorism ‘simplistic’. He has apologised for Tory attacks on Nelson Mandela. As a hoodie-hugger he is soft on the causers of crime. The TUC had its stand at the Conservative conference and Mr Cameron is cultivating a relationship with Brendan Barber, the low-profile but very smart TUC general secretary.

David Rennie

It was almost World War III

Fifty years after the Hungarian uprising, David Rennie talks to Bela Kiraly, now 94, who was urged to call for Western help — a call that could all too easily have sparked nuclear war Budapest Half a century ago Bela Kiraly was invited to start World War III. He said no, though the price was the enslavement of his native Hungary by Soviet invaders. Kiraly was military chief of the Hungarian revolution at the time. The invitation was made on 4 November 1956 by an American reporter, who had somehow tracked him down in the blood-soaked centre of Budapest. The newspaperman was eager for a great scoop: a formal appeal for US military help, to fight off Soviet forces sent to crush Hungary’s week-old national uprising.

Interconnect

Why would a priest want to read about murder?

Two great crime writers of our time — Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith — talk about the terrible allure of bad deeds and the dark side of Edinburgh AMS: Let’s talk about Edinburgh first of all. We both write about the same place, but in different ways. John Rebus’s Edinburgh is a relatively bleak, dark place. Why do you focus on that side to the city? IR: I think of Edinburgh being a Jekyll-and-Hyde place — with an elegant, beautiful, rational new town and a higgledy-piggledy, slightly chaotic, half-buried old town. It’s an absolutely brilliant setting for a crime novel because it almost seems as if there’s a dark side to the geography, not just to the criminals’ characters.

Melissa Kite

How would you have felt, Madonna?

The superstar’s adoption case has shown the powerlessness of an entire African people faced with the might of a single American woman, says Melissa Kite Imagine the scene. Florence Okosieme, wife of a wealthy tribal leader from Nigeria, touches down at Wayne County Airport, Detroit. A limousine awaits to whisk her through the grimy streets of ‘Murder City’ to the suburb of Pontiac, where a poor family awaits her help. She grimaces as the stretch limo passes abandoned and burnt-out shells of buildings where drug gangs hover. When the car pulls up at a tiny house, she pulls her fur coat around her as if to ward off the robbers and rapists that she has heard prowl these streets at night, untroubled by an inept police force.

Saturday

Interconnect

A room of wine’s own

A cellar can - and should be - much more than just a cave; if well-designed it can provide a valuable space in which to drink as well as store your wine, says Paul Wyatt in his comprehensive guide to building the perfect wine store The great Burgundy producer Henri Jayer used to say that although 80% of his region’s wines were good to start with, only 20% remained so after bottling. Things may be better now. But the loss in quality between the acquisition of a wine and its consumption is frequently still unacceptably high, often as a result of poor storage. As auction prices reflect, proper provenance and storage is crucial, since they affect the integrity, quality and, therefore, the value of the wine.

Rian Malan

South Africa: not civil war but sad decay

Rian Malan, acclaimed author of My Traitor’s Heart, says that the rise of Jacob Zuma as a serious presidential contender is a terrible symbol of his country’s inexorable decline into disorder, political corruption and maladministration When the winter rains closed in on Cape Town I thought, bugger this, I’m selling up and moving somewhere sunny. To this end, I asked the char, Mrs Primrose Gwayana, to come in and help spruce up the house.

Allister Heath

‘Anti-Americanism is a form of fascism’

Narrow nationalism, hatred of Jews, and chauvinism find their meeting place in anti-Americanism, the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Allister Heath What is most unusual about Bernard-Henri Lévy is not that he wears his white shirts open almost all the way down to his bellybutton; one would expect little else of a French philosopher who grew up hooked on the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida. Far more intriguing is that the top half of his shirts are entirely and deliberately devoid of buttons â” and have clearly been expensively and carefully tailored, manufacturing the ‘noble savage’ look for which he is renowned.

Iain Johnstone

Keanu Reeves teaches Python magic

Some years ago I was writing a script with John Cleese in Los Angeles and we went for dinner at a buzzy brasserie called Chaya. When the waiter brought our steaks he also brought a $200 bottle of St Francis Cabernet Sauvignon. We hadn’t ordered it; the waiter said it was a gift from some anonymous diners. John suggested to the waiter that they come by our table as they were leaving the restaurant. It turned out to be Keanu Reeves and a couple of chums. They joined us for a drink and then the most remarkable thing happened: they started to re-enact scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, from the knights who say ‘Ni’ changing their name to ‘the knights who say Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-Ekk-PTANG. Zoom-Boing.

Saturday

Allister Heath

The mean streets of Britain

The shootings in a Brixton McDonald’s were a terrible metaphor for the way we live now, writes Allister Heath. A whole section of society, raised on violence and fast food, is drifting away from the rest of the nation: nutrition is destiny Instead of the heavy police presence I had expected to find at Brixton’s underground station, I was greeted by a canned rendition of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. To cool tempers in the notoriously volatile south London hotspot, classical music is being pumped through the ticket hall’s sound system; unfortunately, like the flower power ‘make love, not war’ ideology of the 1960s, this latest gimmick is straight out of the politically correct rulebook.

Michael Henderson

Ken Dodd: still happy at 78

More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through the Ring cycle in a week (both need a head for heights). There are other things one might do in dreams, like scoring a century at Lord’s. But one thing every person sound of mind and body can and should do before they die is catch Ken Dodd, the once-and-forever king of comedy, working his magic on stage. This month, as always in October, he’s in Blackpool.

Rod Liddle

Slaughter in Pennsylvania

Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty  has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouse It was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal in its denouement. Charles C. Roberts, a milkman, marched into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at 10.30 a.m. with a nine-millimetre automatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and buckets containing both plastic restraints and KY Jelly, a sexual lubricant.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

John McCain on David Cameron

In this exclusive interview, the Republican presidential front-runner tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is speaking at the Conservative conference, and says that Cameron has the youth, exuberance and determination to be a Tory JFK David Cameron was only one year and 17 days old on 26 October 1967, when John McCain was shot down in his A4 aircraft over Hanoi and taken prisoner by the Vietnamese. Almost four decades later, the two politicians have been brought together by a shared ambition to govern their respective countries — frontrunners to be prime minister and president — and a shared conservative purpose. Capitol Hill is making common cause with Notting Hill.

Simon Jenkins

Complete the Thatcher revolution

Simon Jenkins says that the Iron Lady’s work will not be complete without the devolution of power to local communities. Is the Tory leader ready to embrace this mission? The Tory party still has to come to terms with Margaret Thatcher. As she broods this week in Chester Square, the revolution associated with her name is still swamping British politics. Labour and Conservative front benches wrangle over the upheavals she initiated like crews clinging to the same wreckage. But with Gordon Brown possibly about to swim free, the Tories must redefine their Thatcherite heritage if they are to persuade electors that they are genuinely new Tories. But redefine does not mean deny.

Maurice Saatchi

Let us leave the ‘centre ground’

Maurice Saatchi says that the dull terrain of modern politics is the breeding ground of voter apathy and cynicism: the Tories must ‘climb the hill’ of idealism once more All proponents of ‘the centre ground’ in politics take satisfaction from analogy with the game of chess. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world chess champion, on whose scientific principles chess is now based, said it was always good, on principle, to take an opponent’s centre pawn. In the geometry of the chessboard, control of the centre — the four central squares and the eight squares round it — takes precedence; control of the centre is needed to maintain communication between the two wings, enabling a player to bring unrivalled power to bear over the whole board.

Matt Ridley

The genetic code genius failed to kill faith

On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a credit-card debt left him by a profligate boyfriend; and Bob Wright’s book on the Almighty is still unpublished. They are not the only ones. The philosopher Dan Dennett has recently published Breaking the Spell while Richard Dawkins’s eagerly awaited (by friends and enemies) The God Delusion is now in the bookshops. This fascination with God does not imply a mass conversion among the typically agnostic scientific ranks.

Clarke Hayes

A handshake with Clinton on the golf course

It was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tin It was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tin. The passion, the best golf and golfers in the world, a glorious setting, rain, sweat and tears, an emphatic triumph for Europe and, of course, the craic. I was on the front row of the barrier overlooking the 16th green on Sunday — where I had stood for four hours — and shook the hand of Bill Clinton as he walked to the scene of the denouement. A short time later I shook hands with Henrik Stenson, the Swede who, moments earlier and cheekily against the ‘script’, had just clinched the Ryder Cup for Europe by 4&3 at the 15th.

Rod Liddle

A miserable waste of space

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an exception to test the rule.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The eight who know Britain’s future

Naming the likely winners and losers in a Gordon Brown government has become a favourite parlour game among the political class. Enthusiastic supporters of Tony Blair’s agenda are routinely tipped for a long spell in political Siberia. Anyone with a Scottish accent or an aptitude for statistics is tipped for the top. Brownite MPs have found themselves being asked what the future holds — as if they were keepers of a great secret. The blunt truth is that everyone is in the dark. Or almost everyone, anyway.

Matthew Dancona

John Reid is not ruling himself out

In an exclusive conference interview with Matthew d’Ancona, the Home Secretary sets out his manifesto for the party’s future once Tony Blair has gone ‘The opportunity is that every end marks a beginning,’ John Reid says. ‘That is the nature of life, and it’s the nature of politics, and therefore we have an opportunity here to begin to shape an agenda for the next decade. People throw around this word “renewal” all the time. Actually, that is something that should be intrinsic to New Labour. It should be done every year.’ Tea time at the Home Office, and Mr Reid, gesturing pugnaciously with every phrase, is warming to his theme.