Features

Saturday

Piers Paul-Read

The Pope was not attacking Islam

Piers Paul Read says that the controversial nature of the Pope’s address has been missed in the furore over Muslim sensitivities: he was daring to equate Europe and Christendom When he delivered his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’ in Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI said some provocative and contentious things. His comment on Islam was only one of them, and was by no means the most significant; but quoting the judgment of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus that certain aspects of Islam were ‘evil and inhuman’ was the most arresting and has caused a worldwide furore. Some have criticised Pope Benedict for being tactless; others on the grounds that what the emperor Manuel II said is not true.

Rod Liddle

Who is right about home schooling?

Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article. Perhaps you read it; my colleague James Bartholomew was explaining how he had intended to tutor his daughter Alex, now that he had taken the liberating decision to remove her from school because the teachers and everybody else were useless. From now on he’s going to teach her at home, or in agreeable bits of the world where there is usually a nicely crisp dry white wine available and a modified peasant cuisine.

Allister Heath

Cameron will hate his own tax inquiry

It was fun for David Cameron while it lasted but the Conservative party’s uneasy moratorium on talking about tax cuts is about to come to an abrupt end. The Tory Tax Reform Commission, launched by his predecessor Michael Howard, will shortly deliver its findings — and the prospect is causing panic in the party’s Victoria Street headquarters. Far from being the modest simplification of the tax code that the Cameroons had hoped for, I have learnt from senior sources that the current draft report includes a blueprint worth up to £19.5 billion a year in net tax cuts to be implemented over the course of a first Tory term, as well as a number of additional uncosted tax reductions.

Saturday

Robert Peston

Brown’s dilemma

Robert Peston’s definitive biography of the Chancellor rocked the government. Here he sets out Brown’s plans, his promise of a ‘new individualism’ — and the nightmare he faces positioning himself in relation to Blair At last comes the final settling of accounts between the bosses of The Two Families, Don Antonio and Don Gordono. Don Antonio, the capo di tutti capi, still sits at the head of the table. But not for much longer, as Don Gordono stares him down. In a relationship measured out in mutual accusations of betrayal over many years, the mayhem of the past few days can be traced in part to what Don Gordono sees as the great treachery of 2004.

Toby Harnden

Bill Clinton on Tony and Gordon

Little Rock, Arkansas What can be done to bring order to a fractious Labour party? Inside Little Rock’s Alltel Arena, home of the Arkansas Twisters football team and filled with local Democrats greedily consuming mounds of deep-fried frogs’ legs washed down with vats of iced tea, the question was hardly a burning one. It was a balmy evening and no one seemed much exercised by the travails of Tony Blair or the overweening ambition of Gordon Brown. Indeed, there was talk of nothing much beyond the borders of a Southern state still viewed by most of the rest of the union as a poor, illiterate cousin. Except from one man.

David Rennie

What you can pick up in Iceland

It is no mystery why British Eurosceptics love Iceland. A bracing visit to Reykjavik is all it takes to see what the European Union could have been, if Brussels had stuck to the path of free trade and shunned ever closer union. Like pilgrims to a shrine, British Tories come to observe how Iceland enjoys the best of all worlds, thanks to its membership of the European Free Trade Association and — equally vitally — its stubborn non-membership of the EU. Iceland enjoys the great prize Brussels has to offer: access to the EU single market. Yet Iceland is not a member of the Common Agricultural Policy. Iceland can strike its own free trade agreements with the rest of the world — unlike Britain.

Rod Liddle

You shouldn’t be arrested for …

Rod Liddle finds Stephen Green’s position on homosexuality laughably offensive — but is much more outraged that police officers from a ‘Minority Support Unit’ should arrest him ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man, as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’Leviticus xx 13 Britain’s most energetic and entertaining bigot, Stephen Green of Christian Voice, has at last managed to get himself arrested. His crime was to hand out leaflets, which quoted the above passage from the Bible, in a park in Cardiff. Stephen believes that Leviticus got it right about homosexuality, although perhaps it does not go far enough, all things considered.

John Reynolds

Gordon will do the job very well

Michael Foot and I are sitting in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, north London. Outside in the garden a red ‘Labour’ rose blooms in the afternoon sun; inside, the house is crammed with books: they’re in piles on the kitchen table, on shelves on every wall: William Hazlitt, William Blake, John Keats, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Paine. Upstairs there’s a whole roomful of books on women’s suffrage that belonged to his late wife, Jill Craigie, then another room where an entire corner is devoted to Irish writers: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift. Mr Foot believes that politicians should have a love of great literature (he has written acclaimed biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H.G.

Tuesday

Interconnect

Beneath every spire a cellar

Apart from libraries and other centrally administered faculties, the University of Oxford is made up of 45 colleges and halls, all possessing a wine cellar. As a result, the wine culture of the place is immense and indelible, and a sizeable minority of dons – the term describes any fellow of a college – have built highly respectable private cellars of their own. Frequently a case of misunderstanding when a tourist asks ‘Where is the University?’, the colleges collectively comprise the university despite being self-governing, quasi-autonomous legal entities.

Wednesday

Alan Dershowitz

How to protect civil liberties

Harvard It is five years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but Western democracies have not even begun to address seriously, and in a nuanced way, the moral and intellectual challenges posed by the relatively new phenomenon of mass-casualty suicide terrorism. The traditional paradigm by which we have long confronted harmful conduct — waiting until the harm occurs and then punishing the harm-doer to deter others — cannot work with the suicide terrorist who welcomes the ultimate punishment. A new paradigm, relying more on anticipatory and preventive measures, must be considered. But such measures carry with them considerable dangers to civil liberties.

Laura Trevelyan

History is relative

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan found others knew more about her famous ancestors than she did â” until she went in search of the great dynasty of scholars and public servants My introduction to the legacy of my ancestors came rather late in life. You might think I had been raised to recite the great works of George Macaulay Trevelyan, historian of England and my great-grandfather, by heart. Or to quote verbatim from the Northcoteâ“Trevelyan reforms of the Civil Service, brainchild of my great-great-great-grandfather Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan.

Rod Liddle

He dared speak the truth about the BBC

There were only two radio reviewers who ever ruffled the feathers of senior management within the BBC. In terms of ratings, the BBC has radio pretty much its own way; neither the competition, which is negligible, nor critical comment is liable to sway a BBC radio mandarin if he firmly believes that (to take an example) You and Yours is groundbreaking investigative journalism in the Reithian tradition. The hard economics of television does not apply — and, you have to say, that with some exceptions, including the one quoted above, BBC Radio is not noticeably worse off for this lack of externally imposed rigour. All the better for it, in fact.

Allister Heath

I stand by what I wrote

Even the most perceptive and brilliant commentators have their blind spots. In the case of Matthew Parris, a giant of modern British journalism if ever there was one, it is an inability to appreciate the true extent of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. This was demonstrated again by his column in these pages last week, where he attacked a recent Spectator/YouGov poll and my accompanying analysis of its findings. The poll revealed the British public to be remarkably hawkish; Matthew believes this to be a distortion. Matthew recently criticised in the harshest terms the thesis expounded by Tory MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7.

Wednesday

Mark Leonard

How Gordon sees the world

Mark Leonard, an authority on Labour foreign policy with strong connections to the government, has spoken to those close to the Chancellor in search of Brown’s notoriously opaque views on international affairs. This is what he discovered Imagine the scene. It is 2007. The pale November sun is slowly melting the frosted roofs of Camp David. A throng of journalists — bristling with cameras, arc lamps and microphones — jostle for position around two podiums. Suddenly the doors of a log cabin swing open, and President Bush and Prime Minister Brown walk out for their first joint press conference. They ignore the battery of predictable questions — ‘Does Prime Minister Brown — like Blair and Bush — use Colgate toothpaste?

Leo McKinstry

Not ‘cricket’s darkest hour’

In the post-war history of English cricket, there have been few more universally respected figures than John Lever, the Essex left-arm bowler. Modest, friendly and hard-working, he was regarded by both colleagues and cricket followers as the ideal professional. But when he made his debut for England during a tour of India in 1976, he found himself embroiled in the kind of ball-tampering row which brought the last Test to a farcical conclusion and plunged the sport of cricket into a major crisis. Unaccustomed to the sweltering heat of Delhi, Lever came up with the unorthodox idea of attaching a number of gauze strips to his forehead to stop the sweat running into his eyes.

Toby Harnden

‘World Trade Center’ is insulting

Toby Harnden says that ‘World Trade Center’ ditches Oliver Stone’s left-wing conspiracy theories, but dishonours one of the heroes of 11 September by caricaturing his faith New York Staff Sergeant David Karnes was working as an accountant at DeLoitte & Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, on 11 September 2001 when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. He and his colleagues watched it on television. Karnes announced that America was ‘at war’ and drove home in his Porsche 911 (he saw this as an omen from above) to don his old marine uniform. He got a buzz cut at the barbers, picked up equipment at a storage facility that he rented and went to a church to pray before driving to Manhattan, stopping for a McDonald’s on the way.

Wednesday

Stephen Schwartz

A threat to the world

With the foiling of the alleged conspiracy by radical Islamists to devastate transatlantic air travel — at the height of the US–UK tourist season — Britain has emerged, a little more than a year after the London Tube bombings, as the apparent main target for jihadist terror in Europe. This has little to do with British policies, poverty, discrimination or Islamophobia. Simply put, a million or more Sunnis of Pakistani background, who comprise the main element among British Asian Muslims, also include the largest contingent of radical Muslims in Europe. Their jihadist sympathies embody an imported ideology, organised through mosques and other religious institutions, rather than a ‘homegrown’ phenomenon, as the cliché would have it.

Allister Heath

Spectator/YouGov poll

When it came to fighting terrorists, Count Alexandre de Marenches, the legendary former head of France’s intelligence services, knew what he was talking about. In a prescient book published just after the end of the Cold War, he was the first to warn that a fourth world war had already begun — a war waged by ‘small, highly deadly units of terrorists’ with ‘the very real prospect of ending civilisation, at least Western civilisation, as we know it’. A lone voice, Marenches was ignored in Britain and America; it was far easier to believe in reassuring theories about the ‘end of history’ and the supposedly inevitable victory of liberal democracy in the great ideological conflicts of the 20th century.

Rod Liddle

Are biscuits a terrorist threat?

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified Aurora, Illinois I’m here to look at a particle accelerator. They’ve got a big one in Aurora, Illinois, all these neutrinos whizzing round and round, wishing they were anywhere but here — and with some justification. Aurora is too distant to properly associate itself with Chicago, 40 miles to the east, but sufficiently attached to the city to not exist in its own right. A desolate concrete ‘hi-tech’ suburb, a hastily tarmac-adamed prairie festooned with Taco Bells, pay-day loan outlets and anti-matter. A sort of endless Slough, except without the charm.

Douglas Davis

This is only time out

During the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Jews were enjoined to recite Psalm 83. ‘Your foes are in uproar, and those who hate you have raised their head. They say, “Come let us cut them off from nationhood so Israel’s name will not be remembered anymore.” For they take counsel together unanimously ... the tents of Edom and Ishmaelites, of Moab and Hagrites, Geval and Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia and the inhabitants of Tyre.’ No change there, then. As the guns fell silent in south Lebanon this week, there were claims of victory from both sides. Israel’s military brass claimed to have destroyed the infrastructure of Hezbollah, while Hezbollah, supported by Iran and Syria, trumpeted a historic victory over the Zionist enemy.