Features

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The future face of Labour

Fraser Nelson talks to Douglas Alexander, the young Transport Secretary, who shot to prominence during last week’s terrorist threat to our airports The last week has given us our first, unexpected glimpse of the post-Blair era. There has been a crisis at the airports, a massive terrorist plot averted. Yet the only sign of the Prime Minister has been blurry pictures of a pair of floral swimming trunks disappearing into the Caribbean. Instead, the two politicians running Britain last week — leaving aside the wretched figure of John Prescott — were the familiar figure of John Reid and a diminutive 38-year-old of whom we will be hearing much more in the coming months.

Yahya Birt

We are not traitors in your midst

Yahya Birt — son of John, the former BBC director-general — says that those who choose Islam are not the modern-day equivalent of Soviet moles such as Anthony Blunt Converts to Islam are now under the microscope. Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker, has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11. The explanations reached for 7/7, about social unrest or cultural clashes between Muslim elders and youth, clearly don’t apply.

Wednesday

Paul Robinson

A sense of proportion

The Israeli Defence Forces’ ethical standards are different from, and in some ways higher than, the British army’s, says Paul Robinson, but in the end the question is not whether IDF actions are moral, but whether they are wise This week David Cameron joined his shadow foreign secretary William Hague in denouncing elements of Israel’s operations in Lebanon as ‘disproportionate’. This view has not gone down well with some on the hawkish Right, but it has been met with approval among the Conservative Arabists and lefty humanists who think that everything Israel does is disproportionate. Very few of the hawks, or lefties, or Arabists, however, seem to know what proportionality in war really means, or how Israel, in particular, understands it.

Allister Heath

Bush won’t allow Iran to go nuclear

The former Israeli prime minister tells Allister Heath why he believes the US President will keep his promise to curb Tehran — even if many Europeans remain blind to the threat It was not my idea of a joke, but I reluctantly complied with the Israeli detective’s request that I hand over all my belongings to him ‘as hostages’, including my mobile phone and passport. He congratulated himself repeatedly on his sense of humour, before ushering me on to the back seat of the heavily armoured Jaguar, where I squeezed in as best as I could between Benjamin Netanyahu and one of his bodyguards.

Rod Liddle

Our overpopulation is a catastrophe

There are queues everywhere in Britain, says Rod Liddle. The country has long since reached saturation point and it’s time for the government to admit that we have a problem There were two stories in our morning newspapers this week which seemed at first sight unrelated. The first was a report from the Local Government Association warning the government that council tax charges might need to rise by as much as 6 per cent because the number of immigrants to the UK had hitherto not been properly accounted for. Immigrants placed a new and costly burden on local councils and there were many more of them than had previously been imagined.

Wednesday

Melanie Phillips

Hezbollah cells await Iran’s orders

At a recent Stop the West rally (yes, I know, but that’s their real agenda) demonstrators waved placards proclaiming ‘We’re all Hezbollah now’. Really? If so, why were they allowed to parade in Trafalgar Square? In a sane society they should surely all have been arrested as a self-proclaimed army of holy warriors whose explicit aim was to murder untold numbers of innocents, destroy Britain, America and the free world and subjugate them to the dictatorship of the ayatollahs. Because that’s what Hezbollah is. Literally designated the Army of God, it is a military force funded, trained by and answerable to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Fergal Keane

‘See dogs eating bodies in the rubble’

Qana There was no smell of death. The dying had taken place too recently. When I arrived they were still pulling corpses from the collapsed building. The first I saw were two young brothers of the Shalhoub family. If you have ever watched sleeping children carried to their beds late at night, you will have some idea of the scene. The dead children of Qana looked as if they were in a deep slumber. The shock waves of the explosion had collapsed their lungs, suffocating them in the rubble. I saw one whose mouth and nose were stuffed with sand. The only sign of the violence done to them was a trickle of blood from the noses of a few and several dark bruises where masonry had crashed on to their flesh. I counted five child corpses being carried out in just ten minutes.

Michael Beloff

Oxford needs inspiration

Three days ago I demitted the presidency of Trinity College to which I had been elected exactly 30 years after ceasing to be a short-term college lecturer there. Oxford then, Oxford now? Tempora mutantur, but plus c’est la même chose. Oxford University is an association of independent colleges with a distinctive tutorial system or it is nothing special; but the college community and tutorial system are both under strain. The dons of yesteryear, who lived not only in but for the college, are all but extinct. College offices are no longer shared out among the Fellowship, but have become the province of professionals.

Wednesday

Irwin Stelzer

Why Blair is standing by Bush now

Whether Tony Blair decides to step down at the next party conference, or hang in there until 2007, doesn’t much matter when it comes to appraising the much-mocked Blair–Bush relationship. Washington Whether Tony Blair decides to oblige the braying Brownites and step down at the next party conference, or hang in there until the 2007 Labour party gathering, doesn’t much matter when it comes to appraising the much-mocked Blair–Bush relationship. In relatively short order, both men will have reached the end of their careers in electoral politics, bringing to a close an amazing relationship between your Prime Minister and my President. And one that is badly misunderstood. Not by chance.

Denis Macshane

We should have intervened in Spain

Granada The papers have been full of the Suez story. Both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph have zeroed in on Eden’s adventure of 50 years ago to try to draw parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is another anniversary that so far has gone all but unnoticed. It also has lessons for contemporary history. Seventy years ago this month (July) a British pilot took off from Croydon airport. On his Dragon Rapide aeroplane were a Spanish newspaper man, an MI6 officer and two pretty young women for cover. They flew via France and Portugal to the Canary Islands. There they picked up a no-nonsense conservative general called Franco. The plane took him back to his soldiers at the Spanish Foreign Legion base in Morocco.

Toby Harnden

Gays have the right to be miserable too

Lubbock, Texas The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his stump speech, the ageing cowboy with Frank Zappa facial hair and a history of substance abuse proudly confesses to lewd conduct and breaking a state law. ‘I’m a member of the Mile High Club,’ declares Kinky Friedman, the former country and western singer, to delegates at the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas conference, where stalls advertise professional ‘tragedy clean-up’ services and a commemorative handgun auction.

Rod Liddle

Sorry: there is no special relationship

We’ve got enough pollution around here already without Harold coming over with his fly open... peeing all over me. Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1965 The words ‘special’ and ‘relationship’ contain within them an endless multiplicity of meaning, all the more so, paradoxically, when they are deployed in combination. You may describe your relationship with another person as most definitely ‘special’ if you lavish love and affection upon them, and in return they break your glasses and spit on your shoes. In this case, the word ‘special’ would mean out of the ordinary, unusual in its lack of reciprocity; not the sort of relationship one might expect.

Interconnect

Drinking to the Future

Wine has been collected since the late 17th century by everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Not much has changed either, except the idea of wine as an investment  -  any suggestion that wine might be sold on for a profit, effectively creating a wine stock market, would in days gone by have made any gentleman choke on his venison.  But the most important considerations for buying wine are the same as ever, namely to know what to buy, who to buy it from, when to buy it, and how much to pay for it. The advantages of investing in wine are fairly straightforward.  Wine is an easily transferable asset with an established and thriving broking and auction market.  There are no limits to investing; you can put in £250 or £250,000.

Jason Yapp

What wine when?

This is a good question and the knee-jerk reaction for those with plenty of money to spend would be to think of silly City bonuses and high-end, classed growth Bordeaux, beloved of the pin-striped fraternity. While this does have its attractions one would be wise to hold off until the highly acclaimed (and much hyped) 2005 vintage is available. But I can see little advantage of buying this en primeur (in futures) so maybe this is a consideration for subsequent windfalls. For immediate gratification (of more secular rewards) I think the Languedoc-Roussillon offers both value and interest and the recent (post 2002) vintages have all been commendable. Picpoul de Pinet is a specialist micro-appellation producing exclusively dry white wines on the banks of the Bassin de Thau.

Wednesday

David Selbourne

The Islamists are winning

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century Truth is generally the first casualty in war. On the battlefields of the Middle East, especially when Israel is involved, Reason also has a hard time of it. For neither Israel nor the Jews are seen — whether by themselves, by their friends, or by their foes — as a nation and a people like others. One form of irrationality, shared by (some) evangelical Christians and (some) Jews, has it that Israel is the ‘Zion’ of prophecy, part of God’s plan, with its borders fixed for eternity by the Almighty.

Douglas Hurd

Half a century on, the ghosts of Suez return

Fifty years since Suez, and this week the cauldron boils over yet again. Some of the ingredients are different. Britain and France used force in a way they would not now dare. The United States in 1956 had the power to stop the crisis which it has now lost. Most Arabs today accept the existence of Israel, but fail to impose that acceptance on those still bent on its destruction. Israel still tries to safeguard its citizens by using overwhelming force which breeds hatred and future danger. Suez was a dramatic setback for Britain; but this week we can look back almost with relief at how quickly that crisis was controlled. Fifty years ago on 26 July 1956 the prime minister was entertaining the young King of Iraq to dinner in Downing Street.

Irwin Stelzer

Bush wants much more than ceremonial diplomacy

Washington It is not to be. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a more than passable classical pianist, had blocked time in her summer diary for a pleasant meeting with some of the 700 music students attending classes and performing at the Aspen Music Festival and School. President Bush has other ideas. Instead of the cool breezes of the Rocky Mountains, Rice will find herself in the hotter-than-hot Middle East, attempting to bring an end to the two-front war in which Israel finds itself engaged which, in past flare-ups, has been bad news for the Israelis. Rice presides over a department that traditionally holds that almost any deal is better than no deal at all. The President is hoping that his Secretary of State and long-time foreign policy adviser can bring that bureaucracy to heel.

Andrew J. Bacevich

This is not World War Three — or Four

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished American journalist and neoconservative godfather, penned a series of articles describing the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the opening shots of what he called ‘World War IV’. For Podhoretz, the more commonly used construct ‘global war on terror’ is too generic. Placing 9/11 in its proper context requires fitting it into the grand narrative of contemporary history which, as Podhoretz sees it, began in 1933 in Berlin. For Podhoretz and other neoconservatives — for large numbers of Americans generally — history is above all a morality tale.

Rod Liddle

It’s so hot that I’m even cross with the evacuees

Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of questionable knitwear at world summit meetings. (Apparently it was a Burberry jumper our Prime Minister gave to George W. Bush; so if he wore it, he’d be refused entry to quite a large number of public houses and bars in the Leicester area, where Burberry knitwear has become associated with monosyllabic, aggressive troublemakers. Yes, how apt, good old Leicester, etc.). I don’t know how you reacted to that stolen snatch of conversation broadcast around the world this week.