Features

Saturday

Stuart Wheeler

The Tories must say No to torture

The government is, on behalf of you and me, involved in the worst type of man’s inhumanity to man — torture. Yet with the honourable exceptions of William Hague and Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative party, the party I wholeheartedly support, the party that talks of compassionate conservatism, is failing to speak out about it when it should be shouting from the rooftops. Think of your wife or child screaming in unbearable pain, deliberately inflicted. The mere thought is enough for me to know that torture is unacceptable under any circumstances. Yet some people need to be convinced by other arguments. There are plenty. The first is that torture does not work.

Rod Liddle

The BA row is about fair play

First it was peanuts; now Jesus Christ has been banished from the cabins of British Airways aeroplanes. What will be next to fall victim to the apparently arbitrary scythe of censorship of the BA executives? The airline — which once enraged Margaret Thatcher by replacing the Union flag on the tail fins of its fleet with representations of radical mullahs invoking intifada, single mums taking smack, colourful gypsies and homosexuals, or something — has aroused British public opprobrium once again. It has decided that one of its employees, Nadia Eweida, must not be allowed to wear a crucifix advertising her love of Jesus Christ while she is at work.

Saturday

Interconnect

The Cape of good wines

As part of a six-month tour of the main wine-producing countries of the world, the author stopped long enough in South Africa to discover the hidden treasures of Hamilton Russell Standing on Cap Agulhas gazing at the ocean, aware of the fact that we were on the very tip of Africa, it seemed unlikely that we would find anywhere quite as beautiful again. We had driven to this remote spot and walked through budding fynbos, the gorgeous display of nature's wild flowers unique to the Cape. And yet the drive from that windswept corner of South Africa towards Hermanus on minor roads proved to be equally spectacular. Hermanus is synonymous with whale-watching and a high standard of living.

Fraser Nelson

Fiasco Royale: Labour’s ineptitude

Fraser Nelson reveals the mounting fury within the intelligence community at ministers’ failure to set in place a serious framework for smashing Islamic terrorism. Too little too late is the angry verdict of the spooks Throughout their history, James Bond films have shown an eerie ability to predict national security threats. Dr No (1962) looked beyond the Cold War towards a new brand of international terrorism. In Goldfinger (1964) the menace was rogue nuclear weapons, and in Moonraker (1979), biological warfare. In Casino Royale, released this week, Bond fights terrorists by cutting off their sources of funding — precisely the mission which Gordon Brown has set himself in real life. The tragedy for Britain is that this time both 007 and the Chancellor have got it wrong.

Melissa Kite

Meet the funniest man on the planet

Karl Pilkington stares balefully at my tape recorder. ‘How long have you got on it? Six hours! Bloody hell.’ The unexpected star of The Ricky Gervais Show is fretting about why The Spectator wants to interview him. ‘I don’t understand why I’m in it. I normally read magazines which do things in little bite-size bits, like, how they’re making cows with more muscle. Bits of info like that that might come in handy. ‘I like to learn stuff cos I didn’t do well at school. I think it’s better this way round cos when you’re a kid you want to play out on your bike.’ If Karl Pilkington did not exist, it would take a genius to invent him. Which is ironic, because this is precisely what some critics seem to think has happened.

Allister Heath

A Kiwi conservative’s message for Dave

Allister Heath talks to Don Brash, leader of New Zealand’s National party, and finds him much more robust than Cameron on tax cuts, welfare and the environment If you were to cross Clark Kent with Josiah Bartlet of The West Wing, you would end up with somebody very much like Don Brash, leader of New Zealand’s conservative National party. A mild-mannered, grey and softly spoken 66-year-old, he is endearingly wonkish; thanks to eye surgery, he no longer wears thick glasses but his hobby remains growing kiwi fruit on his orchards.

Saturday

Christopher Caldwell

The message of this wipeout is that Americans believe they’ve lost the war

Washington On Monday afternoon, President Bush addressed a crowd of several thousand Republican supporters in Pensacola, Florida. The appearance was meant to shore up the sputtering campaign of Charlie Crist, the Republican candidate to succeed Mr Bush’s brother Jeb as governor of Florida. Crist was one of the rare Republican candidates willing to appear with the President in public. Until this week, that is. Crist (who won his race in the end) stood Bush up. He suddenly remembered that his campaign was ‘doing very well in Pensacola’ and that there were a lot of votes to be canvassed for in Palm Beach, several hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush, appearing solo, gave his standard speech.

Alasdair Palmer

Saddam’s trial shouldn’t be fair

When Mohammed al-Ureybi, the presiding judge at the trial of Saddam Hussein, started reading out that the court sentenced Saddam to death for killing 148 inhabitants of the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982, Saddam interrupted him. Just as the learned judge got to the part about the punishment for ‘crimes against humanity’, the deposed tyrant shouted, ‘Down with the traitors! Down with the invaders! To hell with your articles and your clauses!’ It is not how a man accused of crimes against humanity is supposed to react to a guilty verdict. According to the ideals of international law, he is supposed to accept his own guilt and bend his head in shame. Saddam didn’t even recognise the legitimacy of the court.

Saturday

Matthew Dancona

How to build the peace: the King of the Nation Builders reveals all

Paddy Ashdown spent more than three years trying to reconstruct Bosnia. He was asked by Donald Rumsfeld to do the same in Iraq. Here, he tells Matthew d’Ancona that such reconstruction must be at the heart of 21st-century geopolitics You send an ex-Lib Dem leader to the Balkans for three and a half years, and he comes back the King of Nation Builders. Not that ‘nation-building’ is a term much liked by Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ‘That’s something you do to start a nation. This is reconstruction: how do you reconstruct? And let’s not talk about a “nation”, either. Foreigners are not given to creating nations.

Saturday

Interconnect

Chevalier, the white knight and the red

Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Possibly the finest white wine of all France, Chevalier Blanc is remarkable for having a little known cousin, a red Chevalier that stands up to many of the fine wines of the Médoc Claude Ricard inherited the celebrated Graves estate Domaine de Chevalier in 1948, at the age of 21, and abandoned a potential career as a classical pianist to take over the reins. But music still pervaded the domaine when Ricard was in charge. On my first visit to Chevalier in the 1980s, the other guests were two flamenco guitarists. There was music – and there was astonishing wine.

Boris Johnson

Talking about their generation: Britain’s golden youth

By the time we had been interviewing for three solid hours I was like a limp dishrag. I was wrung out with the hopefulness of it all. It was the talent, the energy, the sheer brilliance of these young people, all of them beaming ‘Pick me, pick me’ into my befuddled skull. We were only trying to hire a new researcher, and it was as though we were auditioning the next prime minister. They could write. They could talk. They could do anything. They had Grade 8 piccolo/flute and Grade 8 viola and awards for the top GCSE marks in the entire country. Their A-level results cascaded down the page like a suicidal scream. They were magazine editors, union presidents, champion mooters, and they had blues for everything from rugby to lacrosse.

Tim Walker

Will Charles be the first multicultural monarch?

The Queen turned 80 on 21 April this year, and while she may finally have been prevailed upon to scale back on her public duties, she remains — as anyone who saw her during her visit to the Baltic States last week knows — in robust good health. Alex Galloway, the Clerk of the Privy Council, has however deemed this a prudent juncture to dispatch a circular letter to all the 500 or so members of Her Majesty’s Privy Council to ensure that he has up-to-date land and mobile telephone numbers and email addresses for each of them should he ever need to relay urgent information.

James Shaw

I am a new kind of university drop-out

It’s been more than a month now since thousands of fresh-faced young students began their first year at university, full of excitement, confidence and hope. Poor souls. I felt that way at first, but it didn’t take long for my first doubts to surface. When I set out I was innocent enough to think that university was all about working hard (I was studying theology), absorbing facts and learning how to think and argue — as well as having fun, of course. I soon discovered my mistake. In fact I lasted only a term before deciding I wanted to leave, and I did so at the end of the first year. The problem was that my university — like, I later discovered, most of the others — was much keener on the appearance of success than on actually educating students.

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.