Features

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Ming’s message to the Tories: my heart’s on the Left

‘I’m going to take my tie half-off,’ Sir Menzies Campbell announces. ‘Feel free to do so.’ It is a sweltering afternoon in his office, and there is no etiquette governing how men should strip off in such circumstances. I lower my tie knot an inch or so. He takes off his jacket. I follow suit. ‘There’s nothing I can take off,’ pipes up his press officer, sitting beside me in a dress. Sir Menzies blushes, stutters and moves straight on to the subject: his relaunch as leader of the Liberal Democrats. He would bridle at this description, but this in effect is what is underway.

Wednesday

Allister Heath

The rich have never been richer: their predecessors were small fry

The wealthy are now wealthier, more numerous and more socially mobile than at any time in history. But will Gordon Brown’s tax-and-spend policies put an end to this? For the rich and successful, these are the best of times. They are earning more than most had ever dreamt possible and are celebrated in popular culture and courted by the political establishment as never before. Millionaires have become Britain’s fastest-growing social class; every single working day, another hundred people, many of them women, join that once exclusive club, thanks to bumper bonuses or judicious investments. The rich have always been among us, of course, but their current good fortune is utterly unprecedented.

Paul Bita

The example of France’s football players

For all that was made of the ‘diversity’ of the French World Cup side, what was truly striking about the team that took to the field to face Italy in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium was its very lack of diversity. For all but three of the players who thundered on to the pitch to do battle with the Italians were black Frenchmen. Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira, the Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines of the beautiful game (along with its now disgraced Algerian maestro, Zinedine Zidane), fought the good fight for France in a contest that ultimately favoured Italy — and that says as much about the changing face of modern Europe as it does about the game of football.

Matthew Dancona

‘The special relationship is safe’

Am I about to become the ‘Spectator One’? Having cleared the first airport-style security check at the US Embassy on Upper Grosvenor Street, I reach a second perimeter inside the building itself. This time the X-ray machine picks up a mysterious electronic device inside my briefcase which turns out to be a mobile phone I do not recognise. Uh-oh. Here I am, on my way to interview the American ambassador, and there is a stray mobile in my case — a potential trigger device, as everyone around me is thinking, but not saying. Not good. Hushed calls are made, a Marine frowns and a plainclothes officer straight out of 24 whisks me off to the so-called security ‘igloo’ so that every single item in my case can be checked meticulously.

Wednesday

Anne Applebaum

Should Putin host the G8?

By allowing Russia to stage the summit we have accepted her as one of us,  says Anne Applebaum. This G8 will give its tacit approval to the theft of private  assets, the destruction of the rule of law and the violation of human rights For sale, the advertisement might read: One very large Russian energy company. Estimated assets, including oil wells, reserves, refineries: $60 billion. Possible liabilities: four major international lawsuits, a part-time CEO who works full-time as President Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff, and a certain — shall we say — lack of clarity about whether the company legally acquired most of those assets at all. I am talking here about Rosneft, the very large Russian energy company whose shares go on sale in London next week.

Matthew Dancona-David-Rennie

‘Don’t come to a beefeating club if you’re vegetarian’

Brussels ‘I really like your magazine,’ says the president of the European Commission, welcoming The Spectator to the inner sanctum of his suite on the top floor of the Berlaymont building, the EC’s headquarters. Euro-schmooze? Of course. But, in the world of EU politics, it is progress of a kind. Imagine, say, Jacques Santer or Jacques Delors steeling himself to praise an avowedly Eurosceptic British magazine. English may be the fourth language of José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese prime minister, but he has evidently put it to good use.

A.C. Grayling

The philosophy of Superman

I must declare an interest: as a devotee of DC Comics’ Superman since early childhood, I am incontinently prepared in advance to enjoy every radio show, television series and film that features him. So before seeing this one, Superman Returns (which opens here on 14 July), I was ready to give it a good review, and I have not been disappointed. It’s a cracker. Christopher Reeve look-alike Brandon Routh does not have to act — his task is to be tall, to fill the famous suit well, and to keep still for the cameras when in flying pose, and he succeeds on all counts; so there are no problems there. Because the real acting is done by Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor and Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, the result is a treat.

Fraser Nelson

‘The stroke could have killed me’

When facing an audience of ambulance workers in a speech last Friday, Andrew Lansley had the ideal joke to warm them up. ‘People always imagine politicians are a bit brain dead,’ he said. ‘Well I am — and I have the MRI scan to prove it.’ He was being absolutely serious. In a freak medical incident while playing cricket in Kent 14 years ago, the shadow health secretary became one of the 150,000 people in Britain to suffer a stroke. While he has made no secret about his condition, few in Westminster are aware of it. Yet plenty of clues exist for those with an eye to see them. Mr Lansley chairs the all-parliamentary group for stroke, and has bombarded ministers with questions on the subject for years.

Thursday

Philip Bobbitt

We haven’t absorbed the lessons

Philip Bobbitt, the acclaimed author of ‘The Shield of Achilles’, says that the attacks were the work of an ultra-modern movement — closer to Mastercard than the IRA in structure. The worst is not inevitable: but it is distinctly possible With terror, the murderous act itself is always nihilistic; it is the reaction that gives the atrocity political meaning. The meaning of the London transport bombings is that a society accustomed to the predations of the IRA and, within living memory, the terror bombing of the second world war will not be easily shaken. This stoic reaction masks, however, several troubling, less reassuring reactions here in London and in the ethereal network that connects al-Qa’eda.

Mary Wakefield

‘Opinion-formers are Christophobic’

Is it ethical to snoop around an Archbishop’s sitting-room? Surely, I decide, a gentle stroll around furniture is OK: past a gilt mirror and a large crucifix, past a picture book of the Jewish Haggadah and over to a baby grand tucked into the curve of a bay window. There are two piano pieces on the stand and no sign of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor — it seems sensible, not sneaky, to see if the music offers any insight into the man’s mind. The first piece is Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante; underneath it, Francis and Day’s Community Song Book with optional guitar accompaniment. Then, behind me, a voice, ‘Do you play the piano?’ The Cardinal is smiling, dressed in immaculate black, thinner than I expected, older.

Rod Liddle

What really insults the Scots

The Scotch First Minister, Jack McConnell, will doubtless be huddled before a television screen today, dressed in a Portugal football shirt and perhaps munching salted cod, out of respect. An awful lot of his compatriots will be doing the same thing: the Treaty of Windsor, signed with Portugal in 1386, may well be the longest lasting alliance in English military history, but it will be superseded by the less formal, 90-minute Treaty of Gelsenkirchen between Scotland and Portugal.

Wednesday

Allister Heath

‘You can control crime’

Allister Heath talks to a deputation of US police chiefs drafted in to help John Reid in his do-or-die battle to restore faith in the criminal justice system. Is this New Labour’s Dirty Harry moment? It was as if the two men had suddenly burst out of nowhere. ‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them growled as they pounced on Caroline, grabbing her by the arms and starting to drag her down a dark side alley. It was the early hours of Saturday morning in central Durham, about a mile from the cathedral, a part of the city which is never deserted; so my friend, a 22-year-old medical student, lashed out screaming and kicking as hard as she could. For a split second, the kidnappers hesitated, allowing her to break free and run for her life.

Fraser Nelson

The real father of Cameronism

Any attempt to trace the intellectual origins of today’s new Conservative party leads fairly quickly to the space between David Willetts’s ears. For the best part of two decades, he has been arguing for the need for a softer-focus social agenda which would resonate with voters who were convinced that hard-edged Thatcherism had nothing to offer them. In the early 1990s he called this ‘civic conservatism’ — yet it was lost in the messy decline of the Major years. Now, it is called Cameronism and is universally lauded. But rather than be fêted, Mr Willetts must watch like an inventor without a patent as his ideas are put to use by other people. Success has many fathers, and there are several claimants to the David Cameron phenomenon.

Rod Liddle

Killing a gay man is no worse than killing a disc jockey

Sarah Porter may turn out to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer of recent years. Right now, she is behind bars. Porter contracted HIV from a lover and, when she discovered her predicament, set about passing on the virus to as many men as she could, by ‘encouraging’ them to have unprotected sex with her. When caught by the police she refused to co-operate, naming no names. The police believe that the number of men it is known for a fact that she tried to infect — four — is ‘only the tip of the iceberg’. The life expectancy for someone with HIV/Aids is, mercifully, much improved on what it once was. But to be told that you are infected is nonetheless to be told that your life will be much shorter than would otherwise have been the case.

Wednesday

Irwin Stelzer

Gordon Brown vs David Cameron

Politics is about choices. It is not about wishes, for wishing won’t make it so. The Blairites might wish that a formidable challenger to Gordon Brown would emerge in the next year, but none will. The Brownites might wish that they could pass their man off as the very model of a modern Englishman, his income redistribution programme complete, but they can’t. The Tories might wish their man harboured purely Thatcherite instincts, but he doesn’t. And the Lib Dems might wish ... well, for something. Neither Brown nor Cameron offers the clear alternative to the status quo that Margaret Thatcher and, later, Tony Blair offered.

Tim Walker

In praise of the patriotic playwright

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Pianist and The Dresser, tells Tim Walker that he is delighted to be in demand — but never wants to be ‘fashionable’ I first came face to face with Ronald Harwood three years ago as we were waiting for our coats after the party to mark the opening of the Saatchi Gallery in the old County Hall building in London. Two disgruntled lines of people had converged and he thought I was queue-barging and I thought he was. It could have gone either way. Either a big row or the start of a friendship. Happily, it was the latter. Harwood does charm but he also does fury. On that occasion I wasn’t quite sure which I was going to get.

Rod Liddle

All laws to be written in plain English?

Harriet Harman’s campaign against ‘lawyer-speak’ Harriet Harman has got herself back in the news by doing something rather good. She is the minister for constitutional affairs and last week introduced legislation which is more notable for the way in which it is drafted than for the change to the law it effects. The Bill in question is quite remarkable, for it is written in something called ‘plain English’, which is what we all used to speak before the lawyers somehow attained their total cultural, political and linguistic hegemony over the rest of us at some point towards the end of the last century.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

Darfur’s terrible export

Peter Oborne reports from the battlefield on the Chad–Sudan border where Janjaweed bandits, armed with AK-47s, grenades and helicopter gunships, are ethnically cleansing local African tribesmen Adre, Chad When we visited the scene of the battle we found that bodies had been shoved hastily into mass graves. An arm stuck out from under one bush, and the flesh had been eaten by wild animals. A human foot obtruded from another grave. Dried pools of blood stained the ground. The stench of human putrefaction was heavy in the air. Bits and pieces of clothing, spent bullets and the protective amulets used by African fighters lay scattered on the ground. One body still lay exposed. The dead man had evidently climbed a tree to escape his attackers, but been shot down from his hiding place.

Alan Duncan

The don who embodies Oxford

Sir John Betjeman gripped the sword and, with great gusto, sliced through the marzipan towers of Battersea power station. The party, nearly 30 years ago, was for the launch of ‘Temples of Power’, Glyn Boyd Harte’s delicious compendium of unusual industrial paintings. Such memorable occasions are not so unusual in the life of Jeremy Catto. He is the quintessential Oxford don — his portrait by Boyd Harte shows him in black tie and plimsolls, with his left foot shooting out of the frame. I can’t detect Jeremy anywhere in his friend Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, but if one were to devour C.P. Snow, Goodbye Mr Chips and Porterhouse Blue, there is a smattering of Catto in each. This month the cruel dictates of age will force him to retire from Oriel College.

Matthew Dancona

Jack Straw, Labour’s ‘trust tsar’

On life after Blair, who ‘will go well before the next election’ For a man supposedly humiliated by his move last month from the Foreign Office, Jack Straw shows every sign of enjoying life. The new Leader of the House is following a path trodden by Geoffrey Howe and Robin Cook. Both men concede in their memoirs that they considered resigning before taking the junior post. Lord Howe even laments that his new staff was ‘no larger in total number than the private office alone in either of my previous jobs’. While admitting to ‘culture shock’, Mr Straw takes a more stoical view. ‘You can’t do Foreign Secretary for ever,’ he says.