Features

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The war of the Scottish clans

The Home Office vs the Treasury: No. 10 has become the Department for the Prime Minister’s Legacy, leaving the two great domestic departments to slug it out. But does John Reid have what it takes to thwart the Chancellor’s ambition for the top job? When John Reid was appointed Home Secretary last month, his staff presented him with a rather macabre gift: a league table of the shortest-serving secretaries of state in the department’s 225-year history. With each passing week he could count how many people he had outlasted. Mr Reid loved the present, especially as he had already beaten the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who — according to the Home Office briefing at least — had lasted only six days in 1782.

Tim Walker

‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

Listing page content here The waiters at Le Caprice in St James’s have never had to go out to see the world. The world has always come to them. Just after the war, Humphrey Bogart used to dine at the ineffably glamorous establishment with Lauren Bacall and, since then, just about every major headline-maker of the past century — and the start of this one — has had a regular table, including the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Over the past two decades I have broken bread there myself with a variety of political, social and show-business figures and, needless to say, the waiters never batted an eyelid. Until the other day, when I lunched with a man who almost brought the place to a standstill.

Wednesday

Dean Godson

Rifkind could be deselected

Is Kensington and Chelsea, that jewel in the crown of Conservative parliamentary seats, becoming the Bermuda Triangle of Tory politics? Thanks to the little-noticed workings of the Boundary Commission, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, could soon find himself in a battle royal to remain in the Commons. The local precedents are not good for Sir Malcolm. When Kensington was amalgamated with Chelsea in the run-up to the 1997 election, Dudley Fishburn stood down in favour of the Chelsea MP, Sir Nicholas Scott. The following year, Scott (by then suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s) nearly crushed a child while parking his car and was then too drunk to attend his association’s party at party conference. He was promptly deselected.

Allister Heath

I want to be Ukraine’s Thatcher

Yulia Tymoshenko’s plans to reform her country To her legions of adoring groupies she is the Orange Princess, the goddess of the Ukrainian revolution and the world’s most beautiful politician. Even her critics admit that with her blonde hair braided in the traditional Ukrainian peasant way like a crown around her head and her flamboyant designer outfits, Yulia Tymoshenko cuts a surreal figure, a cross between Princess Leia of Star Wars and Princess Diana. Her striking appearance helped to turn her into a global cultural icon when she took to the barricades during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and then during her brief stint as prime minister last year.

Rod Liddle

Profusion of choice makes us unhappy

Has the David Cameron dog sled recently swung by the little Himalayan city of Thimphu, do you suppose? His latest policy — to make us all, in a rather nebulous way, happier — seems to have been taken word for word from the philosophy of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the supreme ruler of Bhutan. Bhutan is the only country in the world which has an annually measurable index of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which takes precedence over such arid and abstruse criteria as GDP. The country was the subject of a rather wide-eyed and credulous BBC documentary recently, so perhaps David caught the tail end of that before The Bill came on and liked what he saw.

Boris Johnson

Farewell to the Young Ones

Now if you were an average overworked overtaxed Spectator-reading parent of a university student, I think I know how you would feel about this lecturers’ strike. I think you’d be fit to be tied. You would be chomping the carpet and firing off letters to the editor about the Spartist whingers who were prejudicing your daughter’s future. You would be ringing up Radio Five phone-ins after midnight, and raving about how these degrees were life-defining moments, and how unthinkable it was that papers should go unmarked. You would find it incredible that the Labour government has said nothing in defence of the students. Exams are being scrubbed! Vital academic credentials are melting away!

Christopher Caldwell

Why I love the French

Taking issue with the Americans’ Francophobia Washington DC On the night of the Arsenal-Barcelona match, I was on the train between Manchester and London when something happened that would be inexplicable to my American compatriots. Two English couples, aged about 60, sat across the aisle. They were what Americans would call middle-class, and they were tidily dressed: sweaters and ties for the men, sweaters and necklaces for the women. They were discussing the first Barcelona goal when one of the men loudly broke wind. This is not the part that is outside the American experience. It was rather that the guy followed up with a triumphant burst of laughter. His companions joined him. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’ ‘Oh, you’re terrible!’ and ‘Oh, stop!

Friday

Austen Ivereigh

Blessed are the spin doctors

Austen Ivereigh, who is leading the battle against the movie of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in this country, reveals how its principal target — the controversial Catholic organisation Opus Dei — is turning the fight to its advantage Rome In the run-up to the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code on 19 May the communications director for the UK branch of Opus Dei, a bundle of nervous energy even in calmer times, can hardly contain himself.

Mary Wakefield

Opus Dei is scary because it’s so normal

Mary Wakefield visits one of the group’s halls of residence and meets not albino assassins but a more pious version of Trinny and Susannah After three hours with Opus Dei women at Ashwell House in east London I wandered west, half-stunned, like a cat hit by a car. At Oxford Circus the usual loons were saving souls: ‘Repent now, turn to God!’ from a woman on the south side. From a north-end traffic island, megaphone man provided the antiphonal response: ‘Seek salvation before it is too late!’ And in my pocket my mobile, ringing with a message from an Opus Dei publicity man. ‘Hi there! When you’re finished at Ashwell House, come to Notting Hill to have tea with Sebastian. He’s a supernumerary and he plays the cello!

Irwin Stelzer

Immigration, Iraq and oil: a bitter brew for Bush

Don’t look to polling data to get an idea of what is going on in the minds of Americans. Only 29 per cent of Americans say they are satisfied ‘with the way things are going in the United States at this time’. Yet 85 per cent are satisfied with ‘the way things are going in their personal lives’. Three out of four say they are uneasy about the economy, but only one in ten thinks it likely he will be laid off, and consumer confidence is at its highest level in four years. It is easier to read the mood in Washington. This is the time of year when the city is at its glorious best.

David Rennie

The future of Europe will be decided by tomatoes

Ioannina, Greece Like a penitent sinner, or an addict entering recovery, the European Union has developed a fondness for confessing it has lost the public’s confidence. Among EU leaders and top Eurocrats, there is much talk of ‘reconnecting with citizens’. To know why you should be sceptical, go to the ancient bazaars of Ioannina and ask shoppers what they think of the euro single currency. In common with consumers across the rest of Greece, indeed across much of Europe, Ioannina residents accuse the single currency of triggering runaway inflation since it was introduced four years ago. EU leaders worry about excessive public deficits in countries that adopted the euro, and a lack of convergence in national growth rates.

Rod Liddle

The real disgrace is a fit of bogus morality about Prescott

Rod Liddle say that — whatever his political failures — the Deputy Prime Minister is the victim of a deplorably hypocritical press assault I spent Bank Holiday Monday trying to find out everything I could about Jo Knowsley, for your benefit. I didn’t find out very much. Certain questions, crucial to the public interest, remain unanswered — so I will have to speculate about them instead, a little later on in this article. Jo was one of the plethora of journalists charged, last weekend, with investing weight and significance to the semi-literate diary scribblings of a certain Tracey Temple, the woman who frequently had sexual intercourse with John Prescott.

Tom Stacey

Expel foreign crooks? No, we’re far too nice

Tom Stacey, a prison visitor for 30 years, says that jails devote scandalous resources to ‘diversity’. No wonder the Home Office has so little time to manage deportations Political defenders of Charles Clarke insist it’s unreasonable to expect ministers to be acquainted with ‘every nook and cranny’ of the department they are responsible for, especially one as cumbrous as his. It’s hardly his fault, they say, that 1,023 foreign prisoners were freed without being considered for deportation. And true enough that the Home Secretary cannot be familiar with everything that’s going on. He’s only human.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s secret plan if he fails next week is to carry on regardless

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader knows that his campaign to win over the Lib Dem voters may not succeed in the local elections. But he has decided not to change his strategy a jot: the chameleon’s not for turning David Cameron could hardly wish for a better backdrop to next week’s English local elections. The Home Secretary admits that a thousand foreign ex-convicts have slipped the deportation net and been left at large. The Health Secretary is heckled by union workers and spectacularly mishandles a National Health Service crisis. Donors in the loans-for-ermine scandal are demanding their money back, and the Deputy Prime Minister confesses to an extramarital affair.

Christopher Caldwell

This is how Bush will be impeached

Washington In early April a silver-haired lady held up a placard at an Iraq war protest that has since been replicated on bumper stickers across America and blogs all over cyberspace. ‘Will Someone Please Give George W. Bush a B*** Job,’ the sign read, ‘So We Can Impeach Him?’ For partisan Democrats — at least those still smarting over the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about his office sex life — the sign’s appeal lay in its combination of low humour and righteous embitterment. But the embitterment predominates over the humour. Should Democrats win back the House of Representatives next fall, as appears more and more likely, the humour will fall away, and Bush will be impeached — whether he gets what Clinton got or not.

Allister Heath

The Pole who is Europe’s man to watch

Allister Heath meets Radek Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, and hears his robust views on al-Qa’eda, economic reform and the European Union There are old Cold Warriors — and then there are those who actually donned combat fatigues, picked up AK-47s, and trekked halfway around the world. In the case of Radek Sikorski, a Polish Solidarity student activist who found refuge in Britain, the calling of the Afghan mujahedin proved irresistible and he spent a lengthy period in the late 1980s undercover with the guerrillas as they fought the Red Army to the death.

Rod Liddle

If BBC staff could be open about their views, we would all be better off

How should our unelected and unaccountable television and radio presenters and interviewers conduct themselves, so as to avoid the continual allegations of political bias? Last week, in this magazine, Charles Moore had a bit of fun at the expense of Jim Naughtie, the Today programme presenter, for having balked in a rather sententious manner when a guest on the programme described him as ‘a liberal’. Jim apparently replied, ‘You have no idea what my political views are’, provoking Charles into a few paragraphs of typically elegant and dry parody: ‘As Bagehot must have pointed out somewhere, the Naughtie can constitutionally have no views of his own and acts only on the advice of his ministers (or “researchers”, as they are called).

Jemima Lewis

I wish I had the strength of character to be a liar

It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie. It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie. Consider, for example, the sheer brass neck of Alan McIlwraith — or Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith KBE, DSO, MC, as he prefers to be known. This mysterious young war hero was pictured recently in the celebrity magazine No. 1 sipping champagne at a charity function. He was dressed in full military regalia, his breast clattering with medals, accompanied by a woman described as his wife, ‘Lady Shona’. Sir Alan’s decorations were, he claimed, won on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and Kosovo.

Roger Scruton

An unhappy birthday to Sigmund the Fraud

Roger Scruton says that the century and a half since Freud’s birth has been marred by his imagined diseases of the mind Freud was born 150 years ago, on 6 May 1856, the same year as Wagner finished work on Die Walküre, the work which dramatises all the themes, from dreams to incest, that were to fascinate Freud. There is no doubt in my mind that it was Wagner, not Freud, who got things right, and that a knowledge of Wagner’s masterpiece casts serious doubts on Freud’s claims to originality. However, Freud’s reputation remains as great today as it was in my youth, when the Kleinians, the Jungians and the Adlerians were disputing his legacy.

Wednesday

Matthew Dancona

‘Everything we think about the wars on terror is wrong’

Philip Bobbitt tells Matthew d’Ancona, we must start from scratch if we are to beat the terrorists Cometh the war, cometh the guru. South of Baghdad, insurgents shoot down a US helicopter, killing two US servicemen, days after five British military servicemen died when their Lynx was brought down in Basra. Iran’s President scornfully rejects the EU’s latest desperate bid to stop him building nuclear weapons. A parliamentary report on the 7 July bombings reveals terrible intelligence errors. The Afghan foreign minister complains that Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan. A war on many fronts: but are we winning? Step forward Philip Bobbitt, a tall, immaculately dressed 57-year-old Texan scholar, who now spends most of his time in London.