Features

Wednesday

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.

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!