Features

Saturday

Rian Malan

The Great White Hyena

Cape Town ‘This is a goer,’ declares Deon du Plessis. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the Great White Hyena is presiding over a news conference in the Johannesburg offices of the Daily Sun, the largest daily in Africa. Mr du Plessis is publisher and part-owner. Seated before him are his editor, Themba Khumalo, an amiable Zulu in a baseball cap, and a cheerful menagerie of subs and reporters. Some weeks ago they ran a story headlined ‘Dark Secrets of Crime Terror!’ which revealed that unscrupulous witch-doctors were charging up to £8,000 for magical potions (almost) guaranteed to render thieves and armed robbers invisible to police.

Alasdair Palmer

Life, liberty and terrorists

‘When it comes to the British courts,’ Charles Clarke insists, ‘I am a perpetual optimist.’ Which is fortunate, because he needs to be. We met on the day the Law Lords proclaimed that the government was not permitted to detain terrorist suspects on the basis of evidence which might have been extracted under torture. The government had been arguing that it needed to be able to use such information in court in order lawfully to detain people who were a threat to the British public. The Law Lords called that argument ‘disquieting’ and ‘disturbing’. It was merely the latest in a series of reverses that the government’s policies to combat terrorism have suffered at the hands of the highest court in the land.

John Hemming

The people who shun us

I have just spent a week in Amazonia with Sydney Possuelo, the man I regard as the world’s greatest explorer — well, at any rate, the greatest tropical explorer. Weatherbeaten, balding, with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, 65-year-old Sydney exudes vitality and charm. Although he has just had a triple heart bypass, he looks lean and fit, as you would expect of someone who has spent much of his life in unexplored rainforests and who has by no means hung up his hammock and mosquito net. For two years in the early 1990s Sydney Possuelo was a very successful president of the Brazilian government’s Indian protection agency, Funai. But he is an action man who dislikes offices and politics, so he fled the urban jungle for the real one.

Mary Wakefield

The awkward squad

An excited twitter filled the assembly room of the Eastside Young Leaders Academy (EYCA) in Plaistow, east London. ‘David Cameron’s arrived! He’s in the corridor! He’s nearly here!’ Day three of his leadership, and just the thought of Dave’s presence has the same effect on Tories as Will Young has on teenage girls. Middle-aged charity workers patted their hair, Dave’s female handlers began to herd hacks into ever smaller spaces; across the room our host, Iain Duncan Smith, sat up straighter. A silence, then David Cameron bounced in, his left hand clenched in its trademark fist, his face the usual pink. Bulbs flashed, women clapped, pens scratched.

Tina Brown

Can anything stop Hillary?

New York It may have been lost in all the news about Iraq but Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat Senator of New York, has received the 2005 National Farmers Union presidential award for her leadership in introducing the Milk Import Tariff Equity Act. The snippy feminist who nearly derailed her husband’s first presidential campaign by scoffing that she didn’t just ‘stay home and bake cookies’ can now be presented as the Butter Queen of the Empire State. It’s another piquant moment in the stunning evolution of Hillary Clinton. The first lady who chafed at the hostessy duties of political wifehood has been all homey practicality since she got out of the White House.

Roger Scruton

Your countryside needs you

Roger Scruton says that it’s time for rural residents to protect the land they love by clubbing together and buying it If you look at an electoral map of England, you will discover that most of it is blue, the occasional pockets of red corresponding to the large conurbations. Rural England is Tory and always has been. It is not surprising, therefore, if our present government has little affection for the countryside, or if it is always looking for new ways either to punish rural voters or to destroy the idyll that nourishes their dissent. No character in politics more clearly embodies this anti-rural sentiment than John Prescott, whose plans to Balkanise England, to centralise planning and to jettison the green belt have caused alarm and despondency in the shires.

Saturday

Andrew Neil

Britain can learn from China

Of all the insights that Friedrich August von Hayek bequeathed to us, one in particular shines out today. It is that running through the ideological and political divisions of human history are two distinct and different ways of looking at the world. One Hayek called constructivist rationalism; the other evolutionary rationalism. Hayek spent a lifetime arguing that constructivist rationalism is economically and philosophically flawed because it assumes that ‘all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design’. He later called this The Fatal Conceit. Those who follow this route believe they have it within their power to build, organise and mould society so that it conforms to their concept of what is just and efficient.

Peter Oborne

The triumph of tradition

British politics froze for about 12 years after 16 September 1992, otherwise known as Black Wednesday. Real movement between the two main parties was imperceptible. The Conservative party, dominant for most of the 20th century, embarked on a long period of semi-collapse, commanding the support of no more than one third of voters, perhaps rather less. New Labour, in sharp contrast, could rely on the goodwill of over 40 per cent of the electorate. The Liberal Democrats were the only real movers. They re-emerged as a healthy third party, steadily gaining ground at the expense of the Conservatives and, towards the 2005 general election, of New Labour. There were a number of reasons for this unusual political stasis. The first was an economic boom of unprecedented durability.

Saturday

Matt Price

Proud to be Thatcherite

Canberra John Howard is defying political gravity. After nearly ten years as Prime Minister of Australia he has no serious challengers. Tony Blair, by contrast, hobbles along performing an excellent impression of a fellow in the crippled poultry phase of his leadership. At 66, Howard is 14 years older than Blair. He has served a year longer in office, and he has won four elections to Blair’s three. You might think that Howard would be at least as burdened by scandal, disillusion, infighting, ennui and fatigue as the younger man. But you’d be wrong. Indeed, Howard is being encouraged by many in the Liberal party — Australia’s equivalent of the Conservative party — to soldier onwards and upwards to a fifth campaign in 2007.

Kevin Myers

Not all priests are paedophiles

The nightmare of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues. Last month a US law firm, Manly & Maguire, ann- ounced it was suing the Irish diocese that trained the busy paedophile priest Oliver O’Grady. This worthy is now at the centre of at least 17 multi-million-dollar child-abuse lawsuits in the Californian diocese of Stockton. Worse is to come. Another 18 Irish priests are facing multiple-abuse charges in California alone, with law firms hustling for their share of the action against the Irish dioceses from which they came. Lawyers in many states across the US where Irish priests sowed their paedophiliac oats, turning Catholic children into unwilling catamites, are now eagerly watching the Manly & Maguire case, meanwhile sizing up juicy Church assets in Ireland.

Ross Clark

Public-sector scroungers

Ross Clark on the workers who milk the rest of us by retiring early as a result of ‘ill health’ The next few months may well see the political death of Tony Blair. But whether he will get buried is another matter. In an echo of the public-sector bolshieness 27 winters ago that eventually brought down the Callaghan government, public-sector unions have renewed their threat to stage a national strike over proposals to raise their normal retirement age from 60 to 65. A month ago Alan Johnson, the trade secretary, appeared to buy off a strike by agreeing with the unions to exempt all existing public-sector employees, even newly recruited 18-year-old postmen, from the need to work until 65.

Rod Liddle

Let Irving speak

I am surprised, incidentally, that our tradi-tional enemies do not object that only Aryan names are used for these disasters — why no Hurricane Isidores or Chaims?David Irving offers up his observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, September 2005. David Irving, the British histo-rian and alleged ‘Holocaust denier’ will be spending this Christmas and New Year in a Viennese prison cell while the Austrian authorities attempt to cobble together a charge against him relating to something he said 16 years ago. Back in 1989, while visiting Austria, he remarked, as he was wont to do, that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz — a view he has more recently modified (he now accepts, apparently, that there were one or two).

Simon Nixon

The end of Britain’s economic miracle

Simon Nixon on what happens when North Sea oil runs out — and we have to do without the drug that fuelled the boom years The New Labour spin doctor’s handbook has clear guidelines on how to deal with a crisis. First, deny it exists. If that doesn’t work, attack anybody who dares draw attention to the problem, usually subjecting them to a vicious smear campaign. And, if all else fails, blame it on Europe. So it has been with this winter’s great gas crisis. Wholesale gas prices have quintupled in a month, factories are shutting down, bosses are threatening to shift production abroad, and terrified pensioners are wondering whether they can afford to keep their houses warm this winter. The government’s response?

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

The UN and the internet

The laptop on which I’m working tells me that it has sent 7,392 email messages to date, and if I knew how to reach its innermost parts it would probably provide a rather embarrassing list of every website it has ever visited on my behalf as well. Like most internet users, I have absolutely no idea how any of that traffic actually happened. I have a fantasy that it involves satellites in space and bunkers deep underground, full of scary professors and beautiful girls in lycra spacesuits dancing attendance on giant computers; and I sometimes wonder whether my cyber-correspondence is being monitored for key words (‘jihad’ perhaps, or ‘Galloway bank account’) at GCHQ Cheltenham or Langley, Virginia.

Trevor Grove

Asbo-lutely mad

One way to imprison a suspected terrorist for 90 days or even longer, without any bother from Parliament, would be to give him an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. The Asbo could be drawn up to include a number of hard-to-follow rules such as never to associate with more than one other person in public or use the internet. Once a breach was proved in court, where it would be regarded as a serious criminal offence, the offender could be given a jail sentence of up to five years. Gotcha! Such is the concealed yet far-reaching power of the Asbo that this is a not entirely frivolous hypothesis.

Alasdair Palmer

The American way of torture

Alasdair Palmer on how the White House is trying to defeat Senator McCain’s anti-torture Bill America is starting to get anxious again about its use of ‘aggressive interrogation’. The more usual name for what the Americans have been doing to some of the people they think are terrorists is ‘torture’. When the pictures from Abu Ghraib first became public 18 months or so ago, they caused a flurry of agonised self-examination among senior officials in the country’s armed forces and intelligence services. That quickly passed when it was decided that what happened in Abu Ghraib wasn’t officially sanctioned.

Rod Liddle

Sometimes women share the blame

Rape is wrong, says Rod Liddle, but it is right to believe — as 30 per cent of British people do — that some victims are partly responsible There was a clever little opinion poll in your morning news-papers this week, courtesy of Amnesty International UK. The headline story from the poll was that about one third of British people thought that women were ‘partially or totally responsible’ for being raped if they didn’t say ‘No’ clearly enough, or were wearing revealing clothing, or were drunk, or had been behaving in a flirtatious manner. Usually opinion polls are, well, a matter of opinion: respondents tick a box expressing one view or another and the rest of us can agree or agree to differ. Not with this poll, though.

Anthony Browne

Brussels bites back

Anthony Browne reports on the EU’s unabated lust for control of national policies, from law and order to universities, from biotechnology to tax Brussels It was perhaps inevitable that the crash in central London of Banana Republic Airlines Flight 101, which killed 453 people and created a swath of destruction across Islington, provoked Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Few could understand how the judges in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg had the power to overturn the secretary of state’s ban on the airline for its poor safety record, giving it the right to enter UK airspace.

Saturday

Interconnect

Parliamentarian of the Year

The 22nd annual Threadneedle/ Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch took place last Thursday at Claridge’s and the prizes were presented by the Rt Hon. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Welcoming Mr Kennedy, the editor of The Spectator, Boris Johnson, recalled the tumultuous events at last year’s luncheon. He said that among the advantages of having Mr Kennedy as guest of honour were not only his general geniality but also that he was not a Conservative and therefore unlikely to launch an unprovoked satirical attack on another Conservative. Nor had he faced the Sisyphean task — borne by last year’s guest of honour — of making the policy of Her Majesty’s official opposition cohere with the official policy of The Spectator.

Frank Furedi

The age of unreason

To this day I am astonished when I hear that sensible, biologically mature adults allow themselves to be treated as if they were incompetent dimwits by a new army of professional surrogate parents. In days of old, traditional authority figures, like priests, instructed us how to behave in public and told us which rules to observe. Today’s experts are even freer with their advice. They do not simply tell us what to do and think, but also how to feel. A new army of life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides regularly lecture us about the most intimate details of our existence. They are not simply interested in monitoring public behaviour but in colonising our internal life.