Features

Saturday

Richard Ehrman

A dying breed

By mid-century, the world’s population will be 50 per cent higher than it is now, says Richard Ehrman, but the boom will come from developing countries, not Europe, and that’s very bad news indeed If demography is destiny, then, on the face of it, Britain should be feeling pretty smug. In late May the number of people in the UK finally passed the 60 million mark. By 2031, according to official projections released last month, there will be 67 million of us. While populations across most of the rest of Europe are stagnating, and many will soon be shrinking, ours is booming. So why does this bountiful prospect make so many of us uneasy? A century ago such news would have been greeted with jubilation, as another sign of national virility and self-confidence.

Saturday

Paul Robinson

The return of White Russia

‘Unbelievable,’ the professor told me. It was hard to disagree. We had just laid flowers on the grave of the anti-communist Russian philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Il’in. Just a short time ago, mere possession of one of Il’in’s books would have brought six years in prison. Now the Russian state has reburied the philosopher in Moscow with all the pomp and ceremony it could muster. Earlier this month the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexei II, presided over a service of reburial at the Donskoi monastery in Moscow for not only Il’in but also his far more famous contemporary General Anton Denikin, head of the anti-Bolshevik White forces in southern Russia during the Russian civil war.

Andrew Gilligan

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

Britain, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn, once had a nuclear weapon named the Tony. (It was a prototype warhead to be fitted to the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, tried in the 1950s but never developed.) The record books of our great nation’s early nuclear experiments also yield something called the Peter (appropriately enough, a trigger device for a larger explosion) but, alas, no Alastair, no Gordon (though there was, perhaps in anticipation of the late Robin Cook, another prototype unhappily christened the Pixie). The first-generation Tony, produced by trench-coated chaps with soldering irons in a collection of sheds just off the A340, was reassuringly cheap. Hidden under a thick 1950s bedsheet of secrecy, it was also free from specific public controversy.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Is homeopathy really hogwash?

It didn’t occur to me until a few weeks ago to question homeopathy. Of course it worked. I grew up with it; my aunt Liz was and still is a homeopathic practitioner and for us — my mother, father, aunts, uncles, brother, cousins — calling Liz was the natural reaction to the slightest swollen gland. We weren’t loopy: if things got dangerous, a trained doctor would be summoned but as he tapped and tutted, the aunts would hover, a copy of First Aid Homeopathy in Accidents and Ailments by Dr D.M. Gibson to hand. My childhood memories are full of the taste of little sugary pills — ‘There, open wide, let it dissolve on your tongue’ — and the rhythmic clinking of remedies being beaten into water with a hundred stirs of a silver spoon.

Ian Birrell

The hell I share with David Cameron

My daughter suffered two seizures the other night. One was shortly after midnight, the other a couple of hours later. Having been away on business the previous night, it was my turn to get up to comfort her, to check that the fits were not life-threatening and, afterwards, to settle her back to sleep. Five hours later the alarm went off and, as my teenage son stomped into the shower, I popped back into her bedroom to check that she was still asleep — and still alive. This was a typical night in our house, and it was followed by a typical day of attempting to balance work and family while caring for a severely disabled child and engaging in a ceaseless battle with the bureaucracy of our public services.

Tom Gross

Dead Jews aren’t news

British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror — even if they are British Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002. Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper. Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press.

Quentin Letts

The Tories pick a winner

Less than six weeks ago a threadbare group of Conservative MPs, from what one might call the boarding-school wing of the party, assembled in a small, air-conditioned room in Portcullis House, Westminster. Not everyone was punctual. The Commons was deep in recess. The fifth Test against Australia was flickering on television sets around London SW1, Mark Nicholas saying, ‘there’s still plenty of time in this game’. But was there? September-heavy houseflies buzzed against window panes as the team supporting David Cameron’s bid for the Tory leadership excavated their ear wax and pondered a different sort of leader — in the Times.

Saturday

Tony Leon

Why South Africa backs Mugabe

Tony Leon says the Zimbabwean leader’s histrionics appeal to the resentment and Soviet nostalgia of southern Africa’s elite Cape Town It was a proud moment for aviation in Zimbabwe. The country was suffering the worst fuel crisis in its history; hospitals were reverting to ox-drawn ambulances. But still the Zimbabwean air force managed to stage a spectacular air show last month to celebrate its 25th anniversary. In recognition of this astounding logistical feat, the South African air force sent its own planes to join the fun, including a squadron of fighter jets, two helicopters and the Silver Falcons aerobatics team. Our defence minister explained that it was necessary for South African pilots ‘to test their skills against other defence forces’.

Vernon Bogdanor

The Tories need a genuine liberal

Vernon Bogdanor says that David Cameron is the only Conservative who can read the nation’s mood and respond to it In the 1960s Harold Wilson sought to make Labour the natural party of government. Tony Blair seems to have succeeded in doing so. The Conservatives have now been in opposition for eight years, their longest period out of government since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George before 1914. Never before, during the period of mass suffrage, have they lost three consecutive general elections. Moreover, at no stage since 1997 have they appeared credible as a potential party of government. That is bad, not only for the Conservatives but also for the country.

Richard North

Europe is costing us a bomb

The threat to our national security has seldom been greater. Not only are historic regiments being scrapped — or amalgamated — but the fundamental reorganisation of armed forces now under way is likely to undermine the special relationship with the United States, and thus a key element in our defence strategy. There is, of course, nothing wrong in principle with the reorganisation: it has been embarked on to accommodate a technological revolution in warfare. This revolution is as profound as the switch from horse to tank. The term for the new military technology is ‘netcentric warfare’ and it aims to meld high-tech weaponry with the power of computers, satellites and advanced digital communications.

Ross Clark

Death, drugs and red tape

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty their lofts to send surplus possessions to Cancer Research shops, and many more will be stuffing ‘pinkie rings’ on to their fingers and toes in order to support work on breast cancer. In all, Britons last year raised £302 million for cancer charities, far more than any other country in Europe.

Saturday

Aidan Hartley

Terror in Mogadishu

On a recent drive in downtown Mogadishu with ten heavily armed bodyguards, I passed the site of the old US embassy, and observed a melancholy scene that Britain and the USA might ponder if they decide to bale out of Iraq early. The embassy has been totally demolished, either out of hatred or because Mogadishu’s benighted inhabitants need bricks with which to build their hovels. The site is now a forest of thorns browsed by camels. Washington has long regarded Somalia as nothing but a nasty backwater populated by ungrateful Africans, but the continuing violence there — much of it directed by Islamic extremists — suggests that the country may become the springboard for an Africa-wide Islamic jihad.

Ross Clark

Guilty until proved innocent

Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max Clifford could not have timed better her arrival in Britain. As Mrs Menezes and other members of her family surveyed the spot where her son was summarily executed on suspicion of being a terrorist, the Prime Minister was on a stage in Brighton saying this: ‘We are trying to fight 21st-century crime — antisocial behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime — with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

Bruce Anderson

The next Tory Prime Minister

On Monday morning, a tense young politician was rehearsing a speech. The performance was less than fluent; the delivery was far too fast. The youngster’s peace of mind did not benefit from his growing awareness that he was being overheard. A number of journalists had managed to slip into the hall. Twenty-eight hours later, the rehearsal turned into the live performance. David Cameron had decided to speak without notes or an autocue. The previous day, Malcolm Rifkind did the same, but Sir Malcolm has been one of the two or three best speakers in Britain for the past 20 years, since he was David Cameron’s age. When Mr Cameron dispensed with the normal speech-maker’s aids, which Margaret Thatcher always used, he was gambling his leadership campaign on his success.

Dominic Midgley

Oiling up to the oligarchs

Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash A senior member of the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow once said that any mention of the word ‘oligarch’ had the average Russian reaching for a gun. That’s because much of the population is furious at the way the national wealth was passed to a handful of hustlers in a series of sweetheart deals with Boris Yeltsin. In London, however, the word ‘oligarch’ produces a very different reaction, inspiring an enterprising collection of opportunists to reach for the telephone.

Saturday

Andrew Gilmour

Stop bashing the UN

Question: what do the Taleban, Serb war criminals, al-Qa’eda, Rwandan genocidaires, the Ku Klux Klan, the Kach movement, the Japanese Red Army and the Janjaweed of Darfur have in common? Answer: two things actually. The obvious one, plus the fact that — like the Spectator columnist Mark Steyn — they all passionately abhor the United Nations, see it as an obstacle to their particular agenda and call for its abolition. The UN has always evoked violent passions, especially among its detractors. Its defenders tend to be rather calmer.

Petronella Wyatt

A bastard? Me?

David Davis is the first prospective Tory leader to have been born in a council house to an unmarried mother. The bookies’ favourite to take over from Michael Howard, Davis, 56, is said by his supporters to have garnered the necessary qualities on his way to the top: determination, spirit, tenacity, a sense of social justice and an understanding of ‘the man and woman on the street’. His detractors claim the shadow home secretary is arrogant, treacherous, lazy and unable to get on with those from more privileged backgrounds, such as the members of the ‘Notting Hill Set’, to which his leadership rival David Cameron belongs. I have arranged to meet Davis in his Westminster office.

Stephan Shakespeare

Clarke’s advantage fades away

YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare on how the public would view the four candidates — if they were all better known Up to now, polls on the Conservative leadership have been flawed in a fundamental way: they have tried to gauge public reaction to a group of candidates, when one of them is much better known than the rest. But this contest is about the future — about how they might be regarded after they become leader, when the public gets to know them better. And so YouGov and The Spectator designed a poll to get some vital added insight. First, we asked 4,000 people representative of the UK electorate how likely they were to vote for each of the main parties, on a scale from 0 to 10. Labour’s average rating was 4.0, the Conservatives’ 3.

Peter Oborne

It could all come down to one speech

The annual party conference has been the occasion of the destruction of a Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, within very recent history. But more than 40 years have passed since a leader was last created at a conference. That was back in 1963, also in Blackpool. Representatives had already gathered when news came through that the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was severely ill and had determined to stand down. It was far too late to bring events to a halt. The conference went on but ceased to be the well-ordered and deferential affair beloved of party managers. On the contrary, as Quintin Hogg at once spotted, this was a hustings. Hogg had recently returned from the United States where he had made a study of the techniques pioneered by John F. Kennedy’s Democrats.

Saturday

Alasdair Palmer

Is torture always wrong?

The officers who pumped seven bullets into Jean Charles de Menezes as he sat in a Tube train in Stockwell station on 22 July believed he was a suicide-bomber about to detonate a bomb. They were wrong, and may now face trial for murder. Whether or not they are prosecuted, however, it is almost certain that the Metropolitan Police’s policy of killing people who its senior officers believe are about to detonate bombs will remain. Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Met, has said it will stay, and insists it has been approved by the Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police Authority.