Features

Saturday

Boris Johnson

The fear, the squalor …and the hope | 19 March 2005

This article first ran in the 3rd May 2003 issue of The Spectator Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I heard shouting and saw the Americans using their carbines like staves to push back some of the customers, who were evidently trying their luck. Just then a black sergeant near me started shouting at an Iraqi. 'You, I've told you to get away from there,' he said, swinging his gun round. The Iraqi appeared to be a phone technician, with pliers and a handset.

Interconnect

Alice doesn’t live here any more

Alice Thomas Ellis, the novelist and former Spectator columnist who died last week, once took part in an earnest feminist questionnaire that asked her to name the most important event in women’s history. ‘The Annunciation,’ she replied. Alice — known to all her friends by her real name, Anna — bore the physical aspect of a sensitive north London novelist: her huge, panda eyes were pools of compassion, framed by wispy hair and hand-made earrings. When people discovered that she was a Catholic — indeed, that it was the most important thing in her life — they sometimes assumed that she belonged to the Church’s ‘justice ’n’ peace’ brigade and subscribed to the Tablet, an archly progressive Catholic magazine.

Susan Crosland

How I escaped from my hospital hell

You thought it was difficult to get into an NHS bed? Try getting out when the bureaucrats say no. In my own case you might have thought they would urge me to be gone, for I was a bad patient. Normally I have a high pain threshold, but that Monday as I came round from the general anaesthetic the pain was sensational and I took it personally. Returned to my ward, the curtains drawn around my bay, I heard the sounds of a nearby patient being prepared to be wheeled to the operating theatre. I also heard a woman shouting ‘Do not let Dr Mooney operate on you. Dr Mooney is a bad doctor.’ Dr Mooney was the surgeon who had just operated on me. The woman shouting these denigrations was, I realised, myself. ‘Do not let Dr Mooney touch you,’ I yelled.

John Laughland

The devils’ advocate

For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the Kennedy administration in 1961. Promoted to the post of US attorney general by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Clark’s left-liberal political trajectory has taken him so far from the political mainstream that he is now campaigning for the rights of the two most hated men in the world. Is he mad? These men’s very names resound with the thud of the scud and the sear of the flame-thrower’s torch.

Boris Johnson

Out of the ashes

Baghdad As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly. It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous hope. I jogged by the twinkling Tigris. I ate out in restaurants — shoarma and chips, served with every sign of friendliness. I wandered around without a flak jacket and shoved my notebook under people’s noses, and said things like, ‘What do you think of George Bush, hmmm?’ And now look at the dear old place. We have been here for two years. We have spent something like £5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money, and the Americans have spent $400 billion.

Saturday

Petronella Wyatt

The price of happiness

Richard Layard, the founder of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, is a brave man. The Labour peer and adviser to the government has written a book on happiness. Or to be more precise, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. This is big stuff. I mean, happiness is the whole point of life, right? Philosophers since Aristotle have been trying to puzzle it out. And then this geezer with no philosophical training claims to have knocked out a tome containing all the answers. Not only that; Layard thinks that governments should legislate to reduce unhappiness, as they legislate to reduce unemployment or crime.

Interconnect

The Pentagon’s new pin-up boy

Mukhtara, Lebanon With his bald pate, droopy moustache and sad, bleary eyes, Walid Jumblatt looks more circus clown than Pentagon pin-up. And if the warlord’s eccentric appearance were not enough to dismay White House officials, then his penchant for virulent leftist anti-Americanism would seem to place him firmly in their ‘against us’ category. As Lebanon’s Soviet-backed chieftain of the Druze, a secretive sect which broke away from Shia Islam in the 11th century and believes in reincarnation, Jumblatt, now 55, played an active role in the country’s blood-soaked civil war. In 1983 he announced a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Maronites. ‘With the help of our Syrian allies we have removed the Christians and only the Druze villages will remain....

Interconnect

A revolution made for TV

On Tuesday, half a million people were demonstrating in the streets of Beirut, chanting and waving flags. If you only gave the TV a quick glance, you probably assumed that they were protesting against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In fact it was a rally organised by Hezbollah in support of Syria, but for almost a month now — since the assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri — the newspapers have been full of Beirut rising up in outrage against occupation, men and women in the streets dressed in red and white, shouting, ‘Syria Out!’: the Cedar Revolution. Last Saturday, in Beirut, I set off in search of the revolution. I took a friend for company in case of a hostage situation, and walked west to the Place des Martyrs to show solidarity.

Saturday

Michael Meacher

One for oil and oil for one

Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about. If the issue was fair elections, there would have been an equal furore about the grossly rigged elections by which Ilham Aliyev assumed the presidency of Azerbaijan in 2003 from his father, a ruthless KGB hardman in the former Soviet state. In fact the West turned a blind eye, in order to maintain access to Azerbaijan’s oil supplies after a $13 billion contract had been signed with BP in 1998.

Piers Paul-Read

The man who should be Pope

Pope John Paul II’s recovery from his tracheotomy in the Gemelli Hospital in Rome will have delighted his well-wishers, but it may have come as a disappointment to the Pope himself. He would like to die in harness and, realising that he can no longer pull the barque of the Church with the same vigour as before, hopes that God will call him sooner rather than later to enjoy an eternal repose. Journalists, too, are impatient to start the circus that they have prepared for so long, and some Curial cardinals seem to think that it is time for a change: no Cardinal Secretary of State since the 13th century has suggested the possibility of a Papal resignation as did Cardinal Solano. That precedent is not a happy one.

Sam Leith

So you want to stuff a badger

Sam Leith has been taking lessons in taxidermy, and he hasn’t had so much fun in ages ‘Now I’m going to show you what a scalpel handle is for,’ says Mike Gadd. I pick up the one nearest me, and start trying to affix the blade that I’ve so far been using pinched between finger and thumb. ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Mike. ‘It’s not for holding a scalpel blade.’ And with that, he reverses the scalpel handle in his own hand and digs its blunt, spatulate back end into the orbit of the eye in the skinned bird skull he’s holding. He whips it deftly round in a circle, and neatly pops out the eyeball. He turns the skull over and does the other. I try it on my own bird. Very satisfying. Jays’ eyes come out dead easy.

Martin Vander Weyer

Paying for Tony’s fat cats

There is a new kind of class distinction in the dining car from King’s Cross to York. Most of us — hoi polloi, relatively speaking — observe the convention that once the fishcake starters are served, it is polite to talk to the strangers with whom we happen to be sharing a table; and there is usually someone willing to start the ball rolling by pointing to a news item in the London Evening Standard and saying: ‘Honestly, this bloody government, the money they waste....’ This opening gambit has a curious effect on the other class of diner, the sleek-suited men and women who occupy the window seats because they get there first and signal by their body language that they prefer not to be spoken to.

Saturday

Leo McKinstry

Not ill — just naughty

Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you can still hold a conversation without being constantly interrupted by puerile screeching, crying, charging and table-thumping. And whenever I reach the Channel Tunnel terminal at Calais on the return leg of a trip to France, I know from the din of temper tantrums that I am once more approaching the land of the spoilt brat. Yet, according to influential psychiatric opinion, the badly behaved child here deserves our sympathy rather than our condemnation.

Martin Vander Weyer

Upwardly mobile

Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That is perhaps why Gent — now Sir Christopher — became a great tycoon of the technology age and I didn’t. He moved swiftly on from that airless back office in Holborn where we first met. After a few more years in computers he joined a fledgling mobile-phone company which had been set up by Racal, the defence electronics group, behind a curry house in Newbury.

Dean Godson

Will Dublin turn on Gerry Adams?

Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most popular politician in the Irish Republic. His party seemed set fair to make huge gains in the next Irish general election and he was being widely talked of as the next president of this state. Even the foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, spoke of the republicans as potential partners in a future coalition. Southerners have historically afforded the republican movement a degree of latitude in operating up north.

Interconnect

Time to fight back | 26 February 2005

It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most important news of the day. With all solemnity it announces that the Duchess of York has voiced support for Prince Harry in the argument about a swastika at a fancy dress party. How low can the BBC sink in obeisance to the triviality of the popular press? No one should blame the Duchess, who needs all the headlines she can get. But the BBC is a public-sector body, at present arguing its portentous case for continuing the licence fee.

Saturday

Boris Johnson

The end of part of England

As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen. In a daze, I mount the stool, held for me by Di Grisselle, joint master, shove one foot in the stirrup and try to swing myself over. Bertha chooses that moment to reverse, and I begin my first day’s hunting, in the last week of that ancient custom, by slowly and dreamily falling to the concrete farmyard floor. So let us leave me there, between the stirrup and the ground, and review the reasons for this desperate act.

Saturday

Interconnect

Bush will not be mocked

Mark Steyn says it’s time for limp, languid Tory toffs to join the fight for freedom New Hampshire On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: ‘We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell’ — in perfect harmony. To modify Churchill, defeat may be an orphan, but defeatism has many fathers, and these three were in tripartisan agreement about what a disaster Iraq had been.

Interconnect

Die in Britain, survive in the US

James Bartholomew says American healthcare is an expensive muddle that leaves millions unprotected, and yet it delivers much better results — for everyone — than the NHS Which is better — American or British medical care? If a defender of the National Health Service wants to win the argument against a free market alternative, he declares, ‘You wouldn’t want healthcare like they have in America, would you?’ That is the knock-out blow. Everyone knows the American system is horrible. You arrive in hospital, desperately ill, and they ask to see your credit card. If you haven’t got one, they boot you out. It is, surely, a heartless, callous, unthinkable system. American healthcare is unbridled capitalism, red in the blood of the untreated poor.

Saturday

Interconnect

A crushing defeat for the insurgents

Tikrit Sitting beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office deep inside a former Baathist presidential palace, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies. ‘We’ve had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing stupid things,’ he chuckled. ‘Here’s a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn’t have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off.