Features

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Stagnant Britain

What with Jamie Oliver dictating government policy last month, and Lady Isabella Hervey flaunting her tanned bod for the lads on Celebrity Love Island, you could be forgiven for thinking that social mobility in Britain, both upwards and downwards, has attained what scientists might call inertia-free perfection. Daily observation suggests that the game of snakes and ladders between the classes has never been so vigorously played, and that the rules have been entirely rewritten. An expensive education and a father with friends in high places no longer buy you a double six to start; received pronunciation is now a positive handicap in any career in which you might ever have to open your mouth in public.

Saturday

Alice Thomson

‘The Tories must be ruthless’

In his first interview since the election, Lynton Crosby tells Alice Thomson what he has enjoyed about living in Britain and running Michael Howard’s campaign He is the Wizard of Oz. During the election campaign he used to stand behind the curtains at press conferences directing operations. He never talked to journalists and no one ever saw him on television but everyone assumed that the Tories’ Australian campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, was pulling all the levers. He was credited with many great and evil powers, with revitalising the Tory party, with demonising asylum-seekers, with forcing Gordon Brown to hold hands with Tony Blair. All three parties were afraid of him.

Ross Clark

Asbo madness

Like many of my countrymen, I find the cantankerous figure of Charles Clarke somewhat alarming. In fact, I think on balance I would rather live next door to David Boag. It would certainly be more entertaining. Boag, a 28-year-old warehouseman from Dechmont, West Lothian, is a man of unusual habits. He likes to watch the film An American Werewolf in London, after which he spends some time howling. Not only that; neighbours who have taken to watching him through his curtainless windows have spotted him climb up a step ladder, leap on to his sofa and then dance around the room with a Christmas tree. Whether Mr Boag is a little mad or just eccentric I don’t feel qualified to say. Perhaps he needs to meet some girls, or at least broaden his taste in films a little.

Michael Andersen

Base motives

The Kyrgyz-Uzbek border To people in Central Asia, home to some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, President Bush’s inaugural speech in January was important. ‘When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you,’ said Bush, and his words sounded very promising. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, no country in Central Asia has yet held elections which could be described as even remotely free or fair. While the presidents, their families and entourages amass enormous fortunes, 80 per cent of the population struggles to survive on less than $1 a day. Celebrating VE Day in the Baltic states, the US President lambasted the Soviet occupation and ‘secret deals to determine somebody else’s fate’.

Wolfgang Münchau

Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism

Looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up in Germany, one of the most striking things was that everyone talked about work and money. The country was infuriatingly materialistic. The old West Germany felt more like an economy than a country. It used to have a proper currency, the Deutschmark, but it lacked a proper political capital. At a time when the British believed in incomes policies, capital controls and state ownership, Germany was as laissez-faire an economy as you could find anywhere in Europe. The Germans were the Americans of Europe, as a friend remarked at the time. Everyone was brimming with confidence and the superiority that comes with the belief that you are running the world’s most superior economy.

Saturday

Alex Bilmes

Sachs appeal

Recently I found myself idling away an afternoon in Angelina Jolie’s Winnebago. Angelina and I were discussing books. More specifically, she was talking me through her taste in erotic fiction, which spans the centuries from the Marquis de Sade to ‘more modern stuff’. ‘Sometimes,’ she remarked, ‘you find a passage that works for you and you can go back to it over and over.’ Crikey! Glancing around her rather anonymous trailer, parked inside a vast hangar about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, I was disappointed to see no evidence to support her claim to an interest in mucky literature. Instead, there was only one book on her sofa, there to keep her company during the longueurs that accompany the shooting of any big Hollywood film.

Jules Evans

Is Belarus next in line?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the drums of revolution beating once more in Washington. The neoconservatives have found another regime that needs changing, another enemy of ‘freedom’, and they are setting about putting matters right in their usual way. This time the target is Belarus, a small country in between Poland, Ukraine and Russia with a population of 10 million. Since 1996 Belarus has been run as a communist dictatorship by President Aleksander Lukashenko. All the usual precursors to a US-sponsored ‘revolution’ are in place: an influential Washington NGO — the US Committee on Nato — has said that fostering democracy in Belarus is an ‘essential, moral and strategic imperative for US foreign policy’.

Peter Oborne

The end of Tony Blair

A peculiar arrangement prevailed in 8th-century France, during the final decades of the Merovingian dynasty. The power of the kings, once savage and formidable, had subsided and then collapsed. They continued to enjoy the title of monarch, but the real power was exercised by officers of the royal household, the so-called ‘mayors of the palace’. The mayors ruled, while the Merovingians, who were regarded with contempt, occupied a purely formal and instrumental role. This pattern of indirect rule, with its separation of real and titular authority, is by no means unique. Japanese emperors in the 9th century ruled in name only. The Fujiwaras, a dynasty of court officials, exercised the real power though they were content to maintain and honour the throne.

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Losing their religion

Brendan O’Neill says that Lapsed, or Recovering, Catholics are wallowing in their victim status now that a traditionalist has been elected Pope Lapsed Catholics are sorely disappointed that the 265th Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, is — shock, horror — a strict Roman Catholic. The 20 million lapsed Catholics in America had hoped, according to an Ohio-based newspaper, that the Church would become a ‘friendlier place’ after the demise of John Paul II, and coax ‘hurt, angry and lapsed Catholics’ like themselves back into the pews. Lapsed Catholics in Britain also prayed for a new happy-clappy era under a less dogmatic Pope, who might, a friend of mine hoped, ‘bend some of the old rules’.

Stephanie Sprague

Girls just want to have boys

‘If my next child’s a boy, I’ll stop. If not, then I’ll keep trying until I get one.’ These words weren’t spoken by an Asian or Indian woman, desperate to give her husband an heir, but by a white woman, upper-middle-class and married to an investment banker. She spoke from the cosy confines of her flat in Hampstead two months after giving birth to her first child, a girl. Of course, she loves her daughter and she is a wonderful mother. Still, there it is: the disappointment that she didn’t bear a boy. This was not the first time I had met someone disappointed not to have a boy.

Simon Heffer

The way ahead for the Conservatives

If we political pundits were truly blessed with the gift of accurate prophecy, we would not be writing about one of the most sordid subjects known to man. We would be earning shedloads of money as astrologers, with premium-rate telephone lines conveying our charlatanry to the masses, and conveying the masses’ money back to us. Since by the time you read this we will be having, or will just have had, the most unpredictable election of modern times, it is harder than ever to base any argument on its likely outcome. I had better risk humiliation, therefore, by stating that what follows is based on the unkind assumption that on Friday afternoon Mrs Michael Howard will not be measuring up for curtains in No. 10 Downing Street.

Saturday

Kelvin MacKenzie

Essex Man is alive and well and voting Tory

He was always Maggie’s favourite. She loved him. He adored her. But as in most hot romances, there was a cooling. And finally the embers died. Essex Man had found another. In slightly less than a decade a Tory majority of 17,000 in Braintree had turned, incredibly, into a 358 majority for Labour. Braintree, with an electorate of 82,000, is now the second most marginal majority in England and may well hold a clue to how the rest of the South votes. Mrs Thatcher had a special place in Essex Man’s heart. She had given him a chance to buy his own council house plus the confidence and tax breaks to start his own business, instead of working under the union yoke.

Allister Heath

Why we can’t afford a third term

The reputation of Gordon Brown has never stood higher than it does this election weekend. The Chancellor has pulled off a double which has eluded virtually every chancellor in history: he is hailed simultaneously as a political genius and as an outstanding manager of the British economy. Politically, this reputation is well enough justified. The general election has granted Gordon Brown the prize he has sought for almost two decades. He is now the universally accepted Labour leader-in-waiting. Tony Blair has publicly pledged his endorsement, but only because he had no choice. The Chancellor is a far more powerful and trusted figure than the Prime Minister, both inside the Labour party and in the country at large. Gordon Brown has become the crutch of a widely despised Prime Minister.

Saturday

The Spectator

The Coffee House debt counter – information and sources

National debt: Taken from public sector net debt figures (PSND) in Table B13 of Pre-Budget 2009.  PSND rising from £618.8 billion on 5 April 2009 to £798.9 billion a year later. This is the most conservative of the available debt indices as it excludes liabilities for PFI deals, public sector pensions and bank bailouts. Family share: Calculated by dividing the national debt figure by the number of households in the UK. Number of households taken as 25.7 million, as per the written answer to a Parliamentary question in March 2009. To insert the debt counter on your own site use this code: <iframe width="300" height="115" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="https://spectator.com/odometer/index.php?

William Wolff

The Germans have ways of making you walk

The moment after I stepped on the treacherously transparent black ice on the Newcastle garden path, my buttocks were on the ground and my heels in the air. I needed an 87-year-old to pull me up and get me into the waiting taxi. As the pain got more excruciating I sought to dull it with a promise to myself that became a mantra: no endless hours on a trolley. The alternative was a taxi to the airport, a wheelchair on to the plane to Hamburg, and back to Schwerin, the north-east German town where I work. By seven the following morning I was outside the accident doctor’s practice there. ‘We’re in trouble,’ my driver announced. ‘They don’t open till eight.’ He rang the doorbell just in case and a voice on the intercom told him to bring me up.

Theo Hobson

Where Blair has gone wrong

Frank Field tells Theo Hobson about Christianity, socialism — and the Prime Minister’s failure of leadership I am expecting to meet Edmund Blackadder’s Puritan uncle, who frowns on suggestively shaped turnips, and worries that someone somewhere is having fun. But Frank Field does not fit the description. He’s smiley, forthcoming, chatty. Field is more interesting than most ex-ministers. He embodied New Labour’s early attempt at stern moral idealism and intellectual rigour — the Keith Joseph of the movement. He looks beyond party labels (he is a friend of Lady Thatcher); he writes books about the politics of behaviour and the Kingdom of God (he is a staunch Anglican).

Germaine Greer

The man who made England

My father was about as English as they come. Though he was born and educated in Australia, he talked like an Englishman, dressed like an Englishman, and behaved as he thought an English gentleman would behave, which was several degrees better than the real thing. His manner was as easy, affable and unflappable as any true-born Englishman’s. A homegrown Englishman would have seen through him in a trice, as my father found to his cost when he was seconded to the RAF during the second world war, but to Australians he seemed more English than the English. No one is born a cliché; you have to grow into it, as you do a moustache. My father had a moustache, flying-officer model. As an avid reader of Biggles books, I thought this perfectly appropriate.

Saturday

Roger Scruton

INVESTIGATION: Shameless and loveless

Sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin’s famous poem, in 1963. Four decades have elapsed since then, and these decades have seen a growing recognition that sexual liberation is not the answer to the problems of sex but a new addition to them. Traditional sexual morality reinforced the society-wide commitment to marriage as the sole legitimate avenue to sexual release. It is easy to understand such a morality. It has a clear social function — ensuring stable families and guaranteeing the transfer of social capital from one generation to the next. And it has an intrinsic rational appeal in making sense of love, commitment, jealousy, courtship and the drama of the sexes. The problem is that, by impeding our pleasures, it creates a strong motive to escape from it.

Douglas Davis

Anti-Semitic studies

Pay attention, Professor. If you support the proposed academic boycott of Israel — and if you are to remain intellectually honest — prepare for a radical lifestyle change. Firstly, unplug your computer. Good. Now switch off your interactive digital television set. Well done. And now throw away your mobile phone. Excellent. You see, Professor, these machines are not only the engine of the globalised, capitalist world but they also depend on technologies that have been produced by Israeli academics in the Zionist entity. Stop playing with your detached mouse, Professor, and concentrate. I’m afraid you may not use the British Library because it has been computerised by Ex Libris, a Zionist company that was spawned by the odious Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jules Evans

‘I made this revolution’

In a white room in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a tattooed man from Georgia is trembling violently. His eyes are rolled back to the whites, his spine is arched, his arms flail in front of him as if he is being electrocuted. Behind him stands another man, Asiatic, completely bald, with dark piercing eyes. He shouts, almost raps, into the convulsing Georgian’s ears, ‘Drive out the filth! You are a strong man, charged with energy! Help yourself out of this!’ He repeats this over and over until the Georgian has a spasm and collapses in a trance. He is put on to a stretcher, carried out of the room and laid in a bed with high metal sides.