Features

Saturday

Andrew Gilligan

Can Iraq make it?

Baghdad The election-night special on Iraqi TV, rather like the election itself, bore little resemblance to anything that British viewers might be familiar with. There were few candidates to interview (too scared), no counts to visit (too slow), and a merciful lack of macho electoral clichés. In Iraq, the terms ‘battleground seat,’ ‘war room’ and ‘political annihilation’ are not the concoctions of spin-doctors in suits trying to sound tough. They are all too horribly real. The Iraqi Dimblebys might not have had any exit polls to talk about — would you want to stand outside a polling station all day with a clipboard in this country? — but they did have suicide-bomb polls.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

The man who rescued Caravaggio

Sir Denis Mahon arrived at The Spectator 40 minutes before he was due to be interviewed. While I scuffed around in search of tape recorders and sensible questions, Britain’s most distinguished collector and historian of Italian art sat in the editor’s office, waiting. Every now and then I looked at him through the door jamb. He stared peacefully into the middle distance with his hands folded in his lap: nearly 100 years and £20 million worth of old man, upholstered in impeccable three-piece pinstripe. Eventually I introduced myself. I want to ask you lots of things, I said, about this government, about how badly they treat art collectors. I gather you’re going to see the Prime Minister. ...

Interconnect

You can keep identity politics

Multiculturalism is in crisis. By that I don’t just mean that political correctness has ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail likes to put it: the British public worked that out long ago, and merely shrugs when it learns (for example) that the Lake District National Park is to abolish its guided walks because they attract insufficient numbers of black people. ‘Political correctness’ is shorthand for the etiquette and working practices of the most influential ideology of our age: multiculturalism, or ‘identity politics’. And that ideology is falling apart. This collapse is not evidence of multiculturalism’s weakening hold on public life.

Saturday

Charles Glass

They stood me up

Charles Glass discovers that women are now cancelling dinner dates by text. What’s the world coming to? For the sixth time in as many months, a woman has cancelled our dinner. In and of itself, a cancelled dinner is a trifle. The cancellations themselves were less surprising than the timing and the method. Did the women, all of whom are friends, give me time to make alternative arrangements? Did they call? Did they explain or apologise? Did they hell! Each of these grown women sent a message via text or SMS to my mobile telephone. Average warning time pre-dinner: nine minutes. One message arrived after dinner. When it happens six times, you wonder whether you have stumbled upon a phenomenon. The aberration becomes the trend.

John Bercow

Kick them out!

Last week the United Nations still had no staff at Banda Aceh airport, which is the focal point for the tsunami relief effort in Indonesia. What could more graphically illustrate the miserable inadequacy of this once great body than its failure to act decisively following the Boxing Day disaster? It lagged behind the Americans and the Australians in bringing aid to the devastated areas and was slow to coordinate the activities of international NGOs. Only four years ago in the Millennium Declaration the UN was described as ‘the indispensable common house of the entire human family’. Yet today it is mired in controversy.

Jeremy Clarke

Animals don’t have human rights

‘What happened to him?’ I said, meeting the eye of a thin magpie through the bars of his cage. Andrew Meads, veteran bird rescuer and proprietor of Safewings wildlife sanctuary at Isham, near Kettering, Northants, related the following case history. A fortnight ago a man driving a stolen car suddenly lost control, mounted the pavement, crashed through a wall and came to a halt in a flower-bed of a suburban front garden. Confronted by the angry house owner as he got out of the car, the driver suddenly whipped out a live magpie from his coat pocket and brandished it at her as if it were a deadly weapon. He then flung the bird in her face and hopped it.

Saturday

Ross Clark

A cut-price death penalty

Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog and Duck. On Wednesday Tory MP Patrick Mercer published a Bill which would allow householders greater rights in fighting intruders. Already the Bill has been enthusiastically backed by numerous MPs on both sides of the House and seems likely to become law unless the government blocks it in favour of its own, similar initiative.

Robert Gorelangton

Truth from the trenches

Robert Gore-Langton on R.C. Sherriff, the deeply untrendy author of Journey’s End, whose run finishes next month One of the more bizarre sights of last year must have been at a matinee in the West End. A major in the Royal Green Jackets turned up to see the hit production of Journey’s End, the first world war play set in the trenches. He did so with a crocodile of 50 riflemen in tow. Recruited from the inner cities and hard as nails, most of them had never seen a play before. A handful thought it was like Blackadder Goes Forth only without the jokes. The vast majority adored it; according to the major it had been ‘the best thing they had done in the army’.

Simon Heffer

The slob culture

Simon Heffer deplores the fashion for dressing down. It’s ugly and disrespectful and leaves men looking like idiots We all know that life under the Blair Terror can be pretty grim, but I am beginning to fret about the increasing signs of a collapse in national morale. I do not refer to the well-documented exodus of Britons to live abroad, or to our sense of defeat in the face of rising crime and seemingly unlimited taxation, or even to the semi-formal establishment of the Church of England as an arm of the light entertainment industry. I refer, of course, to the demolition of our pride and self-respect to the extent that many even quite civilised men can no longer bring themselves to dress appropriately when they go out in public.

Douglas Davis

The deadly threat of a nuclear Iran

Douglas Davis reveals new evidence that Tehran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel, and argues that the mullahs’ nuclear facilities must be destroyed The Middle East is on the brink of going nuclear, and the rest of the world is fiddling or looking the other way. The United States is draining its energies in Iraq, the Europeans are fussing over ‘soft power’ diplomacy, and the UN monitoring agencies are dithering. ‘We are not asking the tough questions,’ a senior official in the Vienna-based UN nuclear-monitoring industry told me this week. ‘We are not being persistent. We are too afraid to offend. We are failing.’ One of the problems is that the Americans have lost credibility over Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Saturday

Sholto Byrne

The faithful departed

‘Where have all the Methodists gone?’ This question, posed in the kind of fusty second-hand bookshops where those behind the counter actually read, or at least take an interest in, the wares they sell, led to a baffled silence. The toppling rows of volumes may have contained theses on John Wesley, or detailed accounts of the fierce schismatic battles that split Methodism again and again in the 19th century. But on the current state of the Methodist Church, they had nothing to say. Eventually a fellow browser offered an opinion. ‘To America?’ Here, when we talk of Methodism, it is nearly always in the past, of its role in the union movement or its influence on the Labour party.

Max Hastings

Phoney war

Max Hastings says it’s about time our leaders stopped playing political games and accepted that ‘international terror’ cannot be defeated by conventional military means If the leaders of the Western world want to do our security a favour, they could adopt a New Year resolution to economise on the use of the word ‘terrorist’ in their rhetoric. This proposal is based not upon indulgence towards al-Qa’eda or the IRA, but upon the need to think clear-headedly about how best to protect our societies. Through the ages, Britain has faced enemies of many creeds and nationalities. Today, a mind-boggling weight of verbiage is addressed to the perils posed not by Spaniards or Frenchmen, Germans or Russians, but instead by ‘terrorism’.

Saturday

Julia Langdon

Was it all a terrible mistake?

The rooftop view from the sixth-floor office of the chairman of the British Council — at the cheaper end of The Mall up against Admiralty Arch — encompasses the political landmarks of the new occupant. There’s the Welsh Office, for the man’s roots, halfway down Whitehall on the left; the office of the European Commission, to the right of Westminster Abbey and Methodist Central Hall; and, slap in the middle, Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster. ‘The one thing you never need to buy is a clock,’ says Neil Kinnock.

Rod Liddle

Let the people of England speak

In the middle of December last year, five police officers turned up at the Welsh home of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, and arrested him on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Griffin was driven to Halifax police station and forced to watch three hours’ worth of his own speeches, which the police had surreptitiously recorded. He was then released without charge, bailed and told to reappear on 2 March this year — precisely at the time campaigning is expected to begin for the next general election. Mr Griffin is standing against David Blunkett, in Sheffield Brightside. A bunch of other BNP members were arrested at the same time as Mr Griffin.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Waiting for Mr Right

I live in a city of the dead surrounded by a city of the living. The great cemetery of Kensal Vale is a privately owned metropolis of grass and stone, of trees and rusting iron. At night, the security men scour away the drug addicts and the drunks; they expel the lost, the lonely and the lovers; and at last they leave us with the dark dead in our urban Eden. Eden? Oh yes — because the dead are truly innocent. They no longer know the meaning of sin. They never lose their illusions. Other forms of life remain overnight — cats, for example, a fox or two, grey squirrels, even a badger and a host of lesser mammals, as well as some of our feathered friends.

Deborah Devonshire

Christmas at Chatworth

Not much was made of Christmas at Chatsworth in the 18th and 19th centuries. Diaries and letters hardly mention it. Prince Albert’s trees and decorations took a long time to reach Derbyshire and would have been wasted on the December air because there were no children here for nearly a hundred years. At the turn of the 20th century the grown-ups made up for this strange state of affairs at Christmas-time with homemade entertainment. The theatre in the house, which seats 250 people, was used every night and neighbours were roped in to take parts in the sketches between ambitious songs sung by Princess Daisy of Pless and other would-be opera stars among the guests. They moved in for the duration, so had lots of time for rehearsals. Mrs Hwfa Williams (where did she get that name?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Poor Jack is dead

Somebody once said that the English don’t really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connolly’s characteristically over-elaborate ‘Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope’: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes, while we breed 20 million pheasants artificially every year to be shot, and inevitably sometimes winged and left to die. We pass laws (or they do) making cruelty to goldfish a criminal offence, while the loathsomeness of fish farming is added to the horrors of factory farming.

Andrew Gimson

Carry on, cardiologist

On a Friday morning earlier this year I kept an appointment with Dr Mark Hamilton, a consultant physician and gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, to ask him about a bowel complaint. I was in two minds about whether my symptoms were significant enough to justify taking up Dr Hamilton’s time. It seemed to me that if I went to see him, I might be yielding to hypochondria, but if I did nothing, and I turned out to have the early stages of a still curable cancer, my wife would be furious. She speaks very highly of Dr Hamilton, who has treated her for ulcerative colitis. About a year ago she had a colonoscopy, and I formed the distinct impression that she would not be satisfied until I had undergone the same procedure.

A.N. Wilson

Holy sage

There is an old Jewish proverb that if God came to earth, people would start smashing His windows. After an initial period of loving Rowan Williams, the press and the Church are beginning to have their doubts. The man who was hailed as the complicated Welsh poet and the much longed-for Intellectual in Public Life is now a Welsh Windbag who can control neither the openly gay bishops in America nor the conservative evangelicals at home. He has dismayed his former liberal friends by supporting, a little oddly, it must be said, a measure in the Synod (heavily defeated in the event) which would have brought back heresy trials to the Church.