Features

Saturday

Interconnect

The sovereign individual

The people of the world are moving on, says Mark Steyn, and leaving Western Europeans — and Canadians — far behind New Hampshire I was stunned to hear they were closing the Rover plant at Longbridge. Mainly I was stunned because I had no idea they still made cars at Longbridge. I was vaguely following things up to a decade or three back: I knew that ‘British Leyland’ had gone, and that Red Robbo was no longer picketing the plant every night on ITN and the BBC, and that various foreigners owned what was left of the British car industry. But the news that Longbridge is going out of business is far less amazing to me than the news that they were still (after a fashion) in business — in 2005!

Interconnect

Democracy in danger

What with postal fraud and dodgy demographics, next month’s poll is loaded in favour of the government. Rod Liddle says it’s about time Robert Mugabe started to send election monitors to Britain Isn’t it about time we got a little angrier and a little more scandalised? On 5 May we will troop up to the polling booths having endured four weeks of unfathomably banal soundbites, platitudinous drivel and vapid party political broadcasts — and we will do so because we believe it is our duty and because we have faith in the process. General elections and the whole notion of parliamentary democracy is as British as steak-and-kidney pie. We have it and many others do not, much to their disfavour. We trust it and we have implicit trust in ourselves not to abuse it.

Saturday

Alexander Van Straubenzee

The stench of death

Lieutenant John Randall discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by accident. Sixty years ago, on 15 April 1945, Randall, then a 24-year-old SAS officer, was on a reconnaissance mission in northern Germany.

Richard Littlejohn

Nothing less than victory

‘It’s the Sun wot won it,’ crowed Kelvin MacKenzie with characteristic chutzpah on the front page of Britain’s best-selling newspaper after Neil Kinnock had crashed to defeat in the 1992 general election. As the nation went to the polls, the Currant Bun featured the Welsh Windbag’s head inside a 40-watt bulb, under the headline, ‘If Kinnock wins, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’ When the Tories were returned to office, Kelvin was quick to claim the credit. Well, up to a point, Lord Wapping. The Sun has a voice, but it doesn’t have a vote. In truth, it was the Sun’s readers wot won it, just as they had in every other election in modern times.

Norman Davies

God and mammon

Krakow The greatest churchman of modern times is dead; and the most Catholic nation in Europe is bereft. John Paul II, ‘Papa Wojtyla’ has passed on to a better life. His faithful compatriots must fend for themselves. Men and women weep without shame. Requiem services are celebrated every hour from dawn till midnight. Congregations spill out on to the street, kneeling on the paving stones. Thousands of candles flicker in their coloured-glass holders before makeshift shrines. Radio stations play sombre symphonies or take calls from distressed listeners. The TV channels which aren’t closed down flip endlessly between ‘St Peter’s Square — Live’ and long prepared films about the late Pope’s life. The presenters wear black.

Peter Oborne

How Blair betrays the Crown

Peter Oborne reveals the calculations that led the Prime Minister to ditch the royal wedding in favour of the Pope’s funeral Fifty years ago, almost to the day, Winston Churchill retired as prime minister at the grand old age of 80. On the eve of his retirement the great man gave a private dinner for the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and a very small number of family and friends. It was agreed in advance between the Palace and 10 Downing Street that there should be no speeches. However, at the end of the dinner the Queen did propose a simple toast to ‘my prime minister’. Churchill then rose to reply. Those present later recalled the look of slight panic that showed itself on the face of Clementine Churchill at this moment.

Saturday

Rachel Polonsky

Russia in the dock

Rachel Polonsky says Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a prisoner of conscience, and his show trial stands as an indictment of the country’s criminal justice system Moscow In an iron cage in Hall 56 of the Meshchansky Court, the former chief executive of Yukos sits on his woollen hat, an anorak stuffed into the bars beside him. As his trial enters its 11th month, it is winter still in Moscow. The lumpen guard beside the cage fiddles with a pair of handcuffs, trying to stay awake. On the first row of visitors’ benches, the elderly mother of the accused clasps her shawl, holding her son in a steady gaze. Emerging from her handbag is a small green book called Democracy. Scratched in biro on the back of the bench are the words ‘Free MBK’.

Brendan O’Neill

Al-Qa’eda is a conspiracy of alienated middle-class kids

When Sajid Badat, formerly of Gloucester, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to conspiring to blow up an aeroplane with a crude shoe-bomb device (before bottling it), there was an audible intake of breath among New Labour politicians and Muslim community leaders. The papers said he was quiet and bright, a good Muslim educated at a Church of England school (Gloucester’s prestigious Crypt Grammar School for Boys, which counts the late Sir Robin Day among its alumni). What was a nice kid like him doing hanging out with a nasty crew like al-Qa’eda? In fact, Badat is about as archetypal an al-Qa’eda member as you will find.

Simon Heffer

Honi soi qui mal y pense

Ours would be a grim age if we were to deny millions of people cheap and satisfying entertainment, and so, therefore, perhaps we should be especially grateful to the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles as they approach their wedding day. Few people in Britain seem to welcome the happiness the couple clearly feel as they approach the regularisation of their relationship. However, the joy the public finds instead in engaging in acts of spite, hypocrisy, gratuitous vilification and outright republicanism seems to more than make up for that. Among politicians even one so supposedly senior as the oafish Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, allowed himself a sneer when the engagement was announced.

Saturday

Harry Mount

What makes a hero?

‘Flashman’s just a monster,’ says George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world, and at least he’s honest about himself. But that was because he assumed that his memoirs would never be published.’ I’d just been putting to the author of the Flashman novels the theory of this magazine’s editor: that far from being a scoundrel, Flashman — the fag-roasting rotter thrown out of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays only to pop up in the great historic moments of the Victorian age — was in fact the toppest of eggs; an accidental hero who’s actually the genuine article because he at least admits to his flaws.

Miriam Gross

What it means to be Jewish

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived. My parents both came from secular, middle-class, professional German (and Russian) families and although — unlike thousands of German Jews in the 19th and early 20th century — they didn’t convert to Christianity, they were nevertheless assimilated members of German society. Indeed they believed that assimilation was the best answer to the Jewish ‘problem’. My mother hoped that I would marry a non-Jew, preferably an Englishman.

Interconnect

Labour’s stolen votes

Birmingham At one o’clock in the morning of 9 June last year, two days before the local council elections, Police Sergeant John Rattenberry of Erdington police station, Birmingham, was called to investigate something strange going on inside a warehouse. Here’s what he witnessed, in his own words: ‘I entered the first floor of the warehouse and went into a room where I saw approximately five Asian males along with four police officers. I could see a large table on which there were a lot of miscellaneous papers and A5 unsealed envelopes. I could see that the envelopes contained several pieces of paper including marked ballot papers.

Anthony Browne

Church of martyrs

For most citizens of Iraq, the invasion meant the end of tyranny. For one group, however, it meant a new start: the country’s historic Christian community. When the war stopped, persecution by Islamists, held in check by Saddam, started. At a church in Basra I visited a month after the war ended, the women complained of attacks against them for not wearing the Islamic veil. I saw many Christian-owned shops that had been firebombed, with many of the owners killed for exercising their legal right to sell alcohol. Two years and many church attacks later, Iraq may still be occupied by Christian foreign powers, but the Islamist plan to ethnically cleanse Iraq of its nearly 2,000-year-old Assyrian and Armenian Christian communities is reaching fruition.

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....