Features

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

The problem, not the solution

The last thing we need now is a Tory recovery. Proper conservatives should dread such a thing as much as Labour’s serious faction dreaded victory in the March 1983 Darlington by-election. They longed for the most crushing defeat possible, because it would have provided the pretext for a well-planned putsch against the doomed romantic party leader Michael Foot, chosen in an emotional spasm in 1980. But, to their fury and dismay, Labour won in Darlington. Michael Foot was saved and duly led his movement to ruin, with some dignity, a few months later. Just as I said a year ago in an article for this magazine which has never been rebutted, let alone refuted, by any Conservative thinker, the Tory party is now a train-wreck, not a train, an obstacle to the cause it pretends to serve.

Daniel Kruger

The thinking man’s trumpet

Britain’s pre-eminent conservative philosopher is rather muddy. I’ve seen him in London, tidy in yellow corduroy. In Wiltshire Roger Scruton is green and brown. Sundey Hill Farm, where he lives with his wife and their two young children, is a ‘rural consultancy’, a ‘meta-farm’ whose services include ‘log-cutting’ and ‘logic-chopping’. Scruton complains that he is too busy with the mental to do much manual labour, but this doesn’t stop him looking as though he’s been wrestling with a hedge. As an undergraduate, in the shadow of his schoolteacher father, who detested the Conservatives, Roger Scruton was a ‘vague socialist’.

Paul Robinson

Thought police

When the remaining flotsam of 20 or so Conservative MPs wash up on dry land after the next general election, they may do well to consider why it was that during this Parliament, every time the credibility of Prime Minister Tony Blair sank further into the depths, the credibility of their own party sank with it. If Tony Blair is George W. Bush’s poodle, the Conservative party is the poodle’s poodle or, as Jonathan Swift might have put it, the flea’s flea: ‘Naturalists observe, a flea/hath smaller fleas that on him prey,’ he wrote, ‘And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em,/and so proceed ad infinitum.’ Blair’s genius has been to make his political opponents complicit in his own crimes, so that when he suffers for them, so do they.

Michael Gove

Power to the people

As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I’ve had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are the trickiest to answer. Most of my acquaintances have been extraordinarily encouraging about my decision to relinquish a journalistic career at the Times in the hope of being elected as the MP for Surrey Heath. But the father of one friend was perplexed. Sufficiently so to ask the question I least expected. It wasn’t ‘Why have you done it?’ He could quite understand why someone would want to give up the frustrations of shouting on the sidelines and see if they could make any difference on the pitch.

Friday

John Laughland

Bloody hypocrisy

A brutal-looking 17-year-old girl takes a long swig from a bottle of sake and thumps it down on the bar, as an ugly- looking man next to her asks her if she likes Ferraris. ‘Do you want to screw me?’ she replies. ‘Yes,’ he says, his goofy and surprised smile revealing bad teeth. She immediately stabs him in the stomach and, as his blood gurgles out, she says triumphantly, ‘How does that feel? Do you still want to penetrate me now?’ He falls off the bar stool, dead — and the audience laughs. A voiceover from a third character confirms that the scene is indeed supposed to be funny, and the murder cool, because the young man is hideous and stupid while the girl is utterly vicious.

Saturday

Melanie Phillips

Let’s bring back stigma and shame

The Turkish government recently announced that it intended to make adultery a criminal offence. This was not altogether surprising, since the Turkish government adheres to the principles of Islam, under whose laws adultery is a crime punishable by flogging or execution. Nevertheless, it caused such uproar among more progressive Turks, not to mention horrifying the EU, which threatened to tear up Turkey’s membership application as a result, that the Turkish government has now binned the proposal (perversely, along with a raft of reforms designed to impress the jittery Europeans; but let that pass). So far, so relatively unexceptional.

Tony Barnett

Aids denial costs lives

The figures are unremittingly stark. Last year alone 2.2 million people died from Aids in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-five million people are infected with Aids in Africa. It is not like the Black Death. It is worse. Yet for whatever reason not everyone accepts the seriousness of the Aids epidemic. The South African writer Rian Malan is one of those sceptics. Scion of a famous Afrikaner family, Malan is the author of My Traitor’s Heart, the tortured and much admired 1990 homily on the white man’s relationship with Africa. In The Spectator last Christmas he argued that the Aids epidemic was far less serious than the experts suggest. The story carried the headline ‘Africa isn’t dying of Aids’. Malan likes to shock.

Richard Beeston

The terror, the terror

Baghdad You might have thought that sitting down to watch a series of filmed executions would become tedious after the tenth unfortunate victim is dragged before the camera to be slaughtered like a sheep. After all, most of the characters do not change much. There are the hooded Islamic holy warriors standing to attention, as the charges are read out to the accused, usually a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling and blindfolded on the floor before them. The sets are the same too, often a dingy cement backroom in a house probably on the outskirts of Baghdad. The build-up is tedious. A martial song in Arabic exhorts the faithful to fight and then the commander reads out a statement, often a hammy delivery that even a B-movie Egyptian actor would not get away with.

Niall Ferguson

Britain first

Niall Ferguson says that Tony Blair and George W. Bush are perfect partners — Christian soldiers armed with Bibles and bazookas — but Britain now has more in common with Europe than with the United States ‘I kind of think that the decisions taken in the next few weeks will determine the rest of the world for years to come. As primary players, we have a chance to shape the issues that are discussed. Both of us will have enormous capital and a lot of people will be with us.’ — Tony Blair to George W. Bush, March 2003. Barring some act of God — an authority both men are known regularly to consult — Tony Blair and George W. Bush are now safe. Politically (and what else matters?) they have survived the Iraq war.

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Property Hot property

Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over with a pang of guilt-tinged longing. Once the province of spivs, gangsters and noxious tanneries, this tangle of warehouses, wharves and printworks, Victorian railway arches and council housing has, since the mid-Nineties, emerged as a hip and thriving artists’ quarter.

Mira Barhillel

Property English Heritage

Over the summer, television viewers were treated to a series hosted by the photogenic chief executive of English Heritage, Simon Thurley. In Lost Buildings of Britain, Mr Thurley made a bit of a fool of himself attempting to ‘recreate’ lost architectural treasures based on old drawings and other clues. One superb building which did not feature in this series was the historic Baltic Exchange in the City of London, described in its prime as ‘a veritable fairy palace’ and demolished three years ago. But Mr Thurley will not want to remind anyone of it, as its loss was entirely the fault of English Heritage.

Gerald Cadogan

Property Hungary

Hungary entered the EU in May, 15 years after the fall of communism. Already Budapest is a new place, and everyone has a car. But don’t be put off: the city’s old pleasures — the music, the thermal spas and boating on the Danube — will stay for ever. If you’re buying a house in Budapest, the first question is shall it be Buda, or Pest? Or their suburbs? Buda is the city’s steep acropolis, with the royal castle (rebuilt after 1945) on top and a lower town below beside the great river that separates Buda from Pest. Linking the two is the 1840s Chain Bridge, a suspension bridge designed by William Tierney Clark after he did Marlow Bridge across the Thames.

Interconnect

What’s that on your head?

Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour. Yes, it was worrying, but in hindsight it was also a time of high comedy. After three weeks of treatment, I went on holiday to Cornwall. My young children looked a little more appalled each day and my wife Philippa pretended not to notice. After the holiday the treatment went on for another three weeks: a made-to-measure plastic mask bolted my head to the table, and the nurses directed two shafts of coloured light at the same tiny point on my brow.

Margaret Lenton

Litigation, litigation, litigation

I love my job as a head teacher. It is really satisfying to be responsible for young people and to guide them in realising their potential. But sadly my time is increasingly occupied by lawyers and I have to divert an ever growing proportion of my budget away from staff, books and equipment towards defending and insuring against legal actions. Head teachers do, on occasion, have to exclude pupils. Parents are sometimes reluctant to believe that their child can do any wrong. In one case, a parent having chosen my school, which advertises discipline and strong sanctions, stated that discipline should not be imposed in any circumstances.

Interconnect

The incoming sea of faith

When I was an atheist back in the 1960s, its future seemed assured. I grew up in Northern Ireland, where religious tensions and violence had alienated many from Christianity. Like so many disaffected young people then, I rejected religion as oppressive, hypocritical, a barbarous relic of the past. The sociologists were predicting that religion would soon die out; if not, suitably enlightened governments and social agencies could ensure that it was relegated to the margins of culture, the last refuge of the intellectually feeble and socially devious. The sooner it was eliminated, the better place the world would be. Atheism then had the power to command my mind and excite my heart. It made sense of things, and offered a powerful vision of the future.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

A free market in religion

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing in front of St Michael’s church I can see the roof of the Reverend Keith Ward’s house. Cumnor isn’t quite the sort of parish you’d expect to find the former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a liberal intellectual whom the Archbishop of Canterbury calls ‘a much loved and admired thinker’. In his book The Case for Religion Keith Ward says that it is imperative that all religions accept that other faiths contain truth too.

Frances Osborne

Lilla’s war with China

Little old ladies with bottles of ink, mounds of writing-paper and firm hands have long been the bane of government officials. There’s even a name for them: ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells’. My great-grandmother, Lilla, whom I remember living in that venerable Kentish town, was Super-Angry. She was so angry that at the age of 100, after an extraordinary exchange of correspondence lasting 30 years and consuming many sheets of Basildon Bond, she succeeded in extracting a cheque from none other than the communist government of China. And when I was writing Lilla’s Feast, the story of her remarkable life, I discovered how she did it. Lilla had long been tough. In the 1930s she ran two businesses in a colonial trading port in China called Chefoo.

Simon Heffer

Why we must not appease the Kremlin

Russia’s continuing brutality in Chechnya is the root cause of the Beslan massacre. So why does Blair grovel to Putin? The answer, says Simon Heffer, is oil Were any of us unlucky enough to be Vladimir Putin, we too would be keen to make the rest of the world think that what happened in Beslan last week was yet another chapter in al-Qa’eda’s campaign of international terrorism. Luckily, you would have some evidence to bear out your theory. Some of the hostage-takers were Arab mercenaries. Some Chechen separatists have been trained abroad and have received funding from international organisations.

Saturday

Radek Sikorski

New life in a land of death

I had long wanted to return to Kushk-e-Serwan, a small Afghan village at the narrower end of the Hari Rud river oasis, between the Hindu Kush and Iran. The first time I went there, I was travelling with Ismael Khan, the leader of the Afghan resistance in Western Afghanistan. Most days bombs fell on places where we had stayed a day or two before, as soon as Communist spies could report our whereabouts. We arrived in the vicinity on the morning of 11 August 1987, and while I was there with his men, a couple of Soviet jets arrived too. Afghan houses look impressive, but the mud brick turns to dust at the slightest impact. The valley darkened as the bombs fell and the dust dispersed. I spent the next couple of hours watching villagers dig out their dead, mostly women and children.

Martin Vander Weyer

Regional forecast

If John Prescott needed an easy-to-read précis of the Electoral Commission’s findings on all-postal ballots, published last week, a brave civil servant could have given it to him in four words on a Post-it note: ‘Whoops, not enough fraud.’ The Commission was expected to report widespread hanky-panky in June’s pilot all-postal Euro-elections — especially among Labour activists in the West Yorkshire Asian community, who were alleged to have saved their neighbours the bother of walking to the post-box by collecting their voting papers, helpfully completing them, and delivering them in bundles.