Features

Saturday

Stephen Haseler

Why Europe must have the Bomb

America’s decision to pull troops out of Europe and the Far East should not be seen as a retreat into isolationism. On the contrary: it is classic ‘Rumsfeld-lite’ — the downsizing of old-fashioned Cold War units (principally in Germany) and a new emphasis on flexible, mobile, hi-tech forces to be located around the rim of the Eurasian heartland. By redeploying and streamlining its military the Pentagon believes it will be better placed to respond to threats anywhere in the world. Maybe the Pentagon is right, for the time being. In spite of the streamlining, however, the Bush–Rumsfeld doctrine of ‘full spectrum dominance’ looks a lot less convincing now than it did two years ago.

Boris Johnson

Way to go, Dubya

Boris Johnson, at the Republican convention, says that Bush’s conservative credentials are not always convincing but his optimism is unfailingly inspiring New York Come off it, I am thinking to myself. The last time I saw Tuesday night’s Republican keynote speaker was only a week ago. I was lying comatose on a motel bed in North Carolina, flipping from channel to channel, and he arrived, starkers, in a Plexiglass bubble from space. As I recall, he then changed his batteries by carving a hole in his thorax, destroyed much of downtown Los Angeles with a runaway crane and narrowly failed to avert the annihilation of the earth.

Saturday

Daniel Wolf

Poster killer

According to Jean Paul Sartre, he was ‘the most complete man of his age’. John Berger likened the photograph of his corpse to Andrea Mantegna’s ‘Dead Christ’. When I went up to university, in the month of his death, October 1967, the walls were quilted with his image — the famous Korda photograph of the implacable revolutionary, with the beret, the Comandante star, the wispy hair and beard. I remember particularly a sickly poster version in psychedelic colours — mauve and turquoise and green — taped to the wall of a friend’s room. Even then, I thought, Che Guevara was unlikely to have had much to recommend him, a mythic fanatic adulated by ersatz revolutionaries in Cambridge.

Interconnect

High crimes and misdemeanours

Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord Palmerston, while foreign minister, had entered into a secret treaty with Russia. Nevertheless, impeachment remains part of parliamentary law, a recourse for desperate times. Many MPs feel certain that the moment critique has now arrived. They remain in a state of despair at the way the Prime Minister systematically misled the House of Commons and the British people over the Iraq war.

Saturday

John McEwen

Scotland’s Italian connection

John McEwen applauds the ‘Age of Titian’ in Edinburgh, and other Festival treats Sir Timothy Clifford celebrates the completion of the Playfair Project, uniting the 19th-century architect William Playfair’s two art temples on Edinburgh’s Mound, with an exhibition that is both a witty deceit and appropriately self-congratulatory. The Project gives Edinburgh an ‘exhibition complex’ that vies for charm and technological sophistication with any in the world. Obviously, the show celebrating such a milestone had to be something special: a ‘blockbuster’ that would not only attract sponsorship and pull in the punters, but would also draw specific attention to the significance of the Project.

Ella Windsor

American food sucks

Ella Windsor says that if you don’t like pigging out, you won’t much enjoy eating in the US, where The Cheesecake Factory serves portions big enough to kill an ox My American friends in England never stop complaining about the food here. It’s all ‘gloopy’, they say, and they bitch about the warm beer, grey curries and unidentifiable soups. Sometimes their longing for US comfort food — beefburgers, hotdogs, cookies, tacos and dairy queen ice cream — becomes so strong that some of them even resort to a company called the Food Ferry, a British Internet site that delivers Skippy Peanut Butter, beef jerky and Oreo cookies. My solution is a little different.

David Davis

Victim nation

The compensation culture costs Britain £10 billion a year. David Davis blames the human rights industry One hardly knows where to start. The teacher who won £55,000 from the taxpayer because she slipped on a chip. The parents of the Girl Guide who won £3,500 after singeing her fingers cooking sausages. The prisoner who successfully sued the government when he fell off the roof while trying to escape. The 200 travellers who were granted retrospective planning permission to set up a permanent camp on the edge of a small village because they had a ‘right to family life’. The serial murderer who successfully demanded the delivery of hard-core pornography to his prison cell because of his ‘right to information’.

Rod Liddle

Let’s go nuclear

I am not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that there is almost no oil left anywhere in the world. Out of a sort of childish spite, one is obviously delighted that soon enough countries like Saudi Arabia will have nothing with which to hold the world to ransom. And nothing has caused more environmental damage to our planet than the consumption of hydrocarbons (except maybe that comet which allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs). On the other hand, I am not sure that I wish my children to experience a rapid return to the Stone Age — which will be their future unless we begin to wean ourselves off both oil and, indeed, gas.

Saturday

George Osborne

While England sleeps

This week an unusual piece of junk mail joined the forest of pizza delivery leaflets and minicab cards on my doormat. It was a white envelope marked with six chunky coloured circles under which was written: ‘Inside: Important Information from HM Government’. I assumed the ‘important information’ would be that I had been specially selected to win a prize draw and almost threw it away. In fact it turned out to be a leaflet from something called the National Steering Committee on Warning and Informing the Public telling me ‘What to do in an Emergency’.

Andrew Lambirth

Postcards from the South Seas

If you consult The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists on the subject of William Hodges, the brief entry will inform you that he was a British landscape painter, pupil of Richard Wilson ‘and his most accomplished imitator’, and that not finding success in London he joined Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific as official landscape artist. That was in 1772–5. From 1780 to 1784 he was in India, and in 1790 he visited Russia. ‘Hodges’, we are told, ‘skilfully adapted Wilson’s technique and rules of composition to exotic material, while maintaining an air of documentary fidelity.’ I am a seasoned admirer of Yale’s Dictionary, expertly compiled by Erika Langmuir and Norbert Lynton, but this entry is too bald.

Benet Simon

Ban this evil rag!

The last time I visited my cousins — three boys between the ages of eight and 13 — they were playing a new video game that their mother had bought for them. The eight-year-old had hooked the computer up to an overhead projector and was cruising city streets in an enormous tank, pausing occasionally to point a flame-thrower in the direction of passing pedestrians, policemen and prostitutes and burning them to death. The game was Grand Theft Auto 2, the creation of a company called Rockstar, and it is at the centre of a $246 million lawsuit in the US, accused of provoking teenagers to real-life violence.

Katharine Whitehorn

Bernard Levin remembered

I knew Bernard Levin when we both worked on The Spectator at the end of the Fifties, during its uncharacteristically radical period. He wrote a parliamentary sketch under the name of Taper, and was about the first to treat the political scene as theatre — and amateur theatre at that — rather than a court of high seriousness, though the idea of doing it that way came from the editor, Brian Inglis. Bernard called it ‘the principle that you mainly record the slipping false teeth of those with whose views you disagree’. Inglis, the man who invented the phrase ‘fringe medicine’, had plucked Bernard from the magazine Truth, where he was doing theatre criticism.

Andrew Kenny

Another form of racism

Andrew Kenny says that the National party has met its logical end — in the bosom of the racist ANC Last week an Afrikaans man with a plump face, large spectacles and the nickname of ‘Kortbroek’ (Short Pants) announced that he was joining the ANC. Thus ends the 90-year history of the most radical and notorious political party in the history of South Africa. Thus ends the National party of apartheid. The writer J.G. Farrell once said that the greatest phenomenon of his age was the decline of the British empire. The greatest political experience of my life in South Africa has been the decline of Afrikaner power, which saw its zenith under apartheid.

Saturday

Peter Hitchens

State of decay

There has seldom been a time when responsible, intelligent people were less interested in serious politics. The main opposition, gripped by some Freudian delusion because reality is too hard to bear, behaves as if it were still the government and so cannot oppose or even think about doing so. The discourse of the mainstream parties is duller than congealed porridge. They seek, above all, to hide their real intentions and so must shun controversy. Many still act and speak as if any firm opinion is a sort of bad manners, like talking shop in the mess. It is left to buffoons like Robert Kilroy-Silk, ruffians like the BNP or fanatics like George Galloway to address the subjects that matter, and for the most part to get them wrong.

Celia Walden

It sure beats The Priory

The chances are that if you’re nearing 30, you have begun to feel the itch of dissatisfaction. You’ve struggled to find the perfect profession, job, partner and home, but have failed in at least one respect, and are suffering from a sense of existential disgruntlement that is becoming known as the quarter-life crisis. But however bad it gets, there is one temptation you must resist: the Alpha experience. I came across this phenomenon when a friend invited me to a dinner party recently in Holy Trinity Church on the Brompton Road. Our collective hosts were to be Alpha, an organisation that offers an introductory course in Christianity, over a meal with speeches followed by ‘informal chats’.

Daniel Wolf

Think before you bomb

If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists, officials, agencies and Blair are ignorant of the facts (although ignorance is invariably a contributing factor); it’s because the tragedy and the publicity exist in different universes.

Michael Hanlon

There’s no time like the present

The world is, we are told day after day, week after week, going to hell in a handcart. After the most brutal, catastrophic and inhuman century in history, the new millennium has kicked off in the way it clearly intends to go on. War, famine and pestilence stalk the savannahs and forests of Africa. The Middle East is turning into a charnel house. And the planet itself is under a human onslaught the likes of which we have never seen before. Every day, it seems, there is new and ever-more persuasive evidence that the age of doom, if not quite upon us, must surely be very nearly nigh. Last week we learned that the North Atlantic’s population of seabirds was under grave threat: global warming was heating the sea and killing off their fish prey.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Secrets of the mummies

Mummies have exerted a strange fascination over Westerners ever since the first tomb was rifled and its contents transported to Europe. At one point, the unwrapping of mummified bodies became fashionable events to which came fee-paying audiences of the rich. Lord Londesborough’s At Home card, for Monday, 10 June 1850, was a numbered invitation to attend at 144 Piccadilly. A mummy case in profile decorates the card which is thrillingly inscribed ‘A Mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past Two’. The problem with such dramatic divestments was that nearly all the useful information to advance our knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians was lost or destroyed during the spectacle.

Brendan O’Neill

What a load of b*ll*cks

Young men are being bullied into examining themselves for testicular cancer. It’s not very dignified, says Brendan O’Neill, and may do more harm than good Why is New Britain so obsessed with its young men’s testicles? If, like me, you are aged between 15 and 34 you will almost certainly have been advised by a doctor or a magazine feature or a glossy poster in a GP’s waiting room to test yourself regularly for signs of testicular cancer (or the Big TC for short). Health authorities and cancer charities are spending millions of pounds on ‘raising awareness’ of this disease, in order to keep us blokes on full alert for anything abnormal in the underwear department.

Ross Clark

The terror war we can win

Ross Clark says that if the government were to mount a real fight, we could defeat the animal rights terrorists — and prevent unnecessary suffering in the laboratories Besides the hefty clunk of The Spectator on your doormat this week, you will shortly be receiving HMG’s advice on how citizens should cope with a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction. It tells us to stock up with bottled water, tinned food and a tin opener. It is a noble exercise, preparing people for the worst, even if the government’s last grim warnings about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a little wide of the mark.