Features

Saturday

Interconnect

Dumbing down: the proof

As a service to Spectator readers who still have any doubts about the decline in educational standards, we are printing these exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1898. ENGLISH GRAMMAR 1. Write out in your best handwriting:— ‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands o’ Dee.’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she. The western tide crept up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see.The rolling mist came down and hid the land —And never home came she. 2. Parse fully ‘And call the cattle home.’ 3.

Andrew Gilligan

The case for not attacking Iran

Do the last few days remind you of anything, by any chance? Presidential heavy breathing about a ‘rogue’ Middle Eastern state; a supporting chorus of exiles with dramatic new claims; and a senior member of the US government bearing intelligence which turns out to be more spin than spine-chilling. Less than a month after the presidential election, the Bush White House has begun its campaign against Iran. In the week that Americans break for Thanksgiving, it might seem that, for Washington, the festival of the moment should really be Groundhog Day.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Lies, damned lies and education

When Tony Blair made his famous pledge to concentrate on ‘Education, education, education!’, maybe we all misheard, and he really said: ‘Obfuscation, obsfucation, obsfucation!’ After all, that is what his education ministers have spent the past seven years doing with school exam results. It isn’t hard to find a teacher these days who thinks there has been a lowering of standards of GCSEs. The dramatic improvement in pass rates over the past few years have not been achieved by better teaching or brighter children, they say, but by spoon-fed examination answers, excessive reliance on coursework, making it easier to get your parents to earn your qualifications for you.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Death to Iraqis, not to foxes

In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell us that the future of a traditional country sport enjoyed by barely a quarter of a million people in a damp little island off the north-western corner of Europe cannot be of the highest importance. And yet the hunting controversy is also like a great sheet of lightning which has lit up the whole political landscape in all its horrible detail.

Anthony Browne

Speak your mind, lose your life

Even by the grisly standards of ritual killing, it was shocking. On 2 November in Amsterdam the Dutch iconoclast and film-maker Theo van Gogh was dragged from his bicycle in broad daylight and murdered. His killer, a bearded Dutch-born Islamic radical of Moroccan descent, shot him six times and, as he pleaded for his life, slit his throat through the spinal column with a butcher’s knife, almost decapitating him. The assassin then impaled a five-page declaration of ‘holy war’ into van Gogh’s chest.

Simon Jenkins

People power

The rebuilt town hall of the ancient Borough of Henley still stands brave over its market place. This was Henley’s forum and seat of government, a one-stop shop of civic welfare. From here Henley’s streets were lit, paved and policed, Henley’s traders regulated, Henley’s children educated and its poor relieved, all under the aegis of Henley people. Anywhere abroad this would still be the case. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and throughout America municipalities the size of Henley continue to exercise such power. Town halls and mairies remain centres of local politics and administration and their people like it that way. Yet in England such buildings are empty shells, as if hit by a neutron bomb denuding them of people and power.

Toby Harnden

A cat ate the face of the corpse

Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding it like this?’ he mused. ‘Oh, man.’ Every window in the cinder-block house was shattered. A 155mm shell had blown a large hole through the roof. The front gate had been crushed by a Bradley fighting vehicle and every door kicked in.

Peter Oborne

The mean machine

Peter Oborne reveals that the Tories have a secret weapon — the Voter Vault — which has identified the 900,000 swing voters the party needs to capture at the next election According to all objective criteria the Conservative party leadership ought to be very low in the water. The assassination of Iain Duncan Smith almost exactly 12 months ago has brought about numberless benefits: a new mood among fundraisers; the restoration of discipline and purpose in the parliamentary party; much higher morale on the ground. But it has had no effect on the polls. The Conservatives remain exactly where they were before, becalmed in the low thirties, seemingly heading for a third consecutive landslide defeat. But a mood of optimism endures.

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

A spectator sees most of the City’s game

My arrival was marked by a memorandum: ‘LIBEL. Mr Christopher Fildes and Mr Auberon Waugh have joined the staff of The Spectator. As from today, The Spectator is no longer insured against libel. Gatley’s Libel and Slander may be consulted in my office. Nigel Lawson, Editor.’ We survived that, and in time Algy Cluff, as chairman, suggested that I should write a column on matters City and suburban. The phrase was Milton’s — from Paradise Regained, Dot Wordsworth tells me — but Captain Threadneedle, my racing correspondent, derived it from Epsom, home of the City and Suburban Handicap. That seemed appropriate, for (as the Sunday papers used to tell us) all human life is there. My book, A City Spectator (Nicholas Brealey, £12.

James Bartholomew

The death of decency

James Bartholomew on why bravery, kindness, modesty, generosity and restraint are fast disappearing from Britain — but not from George Bush’s America Those who depend on the BBC for news are still puzzling over why America voted for that bad George Bush. One reason that got little or no airtime was that they liked his domestic policy. Our state broadcasting station gave the impression that this policy consisted mainly of being anti-abortion. In fact, there was more to it than that. Bush appealed to a traditional part of America — not ‘traditional’ meaning ‘gormless know-nothing mid-Westerners and rednecks’, but traditional as in ‘decent’. Go to the Bush website (www.georgewbush.

Daniel Hannan

Accidental hero

Rocco Buttiglione talks to Daniel Hannan about homosexuality, homophobia and ‘the morbid totalitarianism of the Left’ Martyrdom often seems to bring, at the end, a sense of elation. Thomas More was plainly on a high as he was led to the block, getting off a couple of memorable quips to the headsman. Rocco Buttiglione is in a similar mood. Buoyed up by the unwonted attention that followed his exclusion from the European Commission, he is launching a pan-European campaign for liberty of conscience. Supportive emails are flooding in, people are cheering him in the street and, according to the polls, three out of four Italians back him. Shortly before leaving for Brussels, he had told a journalist, ‘I am nobody in Italy, but in Europe I shall be somebody.

Andrew Gilligan

The strongman of Baghdad

The first recorded political act of Iyad Allawi — now the interim prime minister of Iraq, then the student organiser for Saddam Hussein’s Baath party — struck some as a little extreme, even by the standards of Sixties campus politics. ‘We were at medical school in [pre-Saddam] Baghdad together,’ said his contemporary and, more recently, colleague on the Iraqi governing council, Raja al-Khuzai. ‘When we turned up for our exams, we found Iyad at the door of the examination hall, wearing combat gear and holding a machine-gun. He said, “I’m not going to allow anyone to take the exam. We’re on strike.” We were scared.

Bruce Anderson

The silence of the generals

It sometimes seems as if we no longer know how to think about our soldiers, or how to treat them. Last week, three men of the Black Watch fell in battle in Iraq. A sad event certainly, but it was hardly a reason for national mourning. Yet much of the media became hysterical. Some of the men’s relatives, who could hardly be expected to reason clearly in such circumstances, were interviewed as if their grief had turned them into experts on military deployment and the Middle East. At the same time, a brave soldier was being gravely maltreated, and no one seemed to notice. Last week, Trooper Kevin Williams of the Royal Tank Regiment stood in the dock at the Old Bailey, accused of murder. On 2 August last year, Trooper Williams was helping to man a checkpoint near Basra.

Boris Johnson

The beginning of hope in the Middle East

Boris Johnson says that the end of Yasser Arafat — the man who brought so much suffering to his own people — could be the opportunity for lasting peace But why did he do it? I asked the dark and bony young man in the yarmulka, still clearing up the scene of the murders. We were standing at the blackened steel counter of Shimmi’s cheese and olive shop, where three people had yesterday been killed by a suicide bomber and 13 seriously injured. It is a testimony to the vibrancy of the Carmel market, Tel Aviv, that business had resumed at the neighbouring stalls within minutes of the detonation, as though an act of self-destruction and murder by a 16-year-old was as banal as a traffic accident.

Saturday

Interconnect

Do little people go to heaven?

When they showed on television the cave on the island of Flores where the remains of little people had been found, I felt, I admit, a Yeatsian frisson that the world of politics cannot give. It was not delight at a new branch on the hat-stand of anthropoid evolution, but the thought that in the thick Indonesian rainforest there were (or had been, perhaps as recently as the time when dodos lived) creatures with whom we could converse, but which were not men. The appetite for talking to other creatures is amply exemplified by our often exasperated one-sided conversations: ‘Get off the bloody table, Tigger, there’s a good cat.

John Laughland

Western aggression

John Laughland on how the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine’s elections A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, ‘To expel all Jews from our country.

Radek Sikorski

Yearning to breathe free

Radek Sikorski says Russia is using strong-arm tactics to see that its man is returned in Ukraine’s presidential elections The architecture of Independence Square in central Kiev is late Brezhnev but the ambience is Prague 1989. Groups of people stand around tables scattered with the propaganda of the various candidates, or make impassioned speeches to cameras. The atmosphere of a genuine election, one in which the outcome is uncertain — so rare now in the former Soviet Union — is unmistakable. Boys and girls with orange scarves hand out campaign leaflets. It’s cool to be political and there is a sense of hope, urgency and foreboding that I last witnessed when I was their age during the Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980.

Jane Kelly

Searching for Stan

I feel like Job. Everything of significance is being stripped from me. In August my flat in west London was badly flooded; on 25 September I lost my job; on Monday lunch-time, 25 October, my beloved cat Stan, apparently terrified at the sight and sound of me knocking in a fence post, took off and hasn’t been seen since. In the six years since he came in as a stray, Stan has never spent a whole night out of my bed. He is rather cowardly and weighs a stone and a half, so he is not given to gadding about. On the morning after Stan took off I looked out of the kitchen window to see a massive magpie in the tree outside, sounding off with a voice like a cheap child’s rattle. An emblem of utter doom.

Saturday

Alistair Horne

Roots of terror

On the night of All Saints, 1954, a young honeymooning couple of French school teachers, dedicated to their work among underprivileged children, were dragged off a bus in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria and shot down. Their murder by the newly created FLN (National Liberation Front) marked the beginning of organised revolt against the French colonial ‘occupiers’. The eight-year-long Algerian war was to bring down six French prime ministers, open the door to de Gaulle — and come close to destroying him too. The war was the last of the grand-style colonial struggles, but, perhaps more to the point, it was also the first campaign in which poorly equipped Muslim mujahedin licked one of the top Western armies.

Adrian Blomfield

Why I turned against the war

Adrian Blomfield went to Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of the White House Nairobi The other day, shortly after returning from a longish stint in Iraq on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, I had dinner with a staunch Republican friend at a restaurant here. I was expecting a stern rebuke, and she did not disappoint. ‘I thought you were fairly unbiased,’ she said. ‘Yet your stories became increasingly focused on the attacks. Why didn’t you write about the good things, about how Americans troops are building schools and restoring services?’ Many of those intending to vote for President Bush next week would share my chum’s frustrations.