Features

Saturday

Deborah Ross

True to herself

I meet Joan Collins at Waterstone’s in Harrods, where she is signing copies of her latest novel, Misfortune’s Daughters. There she is, behind a big table and, although it pains me to say it, she is very much starting to look her age, the poor clapped-out old thing. And her fan base is not what it used to be. Sadly, she signs only one, maybe two novels during the full hour she is there, while the manager and I hop from foot to foot with embarrassment. Believe me, I take no pleasure in saying any of this, especially as Joan is not only a regular Spectator diarist but also an avid and devoted Spectator reader. Chances are, she is reading this, right now, in which case ...ha! Got you, Joanie! Has the adorable Percy helped you off the floor and back on to your chair yet?

Simon Heffer

What can you say?

Simon Heffer on the insidious new taboos that govern society — and how those who break them risk their careers and credibility It is hard to imagine that at the time when Britain entered what is now called the European Union, in 1973, there would have been such a fuss about the religious beliefs of Mr Rocco Buttiglione, the nominee for the post of Italy’s commissioner. In a predominantly Catholic community, the views for which he is now being vilified would have been regarded as perfectly reasonable.

Saturday

Sarah Perry

A little unexpected

The winning article in the 2004 Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize. There were more than 60 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Horatio Clare, Simon Matthew Kingston, Joanna Kavenna, Bertie Cairns and Barnabas William Erskine Campbell. In the Jollibee burger bar, Kuya Virgo held out his hands. Cradled in each palm was a duck’s egg, still warm from its boiling water. He looked at us expectantly; we looked back. My husband reached out first. ‘Thank you, po,’ he said smilingly. I followed swiftly, attempting a little bravado: other British visitors had apparently responded to the ultimate Filipino culinary challenge with enthusiastic fits of vomiting. Under Virgo’s instruction, we tapped the eggs at the tapered point on the Formica tabletop.

Beryl Bainbridge

Scouse honour

I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned to defend their country during the Six Day War. And that, following an unfortunate leading article in last week’s Spectator, is what I am now doing. The city I grew up in, a quarter destroyed by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, had once been a monument to trade and commerce. When my father was born, there were sailing ships in Salthouse Dock.

Max Hastings

We want to see the back of Bush

The word ‘hate’ should be used cautiously, but most British people seem to hate George W. Bush. The Spectator’s YouGov poll this week — see panel opposite — suggests that only 11 per cent of British voters and about 13 per cent of MPs would welcome a Republican victory in the presidential election. A convincing 53 per cent say they would be either ‘unhappy’ or downright ‘miserable’ if the incumbent renews his tenancy of the White House. There is exceptional British interest in this contest. About a quarter of poll respondents say they do not care about the outcome, but that leaves almost three quarters who profess to mind a good deal.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

Australian odyssey

I must admit that the first arts event in which I participated on arriving in Australia was entirely by chance. Sitting in the sun on the restaurant terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, looking at the ferries bustling in and out of Circular Quay, I picked up a small printed notice that had been placed on my table. It told me that, as part of the current city-wide contemporary art show, the chair in which I would normally have been sitting had been swapped with one from a café in Hanoi. As I pondered on this and gazed across the water, the arm of a crane swung into view and dropped an enormous rock on to a red car that had been parked at the bottom of the steps leading up to the Opera House. That turned out to be a part of the same show.

Roger Scruton

The state can’t set you free

The Human Rights Act has seemed to many to be an innocent adaptation of principles already contained within our common law, and indeed affirmed by statute once before, in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Seen in this way, the Act is no more than an affirmation of an ancient principle of our jurisdiction, which is that the law exists to protect the individual from oppression, whether that oppression be exerted by criminals, by neighbours or by those in authority. But this vision of the matter overlooks a profound distinction between common law and civilian jurisdictions, and between the English presumption that you are free until the law forbids you and the Continental presumption that you are free only if the law explicitly says so.

Owen Matthews

Ankara should be wary of Brussels

Earlier this month Turkey’s bid to join the European Union crept past the tipping point from possibility to probability. The European Commission recommended that accession negotiations be opened with Ankara, and the outgoing enlargement commissioner Günter Verheugen announced that ‘no further obstacles remain’ on Turkey’s path. The news sent the Turkish press into frenzies of enthusiasm, with headlines screaming, ‘Europe, here we come!’, as though egging on the national sports team in the Euro championships, or a conquering Turkish army on its way to, say, Vienna. While no one was actually dancing in the streets, they no doubt will when the EU’s Council of Ministers sets a starting date for talks come December.

Ross Clark

How Labour is turning Britain into a land of paupers

If there was one reason above any other for the British electorate’s flight to socialism in 1945, it was surely the means test. In some ways the national government’s grudging state charity of the Depression years was worse than nothing. For his ha’p’orth of black pudding, the 1930s welfare claimant had first to surrender his dignity, his privacy and in some cases his home. A claimant for the dole or the old age pension had to submit to inspection by the means test man, who had the power to enter his home and order him to dispose of every last luxury before money would be paid. Tales circulated about pensioners ordered to sell dining chairs or pictures from their walls.

Saturday

Interconnect

A matter of whim and fashion?

Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students to imitate. He certainly isn’t that any more. The forthcoming exhibition of early Raphael at the National Gallery may cause his popular stock to rise again, but surely not to that extent. Raphael is a prime example of an artist whose renown has slumped; he isn’t unknown but nor is he ever likely to be again the acme of everything that a painter should be.

John Laughland

Putin the poodle

Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore piquant, although presumably unintended, when last week a hundred Western politicians and ‘intellectuals’ published just such a missive, addressed to the heads of state and government of the EU and Nato. In it, they attacked the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saying that his authoritarian behaviour rendered impossible any true partnership between Russia and Western democracies.

Interconnect

The shocking truth about Kilroy

Rachel Johnson meets Ukip’s pin-up boy and finds to her horror that she likes him In order to interview Robert Kilroy-Silk, the orthodontically perfect public face of Ukip, it is first necessary to talk to his people. But his people, it turns out, are his wife Jan. ‘So,’ Jan growls in what the BBC calls a lovely regional accent (though I am not good on accents, I know the Kilroy clan hails from Birmingham, where his grandfather was a roadsweeper, and his grandmother cleaned pub floors). ‘You want to write one of those fluffy articles, do you, about his orange face?’ I am already beginning to be a little scared of Jan, who is, I am told by several people — including Kilroy himself — ‘the brains behind the throne’.

Peter Oborne

A question of trust

Since his sudden emergence in the 1990s Tony Blair has easily eclipsed three successive Conservative leaders: John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. No prime minister for a century has dominated his opponents in such an emphatic way and for so long. The 2004 party conference season has changed this landscape. It is now possible to assert something which it has not been possible to claim without risk of ridicule since 1992. The present leader of the Conservative party would make a more competent and reassuring prime minister than his Labour counterpart. There are two reasons for this confidence: the degradation of Tony Blair, and the simultaneous emergence of Michael Howard as the strongest Tory leader since the early Thatcher period.

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.