Features

Saturday

Tom Walker

Kosovo goes to hell

Tom Walker says that Tony Blair is too busy doing global management to bother much about the consequences of Nato’s humanitarian intervention in the Balkans From the kitchen balcony of our old flat in Pristina, we used to look out on a rubbish dump in the foreground, then the precipitous and rutted Plevljanska Street, and across that to the old Orthodox church of St Nikola. To the right of our flat were some tumbledown one-storey buildings housing Serbs and gypsies. The gypsies used to clean up the rubbish now and again, but never to the point where it all disappeared. Sasa the Serb used to sell us bootlegged petrol, which he nonchalantly glugged into our car tanks while pulling on a cigarette.

Ross Clark

Listed runways

I have never had much confidence in heritage legislation since I discovered that I would need to seek permission to have a row of leylandii trees in my garden felled. This, not long after the Highways Agency’s bulldozers had torn their way through Twyford Down, and half of Smithfield Market was condemned for redevelopment. No matter how ghastly or inappropriate, every tree in my garden is officially protected because I live in a conservation area. I can’t prune, fell or lop without informing my local tree officer. Nor can I remove the 1970s garden wall or change my 1980s plastic window frames without permission.

Bruce Anderson

Prepare for an October surprise

For nearly seven years, Tony Blair’s caution was the Europhiles’ despair. They wanted him to make the case for Europe and exploit his hold over public opinion. Their confidence exceeded his. Mr Blair was not prepared to take electoral risks for Europe. As recently as December, when the EU constitution seemed lost in the long grass, the PM did not send a search party. Now everything is different, thanks to al-Qa’eda. Spain’s constitutional obstructiveness ended overnight and with it Poland’s. Suddenly Mr Blair had a choice: renounce his Euro diplomatic ambitions, or embrace the constitution. The speed with which he made his decision surprised some of his former critics, who are now almost ready to credit him with courage.

Rod Liddle

More destructive than the Luftwaffe

John Prescott is going to destroy large areas of England with new homes, even though more than 700,000 properties — enough to meet housing needs for the next four years — lie vacant. Rod Liddle urges conservatives to resist the terror According to our government, there is a shortage of affordable housing in this country, and particularly in the south of England. As a result the government, in the redoubtable, if humorous, figure of John Prescott, intends to build hundreds of thousands of new houses every year in order to meet this perceived ‘demand’.

Saturday

Damien Mccrystal

City and Finance Special

If asked to name the visionary behind the development of Canary Wharf, most people who know anything about it would come up with the late Michael von Clemm of the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, who spotted the potential for office developments while scouting for small industrial space on behalf of the Roux Brothers restaurant group in 1984. But go back further, to 1980 and these words, ‘I believe that this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital, having cleared away the outdated. We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity. No other city in the world has got right in its centre such an opportunity for profitable progress.

Jeremy Clarke

Britain’s most reviled man

A bouquet of red, white and blue flowers tied with a royal-blue ribbon has recently appeared among the scores of tributes tied to railings in the street in Pollockshields, Glasgow, from where 15-year-old Kriss Donald was abducted and later murdered, allegedly by an Asian gang. ‘In our hearts,’ the message says. ‘From the Southside British National Party.’ On Saturday the BNP leader Nick Griffin went to Pollockshields and was greeted with the usual abuse. Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell said that Griffin and his party were ‘poisonous’. Others described Griffin as ‘inhuman’, ‘opportunist scum’ and ‘evil’. It’s the same wherever he goes. Mr Griffin must be the most reviled person in the country.

Boris Johnson

The Queen fights back

My father’s father’s father was a romantic Turkish politician who ran a small but distinguished conservative magazine, and whose career ended in a series of judgments that were romantic and certainly conservative, but unwise and sometimes reckless. Most reckless of all was when my ancestor took it upon himself, as interior minister in the government of the last sultan, to sign the arrest warrant for Ataturk, now acknowledged to be the father of modern Turkey, and whose visage adorns almost every municipal building in the country. A short while later, my great-grandfather was having a shave in a place called Izmit when he was beaten to death and stuck in a tree.

Saturday

Sam Leith

The Einstein of maths

The odds are that the name Alexandre Grothendieck will mean little or nothing to most Spectator readers. It’s a name I heard for the first time in high summer two years or so ago, not long, as I remember it, after the film A Beautiful Mind had come out. I was in the garden of my friend Umar’s house in Cambridge, and we were waiting for his ancient cast-iron barbecue, Camp Freddie, to cook some sausages. Umar is a mathematician of considerable braininess, and when we are together we often end up talking maths. That is, I tend to ask him to explain what he does, and he tends to try, and I tend not to understand. But sometimes we strike gold. An entire afternoon was once passed happily playing logic games involving prisoners with different-coloured hats.

Mary Wakefield

What’s morality got to do with it?

Every generation lives a little longer than the last — it’s the sign of an advancing society. A hundred years ago the average British life expectancy at birth was 45. Now it is 75, giving us a blissful free decade at the end of our working lives to spend fending off great-grandchildren and watching wide-screen television. The downside is that as we live longer and as doctors become better at warding off death, we pass an ever greater percentage of our lives suffering. Heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, liver failure, blindness, senile dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, arthritis.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Art for the people

How do people respond to Rubens these days? Is all that lush flesh so out of fashion that he is of historical interest only? The good people of Lille evidently think not, for a large and ambitious Rubens exhibition has been organised under the special patronage of M. Jacques Chirac to celebrate the fact that this year Lille shares with Genoa the status of European Cultural Capital. Rubens is considered an apt choice for a landmark exhibition, and certainly the sumptuous display at the Palais des Beaux-Arts is impressive. It is also the first major exhibition devoted to Rubens ever to be held in France. It deserves to be a huge success.

Freddie Sayers

No youth at all

Freddie Sayers went to an EU conference for young people in Ireland — and no one turned up. Euroenthusiasm is not groovy Imagine a huge celebrity wedding before any of the guests have arrived. A romantic Irish castle, a giant marquee with ruched egg-white lining and silver-birch detail, flurries of organisers talking into radios and making last-minute adjustments. The County Clare police department, excited as never before, have committed 720 officers to the weekend-long security operation. There are roadblocks for miles around, four motorcycle outriders for each of the VIP guests and groups of fluorescent jackets guarding every deserted woodland lane.

Bob Alexander

No hanging chads, please

Bob Alexander on the need to reform the voting system to get rid of ‘electoral bias’ One of New Labour’s most outspoken commitments in opposition was that it would reform Parliament. It vowed to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative and later committed itself to the Wakeham recommendation to introduce some elected members. But now it is reduced to a grudge match against the remaining hereditary peers who are there as part of the clandestine deal agreed by Lords Irvine and Cranborne to stand security for the government’s pledge to have a second stage of change. But where real reform is needed is in the House of Commons. There are glaring inequities in the voting system.

Simon Jenkins

Nothing to fear but fear itself

Simon Jenkins says that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not ‘And the clouds came flying through the air bringing winds and hurling lightning and arrows, and it rained hail, fire and swords, and killed a great number of people.’ So cried the Florentine monk Savonarola of the coming Day of Judgment in 1492. The terrified citizens duly rose and followed him into a disastrous alliance with Italy’s new conqueror, Charles VIII of France. Four years later they had had enough of Savonarola’s apocalyptic waffle, dragged him from his monastery and hanged him. Whenever I hear Tony Blair nowadays, I think of Savonarola.

Saturday

The Spectator

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Andrew Gilligan

Why did the Attorney General change his advice?

Andrew Gilligan can confirm, for the first time, that five months before the invasion of Iraq the Attorney General’s advice to the government was that regime change was illegal Hasn’t it been an exciting few months to be a lawyer? Once they just sat quietly in offices with stripey wallpaper and dado rails, sending out the bills. Now almost every couple of weeks, it seems, they hold the fate of the government in their hands. Lord Hutton may have missed his big chance, but the newspapers have transferred their hopes to the almost equally improbable figure of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, and his advice on the lawfulness of the war with Iraq.

Matthew Reid

Travel Special: Australia

When I arrived in Sydney it was raining. Throughout the 23-hour flight from London, where it was also raining, I had fantasised about walking off the plane into a wall of heat and heading for the beach. Just my bloody luck, I reflected, as I stood in the airport carpark and stared sulkily at the grey sky. ‘Where’s the sun?’ I asked the friends who picked me up at the airport. They were not sympathetic. ‘It’s what we need, good droppa rain. Cool things down a bit. Stop the bushfires.’ My disappointment seemed selfish and petulant. But I wasn’t disappointed for long. Within a couple of days the sun had come out, and the great Pacific Ocean beckoned. I rolled my swimming trunks into a towel and headed for Coogee Beach in shorts and a T-shirt.

Ferdinand Mount

One nation under Her Majesty

As of last Thursday, multiculturalism was officially declared dead in this country. The funeral took place in Brent Town Hall in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Home Secretary and was accompanied by the National Anthem and the theme music from Four Weddings and a Funeral. Although the event was not billed in these terms, these were symbolic obsequies as emphatic in their way as the pouring of the ashes of English cricket into that fragile urn in 1882. English cricket smouldered on, of course, occasionally flaring into a brief revival, but its old unquestioned dominance was gone for good. In the same way, we shall still hear people mouthing the old platitudes about Britain being a multicultural country, but that dogma will no longer be driving the debate.

Ian Thomson

Nightmare in the Caribbean

Shortly after Christmas I went to Haiti for the first time in 13 years. The collapse of the Aristide regime was still two months away, but the Caribbean republic was already descending into chaos. At the airport of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the familiar smells of drainage and burning rubbish hit me forcefully and it was as though I had never been away. Haiti’s history — a vicious cycle of coups d’états — had not changed either. Last Sunday the airport was the scene of a hurried departure as Haiti’s President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, flew out of the country into exile. In an armed uprising backed by the US, he had been deposed by former death-squad commanders and ex-military.

Deborah Ross

Green’s pleasant land

So, off to meet Sir Andrew Green, retired Foreign Office mandarin, now founder and chairman of Migration Watch, which is either an ‘independent think tank which has no links to any political party’ (Migrationwatch.co.uk) or is a ‘nasty little outfit with a distinctly unpleasant agenda’ (the Independent). It depends, I suppose, on where you are coming from. Whatever, Sir Andrew lives in Deddington, an extremely pretty village on the edge of the Cotswolds, in a lovely house of delicious honey-coloured ironstone dating back to the mid-18th century. Through the gate and up the front path, which bisects a just-as-lovely garden, filled with snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, hellebores, rose beds and the first brave geranium leaves pushing through the frost.