Features

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Invasion of the lawyers

Brendan O’Neill says that America’s first gift to Iraq has been the compensation culture and a flood of personal injury claims Whatever you think about democracy and human rights, the Coalition successfully imported one thing from the West into post-Saddam Iraq — the compensation culture. Iraq has become a hotbed of legal claims and counterclaims, of individual complaints and class action lawsuits, for everything from physical and mental injury to destruction of property. Iraqis demand compensation for damage caused to their gardens by American tanks, or for the scrapes and dents to their cars caused by run-ins with speeding Humvees.

Martin-Rosenbaum

How to get into Who’s Who

Michael Crick and Martin Rosenbaum reveal the lengths to which some people will go to record their names in Britain’s foremost work of biographical reference One of Britain’s most secretive and mysterious intelligence-gathering operations is based inside a small, nondescript office block in St Anne’s Court, a short passageway in Soho. The predominantly female staff who work at the heart of the establishment try to remain entirely anonymous. There is no nameplate to indicate what is done on the second floor of this building, and those inside are deeply reluctant to talk about what they do.

Tuesday

Interconnect

An apology to Alastair Crooke

A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on 28 January 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we apologise to Mr Crooke.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Get radical, Mr Howard

It’s not good enough for the Tories to pinch Labour policies, says Simon Heffer. They must appeal to the people on the economy, education, drugs, immigration and Europe A shadow minister said to me last week, ‘We might have a more credible leader now, but we have less credible policies.’ We were talking after the Tories’ announcement on health care — throw more money at the problem — had been followed by the Labour policy — throw more money at the problem. With the Tories still battered after the Euro-elections, and many of their notional supporters still sceptical about them, the aping by the opposition of what the government seeks to do is causing despair. Everyone assumes the election will be next May or June.

Charles Clover

Fins ain’t what they used to be

Charles Clover says that there’s only one way to beat the celebrity chefs who are wiping out every endangered fish in the sea: take a trip to McDonald’s In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century British and Norwegians did to the great whales, and what people in this century are doing to rainforests and bushmeat. This crisis is caused by overfishing. Given that the destruction of once renewable sources of food is a serious problem for the human race, you would imagine it might have troubled the opinion-formers in the culinary establishment.

Saturday

Mark Glazebrook

Giorgione’s artistic poetry

Mark Glazebrook on a magnificent exhibition of work by ‘Big George’ in Vienna Giorgione! A name to conjure with. Other names such as Vasari, Byron and Walter Pater have conjured with the Zorzi, Zorzo or Zorzon of contemporary documents, the exceptionally talented painter who died in his early thirties in 1510, the legendary Big George, the gifted musician and fabulous lover who came to Venice from Castelfranco, a large fortified village situated in a great broken plain at some distance from the Venetian Alps. His copses, glades, brooks and hills must surely have inspired the Giorgionesqe ideal of pastoral scenery.

Rod Liddle

English hooligans are pussycats

Our soccer fans are by no means the most thuggish in the world, says Rod Liddle, and he’ll glass any smug Scotch git who says they are A rather smug, bearded Scotsman upbraided me the other day when I was queuing for a drink at one of those left-of-centre London wine bars where the staff look at you with opprobrium if you order the house Chardonnay. His complaint was with something I’d written about the Euro 2004 football championship — to the effect that it was OK, for 90 minutes, to loathe the opposition for their real or imagined national characteristics. It made the game more fun, I’d argued. ‘Don’t you realise that you are encouraging English football hooliganism?’ he said, stressing the word ‘English’, of course.

Daniel Hannan

The way ahead for Europe

Join me in a little thought experiment. For several months now, Tony Blair has been insisting that the European constitution would be a defeat for Euro-federalism. Within hours of appending his name to it, he announced that, far from creating a superstate, the constitution was about ‘sovereign nation-states co-operating together’. Let us play along with the Prime Minister for a moment. Let us imagine that he really has seen off the Euro-zealots and protected the supremacy of national governments. What, in these circumstances, might we reasonably expect the constitution to contain? First, there would be a proper division of powers.

Saturday

Laura Gascoigne

Moments of experience

At its annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in May, the Royal Society of British Artists held a debate on the motion ‘This house believes that a found object cannot be a work of art’. The motion’s obvious subtext was that since Duchamp’s snow shovel the ‘found object’ has been digging away at the foundations of traditional hand-made art, with potentially catastrophic consequences. A team of speakers, including Julian Spalding (author of The Eclipse of Art), made impassioned speeches in the motion’s favour, and even those against seemed so half-hearted that Peregrine Worsthorne was moved to inquire from the floor: ‘Is there an argument here?

Mary Wakefield

The heart of lightness

Alexander McCall Smith counts Donald Rumsfeld and The Red Hot Chili Peppers among his fans, and has a very cool cat. Mary Wakefield talks to him about Africa and ‘reality’ Alexander McCall Smith wants to show me his cat. ‘I think he’s asleep in the spare bedroom,’ says Edna, his cleaning lady, putting down a mug of coffee. ‘I’ll go and get him.’ ‘No, no, no!’ McCall Smith leaps into the hallway ahead of her. For a big man, he is surprisingly light on his feet. ‘He’ll come, he will! He’ll come if I call him.’ His teenage daughter appears in the study doorway. Edna looks out from the kitchen. I find myself holding on to a small wooden pig carved into the banister rail.

Rod Liddle

One law for the Americans

One of my favourite quotes of the last ten years, for a public display of unintentional black humour, came from a spokesman for Noraid, the American-based organisation which raises funds for the IRA. This chap had been asked, a few days after 9/11, to comment upon the possibility that people might perceive some similarities of method between al-Qa’eda and the good ol’ knee-cappin’ Provos. The Twin Towers had collapsed and Americans were, for the first time, acquainted with the trauma of terrorism on their own soil. The Noraid man was quite outraged by the nature of the inquiry and eventually spluttered, ‘There’s no comparison at all. None whatsoever. The IRA always gives a warning.

Saturday

Colin Bostocksmith

My part in Reagan’s rise

Is it possible to feel a personal warmth and affection, even love, towards someone one has never met? It must be, because that’s how I feel about the late President Ronald Reagan. The reason I felt so fond of the old Cold War warrior, and the reason I cherish his memory now that he is even colder, is this. Back around 1983, towards the end of Ronnie’s first term in the Oval Office, the man did me one enormous favour. Perhaps unwittingly, but nonetheless effectively, he gave my career such a boost that I lived off it for years. Still do, in some ways. What he did was this. He, the leader of the Free World, appeared on an internationally distributed light entertainment television show, and told a worldwide audience a joke that I had written for him.

James Delingpole

Brooding ’bout my generation

Sixty years on, the crossing to Normandy was flat as a millpond, the sun shone, the helicopter from the Portsmouth to Ouistreham ferry’s British destroyer escort (there were three other destroyers, one French, one American, one Canadian) performed all sorts of clever tricks for our amusement, and our welcoming party comprised a Royal Marine and, later in the evening, a magnificent fireworks display from Omaha all the way to Sword. ‘Bet you wish it had been like this on D-Day,’ I said to George Amos, late of 47 RM commando, as we gazed over a sea rather different from the boiling, grey, vomitous, shell-ravaged killing zone which had claimed nearly a third of his unit killed, wounded or missing in June 1944. ‘Not really,’ he replied after some thought.

Daniel Wolf

England’s thugs and losers

The Portuguese police are donning their riot gear, the café owners are boarding up their premises and the locals are telling each other, ‘Don’t go down to the square, the English are coming....’ It’s Euro 2004, and the English have already arrived. They are sitting in clumps around the fountain, groups of pink, misshapen men, wearing St George T-shirts and shellsuit bottoms or shorts. Some are glum, nursing a can of beer as consolation for a lost wallet or a night spent in the park. Others are jovial, the kind of men who think it a lark to try to dance with passing women or moon the Italian supporters drinking coffee underneath the awnings across the square. And there’s a group who are staring angrily, red-faced, up for it, whachewfuckinlookinat?

Saturday

Interconnect

Traveller in time

It’s hard to suppress a feeling of schadenfreude when reading accounts of the crusaders going to the Holy Land in support of Christianity and finding that the indigenous Christians were often the lowest of the low, whereas the infidel leaders, rich and educated, were much more like those whom the Western leaders instinctively admired and wanted to meet. And these Christians were technically heretics, their religious observances thick with dodgy practices, their allegiances fixed on Patriarchs nobody had heard of or respected. It must have seemed a bit like not finding weapons of mass destruction — which didn’t stop our boys from invading again and again. The descendants of those Christians are still there, still poor and still persecuted (so that was a success, then).

George Osborne

Bush and Howard are winners

George Osborne says that on the basis of the ‘keys’ forecasting system George W. Bush will be President next year and Michael Howard will be in No. 10 In the next few months George Bush and John Kerry are going to spend more than $1 billion trying to win the presidential election, while everyone else is going to spend millions of dollars trying to guess the result. They needn’t bother. The result is already obvious. Or so I have just been told by a man called Professor Allan Lichtman. He is a well-known American political scientist who has a simple and (almost) infallible system for forecasting the outcome of presidential elections.

Justin Marozzi

Smack in your face

Kabul The minister had been stood up. Here we were in Bamiyan, in the heart of Afghanistan with Her Majesty’s drugs-busting minister Bill Rammell, and there was no sign of the Afghan farmer who had reportedly given up growing poppies in favour of dried apricots. He seemed an unlikely enough character in any case. Perhaps he never existed. Protected by a phalanx of armed Special Branch officers, we had flown into Bamiyan in a C-130 Hercules to catch up on the British-led counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan, a country that supplies 95 per cent of the heroin on our streets. The UK is providing £70m over three years to help the country turn its back on poppy cultivation.

Inigo Thomas

Life in the bus lane

New York I forgot: you need coins or a pre-paid Metrocard for the New York buses, and one morning several weeks ago, as I stood at the eastbound stop on the corner of Broadway and 125th Street, I realised I had neither. Only notes. Two other men were waiting for the M60, the cross-town bus — the one I was to take to the Harlem railway station — and there was no time to go in search of change. Through the broad arch of the iron bridge over 125th Street, which supports an elevated section of the Broadway subway line, I saw a bus coming from the Hudson, and I turned to the more together-looking of the two men and asked him if he had change for a couple of dollar bills.

Simon Heffer

They won the war but lost the peace

Over the next few days we shall see countless images, in photographs and on film, of the men who won the second world war. The D-Day generation can claim to have been the last that had a genuine measure of greatness. These were not, for the most part, professional warriors, for whom the services had been a vocation. They had been plucked from civilian life, in many cases straight from school, to defend their country and win the bloodiest war in history. Such an achievement required beliefs, values and attitudes that few young people today can begin to imagine. We shall also, over the next few days, see modern images of the same men, or at least of those who survived. Now in their eighties, many will be making their last visit to Normandy and the scene of their claim to immortality.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

A nasty plot in Pall Mall

One important factor in New Labour’s special kind of political success has been its ability to capture independent institutions or individuals and convert them into accomplices. Again and again Tony Blair has pulled off this feat. In his early days he co-opted organisations as diverse as the Country Landowner’s Association, the CBI, the Government Information and Communications Service, the BritaininEurope campaign, and the Liberal Democrat party. The New Labour technique was simple. It targeted vulnerable individuals right at the top of the relevant organisation. An interesting early example was Ewen Cameron — now Sir Ewen — at the CLA. He was flattered by Downing Street, and some came to view him as a partial propagandist for government policy.