Features

Saturday

Rachel Johnson

You have been warned, Mr Blair

Rachel Johnson talks to Vernon Coleman, the one-man publishing sensation who has now turned his sights on the ‘lying little warmonger’ in Downing Street If you’re a Telegraph reader — as I do hope you are — you too will have seen those ads placed by a Dr Vernon Coleman, MB. Not the ones that ask ‘Does Your Memory Fail You?’ above the ink drawing of the man in a suit and specs, but the ones that ask, even more worryingly, ‘Looking for a Present?’ Turns out, Dr Coleman has got the perfect present for just about everybody. For a golf lover, we have The Man Who Inherited a Golf Course, described as a ‘superb novel’ and ‘terrific present for anyone who enjoys golf,’ with 29,000 copies sold.

Saturday

Walter Ellis

Survival of the richest

New York As British universities lurch from funding crisis to funding crisis, the jealous eyes of the academic establishment focus obsessively on the United States as the role model for future success. The assumption is that if UK universities charged ‘realistic’ fees, they would recreate themselves as ‘world class’ — or, at any rate, superior — institutions, like those in America. But what is the truth about American universities? Are they really so much better than those in Britain? Are US students in general better educated? Does the US profit from the enormous sacrifice made each year by parents and students? Some — perhaps 20 or 30 — American universities are better than all but a tiny handful of their British equivalents.

Sam Schulman

What’s the big deal, Naomi?

Naomi Wolf has eased the burden of silence she has been carrying for over 20 years. In New York magazine she reveals that one evening after a dinner party, when she was a Yale undergraduate, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale placed his ‘heavy, boneless hand hot’ on her thigh. After she repelled the advance, if it was an advance, Mr Bloom took his bottle, proclaimed his innocence — or so I take it — by saying ‘You are a deeply troubled girl’, and left. But for me, it awakened a more intimate memory. I was 27, a postgraduate student at Yale in my last term, and then, as now, a man. Unlike Naomi Wolf, I needed nothing from Prof. Bloom. I was destined for a first teaching job at Boston University.

George Osborne

Could a Tory vote for Kerry?

Welcome to CNN’s Presidential Election Night Special. We’re just getting the results in live from the 51st State. We can confirm that the Great State of Great Britain has voted overwhelmingly for Senator John Kerry. This is a big blow for George W. Bush, and a humiliation for Governor Blair, who viewers will remember strongly backed the President during the campaign.’ If Britain could vote this November, no one doubts what the result would be. Kerry would win by a landslide. He’d win votes across the board. Not just on the Left, but on the Right too. In fact, Kerry would probably get more votes in the Tory shires and suburbs than he would from Labour’s urban heartlands.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Not nasty enough

Simon Heffer believes that if the Tories are to have any hope of returning to power, they’ll have to stop tinkering and go for Labour’s jugular In an impressive observation the other day, a Very Senior Tory Indeed said to me, ‘I don’t buy this argument that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them. It’s a cop-out. We have to be better than that.’ With the spasm of activity in the last fortnight, the Conservative party appears to be acting on that view. First, we had Mr Howard making the moral case for low taxation. Now, we have Mr Letwin trying to outline how the moral position might, over six years or so, be reached. It has come not a moment too soon, because the overtaxed natives out there in Middle England are getting restless.

Bruce Anderson

Make war on terror, not drugs

I wants to make your flesh creep,’ is the Fat Boy’s refrain in the Pickwick Papers. In Berlin last week, I was at a conference which the Fat Boy would have enjoyed. The subject was terror; the threat that weapons of mass destruction in terrorist hands would pose to the West, during the foreseeable future. One point impressed itself, instantly and forcefully. The proceedings were dominated by scientists, discussing anthrax, smallpox and chemical weapons in the most matter-of-fact manner. There was agreement that given the difficulty of acquiring plutonium or enriched uranium, the terrorist nuclear threat was still over the horizon. But as for all other threats, horizons contract and dangers close in. Everyone there seemed convinced of the inevitability of terrorist outrages.

Brendan O’Neill

Not a shred of evidence

Did Saddam Hussein really use industrial shredders to kill his enemies? Brendan O’Neill is not persuaded that he did Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war.

Rod Liddle

Fear of paedophilia makes you fat

Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky, a roll of subcutaneous blubber the colour and consistency of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake around the midriff, or at the top of the legs. Quite often, though, they’re quiveringly leviathan and — rather like our universe — in a state of perpetual, hectic expansion; the folds of enveloping flesh growing almost before your eyes.

Saturday

Interconnect

Seek those things that are above

Something extraordinary and rare is happening in London: we have an incomparable El Greco exhibition in our midst. It doesn’t really matter that it’s being staged in the rebarbative dungeon-like rooms of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing basement, for even those inconsiderate walls are alive with the strange music of El Greco’s vision. For a few months the dungeon becomes a sacred crypt, filled with the fluttering spirits of El Greco’s agonies, ecstasies and visitations, with a wild chant that cannot be stilled. Against such strong magic we are powerless: along with El Greco’s saints and sinners our gaze drifts inevitably heavenwards.

Mary Wakefield

Equal rites

Last Saturday must have been a difficult day for St Paul. His cathedral, still covered in patches of scaffolding like pins supporting badly broken legs, was teeming, inside and out, with women in dog collars. In the crypt, an hour before the grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the priesthood, there were women priests of every description: fifty-something tiggywinkles with thick NHS spectacles; red-cheeked 30-year-olds, their clerical collars just visible above green fleeces; Laura Ashley skirts and sensible slip-ons mixed with smart black trouser suits and high heels.

Jeremy Clarke

Why blue is the new black

Last Monday afternoon Professor Lewis Wolpert CBE, FRSL and I sat in his chaotic study in the Anatomy department at University College, London, quietly regarding each other. Professor Wolpert seemed to me to be superior to myself in every way possible. He was better-looking, better-dressed, more self-assured, miles more intelligent, and probably richer. It was a great comfort, therefore, to know that, like me, he has thrown the wrong number and tumbled down the longest snake on the board. Nine years ago, aged 65, Professor Wolpert suffered a devastating depressive breakdown. But even here I imagine he made a better fist of it than I did, that he was depressed with more aplomb.

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

Cigarette lady

Lady Trumpington is on the warpath. At the age of 81, the author of the tremendous dictum ‘I’d rather be common than middle-class’ will deploy her formidable rhetorical powers to condemn a wretched piece of legislation. The ‘Bill to prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place’, as its long title runs, is now making its way through the House of Lords, and Lady Trumpington is one of the select band of peers who oppose it. For nearly 70 years she was herself a heavy smoker: ‘I started at the age of 11 and smoked 40 a day until two years ago. No doctor has ever gone at me, really, but I think a lot of them smoke anyway. I used to be a junior health minister [from 1985-87].

Max Hastings

How to lose the battle for Britain

Now that Mr Geoff Hoon has put his Hutton embarrassments behind him and emerged shining like a new pin, some of us hope that he will address his day job. Britain’s defence planning is in a dreadful mess. Unless the Secretary of State acts effectively, the services face a grim future — and they know it. Curiously enough, the issues have nothing to do with Iraq and the alleged equipment shortcomings which have attracted so many headlines since a critical National Audit Office report was published. It was indeed tragic that Sergeant Steve Roberts lacked the latest model of body armour when he was killed. But in the big picture, the British army fought its Iraq campaign with fewer equipment problems than it has experienced during any war in its history.

Saturday

Stuart Reid

TRAVELItaly

Nothing is more important to a journalist than his integrity. The founders of the Independent were men of such unyielding principle that they would not allow their journalists to go on freebies. On other papers most journalists handled the integrity/freebie issue in the time-honoured fashion: by abusing any hospitality they were given — trashing a hotel room, getting weeping drunk, pawing the mayor’s wife — and then writing a mocking piece about those who had squandered fine food, wine and linen on them. That way, the hacks reasoned, nobody could say that they had been bought. Their honour was intact. These days I don’t have the energy for integrity. It’s a young man’s caper. So here comes the plug.

Lloyd Evans

Self abuse | 31 January 2004

Lloyd Evans believes that the lesson of Will Self’s success — which he envies — is that it is better to be a ‘writer’ than to write well It’s happened again. The other day I was deep in the Tube, powering my way through the loose maul, when a poster caught my eye. Will Self is promoting his latest book. At first glance the photo resembles an ad for a men’s magazine. Cool guy, cool clothes, cool chair, cool glare. Self sits sheathed in impassive black tailoring, with one leg casually thrown over the other; his intense skull and cold blazing eyes appraise you with a look of narcissistic derision. Hm, I thought, another Will Self novel. Already? They’re getting more frequent than rail crashes.

Leo McKinstry

Straight and narrow

As I waded through page after page of interminable dogma and municipal jargon, one statement suddenly leapt out at me: ‘Some 50 per cent of people being approved of as adoptive parents in Brighton and Hove are from the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.’ Those words — from a policy document entitled ‘Sexuality — the New Agenda’, published this month by the Local Government Association (LGA), the umbrella body for local authorities — were followed by another disturbing sentence: ‘Brighton and Hove Council has also shown that it is committed to taking rigorous action against homophobia, including, in one instance, de-registering foster carers who stated that they opposed lesbians being parents.

Freddie Sayers

Fee choice

Blair has made a mess of the top-up Bill, says Freddie Sayers. It’s now up to the Tories to revolutionise our universities on market principles I think I once knew how Tony Blair felt on Tuesday night. It was Matriculation Day for the Fresher class of 2000 at New College, Oxford. With the obligatory white tie and gown as scruffy as I could make it, I strolled over to join the expanding group of nervous, black-and-white-clad new students, of which I was one. I was slouching against a buttress, trying to look reluctant and hungover as we lined up for the official photograph, when someone threw me a yellow ribbon. ‘Put it on! It’s a protest against top-up fees! We’re all wearing them!’ I instinctively threw it into the herbaceous border.

Rod Liddle

The great whitewash

So what were you all waiting for? You surely could not have been expecting an inquiry, headed by an eminent law lord, to deliver an indictment of the government? They don’t do that, law lords. Certainly they haven’t in my lifetime. And it hasn’t happened now, with Lord Hutton. But even by the standards of his equally well appointed and eminent predecessors — Lord Franks, Sir Richard Scott, Sir Anthony Hammond, Lord Denning, all of whom found it necessary to exculpate the political establishment when push came to shove — Lord Hutton has flung the whitewash around with a copiousness, a completeness, which must have surprised even the inhabitants of Downing Street.

Saturday

Interconnect

Apocalyptic vision

The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely moving human document it deserves to be seen. Guston was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, and moved to America in 1919. When he began to paint in 1927, he was largely self-taught. He worked on government-funded mural projects and absorbed the drawing techniques of the Old Masters.

Peter Oborne

The ballad of Connie and Babs

A few weeks ago executives were endeavouring to bring home to Conrad Black the full horror of his personal and corporate predicament, when a sight met their eyes. His wife Barbara, clad only in a leotard and shades, had swept into the room. For a moment nobody spoke. ‘Oh Conrad,’ Barbara Black proclaimed: ‘Let’s just get out of here. They hate us.’ Barbara Amiel was born in Watford, and she enjoyed the kind of childhood that, if survived at all, instils resilience through life. She wrote her first autobiography — it is greatly to be hoped that another will follow — as early as 1980. Amiel was only 39, but there was already plenty of ground to cover.