Features

Saturday

Deborah Ross

The triumph of Tesco

Deborah Ross joins her mother on a trip down the aisles of Britain’s favourite food chain When I was growing up, my mother always went to Sainsbury’s, the Sainsbury’s on Ballards Lane, Finchley. I must have accompanied her sometimes because I can remember the marble counters, the rotating saw of the ham-slicer, turned by hand, and, strangely, hairnets. What she most remembers is that ‘for £7 a week I fed four children, one dog and a husband’. (I have no idea, by the way, how my father will feel on reading that he always came after the dog, but imagine he won’t be too surprised.) My mother was thought to be Sainsbury’s through and through. Cut her and she’d bleed orange and blue.

Theodore Dalrymple

The lies of the land

Forget Dame Shirley Porter, says Theodore Dalrymple. If it’s real scandal you are after, consider the millions wasted as a result of public service corruption Dame Shirley Porter is the unacceptable face of corruption, a rich woman taken in gerrymandering (had she started off poor, no one would have minded). But though the sum of money she was initially required to pay Westminster Council in restitution was enormous, and the sum she agreed finally to pay pretty substantial by the standards of 99.99 per cent of humanity, these sums are small beer by comparison with what the thorough-going moral and intellectual corruption of the British public services costs the taxpayer every single day.

Rod Liddle

How Islam has killed multiculturalism

Rod Liddle says that Blair’s great U-turn on immigration has placed the Labour party to the right of Ray Honeyford — the man once vilified as a racist Do you have a core of Britishness within you? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, is anxious for us all to have one, even if we are not quite sure what it is. Trevor reckons he has one, at any rate. Perhaps it was implanted along with his OBE back in 1999. His attachment to this notional thing, a core of Britishness, is nonetheless excellent news — and also a little surprising. Because Trevor’s enormous quango, the Commission for Racial Equality, has spent the last 30 years arguing that there is no such thing at all.

Saturday

Graham Claydon

Harry, England and St Alban!

This is the time of year when we stop complaining for a moment about the dreadful spring weather and start complaining about the neglect of England’s patron saint, St George. Our grumbles go something like this: we don’t know what to do to mark his feast day (23 April), we have no traditions like the shamrock or daffodils to fall back on — and the nearest we can manage to a dragon seems to be a bout of football violence. All that is true; and it reinforces my view that adopting St George as our patron saint was a terrible mistake. It was something we stumbled into and don’t know how to get out of. St George was a soldier who openly reproached Diocletian for his cruelty.

Gerald Kaufman

Recipe for terror

Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel and that her daughter, on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigration to the Holy Land), was a doctor in Jerusalem. This nice lady told me, ‘I would defend Israel with my last breath.

Emma Tennant

Oh, to be in England …

... now that April’s there The annual miracle of spring is thrilling everywhere. It is especially beautiful in the Chilterns, where the Prime Minister has a country house courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers. Our leader, however, scorns the beechwoods, the bluebells, the song of the blackbird and the call of the cuckoo. The Blairs preferred to spend Easter in Barbados. They must really hate England. They spend as little time as possible on this sceptr’d isle. It is lucky that I live in Scotland, because I am tied to it hand and foot at this time of year. Lambing is in full swing on our Roxborough hill farm. Every day brings a mixture of routine and drama. A fox has been getting into the lambing field. Five lambs were killed over as many nights.

Bruce Anderson

Passport to Eton?

Bruce Anderson says the Tories’ revolutionary new education policy will devolve power to schools and parents In 1874, Disraeli told the House of Commons that ‘Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.’ Over the subsequent decades, few senior Tories would have disagreed — yet hardly any of them can be said to have put those words into practice. Rab Butler did devise the 1944 Act which was intended to shape the structure of post-war education. Less than 30 years later, Margaret Thatcher was dismantling it. She turned more grammar schools into comprehensives than any other Education Secretary, with few safeguards to ensure that they did not become bog-standard comprehensives.

Peter Oborne

The man who calls the shots

Peter Oborne says that the Prime Minister is a client of Rupert Murdoch’s global empire — and he decided to hold a referendum on the EU constitution only because the press magnate told him to An essential part of the New Labour belief system is structured around the proposition that Tony Blair is a resolute, bold, decisive leader. The Prime Minister has worked hard to build and then to sustain this myth. Last October he informed the Labour party conference that ‘I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear.’ This pronouncement, made during a woeful attempt to emulate the oratorical successes of Margaret Thatcher two decades earlier, was palpable nonsense.

Saturday

James Morwood

The pluperfect is doing nicely

We classicists like to think that our subject is one of the great civilising disciplines, that it makes the people who study it better. Sadly for us, though, there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. A lot of us are arrogant, offensive and utterly assured of the rightness of our position. The most famous exemplar of this is probably the poet and scholar A.E. Housman whose unsurpassed skills as a Latinist were communicated by the most venomous pen of his time. (One Oxford professor of Latin, he commented, had ‘the intellect of an idiot child’.) This is the kind of classicist whose obituary so often includes that killer clause, ‘He did not suffer fools gladly.

Sam Kiley

The hogs of war

Mercenaries make big money in Iraq but, says Sam Kiley, the ‘outsourcing’ of security work is adding to the chaos in the country They bustle through the Palestine Hotel lobby in central Baghdad clanking with military hardware. They have a very special look. The head is crew-cut, the sunglasses wraparound. A Heckler and Koch 9mm submachine gun is de rigueur — strapped across a black Kevlar bullet-proof vest, barely hidden by a photographer’s jacket. Pockets are stuffed with radios, a hand-held global positioning system, medical trauma packs. From the webbing belt holding up ‘rip-proof’ combat trousers, a Gerber multi-tool dangles beside a Leatherman knife. Another gun, usually a Glock 9mm, is held in a black nylon holster halfway down one thigh.

Andrew Gilligan

The sound of rockets in the morning

Baghdad Twelve months after the war which was supposed to return Iraq to the ‘international community’, to open it up for democracy, trade and progress, Baghdad is a city almost totally cut off from the outside world. Not one of the four main roads linking the capital with its neighbours, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Kuwait, is safe to travel on. At the city approaches from north, south and west, Baghdad has gunmen like London has DIY warehouses. Iraqis are routinely stopped and robbed. As for foreigners, anyone stupid enough to try these roads has, in the last few days, almost always ended up a hostage, or dead.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

How ID cards can liberate us

On 11 September 2001 Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was on an aircraft heading for America. He was about to meet his counterpart in the FBI for talks about combating organised crime. Instead, crime organised on a scale neither of them had anticipated was being committed. Sir John’s plane did a U-turn over the Atlantic. The captain of the plane urgently sought the counsel of his eminent passenger. ‘I went to the flight deck to talk to them and give my advice. You could see the shock that they were going through with the closure of American airspace. The purser in particular was in a state of great distress. I think most of us realised the world would never be the same again.

Peter Hitchens

Contempt for liberty

Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of privacy — and of England The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their introduction, when he means that nobody in his gutless Cabinet is prepared to put up a principled fight on this issue. He himself does not know what liberty is. Nor, clearly, does David Blunkett, who is planning to introduce legislation that could force everyone in Britain to have identity cards within five years.

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.