Features

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

Competition – terms and conditions

1. This prize draw is open to residents of the UK, 18 years or over, except employees of The Spectator 1828 Limited their associated, affiliated or subsidiary companies, and their families, agents or anyone else professionally associated with the draw. 2. Details regarding how to enter as published form part of the terms and conditions. It is a condition of entry that all rules are accepted as final and that the competitor agrees to abide by these rules. The decision of the judges is final and no correspondence will be entered into. 3. Only one entry per person. Late, illegible, incomplete, defaced or corrupt entries will not be accepted. No responsibility can be accepted for lost entries and proof of transmission will not be accepted as proof of receipt.

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.

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.