Features

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Swimming pool or work of art?

One of the most amusing broadcast moments of the early 1990s was a radio debate between the painter Patrick Heron and various citizens of St Ives. The subject was the proposal to build a new art gallery in the town. Several angry Cornish voices were to be heard going on about a swimming pool – the alternative project. On the other side, plaintively upholding the cause of Modernist art, were the reedy, patrician tones of the artist (a public-school voice that Heron, a staunch socialist, was very sorry he had).

Brendan O’Neill

How we trained al-Qa’eda

For all the millions of words written about al-Qa’eda since the 9/11 attacks two years ago, one phenomenon is consistently overlooked – the role of the Bosnian war in transforming the mujahedin of the 1980s into the roving Islamic terrorists of today.

Harry Mount

The Young Fogey: an elegy

They’re playing rap music in the jewellery department at Christie’s South Kensington. In T.M. Lewin, the Jermyn Street shirtmakers, you can dip into a fridge by the cufflinks counter and have a frozen mini-Mars while you are leafing through the chocolate corduroy jackets. But who is left to mourn these things? In the old days, the Young Fogey, the character invented by Alan Watkins on these pages in 1984, would have been in the vanguard of the protesters, shrieking and whinnying away about the desecration of his haunts. He is silent ...because he is no more.

Leo McKinstry

I prefer the tub of lard

Just after David Hill’s appointment as the new Downing Street press chief, I wrote a profile of him for the Daily Mail. In this article, I revealed that Hill was a superb amateur rock vocalist, who had not only sung in several major venues across London, but had also appeared in the musical Hair. But, even in the face of such revelations, by far the most startling fact about Hill remains his 20 years of service as an aide to Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader of the Labour party. Even murderers rarely have to endure sentences of more than 15 years, yet Hill was shackled to this charmless figure of epic mediocrity from 1971 to 1991. As one former Labour press officer, who worked with Hill in the early Nineties, said to me last week, ‘David has a great sense of humour.

Rod Liddle

I was 12, she was 13

According to a survey reported last weekend in the Independent on Sunday, almost all homosexuals are barking mad. I am using the politically correct term ‘barking mad’ so as not to incur the wrath of the mental-health pressure groups, all of which become psychotically incensed and even violent when they read of mad people being described as ‘nutters’ or ‘doolally’ or – an old favourite of mine purloined from the US demotic – ‘crazier than a shithouse rat’. So I’ll stick to ‘barking mad’ and thus forestall angry letters from Mind, et al.

Tom Utley

Madonna of the Pseuds

Leonardo’s ‘Madonna of the Yarnwinder’, stolen the other day from the Duke of Buccleuch, is the painting that changed my view of civilisation. I know it quite well, because one of my sisters-in-law used to live just up the road from Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, where it hung until it was pinched. Whenever I stayed with her and wanted to escape from the children, I would slope off to the castle to take the guided tour. There was no danger that my sons or nephews would want to come with me, because at that age they would almost rather have had an extra maths lesson than traipse around a stately home, looking at pictures. My life-changing moment came on about my third visit to the castle, when I was standing in a little group of tourists in the Staircase Hall.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Chirac and the son of Nippon

Paris Within the next few months, Jacques Chirac’s illegitimate son will turn 18 and the French press will face a dilemma. Do they celebrate his majority on the front page of Paris Match? Or do they keep it as hush-hush as they have in the past out of courtesy, respect for a statesman’s private life and fear? I talk of Chirac’s illegitimate son as if he were a fact, but all I have to go on is ever more brazen Parisian gossip which says that we are in 1994 all over again, counting down to when Paris Match put Mazarine Pingeot on its front cover and the world found out that Fran’ois Mitterrand had a 19-year-old daughter who lived with his long-standing mistress in a government flat on the Left Bank.

Saturday

Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell

Forza Berlusconi!

It is twilight in Sardinia. The sun has vanished behind the beetling crags. The crickets have momentarily stopped. The machine-gun-toting guards face out into the maquis of myrtle and olive, and the richest man in Europe is gripping me by the upper arm. His voice is excited. ‘Look’ he says, pointing his flashlight. ‘Look at the strength of that tree.’ It is indeed a suggestive sight. An olive of seemingly Jurassic antiquity has grown from a crack in the rock, and like some patient wooden python it has split the huge grey boulder in two. ‘Extraordinary,’ I murmur. My host and I stand lost in awe at olive power. If Silvio Berlusconi, 67, Italian Prime Minister, is secretly hoping that a metaphor will form in my head, he is not disappointed.

Marcus Berkmann

The strange potency of bad music

A lesson is learnt. Good music, as we hear it, tends to be ours and ours alone. But bad music is everyone's: we all suffer together. Last month I related the harrowing tale of a recent family holiday in St Ives, where my girlfriend and I, while not buying beach balls in a tourist-tat emporium, happened to hear Neil Diamond's singular version of the Hollies' 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother'. With customary lack of restraint, the old schlockmeister transforms a simple pop song into a full-blooded Broadway show-stopper. You have to hear it to believe it. It drips with goo and phoney sentiment. But it's so vile you can't ignore it. My girlfriend and I stood and listened all the way to the end, while our small children created havoc in the multicoloured-bucket-and-spade section.

Andrew Gimson

Cat flap

We got word that our house in London was infested with fleas as we drove north on holiday in glorious weather through the borders into Scotland. Sid, who very kindly and conscientiously looks after our cats while we are away, sent a series of increasingly alarmed text messages, in which he informed us that he was suffering flea attacks of unbridled savagery on his ankles every time he went into the kitchen or sitting-room. He is not the kind of man to take that sort of thing lying down, and he requested an immediate transfer of funds so that he could buy a full suit of protective clothing and launch all-out chemical warfare.

Douglas Davis

Biological warfare

The moment has come for the long queue of diplomatic high-wire artists to bite the bullet: there is no immediate prospect of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. No matter how much Tony Blair huffs and Jack Straw puffs, the painful reality is that the Middle East 'road-map' is destined to join the slew of failed peace plans in the garbage can marked 'Diplomatic Good Intentions'. True, both Israeli and Palestinian Prime Ministers have embraced the 'road-map', which provides a choreographed procession towards an independent Palestinian state. But their apparent accord ignores the reality on the ground.

Paul Michael-Wihbey

The end of the affair

America is disengaging from Saudi Arabia. To many observers this seems shocking, to others it is unthinkable, but all the evidence points to a dramatic change in relations. A few weeks ago, the last of America's bases, Prince Sultan Air Base, was closed and the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing deactivated. This coincides with claims that there are direct links between the House of Saud and America's arch enemy, Osama bin Laden. The current issue of Time magazine says that Abu Zubaidah, the leading al-Qa'eda terrorist captured in Pakistan last year, was supported by members of the Saudi royal family. While it lasted, the alliance worked well for the two countries.

Neil Barnett

Catch me if you can

Will Osama and Saddam ever be found? If they fare as well as the Bosnian Serb mass murderers Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, perhaps not. In July the desperate duo celebrated eight years on the run from indictments by The Hague Tribunal, and the smart money has them at large a while longer. Mladic seems to have vanished, but the hunt for Karadzic goes on. It goes without saying that no one is quite sure where the bouffant-haired psychiatrist and cod poet is, but best guesses have him roving the remoter parts of Republika Srpska (the Serbian bit of Bosnia) and Montenegro.

Interconnect

The new imperial vision of Silvio Berlusconi

The Spectator began by asking Berlusconi whether he has mended fences with Chancellor Schröder, after he likened the German Social Democrat MEP, Martin Schulz, to a Nazi camp commandant? It was I who was offended, my government and my country. I replied with a joke. I wanted to be humorous. The whole of the parliament laughed. My reply was taken and exploited against me. But you know what? It was a reply that was virtually impossible for me to resist because I once broadcast 120 episodes of Hogan's Heroes in which there was this Sergeant Schulz. You remember? I didn't even think about it. Schulz was shouting at me – no? And it just came to me off the cuff. I always try to be ironical in my speeches.

Saturday

Geoffrey Howe

Don’t vote for us

Where next for the House of Lords? The debate has moved on a long way since that question raced up the agenda, after Labour's landslide victory in 1997. It was possible then for sensible people to regard the Lords as an archaic anomaly with no practical role and even less claim to legitimacy. There was, at that time, more than one reason for taking that view. First, the fact that a clear majority of the House (the hereditaries, 750 out of 1,270) were there only because of an accident of birth – scant justification for political power in a modern democracy. Second, because one party, the Conservatives, had a large and permanent majority in the House (200 more than Lab and Lib combined).

Catherine Maskell

Class slobbery

Ordinary, old-fashioned snobbery and the class war are supposed to be as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Well, they're not. I learnt that in my first year at university – not from lectures but while cleaning halls of residence. There, for the first time in my life (having been thought one of the posh ones at home, 'up North'), I found myself on the receiving end of social snobbery. I had spent the previous year as a cleaner for a small hotel and several houses (while standing by my man as he screwed up his A-levels for a second time, in preparation for screwing up his degree).

Anthony Daniels

The perils of Pauline Hanson

Sydney In his heart of hearts, everyone believes in long prison sentences; it is just that no one agrees about who should receive them. The three-year sentence handed out last week to Pauline Hanson, the former fish-and-chip shop owner who for a time was Australia's answer to Jean-Marie Le Pen, has excited a lively, if not always entirely lucid, debate in Australia. Political liberals who usually cannot wait to forgive criminals for the harm they do to others now crow in vindictive triumph, while the hanging-not-punishment-enough brigade, of whom Hanson herself was once a prominent member, are outraged by the severity of the sentence.

Adrian Hilton

Render unto the Pope…

This realm of England is an Empire ...governed by one Supreme Head and King.' So proclaimed Thomas Cromwell in his most critical piece of legislation, the Act in Restraint of Appeals in 1533. By calling England an empire, he designated it a sovereign state, with a king who owed no submission to any other human ruler and who was invested with plenary power to give his people justice in all causes. Interestingly, the Act's critics in Parliament were not so much concerned by its doctrinal corollaries, as by the fear that the Pope might retaliate by organising a European trade embargo against England. The Pope, of course, laid claim to the ultimate divine right.

Rod Liddle

The hand of history is pointing to the door

The government brought the Hutton inquiry into being by its own shoddy actions. The lying and dissembling of No. 10 has so eroded public trust that, says Rod Liddle, the man responsible – Tony Blair – must go It seems as if we have another thing for which to thank the beleaguered BBC journalist, Mr Andrew Gilligan. According to Britain in Europe, that tautologically entitled pro-euro pressure group, there is no longer even the slenderest chance that the Prime Minister will attempt to drag us all into the single European currency before the next election. Ian Taylor, a Conservative MP and a board member of BiE, told the Daily Telegraph, 'Earlier in the summer they [the government] were holding to the line that we could have a referendum in this parliament.