Features

Saturday

Simon Heffer

Collapse of England

Since it is always helpful to blame the government for most things, it might be some consolation to those of us who sat shellshocked at Lord's last weekend, and watched South Africa obliterate England, to reflect on how politics has brought about the decline of English cricket. Such an analysis will bring no short-term comfort to those who must prevent further thrashings of the national side; but only by understanding the causes can we hope, in due course, to eliminate the symptoms. Class is at the heart of the problem. For various reasons, few state schools engage in serious competitive sport any more, and cricket has suffered especially. It requires more time than most games, and that is in short supply thanks to the National Curriculum.

Jeremy Clarke

Sleeping with Freda

Miss Busby's room – room five – had a westerly facing seaview. Latterly, if it was shaping up to be a particularly beautiful one, and there was nothing on telly, I'd go and sit with her and watch the sunset. We'd sit side by side in a pair of her comfortable high-backed antique chairs and watch the sun going down in flames over the sea. We didn't say a lot. We'd just sit there in appreciative, companionable silence. It was very therapeutic. Sometimes I'd turn my head and see the redness of the sun reflected on her face. She had rather a long, hooked nose and her eyes were small and a bit too close together. And whenever she had her hair done it fluffed up, ludicrously, like candy-floss. But it was a fascinating face, one that had looked out on three very different centuries.

Peter Hitchens

God save the nation

If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not crown our next monarch, then who will? The president of Europe? A multi-faith collective? Nobody at all? In which case, what sort of country will we then be and where will ultimate authority and legitimacy come from? Perhaps the prior question is why there should now be serious doubt about the Archbishop's role at the heart of our constitution. It says something about the state of the worldwide Anglican Church that it seems more interested in homosexuality than in anything else. Last month we were entertained by the Archbishop of Canterbury's U-turn on the appointment of a homosexual bishop. Now the Episcopalians have broken the taboo.

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Giving something back

In the past, great benefactors to the visual arts have generally doubled as tastemakers. Their success, as the US critic Jed Perl recently noted, is often best judged by the extent to which their avidities become what the culture takes for granted. But how does taste, which is private, become public in this way? It's a complicated question, and in answering it one can never hope to filter out sheer force of personality as a decisive factor. In curmudgeonly cases such as Grenville L. Winthrop, whose spectacular collection is showing at the National Gallery, and Albert Barnes, as well as more effervescent personalities such as William Beckford or Peggy Guggenheim, a degree of egotism and grandstanding inevitably play their part.

Simon Nixon

Bring back Beeching

Simon Nixon says that we must build more motorways – and scrap railway lines Perhaps the most important discovery I have made over the last few years is that the way to stay sane in Britain is never to use public transport. The Department of Health tells us to eat five portions of fruit a day and to give up booze and fags. But what it dare not tell us is that the best way to reduce the risk of a heart attack and a host of other stress-related ailments is never to use the bus, Tube or train when you can drive a car or ride a bicycle instead. I've been thinking a lot about this in the weeks since my fiancée and I found ourselves – for reasons we're still arguing over – facing the wrong way down one of the approach roads to the M11.

David Gardner

Plain Hinglish

A n early-morning phone call the other day alerted me to the news that my midday appointment in New Delhi had been 'pre-poned'. Could I 'do the needful', the voice said, and 'get my skates on'. A few months ago, I received an invitation from an Indian ministry. First they sent a fax giving me 'advance intimation' of the event, then two more faxes advising me of a 'formal intimation'. After this, an invitation card arrived with the preamble: 'Sir, we would like to confirm our intimation....' Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour – not all of it intended. Hinglish is full of cricket terminology and army metaphors, with echoes of P.G. Wodehouse and Dickens.

Anthony Browne

Some truths about immigration

Something strange is happening when a left-wing government publicly accuses the BBC, riddled with institutionalised political correctness, of – can you think of a more wounding insult? – a 'Powellite anti-immigration agenda'. The Pope publicly denouncing one of his cardinals as a Satanist would hardly be more surprising. It is not just cats of the postwar fractured Left scratching each other's eyes out; David Blunkett's intemperate outburst was in reality an admission that he is losing the most important political argument of the day. It is not only that Britain doesn't want mass immigration but that, despite the government's attempts to persuade us that we need it, even parts of the BBC are finally waking up to see that there are real problems.

Jasper Gerard

How to sack Blair

Tony Woodley, the new head of the Transport and General Workers' Union, intends to make sure that Tony Blair suffers. His plan is to call a meeting of top union guns and instigate a new form of entryism that will select left-wing, union-friendly parliamentary candidates. After this, he will concentrate on ousting Blair from the union. Woodley's antipathy to Blair is such that he is to instigate a review of all 91 MPs on his payroll to determine which ones are 'too close to the gaffer' (a wonderfully evocative phrase, this, rarely heard since the high old days of the three-day week). Anyone whose loyalty is doubted could find that their union days are numbered. So Blair, who only last year opened the new Transport House, the union's London HQ, faces the sack.

Ross Clark

Just when you thought it was safe…

Lady Thatcher so disliked British Airways's ethnic tailfins that she famously took out a paper napkin and covered up the tail of a model plane on the BA stand at a Tory party conference. Should she be passing a model of a BA plane in the next few days, she'll want a tablecloth to cover up the whole damn thing. It wasn't meant to end this way, not when British Airways was liberated from state control in the first flush of privatisations in the early 1980s. With the dead hand of the minister for transport lifted from its shoulder, the airline became one of the most admired British businesses of that decade. The service became responsive to consumer demand rather than to a civil servant's whim.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

England’s national saint

Shakespeare is all things to all people. The greatest writer we have, he was subtle to the extent of ambivalence. As a man he was sexually fluid, politically ambidextrous and not prepared to commit himself on anything, least of all religion. It's sometimes said that the son of a provincial glove-maker could not have had sufficient knowledge or experience to write the plays and poems he is credited with. These people perhaps forget the quality of imagination. Shakespeare is imagination and he was naturally a master of disguises. Those who say his plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon may be forgiven: they weren't, because Bacon didn't have the imagination. (Though I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Shakespeare on occasion pretended to be Bacon.

Leo McKinstry

Boycott Britain

The British tourism industry appears to be gripped by a form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are told that holidaying in Britain has never been more fashionable, with hotels and resorts enjoying a boom this summer. 'Suddenly our seaside towns are the places to be. Santorini is out. Scarborough is in,' gushed the Sunday Times last weekend. On the other hand, it is barely a month since we were warned that domestic tourism was facing its deepest ever crisis. Overseas bookings were plummeting, down 15 per cent in April compared with the same period in 2002, revenue was falling and the government was urged to bail out the beleaguered industry.

Bruce Anderson

My hero

Few Tory MPs set off for the summer recess in a confident mood. There is unease about the opinion polls, and the leader. There is also grumbling about IDS's failure to sharpen up the shadow Cabinet, though it would have been hard for him to do that. The obvious candidates for the sack are Quentin Davies, John Hayes and Bernard Jenkin, the shadow Defence Secretary who makes Geoff Hoon look like Bismarck. But they are also IDS's closest political allies. So instead, he merely made minor changes to the back row of the front bench. Yet one of these, even if unlikely to transform the party's short-term fortunes, has provided Tory MPs with some reason to feel cheerful.

Paul Robinson

Sword of honour

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one 'asshole'. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems.

Simon Heffer

‘Good things are happening in Iraq’

There are no cloud-capped towers, but it is a gorgeous palace – or, rather, ranch. King Hamad of Bahrain, a short, stocky but powerfully built man in his early 50s, strides out of his marble hall to shake my hand on his distinctly palatial doorstep. It is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade in this desert kingdom, so we head for the air-conditioning as swiftly as possible. His Majesty, who succeeded his father as Emir in 1999 and became King two years ago after establishing a constitutional monarchy, is between rides. He is wearing a green polo shirt with a discreet gold crown on the left breast, jodhpurs and riding boots. Each bears his insignia as a five-star general.

Theodore Dalrymple

Black-eyed monster

If you exclude the hypothesis that most British official statistics have been manipulated for one political purpose or another, the latest crime figures appear strange and mysterious: while crimes of violence against the person have risen by 20 per cent in a single year, other forms of crime have fallen somewhat. Since most serious crimes are committed by people who also commit many lesser crimes, and clear-up rates are at an all-time low, the figures are surprising, to say the least.

Peter Oborne

The fall guy

The lightening of Tony Blair's mood on Sunday afternoon was palpable. For two days, ever since news of David Kelly's suicide broke during his Far-East tour, the Prime Minister had looked haggard and broken. His voice went miserable and panicky. But the BBC announcement that Dr Kelly was the source for reporter Andrew Gilligan brought the colour back to the Prime Minister's cheeks. Tony Blair and his Downing Street strategists believed that the revelation that Kelly was the source gave them the chance to seize victory in their six-week-old war against the BBC. They were certain they could identify fault-lines in the BBC testimony and secure an apology as well as the dismissal of Gilligan. The Prime Minister's optimism was premature. This weekend the government is back on the rack.

Rod Liddle

A despicable and cowardly diversion

There was a strange sort of hiatus between Andrew Gilligan's report on the Today programme that Alastair Campbell had 'sexed up' some of the evidence about Iraq's threat to the West, and Mr Campbell's rage at being so accused. It lasted for nearly four weeks. Immediately after Gilligan made his report, there was a brief letter of complaint from Campbell – not an unusual eventuality – but nothing more; just this rageless lacuna. In the middle of the interval, Mr Campbell and the Prime Minister met BBC executives and the editors of the Radio Four news programmes, including Today, to discuss various stuff: the euro, foundation hospitals, the battle against crime, and so on.

Saturday

Alasdair Palmer

Railtrack’s show trial

Alasdair Palmer says the charges against Railtrack’s Gerald Corbett are the cynical prelude to a law on corporate killing The families of the four people who were killed in the Hatfield rail crash are reported to be ‘jubilant’ that a total of six managers from Railtrack and Balfour Beatty are to be charged with manslaughter. They are also said to be quite pleased that Railtrack and Balfour Beatty, the companies with responsibility for maintaining the Hatfield track, are to face charges of ‘corporate manslaughter’, and that five other executives will be tried. It is, they say, a sign that ‘people will be held accountable’. The legal process itself, however, is likely to disappoint them.

John Laughland

My secret garden

It was those trips to the Balkans that started it. As we hard-core Europhobes know, one of the main joys of leaving EU Europe is that the food tastes incomparably better wherever the writ of Brussels does not extend. Although the hard-skinned, white-membraned Dutch tomato has already started to colonise the humble Skopje salad in Bulgaria — agriculture in the bread baskets of Eastern Europe is being comprehensively closed down in preparation for EU membership — there are still pockets of resistance south of the Danube, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, where a cucumber does not taste the same as a carrot.

Philip Delves-Broughton

Elf warning

Paris During the past ten years, 34 out of the 128 Cabinet ministers to have served in the French government have been indicted, mostly for financial crimes. President Chirac himself has had to rig up an immunity law to protect him from charges that he treated his previous job, as mayor of Paris, as a cash-till to enrich himself, his party and his supporters. Among Western leaders, only Silvio Berlusconi has a murkier legal past. So when a French judge decides to talk about corruption, it should be no surprise that she is pilloried by Chirac’s heavies in the establishment. Eva Joly, if you believe the macho Chirac loyalists, is nothing but a vain old widow who is ready to bend the truth and takes bribes to promote herself.