Features

Saturday

Peter Kellner

The voice of Baghdad

Peter Kellner analyses the first systematic opinion poll of Iraq, and finds a population full of anxiety — but also convinced that war has made their future brighter Baghdad is on a knife edge. Three in four of its residents say the city is now more dangerous than when Saddam Hussein was in power. Two in three fear being attacked in the street. Most think that we went to war to grab Iraq’s oil and/or to help Israel. Yet despite these deep concerns, only a minority oppose the American and British invasion, and as few as one in eight want the invaders to leave the country straight away. They want the occupying troops to restore normality and then hand the country back to the Iraqis.

Saturday

Sarah Walden

Shared wit of Whistler and Wilde

Oscar's play (I was there on Saturday) strikes me as a mixture that will run...though infantine to my sense...There is so much drollery – that is, 'cheeky' paradoxical wit of dialogue, and the pit and the gallery are so pleased at finding themselves clever enough to 'catch on' to four or five of the ingenious – too ingenious – mots in the dozen, that it makes them feel quite decadent and raffiné ...The 'impudent' speech at the end was simply inevitable mechanical Oscar – I mean the usual trick of saying the unusual... How about that for a piece of lese-majesty. Few would dare write it about St Oscar today, when the aspiration to appear at once infantine and decadent has become universal.

Leo McKinstry

Regions of the damned

Whether we like it or not, says Leo McKinstry, regional government is already here – and it is expensive, absurd and undemocratic Expanding bureaucracy is the hallmark of the government. Since the 1997 election, there has been a deluge of expensive new bodies, from the Scottish Parliament to the General Teaching Council. Thanks to Labour, Britain is awash with publicly funded apparatchiks and well-heeled paper-shufflers. We are drowning in action plans, strategy documents, task forces, co-ordination units, forums, commissions, programmes, tsars and mayors. But perhaps the most wasteful, offensive – and ultimately sinister – aspect of Labour's mania for organisational growth appears not at Westminster, but at a regional level.

Clyde Prestowitz

Like father, like son?

For a moment in early May, American neoconservatives thought they had died and gone to heaven, so much did Bahgdad seem to them to resemble paradise. Their vision of an America that would shed its paper-tiger hesitation and boldly use its overwhelming military power to crush tyrannical regimes and reshape the world for decades to come by establishing American-style democracies in their place seemed well on its way to realisation. As the months have passed since then, however, the whole project is increasingly foundering on a very large rock – the apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

Kimberly Fortier

The truth about Campbell and me

Kimberly Fortier talks to Robin Cook about war and peace – and that day at Heathrow Don't you just love the two Robin Cooks? There's the philandering habitué of the turf, the one who runs off with his secretary; and then there's the conscientious objector to war, the one who sacrifices power for principle. These two Robin Cooks invite two distinct lines of questioning. The first is far more fun. 'Tell me, Mr Cook,' I say, bounding into his office. 'Did you sex up your own dossier by inserting a new wife at the last minute?' Actually I don't, because I am a coward. Instead Robin takes control. 'Let me explain the rules of the game,' he says.

Lloyd Evans

Hail, Galloway!

I spent last weekend trying to become a revolutionary. In early July the sunny avenues of Bloomsbury fill up with Marxists at their annual conference. The jamboree lasts a week (it's still going on right now) and there are lectures on a range of subjects from 'The Roots of Gay Oppression' to 'Luk•cs and Class Consciousness' and 'The Meiji Restoration: Japan's revolution from above'. I passed a useful morning in a lecture hall attending a three-module course in political theory. I opened my eyes to historical materialism. I learnt with disgust about the oppression of the workers. I felt a thrilling revulsion at the vices of the ruling class. But at the end of the second hour, something unexpected happened. I grew thirsty and suddenly tired.

Mary Wakefield

You don’t look Buddhist

There is a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: 'Sheldon, come home.' The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Buddhism about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, 'Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.' By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg's guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jewish Buddhists – or Jubus – are the largest group of converts in the West, with all the hallmarks of an established movement.

Rachel Royce

Girls just want to have funds

The government would like to outlaw pyramid selling. Why? Rachel Royce has joined Hearts, the girls-only investment scheme, and finds it good, clean – and profitable – fun I have a confession to make – but please don't tell my boyfriend. I've made a somewhat high-risk investment. It will cost me £375, but for that I can expect a return of £6,000 – maybe. It's a gamble – I know it's a gamble – but I thought that amount of money could be laundered from the housekeeping, lost somewhere among the cornflakes and the chardonnay and bailiff demands for forgotten Blockbuster videos. The scheme I've invested in is known as Hearts, and it's for women only. It calls itself a 'gifting scheme that benefits all women'.

Saturday

Tom Flynn

The sacred in secular societies

Those nations and cultural groups lobbying Western museums for the restitution of cultural property acquired during the colonial period are accustomed to having their requests denied on the grounds that modern museums should not be required to atone for historical contingencies. A recent declaration by a group of leading international museum directors phrased it like this: 'The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.' In other words, that was then, this is now.

Andrew Kenny

Black fascism

Cape Town Anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of South Africa should pay careful attention to a speech made by President Mbeki at an official funeral in the Eastern Cape on 22 June. Surrounded by powerful black leaders of the new, liberated South Africa, Mbeki gave a eulogy for the departed man and urged the nation to rally behind his dream and to carry on his work. The deceased was the leading black supporter of apartheid, Kaiser Matanzima, the former president of the Transkei 'homeland', Pretoria's ultimate stooge in the days of white minority rule. The two key figures in the formation of 'Grand Apartheid' were Hendrik Verwoerd and Kaiser Matanzima.

James Delingpole

I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It's absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it's the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it's funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it's at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it's better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, 'Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending.

Simon Nixon

Whistling in the dark

Power cuts and rolling blackouts are about as Old Labour as rising taxes and paranoia about spooks, so it should come as no surprise that astute observers of the political scene are stockpiling candles. A report published this week explains why. According to the Institution of Civil Engineers (Ice), Britain is heading for a repeat of the 1974 three-day week, with the government forced to impose power cuts and homes left without light and heat. Ice says these problems will be upon us by 2020, but many industry experts think this is too optimistic.

Andrew Gimson

Let’s hear it for traffic wardens

They are among the most hated people in urban Britain and – because many of them are from west Africa – often the victims of racial abuse. But, says Andrew Gimson, without their bravery and dedication our civilisation might collapse Get a proper job, get a life, sod off back to Africa, black monkey, African prick, storm trooper, German scum. These are among the many insults thrown at parking wardens as they go about their daily work. The jibes about Africa reflect the curious fact that in London about 60 per cent of traffic wardens are from west Africa, while the jibes about Germany reflect the German ownership of Apcoa, one of the main companies in the parking business.

Saturday

Peter Williams

Pedantry and philistine parsimony

The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) was established five years ago to support research and postgraduate study within the UK's higher education institutions. But to read its website or its voluminous guides to applicants is a depressing experience – even if it is only to familiarise oneself with the hurdles colleagues have to jump to get a bit of money most would not need if they were properly paid in the first place or did not have their creativity consumed by overlarge student bodies and by work assessments of various specious kinds. I am deeply sorry for younger academics today, who will never know how wonderful it used to be to work in a university. Of course, the AHRB is not the only instance of the degradation to which academics and real scholars have now to submit.

Jo Johnson

French farce

It is Hollywood's most predictable script. 'Dazzle foreign investors, force them to spend as much as possible and then drive them out once they're broke.' For the third time in a decade, the French are beating a humiliating retreat from Beverly Hills. This time the French national champion in question – Vivendi Universal, a once mighty conglomerate run into the ground by a megalomaniac called Jean-Marie Messier – has taken such a drubbing, it is doubtful that there will ever be a sequel. For the past 12 months, a company that was once the undisputed flagship of French capitalism has been on its knees begging its banks for mercy. France's largest private-sector employer has escaped bankruptcy thanks only to the embarrassed intervention of the French establishment.

Richard Branson

Come fly with me

Most Spectator readers no doubt know that this is the 100th anniversary of aviation and that the patriotic American brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, flew the world's first aeroplane. I would imagine most of the readers have also heard of Charles Lindbergh, who was the first man to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. These names, along with Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin and most recently Steve Fossett, join a host of other Americans who had 'the Right Stuff' and are etched into both the history of aviation as well as the imagination of every child enthusiast who looks up at the sky. Sadly, virtually no one realises that this year is really the 150th anniversary of aviation.

Richard Comber

It could be you

Do you suspect you soon may be going to lose your marbles? And are you over 65? Or do you suspect your elderly parents may be going to lose theirs? Is this loss of faculties likely to be a serious one? Then do not inquire in New Labour's New Britain for whom the bell of despair tolls. It tolls for thee. The care of the elderly mentally ill is in meltdown in much of the country and can only get far worse. It is a national disaster, made worse by the old and infirm who lack the energy and means to defend themselves. It is callous and shameful. I was a community psychiatric nurse until I retired earlier this year with exhausted relief. Every day I came across tragedies which make the admirable Dr Theodore Dalrymple sound like an optimist.

John Sweeney

The first casualty of Pilger…

The Americans are making a hash of rebuilding Iraq, but one of the not so bad things they have done is to give Iraqis the freedom to scribble. On the wall outside the Baathist ministry of health the other day, a graffiti artist had scrawled in perfect English, 'We need a health ministry free of corruption.' For years John Pilger – 'one of the world's most renowned investigative journalists', it says on the back of his latest book – has been insisting that the West, not Saddam, is to blame for the crisis in Iraq's public health; that 5,200 Iraqi children were dying every month; that Western depleted-uranium weapons were to blame for an epidemic of cancers; that sanctions crippled Iraq's doctors.

Sean Thomas

Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn't really go for jazz mags or blue movies. I found them tedious, repetitive, absurd and very embarrassing to buy. There was also a certain bleakness about the harder, nastier porn videos: all those sad and sorry women; all those contrived and silly poses. And as for the guys with mullets and thick moustaches: ugh! In 2001 I went online. A few months later, sitting idly at my laptop feeling a bit bored of typing my own name into Google, I decided to have a peek at all this porn that was supposed to be saturating the Net.

Ross Clark

Public scandal

To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of 'Mondeo Man', a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour's six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person. That antihero of Chekhov, the white-collar government employee, is emerging as the hero of Blair's Britain. Forget the corporate fat cats supposedly draining the British economy dry through their self-rewarding of failure; it is the public sector that is enjoying the explosion in pay.