Features

Saturday

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.

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.