Features

Saturday

Mark Palmer

‘We don’t do burglary’

I like my Vespa. In fact, I can't think of anything that has improved the quality of my life in London more in the last couple of years than my slightly retro 49cc 'Chelsea blue' Piaggio ET2. Getting around town takes half as long as it once did by bus, car or taxi; scooters are exempt from Ken's congestion charge; and it is a cheap way to travel. A full tank of petrol costs £5.50 and lasts at least two weeks. The trouble is that other people like my Vespa, too. Three scumbags have taken it on themselves to steal or vandalise my bike when my back has been turned for more than five minutes – which it was the other Monday.

Simon Nixon

Why the Tories backed the war

Tories are used to getting blamed for many things, but to be blamed for a Labour Cabinet minister's lack of principles is surely a first. That was their fate at the hands of Clare Short. For weeks, people have struggled to understand the former International Development Secretary's failure to resign after calling the Prime Minister's policy on Iraq 'reckless'. Now we know that her hypocrisy was all the fault of the Tories. 'Because the official opposition was voting with the government, a conflict was unavoidable,' Short told Parliament. 'I decided I should not weaken the government at that time.

Andrew Gimson

Pole position

Anyone inclined to despair at the European Union's headlong rush towards statehood should visit Poland. It is impossible, when one talks to the Poles, to imagine that having survived Hitler's and Stalin's attempts to destroy them, they will allow their nation to be drafted out of existence by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and the other notables who are even now completing a new European constitution. The Poles' habits of thought and behaviour, including their tradition of disobedience to foreign powers, render them quite unfit for the submissive role envisaged for them by French and German politicians. This is not to say that the Poles are bent on causing trouble.

Peter Oborne

The New Labour party is over

A photograph was taken of the Blair Cabinet immediately after the 1997 general election. There is a bemused, nervous air about the Prime Minister and his colleagues, as if they had just won the National Lottery but weren't quite sure whether the cheque had cleared. But there is also a palpable sense of common purpose. That unity was finally destroyed last week, as Clare Short quit the Cabinet. She is the 13th of the original 22 to leave since 2 May 1997. One of the 13, Ron Davies, quit through scandal; but most have been driven out of office by Tony Blair. The list of victims is now very long and quite distinguished.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

When all the rules go

Although best known as political cartoonist of the Daily Telegraph, and for his eye-catching covers for The Spectator, Nicholas Garland trained as a fine artist, and never stopped drawing even during his active though short-lived career in the theatre. Recently, he has focused his energies on print-making and is about to open his first exhibition of woodcuts at the Fine Art Society. Exploiting different densities of black ink and the varying texture of the woodblock into which he carves his design, he makes bold simplified images of considerable impact and sophistication.

Malcolm Rifkind

That’s enough grovelling, PM

Why is Tony Blair regularly lampooned as George Bush's poodle? It is a fate that Margaret Thatcher never suffered, despite her long and intimate alliance with Ronald Reagan. The reason is not that difficult to find. Thatcher was perfectly willing to swing her handbag at the Americans if she judged that British interests required it. There is, as yet, no evidence that Blair would even wag his finger in that direction. Few of us would disagree with any British prime minister who makes the relationship with Washington and the White House a central part of his foreign policy. The British are more interested in power than in philosophy, more concerned with influence than with ideology. The Americans have that power. We want to have the influence.

Andrew Gimson

Germany falling

You are leaving the civilised sector. These words were pinned, in German and English, to the outside of the fence which protects the American embassy in Berlin. In order to get through that fence, you would have to persuade the gallant, bone-headed men of the Bundesgrenzschutz – Germany's frontier police, who also guard government buildings – that you are not intent on blowing up the Americans. Meanwhile you can take the chance to study the messages left by German peace protesters, of which the general drift is that George Bush is a mass murderer. It would be easy, on the basis not only of these messages but also of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's foreign policy, to dwell at some length on the anti-Americanism that has become so visible in Germany.

Nell Butler

What a shower!

I'm in a Swiss mountain village. I've spent the day glacier skiing, and now I'm showering in my steamy hotel bathroom. The water is crashing off my ample curves, my muscles are aching pleasantly and I'm looking forward to a convivial evening. But, damn, it's difficult to get out of this shower – it's just too good. Every jet of water has zest and purpose, the shower head is big and shiny, and the water has a creamy quality. There's no crusty limescale, the temperature is precisely 42 degrees, and it's thrillingly powerful. It's perfect. And, as I stand, gasping, under this cascade of hot, bubbly, foreign water it sets me wondering: why are British showers so utterly pathetic when compared with the uninhibited spurt of our Continental cousins?

Rachel Johnson

The toffs fight back

If you read only the Daily Mail, you would think the Labour government was taking the middle classes, like the mountain gorillas of Uganda, to the brink of extinction. 'Middle Britain could be forgiven for feeling under siege from a government that remorselessly stakes new and higher claims on its income – while treating its children as some sort of privileged elite which must be put in its place,' boohoos a Mail leading article. Steady on. It is true that taxes have gone up, but the value of the housing stock has risen by much more. Interest rates – at 3.75 per cent – are at a historic low. Inheritance tax is crippling, but not if you can persuade your parents to contemplate what Carmela Soprano calls 'estate planning'.

Mary Wakefield

‘I focus on winning’

Right! You've got 40 minutes,' says Nick Wood, Iain Duncan Smith's spin doctor, in the manner of a game-show host. We are sitting round a table in IDS's office. Nick has a large glass of red wine in his hand and I have water. Iain can't have a drink, I soon realise, because it would end up all over the wall after one of his emphatic hand gestures. It has been a good week for IDS, perhaps his best since becoming leader of the opposition. Crispin Blunt may have plunged his dagger, but it turned out to have a rubber blade. The Tories gained more than 600 seats in the council elections, the Liberals failed to break through, and Labour did abysmally. Now is the time for the Tory leader to rout his internal critics, and take the fire into the enemy camp.

Rod Liddle

Why is the BBC so scared of the truth?

Let us imagine for a moment that you are a visitor from the Planet Zarg, a civilised and agreeable world somewhere near the great gaseous star Proxima Centauri. Your spaceship landed here a few weeks ago as part of an interplanetary inclusive outreach scheme funded, on your own planet, by a sort of sophisticated private-finance initiative. Your mission is to observe Earth and its multifarious political and cultural doings, and so, with that in mind, you park your ship on Shepherd's Bush Green, just down from the delectable Nando's chicken franchise on the Uxbridge Road. And you start to observe. By now, week four, you are deeply confused and befuddled. You have been watching too much television and reading too many newspapers.

Saturday

Richard Bebb

‘I shall go on collecting until I die’

The charitable giving of Sir Paul Getty always had a deliciously quirky element to it – one thinks of the elegant replacement of the hideous old Mound Stand at Lord's, the funding of the National Film Archive's work in housing and restoring their immense collection of historic films, the saving of the Mappa Mundi and Canova's 'Three Graces' for the nation, and so on. These apparently random choices, in fact, reflected some of the most passionate interests of the man himself – he was a cricket fanatic (he owned Wisden), a dedicated collector of old films, and, as his father before him, a connoisseur of the fine arts. These are just a few examples of his better-known benefactions.

Theodore Dalrymple

Killing time

There have been far more hangings in British prisons since the abolition of the death penalty than ever there were before. I suspect – though of course I cannot actually prove – that in the old days of what was affectionately known as the topping shed the infrequent official executions acted as a kind of catharsis for many of the inmates' suicidal feelings. War, be it remembered, reduces the suicide rate famously. It would be easy enough to test my hypothesis: reintroduce the death penalty, carry out the executions only in certain designated prisons, and compare the suicide rate in those prisons with that in prisons (similar in all other respects) in which executions are not carried out.

Simon Heffer

With friends like these. . .

One hundred years ago, on 1 May 1903, King Edward VII arrived in Paris on the last stop of a European tour. It had already sparked some controversy: His Majesty's Protestant subjects were not happy that he had dropped in at the Vatican to see the 93-year-old Pope, Leo XIII. What came next, however, was to be far more radical, and would have unimaginably deep consequences. Not even the King's most senior ministers had more than an inkling at the time of what he was up to. Irritated by his nephew the Kaiser, and depressed at the surge of German power in Europe, the King had come to Paris to bury the idea that France was Britain's traditional enemy.

Rod Liddle

Is green the new blue?

Phew! Made it! Just in time, mind. And not without a rather costly rearrangement of the flights back from the Far East, I might add. And a holiday cut short as a result of a lamentable slip of the memory. But all worth it, in the end. Like you, I suspect, I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd missed the chance to vote in this week's crucial local government elections. As with most people, rarely a day goes by without my pondering what, exactly, is the best formula for calculating the amount which should be raised through rates, or the council charge, or council tax, for provision of our local services. Is my particular district eligible for a Rate Support Grant? Do they still have the Rate Support Grant? What, exactly, was the Rate Support Grant in the first place?

Andrew Gimson

Hoon: we have to find those weapons

We could go and invade some country none of us has yet thought of and destroy the regime there while leaving the rest of the country intact. That is not quite how Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, put it when I interviewed him on Monday afternoon in the presence of three members of his staff, but it emerges clearly from what he said. Mr Hoon sees a world in which warfare has changed far more profoundly than most opponents of the Iraq campaign have yet understood, and in which amazing possibilities have opened up. Question to Mr Hoon: 'Can you reassure us that we won't be taking part in any action against Syria or Iran?

Boris Johnson

The fear, the squalor …and the hope

Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I heard shouting and saw the Americans using their carbines like staves to push back some of the customers, who were evidently trying their luck. Just then a black sergeant near me started shouting at an Iraqi. 'You, I've told you to get away from there,' he said, swinging his gun round. The Iraqi appeared to be a phone technician, with pliers and a handset.

Saturday

Stephan Shakespeare

82 per cent want a referendum on the constitution

Only 15 per cent of people in Britain are aware that the EU is drafting a constitution. That's up 5 per cent from the month before (our YouGov poll for The Spectator was taken after wide coverage in the media at the end of last week), but still says little for the success of the EU in 'engaging' with citizens in its most important considerations. In conducting this poll, we first gave respondents a brief explanation about what a constitution is. Then we told them how the European constitution is being developed, and outlined a few of the things it might contain. Thirty-nine per cent approved of the general idea of creating a European constitution (with 42 per cent opposed).

Paul Robinson

The people must decide their fate

In 1825 Russian Decembrist revolutionaries in St Petersburg tried to inspire the peasant masses with the slogan 'Constantine i constitutsia' (Constantine and a constitution) as they pressed for Tsar Nicholas I to abdicate in favour of his brother Constantine. Unfortunately, their pre-spin audience simply assumed that Constitutsia was Constantine's wife, and failed to see the advantage of a different Romanov and his lady over the one already reigning. Here today, Britain is about to get its first ever written constitution, drafted by the obliging Eurocrats of the Convention on the Future of Europe, and binding on us all. Yet 'we the people' in whose name this document is being produced have not been asked for the slightest whisper of a comment.

Susan Moore

Business as usual in London

There is a certain irony in the fact that the art market least affected by the fallout of 11 September was probably Islamic art. After all, the big players in this small, specialist field are unlikely to have incomes dependent on the Western stockmarket – and they are as rich as Croesus anyway. Biggest of all is Sheikh Saud bin Mohamed al-Thani, cousin of the Emir of Qatar, who has spent hundreds of millions in just five years – hoovering up everything from Islamic metalwork to Mamluk glass, manuscripts, Isnik pottery, and Indian and Arab jewellery, much but not all destined for a projected national museum and library.