Features

Saturday

Joe Queenan

Dying for a cigarette

New York Fifty-three years ago, Frank Loesser wrote a famous musical about the refusal of New Yorkers to kowtow to the demands of earnest reformers and implacable do-gooders. Since Guys and Dolls bowed, New York has survived J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Spiro Agnew, Rudy Giuliani and the ministrations of a host of other civic-minded zealots determined to force the city to clean up its act. But it could not survive Mike Bloomberg. On 30 March of this year, Mayor Bloomberg finally got his wish when a citywide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants came into effect.

Mary Wakefield

Lions betrayed by donkeys

Don't be silly,' said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. 'It doesn't matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a bit of a gallop.' It looked, from the newspaper photographs, as though Bruce might be right. Covered in tribal face-paint and with skulls daubed on their helmets, our boys and America's went whooping off in their tanks and planes. Cities fell, civilians looted, and patriots like Bruce knocked back a few bottles of port in celebration. What happens to the heroes when they come home is a matter of less interest to military enthusiasts.

Michael Gove

It’s still the ‘nasty party’

A melancholy anniversary recently passed virtually unnoticed: it is now more than a decade since the Conservative party fell behind in the polls. Never has a major opposition party been so unpopular, with so many, for so long. If Conservatives are ever to govern again, they must do three things. They have honestly to appreciate why their party has come to this pass. They must eschew false comforts and snake-oil remedies, which will only prolong their agony. And, above all, Tories must transform the way they operate. Unless the culture of the party changes, it will never reconnect with a country that it now treats as a foreign land. The scale of the Tory malaise is unprecedented. There have been more than 500 published polls in the past ten years.

Saturday

Michael Prodger

The word made flesh

Alongside the Easter Week story of sacrifice and salvation runs a second narrative – the story of Christ's body. Each stage of Jesus's spiritual journey – from the entry into Jerusalem to the Ascension – has its corporeal counterpart. As the last few days of his earthly life passed by so his physical appearance deteriorated: he was stripped, scourged, crowned with thorns, crushed by the weight of the cross, crucified and pierced by a lance. It is no surprise that Christ's death should become the single greatest life-giving force in art – from the first depiction of Jesus on the cross in about 420 and for the next 1,000 years and more. The Passion narrative provided artists with a ready-made series of set-piece scenes, and each was a painting waiting to happen.

Simon Hinde

Another kidney

Thor Andersen is something of a pariah, or so you would think, to read the denunciations that have been heaped on his head recently. His actions, we were told, were 'abhorrent', their consequences 'tragic'. He was conscienceless, selfish. How, wondered one commentator, did he sleep at night. What had he done, this dreadful specimen of humanity? Well, save his own life, actually. Mr Andersen, a 33-year-old London-based property developer, had suffered complete kidney failure. For a year he had been on dialysis, which for those who don't know is a kind of miserable half-life, requiring the patient to be connected to a machine three times a week for six hours at a stretch.

Rod Liddle

The day of the jackals

The Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting of antiquities in Baghdad took place. For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from Saddam's cruel and iniquitous yoke simply by throwing garlands of flowers at advancing US marines. Far better, far more impressive, was the idea of heading straight for the Iraqi National Museum in downtown Baghdad with a pick-axe handle and a crowbar and a Kalashnikov or two.

Philippa Wragg

My son’s agony

A few weeks ago, Denis Cochrane, the choirmaster of a leading Roman Catholic school, was found guilty on seven counts of indecent assault against boys under 16. He was sought after as a music teacher (one of his pupils was Richard Branson's son) and had a reputation as an organist. Cochrane was also something of a world expert on the Titanic, giving lectures and exhibiting his huge collection of artefacts from the wreck. Denis Cochrane taught my son and assaulted him on numerous occasions. Over the last 19 months I have discovered that, however strong the evidence, it is nearly impossible to make an accusation of molesting children stick against such an influential and admired man. One evening, when my husband was away on a business trip, two police officers rang our front-door bell.

John Gibb

Out of control

In the late 1990s, the US Postal Service identified 75,000 members of a Texas-based paedophile website named 'Landslide'. Credit-card references showed that 7,272 of the subscribers were British. In the naive belief that their personal details would be secure, they had paid £21 a month to download pictures of children being seriously abused. Once they had collected images on their hard drives, they began to trade them with like-minded people. Today, five years later, men from every sector of society and from all over the UK are either under arrest or shaking in their boots, waiting for the early-morning hammering on the door.

Simon Heffer

Stop this evil tour

In what used to be thought to be the gentleman's game of cricket, a brisk handshake was usually enough to end any disagreements. With the Zimbabwean team scheduled to arrive here on 29 April to play two Test matches, various one-day internationals and games against some counties, you might think that doctrine was once again in operation. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that England threw world cricket into what the sports pages call 'turmoil' by refusing, for security reasons, to play a one-day match in Harare. Some Zimbabweans were outraged. A swingeing fine, thought to approach a seven-figure sterling sum, is being negotiated with the International Cricket Council. The total costs to England of not playing the game are said to approach £2 million.

Tim Congdon

The dawning of a new Europe

By accident the war in Iraq has given Britain the opportunity to rethink and to recast its relationship with Europe. It has shown that an understanding between two nations provides and, since the mid-1950s, always has provided the emotional core of the European Union. This is an understanding between its two leading original members – France and Germany – to create a new power with a distinctive voice in world affairs. For most of the last 45 years France and Germany have had the good sense to play second fiddle in world affairs to the United States of America and its close diplomatic and intelligence partner, the United Kingdom. But Chirac and Schröder, and their foreign ministers de Villepin and Fischer, have now committed a blunder of the first order.

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

The Arab street

Londoners have no need to travel to Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus or some other city of the Middle East in order to experience the sensation of being in the Arab world. A visit to the southernmost stretch of the Edgware Road is quite sufficient. The dozens of Arab cafZs, restaurants and shops which line the straight and otherwise dreary main road from Marble Arch to the Marylebone Flyover are thronged with customers, especially at night and especially during the summer, when thousands of Arabs come on holiday to London. To sit here and drink a cup of mint tea, while Arab television, music and conversation fill your ears and around you the Arabs read their newspapers and smoke their water-pipes, is to feel something of the charm of the Orient.

Damian Thompson

Anglican miracle

Ten years ago, a priest at the Brompton Oratory began a sermon with the words, 'At last, we are witnessing the final disintegration of old mother damnable, the Church of England.' At about the same time, Paul Johnson suggested that the cause for which Thomas More was martyred and Cardinal Newman preached was 'now in sight of victory'. Cardinal Hume, throwing his usual caution to the winds, speculated that the Elizabethan Settlement was at an end. The Protestant nostrils of Ferdinand Mount detected 'an intrusive whiff of incense' in public life: writing in The Spectator on 29 January 1994, he said it would be 'much nicer if some of our best friends could continue to be the affable and self-effacing papists we used to know'.

William Shawcross

Pax Americana

Tony Blair has played a blinder on Iraq, standing for the Iraqi people, with the United States, and up to the French and Germans. He has quite rightly said that after the war is over, 'there is going to have to be a discussion; indeed, a reckoning about the relations between Europe and America.' It will not be easy. There is cold fury in America about the perfidious manner in which the axis of France and Germany behaved in recent months, siding in effect with Saddam Hussein. The House of Representatives has just approved an amendment to a £51 billion Bill for financing the war and the start of reconstruction to make sure that no French, German, Russian or Syrian companies profit from it. Although the White House lobbied against it, the Bill was passed by 414-12.

Kim Sengupta

The hero of Baghdad

Baghdad We shall slaughter them all. God will barbecue their bellies in hell. We trap and beat them everywhere. I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.' The last declaration was made while a US army Abrams tank could be clearly seen blazing away across the Tigris. Welcome to the world of Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, who until Tuesday was Iraq's minister of information. During the war, Sahaf was by far the most high-profile member of Saddam Hussein's regime: television viewers from Tokyo to San Francisco became accustomed to him boasting how the Iraqi forces had inflicted stunning defeats on the 'mercenary lackeys of the Zionist entity'.

Douglas Davis

Tony Blair’s Syrian connection

Tony Blair has staked much of his personal and political prestige on attempting to tame the young Syrian President, Bashar Assad. His hard work has been rewarded with embarrassment and humiliation. When the Prime Minister visited Damascus in October 2001, preaching a message of sweet reason and an end to violence, he was forced to listen in silence as Assad defended Palestinian suicide bombers and compared them to the French Resistance fighters against the Nazis: 'Resistance to liberate land is an international right that no one can deny.' Then, when Bashar visited London in December, he made Blair squirm again as he described the plethora of Palestinian terror headquarters in Damascus as 'press offices'.

Michael Ledeen

The end of the beginning

Washington DC The battle for Iraq is drawing to a close, but the war against terrorism has only just begun. As President George W. Bush has said since the first days after 11 September, this will be a long war, involving many terrorist organisations and many countries that support the terrorists. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was never the most threatening of those countries, even though Baghdad gave support to most of the world's leading terrorist organisations, and despite Saddam's programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction. That dubious honour belongs to Iran, three times the size of Iraq, flush with oil revenues, and the creator of modern Islamic terrorism in the form of Hezbollah, arguably the world's most lethal terrorist organisation.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Style of contradictions

Art Deco is the style that succeeded Art Nouveau, enjoying a surprisingly long global life, stretching from 1910 to 1939, and from Europe to America, India and Australia. As the curators of this vast exhibition (over 300 exhibits) maintain, Art Deco was 'arguably' the most popular style of the 20th century, affecting everything from skyscrapers, night-clubs, cocktail bars and cinemas, to handbags, shoes and letterboxes. It was a style of contradictions, an inter-war hold-all which was modern without being Modernist (though the two fruitfully overlapped, as in the Modernist icon, Lubetkin's Highpoint One building in Highgate), frivolous in some manifestations, austere in others, hand-crafted yet industrially moulded and mass-produced, universal yet individual.

Nick Herbert

Pointless, damaging tax

Pollsters talk about the tipping point - the moment when public opinion changes. They think one of these might be about to happen in relation to tax. I'm certain of it. Together with 100,000 other residents, I tipped last week when Westminster's council-tax demand thumped on to my doormat with a 28.1 per cent increase. I confess that I had not noticed a 28.1 per cent improvement in this Tory-controlled council's services; 28.1 per cent more litter, yes, and probably the same increase in the number of Special Brew-swilling drunks on our doorsteps. The council has been complaining that a quarter of its residents have vanished from the electoral register. I am not surprised; indeed, I am planning to go missing myself. A few million more voters may tip after next Sunday's tax rises.

Peter Oborne

The special relationship between Blair and God

It was an unusual preliminary to the war. No British prime minister before Tony Blair has set the scene for a military campaign with a visit to the Vatican for a blessing by the Pope. Admittedly it was not a state visit. Tony Blair's trip to the Vatican was apparently in the capacity of the spouse of a practising Catholic. Nevertheless, it was very striking indeed that the Prime Minister, visibly exhausted by a demanding schedule, should find the time on the eve of war. It is now conventionally held that Tony Blair is the most religious prime minister since Gladstone. 'There is no doubt,' writes the Sunday Telegraph columnist Matthew d'Ancona, 'that he seeks authorisation for war, as well as personal spiritual solace, in the Gospels.

Saturday

Mira Barhillel

Property Special: Agricultural landKilling fields

So just what was that Matt Crawford up to in Midsummer Meadow? For the benefit of the one or two of you who are not Archers fans, a villain of a property developer straight out of central casting (sleazy accent, lap-dancing clubber) was about to buy some meadow land from the saintly David and Ruth (Archer, natch), ostensibly for the use of his lady wife's horses. It was soon suspected that Crawford was, while offering to pay agricultural prices, hoping to employ a planning loophole and get permission for some country house designed by a fashionable architect with the right connections. When the upright David Archer suggested a clause giving him a share of any windfall development game, the nasty developer made an excuse and backed off.