Features

Saturday

John Major

Why we must veto this alien constitution

The history of the Conservative party as the constitutional party has ensured that the issue of Europe is far more troublesome for us than for our political rivals. It was ever thus. The early struggles over entry to the Common Market were fierce, although relatively gentlemanly. Dissent rumbled on in opposition and during Margaret Thatcher's premiership, though it was masked by the size of her parliamentary majority and the belief of the anti-Europeans that the prime minister was 'one of them'. This perception enabled the Single European Act – an integrationist measure that widened majority voting and endorsed the principle of ever closer union – to be passed relatively, but not entirely, painlessly.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

Luxury Goods SpecialWild-boar hunting

Don't worry,' said our guide, Niels Bryan-Low, his eyes bright with malice, 'the only time a wild boar is really dangerous is if you get between a mother and her baby.' A few minutes later, crunching across a patch of orange ferns, there was blur of movement to our right. Niels froze, sniper-style, and we turned to see a terrier-sized wild boarlet, striped dark brown and fawn, zigzagging towards us through the undergrowth. 'Shit,' said Niels, cocking his rifle. 'Where's the mum?' Within seconds, I had hauled myself up into a fork of the only sapling in sight, leaving Niels and my boyfriend to die below. My left foot, balanced upon a slender branch, trembled pathetically.

James Leith

Luxury Goods SpecialJigsaws

If you thought that wooden jigsaw puzzles were a quaint blast from the past, long consigned to the dustbin of recreational history, along with sticks, hoops, tops and diabolo, let me assure you that it ain't necessarily so. First thought up by Thomas Spilsbury, a printer of maps, in the early 1760s, the original 'dissections' were created to help children learn their geography. Thomas pasted maps of the four continents (yes, we have no Australia) to thin sheets of mahogany, then cut around the borders of each country with a fretsaw, and sold the puzzles in plain wooden boxes. The British Library has just obtained a Spilsbury set in their original boxes.

Gerald Warner

Luxury Goods SpecialMonocles

I have been toying with the idea of founding a Cyclops Club, drawing its membership from the dwindling band of individualists who persist in defying the zeitgeist of Cool Britannia by wearing a single eyeglass, commonly known as a monocle. We are a species threatened with extinction and we probably qualify for victimhood, as an oppressed minority. The impending crisis first became apparent last summer when an incident in Bromley provoked national headlines. Brian Dowling, a retired scriptwriter who had worn a monocle for 30 years, went to the Bromley branch of opticians Dollond & Aitchison to renew his prescription, only to be told, 'We don't do them any more.

Merlin Marr-Johnson

Luxury Goods SpecialGold

Golden days, golden child, as good as gold, heart of gold, golden oldie – from the cradle on, gold plays an important part in our language and imagination. The word 'gold' is used in praise, celebration, congratulation and reward. Yet few of us have any notion of where it comes from, or even why gold is so admired. For centuries gold was a symbol of romantic adventure, excellence and wealth. Sadly, it is increasingly a symbol of vulgarity and crass ostentation. This was epitomised by Gerald Ratner's famous admission in 1993 that his 9-carat jewellery was 'crap'. These days, it is more likely to be associated with new money, 'gold-digging' footballers' wives and gangsta rap stars. All in all it seems that gold, if it can be seen and touched, has an image problem.

Jonathan Ray

Luxury Goods SpecialBusiness class

I have always really, really hated flying. The first whiff of an airport and I'm scared out of my wits. But not only am I terrified; I also loathe and resent the contempt in which passengers are generally held by the airlines – the way we're herded like cattle and the way we're expected to eat unspeakable food with a neighbour's elbow in the face.

Michael Mcmahon

Luxury Goods SpecialTreasures in Heaven

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the fullness of Time, even Rolexes rust. Fast cars, foxy clothes, fancy wines and fine jewellery are fun while you can enjoy them, but when you find yourself facing Eternity, you can't take those goodies along. When push comes to Judgment Day, all such trinkets turn to trash. If you want real, lasting luxury, it's not your body you should be pampering, but your soul. There are certainly plenty of people happy to take your money: the Bond Street of spirituality is chock-a-block with shops. Many of them are tour operators, and though their brochures don't offer one-way tickets to Paradise, they do contain suggestions for stopovers en route. 'Our tours and retreats ...

Susan Moore

Luxury Goods SpecialNew ways to keep Old Masters

It seems that hardly a week goes by without the threat of another great work of art leaving these shores. Certainly Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota must think so. Just as he announces, with palpable relief, that a private benefactor has stepped forward and promised £12.5 million to 'save' Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated portrait of Omai from export (more of that later), the gallery may well feel obliged to embark on a new campaign to save yet another costly treasure. This jewel is a recently discovered 'lost' portfolio of 19 highly finished and perfectly preserved William Blake watercolours, the original illustrations to Robert Blair's poem 'The Grave', commissioned by the publisher Robert Cromek in 1805.

Interconnect

More than men with bells

Those of us who worked at the Arts Council of Great Britain, some 40 years ago, were as often as not introduced, even by our own families, as being at or from 'the British Arts Council'. In vain did we explain that lumping these two institutions together was utterly inaccurate, that the Arts Council brought art from overseas to Britain while looking after art appreciation and practice in Britain, whereas the British Council promoted British culture abroad. The avoidance of personal publicity was a part of our ethos, but a nadir in our public relations was reached when my friend, colleague and fellow struggler at the Arts Council's headquarters at 4 St James's Square was introduced as 'Mr Colin Anson – from the British Legion'.

Owen Matthews

Something fishy for Haddock

If there is any justice in the world, Captain Duane Haddock of US special forces is due a medal. He was, we can reveal, the first coalition soldier to find something approaching concrete evidence of Saddam's evil arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; to wit, a trailer believed to be a mobile bio-weapons laboratory found parked by a roadblock south of Mosul.

Melanie Phillips

Road-map to Hell

Colin Powell has said that he can see signs of progress over the Middle East road-map. Israel, he noted, had taken measures which 'constitute the beginning of the road-map process'. Well, that's just terrific, Mr US Secretary of State, because we all know that the big issue is that Israel has not accepted the road-map, which all right-thinking people praise, and is therefore the main obstacle to peace. So what were these Israeli measures? They released 180 Palestinian prisoners and opened up Gaza and the West Bank (closed to keep in mass murderers) as goodwill gestures. And what were the Palestinian goodwill gestures in return?

Emma Williams

The reek of injustice

Emma Williams says good and conscientious Israelis live in denial of what is being done to the Palestinians Living in Jerusalem for the past two and a half years has meant living Israeli fear: the fear of taking children to school and hearing a suicide bomber detonate himself outside the school gates; of not wanting to go to a restaurant or bar or coffee shop for fear of being blown up; of hesitating to call Israeli friends for fear that one of their children had been killed in the latest Palestinian terrorist atrocity. Living in Jerusalem also means seeing the suffering imposed on three million Palestinians because of these fears.

Neil Clark

Let’s hear it for David Blunkett

Like most New Labour ministers, David Blunkett gets considerably more things wrong than he does right. Up to now, his tenure at the Home Office has been characterised by a series of ill-thought-out reforms, half-baked policy proposals and regular verbal gaffes. In three years we have had the draconian Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act – which suspends the 800-year-old habeas corpus in the case of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism – attacks on trial by jury, as well as criticism of Asian arranged marriages, and lectures on what language immigrants should speak in their own homes. When he strays from his Home Office brief, Blunkett's public pronouncements have been even more toe-curdling.

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.