Features

Saturday

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.

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.