Features

Saturday

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.

Karen Robinson

Property Special: DublinBlarney market

A recent news story in the Irish Times began: 'A court has been asked to settle a dispute between a Dublin lesbian couple over the proceeds from their e470,000 [£320,000] former home.' Those not familiar with the changes that have swept through the Irish capital over the last few years would have to wonder which feature of that arresting introduction was the more remarkable: the matter-of-fact reference to a same-sex relationship, or the impressive market value of an average house in one of the city's outer suburbs. A house that, even more astonishingly, was worth only £265,000 a year ago, and £175,000 four years ago.

Rachel Johnson

Property SpecialThe battle for Notting Hill

John Prescott's plans to erect hundreds of thousands of new homes on - I'm going to use that disgusting word - 'brownfield' sites has not, so far as I know, caused a further outbreak of nimbyism in my neighbourhood. In Notting Hill, there is an embarras of new building already. Aubrey Square in W8, by St James Homes, is one of several 'high-end' developments nearing completion. I've wanted to snoop round this for ages. One, it forced the closure of my old tennis club, Campden Hill (that didn't bother me, though I did resent being told off for not wearing 'regulation tennis socks' by a spotty male member of the committee - you know who you are).

Laura Gascoigne

Cobra’s heroic self-belief

Unlike the old Co-Op building on the Newcastle bank of the Tyne, which has rebranded itself the Hotel Malmaison, Gateshead's new Centre for Contemporary Art has kept the name of Baltic Flour Mills. The original 1950s tiles forming the giant black letters have been scrupulously cleaned of decades of kittiwake droppings and the culprits - a protected species - rehoused in a kittiwake tower downwind. The Baltic is proud of its industrial heritage. Clad in the dignity of past labour, it stares down its poncy new neighbours across the water in their ludicrously over-designed office blocks auditioning as stage sets for Aida. When the Romans came they settled first in Gateshead, and once again it's the smart side of the river.

Mike Dewar

A breathtaking achievement

Over the first week of the war in Iraq there has been a quite extraordinary mismatch between the perceptions of the coalition commanders on the ground and the expectations of the media. The fact that a very small number of British and American soldiers have been killed, wounded and captured is not unexpected. What is quite extraordinary is how few casualties there have been. Media talk of 'significant casualties' is ridiculous. Again, the absurd emphasis on the significance of the small bands of Iraqi irregulars that are operating behind allied lines in southern Iraq is misleading. Some of these elements may be around for months to come.

Tim Butcher

This is no cakewalk; this is war

Umm Qasr The shriek of artillery shells has died away from Umm Qasr, the first city in Iraq to be taken by allied troops, but another whining sound can already be heard here. It is the sound of the doubters and sceptics at home, wringing their hands on short-wave radio programmes and satellite television broadcasts because this war has not already been won and Saddam's regime toppled. The last Gulf war was won after 100 hours of ground fighting; Kosovo was secured without a shot being fired by allied troops; and an entire African country, Sierra Leone, was effectively saved within two days by a battalion of British paratroopers. The public has come to expect Pot Noodle wars: instant military victories.

Saturday

Natalie Wheen

Hovering between fact and fantasy

I had the strangest experience at the ballet in Dresden: all perfectly pretty onstage, the company well schooled but I couldn't believe the orchestra. I've never heard a ballet orchestra playing with such love for the music - beautiful phrasing, elegantly balanced winds, seamless ensemble, the right notes all the time, in tune...I had to pinch myself. Of course, this was no ordinary ballet band; at the Semper Oper in Dresden, the Staatskapelle, with a 455-year-old reputation to guard, has the longest record of continuous work of any bunch of musicians. The orchestra did first performances for Wagner and Weber, nine premieres for Richard Strauss, his dream team. It was Beethoven's super band.

Richard Moore

Bush makes more sense than Kennedy

Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, seems to base his policy in the present crisis on: 1) the need to avoid killing innocent Iraqis; 2) the need to uphold the authority of the United Nations; and 3) the need to avoid association with the crudities of the present American administration. People assert that 100,000 or more Iraqis will be killed by the Anglo-American military action. Probably ten times that number have been killed by Saddam Hussein, often in the most atrocious circumstances, such as the torture of children. Until Saddam is got rid of, such crimes and the prevalence of disease and malnutrition among the Iraqis, to which Mr Kennedy referred in his speech at Torquay on 16 March, will continue.