Features

Saturday

James Tooley

A lesson from the Third World

Schoolboy Worlanyo leaves his crowded home in the townships of Accra, Ghana, early in the morning, smartly dressed in brown shorts and a bright but frayed yellow shirt. He makes his way down filthy streets, but walks past the run-down exterior of the government school, where a few children forlornly wait for the doors to be unlocked. The government school teachers won't be there for a few hours, some not at all today, or any day. Worlanyo walks on past, turns off down the next alleyway and enters by the brightly hand-painted signboard the crowded playground of 'De Youngster's International School'. The elderly Mr A.K. De Youngster looks on with pride as the children begin their assembly with a hearty rendition of 'How Great Thou Art' at the school he started from scratch in 1980.

Simon Heffer

The dustbin party

Her Majesty's Government is in a right mid-term mess. The public services don't work, despite all the extra cash being thrown at them. The public has, according to a poll last weekend, completely lost confidence in the forces of law and order. Illegal immigration continues unchecked. The gap between revenue and expenditure is expanding. Mr Blair is losing the support of his party, and Mrs Blair is the public's choice to be deported. Another opinion poll shows the gap between Labour and the Tories to be a mere 5 per cent. However, while the government's support is collapsing, the Tories' is hardly shifting upwards.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Living in a state of terror

THERE has been a row during the last fortnight about whether the government should ban the English cricket team from travelling to Zimbabwe for next month's World Cup. But the cricket has obscured the real issue. And that is whether Britain and the world community will intervene to stop Robert Mugabe from torturing, terrorising and starving to death the people of Zimbabwe. I spent two weeks in this beautiful country shortly before Christmas, making a film for Channel 4. We travelled illegally. Dr Mugabe does not want the world to know what he is up to, so he has banned foreign journalists. We posed as golfers, using secret cameras. We learnt that the famine that looms for eight million Zimbabwean citizens - more than half the population - is no natural disaster.

Saturday

David Lovibond

Rock of ageism

There were four of us on the shortlist: three women in their twenties and me. We sat in a row while a Home Office cheerleader told us what a great life awaited one of us in the press office. The jolly-along lasted for perhaps ten minutes, and not once did the beaver pause in his smiling and giggling, or for a single heartbeat remove his gaze from the girlies in skirts to glance in my direction. I didn't get the job. Not that I'm bitter. It is entirely reasonable that nice Mr Blair should wish to fill his ministries with the young and personable, rather than middle-aged candidates for new-face transplants.

Rod Liddle

Why not kill Saddam and spare Iraq?

There's something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins). This is what we're about to do to Iraq, if I'm not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with the weapons inspectors. We are angry with one evil man and further irritated by his devoted but minuscule coterie. And so we plan to send in the expensive bombers and those weapons of fairly widespread destruction, the missiles; and perhaps thousand upon thousand of ground troops, too, in order to be rid of him and install someone marginally less despotic. It seems an awful lot of effort, just for Saddam. You have to say, we would truly be putting ourselves out.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Treats round the country

For any art lover, the prospect of a new year of exhibitions - of new wonders revealed and old friends revisited - is, of course, immensely exciting. But only the very organised institutions have their exhibition programmes confirmed well in advance, and in these increasingly uncertain times, even the top museums sometimes have to change their plans at the last moment. Since 9/11 collectors abroad have been less inclined to lend valuable works, while the downturn in the economy has made sponsorship more elusive than ever.

Andrew Gimson

The last trade union hero

At a time when even the Labour party panders to the rich and to the middle classes, it is a pleasure to talk to a genuine socialist. Jack Jones, who will be 90 in March and was one of the most powerful men in Britain when he led the Transport & General Workers' Union in the 1970s, retains the unfashionable belief that the purpose of the Labour movement is to improve the lot of the working classes and the poor. He was born in Liverpool in 1913, in a house which was that year declared unfit for human habitation, and was brought up in poverty. In his youth he sometimes taught at a socialist Sunday school, where he inculcated a socialist version of the Ten Commandments, including such sentences as, 'Remember that the good things of the earth are produced by labour.

Andrew Roberts

The secret of Churchill’s gold

Never in the course of parliamentary history has the personal honour of MPs been more widely doubted and discounted than it is today. Last week the Speaker of the House of Commons announced that, from 2004, not just the Register of Members' Interests but even their expenses claims will be made available to public scrutiny. Will it ultimately work in the public's favour to subject our politicians to ever more rigorous audits of their financial affairs? It is not just MPs who are being investigated - always with the automatic assumption of guilt until innocence is proven - by ever-nosier public bodies. Our very parish councillors, whose work is largely unremunerated, have been asked to declare any 'interests', and to register gifts of more than £25 in value.

Saturday

Michael Prodger

An artist for our times

If faith can be said to have fashions, then it has been worn loosely for several seasons. The Christian belief that underlies the great religious paintings of the Renaissance is for many people an alien concept: it can appear, to modern eyes, too structured, too certain, too sentimental. At this time of year in particular, surrounded by painted-by-the-yard Nativities, the faith that brought them into being seems as distant as the age in which they were created. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840, is perhaps a type of artist more suited to our times. His Christianity is not insistent but comes wrapped in another - more widely practiced - religion: Nature. He offers the consolations and beauties of both.

Candia Mcwilliam

The tree without

Since last Christmas, John and Edie have been watching their tree, which they keep outside, with the mixture of helplessness and pride familiar to mothers of sons. They first decided to have a tree that was to enjoy a full life, roots and all, in its pot, five years before. 'I thought it might have happened, and it has,' said John, from behind the tree, more accurately from within it, which he was attempting to fit through their front door. 'It won't come without a fight, this year. It's even prickly on its smooth bits. Did we like it once?' Edie saw where this might end, with a lot of spiteful lopping and some vinous remorse. 'Leave it outside,' she said. And, to make certain, 'I remember you saw an outside tree once, do you remember? You liked it.

John Weston

How to win hearts and minds

Saddam Hussein's mountain of documents now awaiting analysis by UN experts has temporarily flummoxed those in hot pursuit. It has thus bought a little more time before a final reckoning is visited upon him. He is playing a weak hand with customary tactical adroitness. But the underlying realities have not changed. Despite seasonal injunctions to moderation by respected generals, ambassadors and bishops here, we should not allow ourselves to fall prey to the liberal illusion that, so long as no clear or present danger from Iraq is seen to threaten directly the national security of the UK or the US, international inaction is a cost-free option. The evidence of Iraq's proscribed mass weapons programmes during the 1990s was compelling.

Peter Oborne

How Alastair Campbell betrayed Cherie

THERE is something eerie, and a little sinister, about the rise of the Campbell-Millars, as Alastair Campbell and his longstanding partner, Fiona Millar, are known in north London. Their rise started in the 1980s when they were young, unknown and ambitious. They ingratiated themselves with Neil and Glenys Kinnock: helping with the shopping and being on hand at a moment's notice. In due course, the Kinnocks and the Campbell-Millars went on holiday together, and were in and out of each other's houses. The friendship was helpful to Alastair Campbell's budding career as a journalist. His hotline to the leader of the opposition helped him become political editor of the Daily Mirror, the most powerful reporting job on the Left, at the early age of 32.

Saturday

Mark Glazebrook

‘When artists were just tolerated’

In San Francisco in the late 1970s you could cover the entire modern art gallery scene, both commercial galleries and temporary exhibitions in museums or other public institutions, between a leisurely Saturday breakfast in Sausalito on the far side of Golden Gate Bridge - eggs Benedict and coffee perhaps - and a late lunch in the centre. Anyone who lived in London in the 1930s could have done something similar. Today, Galleries Magazine lists some 250 galleries which spread from Teddington to Hampstead and from Hammersmith to Hoxton. In 1935, there were fewer than a dozen dealers' galleries focusing on contemporary art and they were all within walking distance of each other. Everyone knew that if you wanted to find out what was really going on you had to go to Paris.

Charles Moore

A world without trust

Have a look at the current ten-pound note. 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds,' it says. The 'I' who is speaking appends her signature. She is someone called Merlyn Lowther. She describes herself as Chief Cashier, and she signs, as the note states, for the Governors and Company of the Bank of England. This note strikes me as an interesting and important example of how trust works. To the sceptic, after all, there might seem to be nothing to trust at all. What is this ten pounds that Mrs Lowther promises to pay me on demand? The word 'pound' was originally a word describing the weight of sterling for which the note stood.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

The Empire strikes back

Ten years ago, Bristol council were apparently thinking of demolishing the building which now houses the newly opened British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. This would have been a great pity, for it was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel as part of the world's first purpose-built railway terminus - Bristol Temple Meads (completed 1841). And the new museum fits into the renovated Grade I listed building rather snugly, with enough room for a temporary exhibitions gallery on the top floor. In the basement, the education rooms lead directly out of the cafZ, so it's difficult to escape the hordes of schoolchildren, though they genuinely seem to enjoy the displays - especially the Morse code tapper. (I wonder how soon that'll have to be replaced?

Leah McLaren

The Aussie who saved our flag

A cowboy name. Heavy on the consonants and crudely clipped, the first three letters doubling as an instrument of discipline, it is as solid and unpretty as the man it refers to. Given recent challenges, a perfect moniker for a captain of the British aviation industry. 'I've been an airline chief executive for over ten years now and it is a stressful job,' Rod Eddington is saying, fixing me with a crap-cutting, High Noon look. 'But you have to be able to accept that it's stressful. I won't pretend for a moment that it's been easy.' We are sitting in a windowless, over-furnished boardroom in the Park Lane Hotel in Piccadilly. Eddington, who starts work each day shortly after 7 a.m., has been here conducting meetings since early this morning.

Toby Young

Why our gods must die

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. For the next 24 hours I'll be glued to my television set watching the final moments of Celebrity Big Brother. Admittedly, it hasn't proved quite as compelling as the first series, but it has been pretty entertaining nevertheless. I'll be particularly interested to see who wins, because the person emerging triumphantly from the house tomorrow night could easily have been me. I was first contacted about appearing on Celebrity Big Brother on 2 October by a woman claiming to be one of the producers. Naturally, I assumed it was a practical joke being played on me by one of my friends. It wasn't until I received a formal letter the following day that my doubts were finally laid to rest.

Saturday

Interconnect

Parliamentarian of the Year

The 19th annual Parliamentarian of the Year awards, sponsored by The Spectator and by Zurich Financial Services, were presented by Michael Martin, MP, Speaker of the House of Commons, the guest of honour at the awards presentation luncheon held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, London. The guests were welcomed by Sandy Leitch, chief executive of Zurich Financial Services. The chairman of the judges, Boris Johnson, editor of The Spectator, read out the judges' choices and the reasons for them. Parliamentarian of the Year:The Rt Hon. Tony Blair, MPThe talents of this year's victor ludorum were first spotted at Fettes, where he was in the netball team, and played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar.

Mike Denham

Freedom for the South-east!

I once got bashed up by the late John Smith. It was at one of those charm-offensive lunches in the City, and he had asked why London's booming financial firms kept all their jobs in the South-east rather than sharing them round the rest of the country. My mistake was to suggest that dispersing jobs like that might damage competitiveness and profitability. Such innocence. A couple of charming karate chops later, I was stretchered off and never asked back. Afterwards, of course, I realised what had been required: regional empathy, some breast-beating about past failures, and a People's Pledge to forge a new ...er, well, partnership. I could then have settled down to the rest of my prawns. But I would still have spent the next ten years brooding about it.

Owen Matthews

‘The minarets are our bayonets’

Istanbul I have no doubt that Allah moves in mysterious ways. But if He has chosen Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instrument of His vengeance on the infidel, He must be given credit for startling originality. Erdogan, whose party won a landslide victory in Turkey's recent general election, may be feared in some quarters as a dangerous Islamist, in person he looks no more threatening than a rather blokeish bank manager. Even during his most animated moments on the campaign trail, his bearing was that of the trainer of a small-town football club rather than the Ayatollah Khomeini. One wonders what the fuss is about - Erdogan, with his clipped moustache and nondescript suit, evokes less the Nation of Islam than the Abbey National of Islam.