Features

Saturday

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.

Gordon Bourne

Why I quit the army

Tony Blair tells us continually that the British armed forces are 'the best in the world'. They are fighting fit, says the government, and straining at the leash to do battle with Saddam Hussein. It is all the more frightening, therefore, that in truth the Prime Minister is about to deploy a British military force as ill equipped for full-scale war as it is to provide the nation with adequate fire cover. Under New Labour, our soldiers, airmen and sailors are badly trained and woefully equipped, and their morale is being sapped by bad pay and humiliating and absurd exercises in political correctness. I have spent the last four years as a squaddie (in army terms) in the Royal Marines. I served in Sierra Leone and on many high-profile operations and exercises elsewhere.

Peter Oborne

The leader we deserve

No British prime minister has dominated the landscape so obviously, with so little obvious effort or for so long, as Tony Blair. You can check through the lists fruitlessly as far back as they go to find a comparable example. Maybe Palmerston, who attained power only in ripe old age, enjoyed a comparable period of popularity during the high Victorian epoch, but even that assertion is open to debate. Before the emergence of Tony Blair, certain rules were assumed to be immutable. It was axiomatic that governments, in-between general elections, faded in the polls. It was taken for granted that the Conservative party was a formidable electoral machine, but within a two-party system.

Saturday

Robert Baker

Can we panic now?

DON'T PANIC! The enemy has anthrax, plague, botulism, poison gas, dirty bombs and ferries packed with TNT that make the Provisional IRA seem about as dangerous as Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. But Mr Blair has announced that we should stay calm. Is he mad? Last time, in 1997, I almost did panic. It was just after the weapons inspectors had unceremoniously left Iraq. The Daily Mail told us to expect hordes of Iraqi terrorists releasing anthrax from perfume bottles on the Underground. I was then, I suppose, terrified, as many are now. I had, I thought, good reason. Infections like anthrax and plague are directly within my field of professional interest. I knew what these bacteria could do.

Rod Liddle

Diana wins – from beyond the grave

Caught on camera at a Remembrance service last week, Queen Elizabeth appeared, rather unexpectedly, to be crying. It was quite a shocking thing to behold: I had never seen our Queen cry before. Perhaps it was just the cold, dank weather getting to her, biting into her bones. Or maybe it was another of those confused and ill-advised attempts to be modern, something imposed upon her by her Blairite PR people. Crying is certainly the modern thing to do - as is, of course, hugging and touching and being, you know, really, really real. Poor, dead Diana cried and hugged and touched at the drop of a hat, or the opening of a children's hospital ward, at least - and she's officially now one of our greatest ever Britons, so there you are.

Saturday

Jonathan Ray

Luxury Goods SpecialPerfect time

As befitted someone who spent half his life looking at it, my father had a beautiful watch. Although I don't recall the make, I do remember how sleek and elegant it was. My father's whole life seemed to be ruled by time and by his pathological hatred of being late. I remember once sitting in a restaurant with him as we awaited the arrival of his lunch guest, an old friend whom he had bidden to arrive at 1 p.m. My father and I had got to the restaurant 20 minutes or so before the appointed hour, as was his practice, and at five to one he glanced at his watch and sighed crossly, 'Tsk, in five minutes' time the bloody man will be late.' In later years, although a complete technophobe, my father bought himself an answering machine, fearful of the calls that he might miss when he was out.

Thomas Cussons

Luxury Goods SpecialSinking spirits

To say that there is a crisis in the Cognac world is to understate the case. The word scarcely hints at the sorry spectacle that is unfolding. This is more than just a tale of falling sales and mounting stocks, though the extent of the industry's financial woes are real enough. More than anything, the crisis looks set to alter dramatically the fabric of the Deux Charentes, the two dZpartements north of Bordeaux where Cognac is produced. Cognac is more than just the economic heart of the Deux Charentes; it effectively is the Deux Charentes - and has been for several hundred years. It is by far the region's largest business, directly employing 22,000 people and indirectly employing a further 33,000 out of a total population of 880,000.

David Lovibond

Luxury Goods SpecialConfessions of a dustjacket junkie

Like all junkies, my most important relationship is with my dealer. He must be cajoled and wheedled to remember me first, I must pay any price he asks and be grateful for the chance, and in no circumstances can there be the faintest whisper of complaint about the quality of the supply. To be sure, bibliomania is not a comfortable addiction. To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income - more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed).

Mary Wakefield

Maximum Fiennes

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes - a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers - if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly in the foyer of the Lanesborough Hotel by 8 a.m. Instead, I pitch up at 8.15 with black particles of diesel exhaust stuck to my puce face. 'Sorry I'm late, I came by bicycle,' I explain to a tall, middle-aged man with a fine-boned, urgent-looking face like a pencil sketch. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, Bt, OBE stares at me with a polite but total lack of interest. As we sit across the breakfast table from each other, previous articles about him suddenly make sense.

Simon Heffer

Perverts and the course of justice

One of those bad courtroom dramas on television might have used the scene as a denouement, and then been panned by the critics for its unrealism. A good and faithful servant, accused of felonious behaviour and facing prison, is acquitted thanks to a surprise intervention by a third party. The third party happens to be the Head of State. The former saintly reputation of the accused is immediately restored. God save the Queen. In the aftermath, a near-hysterical and assiduously briefed press blames almost everybody concerned. The police, thick, bigoted and incompetent as usual, are said to be especially at fault. The Crown Prosecution Service, it goes without saying, is highly culpable.

Saturday

Martin Gayford

Sensitive to the drama of light

If a portrait 'happened to be on the easel', wrote Henry Angelo of Thomas Gainsborough, 'he was in the humour for a growl at the dispensation of all sublunary things. If, on the other hand, he was engaged in a landscape composition, then he was all gaiety - his imagination was in the skies.' What Angelo doubtless meant was that the painter's creativity rose like a balloon into the air. But, looking at Gainsborough's work assembled at Tate Britain in a huge retrospective (until 19 January), one might be excused for taking his words literally. Take a step back from the early paintings in the first room, and you become overwhelmingly aware of their skies.

Christopher Booker

Killer peak

Imagine you have been walking up into the sky for four days on end, until you reach a frozen plateau as high as Mont Blanc. Only now does the serious business begin. Starting at midnight, you climb continuously for six hours in the dark up what seems like a near-vertical scree slope the height of Snowdon, at 20 degrees below zero while gasping for breath at 50 per cent oxygen. You have reached the crater rim of the highest free-standing mountain in the world, capped with cliffs of ice, only a few miles from the equator.

Boris Johnson

Commissioner PZtain fights back

Chris Patten is used to rudeness. When he was the last governor of Hong Kong, the Chinese used to call him a 'jade-faced prostitute' and a 'tango-dancer for a thousand years', and other baffling insults. In these very pages he is called EU Marshal Chris PZtain, a byword for general sell-outery. To the neo-conservatives of Washington, he is the consummate Euro-weenie, ever warning us of the dangers of American 'unilateralism' and the risks of duffing up Iraq. To a certain kind of British Conservative polemicist, he shows an excessive willingness to listen to the claims of Palestinian terrorists and Irish republican murderers.

Daniel Hannan

Why can’t the English be more like the French?

We all know what 'vigorous exchange of views' means. But rarely can a summit have ended with both sides boasting that their chap managed to get some juicy insults past the other fellow. Reading the press coverage on both sides of the Channel, a cartoon-like picture emerges. One imagines Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac like two Asterix characters, purple with rage, leaning towards each other with their noses squashed together. This is not the first Anglo-French diplomatic row, of course. Lord Palmerston, on being told by his counterpart that the English had no word equivalent to the French 'sensibilitZ', replied, 'Yes we have: humbug.