Features

Saturday

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.

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).