Features

Saturday

Michael Gove

The Maggie, Tony and Iain show

Why didn't the Tories invite Pete Waterman to speak at their conference? The guru behind Kylie Minogue who has become a familiar television face as a judge on ITV's Pop Idol certainly wouldn't have felt out of place. He's used to helping nervous unknowns who want to make it big. And his experience sitting beside the bracingly honest Simon Cowell on the Pop Idol judging panel would have meant that he would instantly have seen the wisdom in Theresa May's uncompromising insistence that the Tories get their act together. Only when you fully realise how badly you're performing will you make the effort required to get it right. The important lesson Waterman could have told the Tories was one he shared with Times readers on Monday.

Interconnect

COMPETITION | 12 October 2002

Mercedes-Benz in association with The Spectator is offering readers the chance to win a wonderful 2-night break including dinner at the 5-star Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds with the use of a new E-Class Saloon. To enter the competition, write an epigram on the theme 'Everything' and send it to Epigram Competition, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL or e-mail it to mercedes-benz@spectator.co.uk. Winners will be announced in the 7 November issue and the top three winning epigrams will be published on the Letters page of the subsequent three issues. Terms and conditions. Closing date for entries is 31 October 2002. Open to all UK residents aged 21 or over except employees of the Spectator, DaimlerChrysler UK and their agents, and Savoy Hotels.

Andrew Gimson

A distant mirror

Hackney, E8 Murals are unfashionable, and peace murals commissioned by loony-left councillors at the height of their self-indulgent assault on the Thatcher government are perhaps most unfashionable of all. Yet the Hackney Peace Carnival Mural in London, created between 1983 and 1985 and now threatened with demolition, really ought to be saved. It is a fascinating work, a grand exercise in figurative painting which lifts your heart, or at least provokes your curiosity, as you see it adorning the entire side of a house in Dalston Lane, a few yards east of Balls Pond Road.

Bruce Anderson

Don’t call us nasty

THE Tories need not despair. Their problems, though grave, are less serious than a superficial reading of the opinion polls would suggest. Anyone trying to make sense of current British politics ought to seek guidance from two unorthodox sources, F.H. Bradley and Greg Dyke. Bradley wrote a book called Appearance and Reality; in politics, the gap has never been greater, one reason why Mr Dyke wishes to debase the BBC's political coverage. As for appearance, everything seems clear. Mr Blair has marginalised the opposition to the extent that he virtually controls the language of public debate. The Prime Minister's hegemony has persuaded much of the media class, including Mr Dyke, that his position is unassailable.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

It’s crunch time for the Tories

on the day of last week's debate on Iraq, senior Tories and business supporters gathered at the Dorchester Hotel for the annual Carlton Club fund-raising dinner. The turnout was impressive, with well over 200 present and more than £100,000 raised for the party. The guests wore black tie, though shadow Cabinet members, conscious of the need to return to the Commons, wore lounge suits. Iain Duncan Smith's speech came at the start of the evening, so that he could make his early getaway. Many of the guests, mainly chairmen and chief executives of major companies, had not heard Duncan Smith before.

Stephan Shakespeare

Floating away from the Tories

If floating voters had to choose between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democratic party, a clear majority of them would choose the Lib Dems, according to a poll conducted for The Spectator. And almost half of them believe it likely that the Lib Dems will take over from the Tories within five years. Floating voters make up as much as 30 per cent of the electorate, while core Tory voters make up about 25 per cent, core Labour 30 per cent, and core Lib Dems perhaps 15 per cent. When floating voters decide whether or not to walk down to the polling booth, they ask themselves two questions: does any party offer me something I really want? And, if so, does it have a chance of winning?

Robin Simon

Bringing the dead to life

Osbert Sitwell tells a story in Left hand! Right hand! about visiting a country house and sitting on a hall chair which promptly collapses. 'Don't worry, Osbert,' his hostess tells him, 'it was a very old chair.' Indeed it was, as Sitwell later discovers: Egyptian and about 3,000 years old. Fortunately, more 'very old' objects have survived from ancient Egypt than from any comparable period, because the Egyptians set such store by filling the tombs of their pharaohs with chairs, sculpture, jewellery, wall paintings, gold, alabaster, model boats, board games - anything that might come in handy for the after-life in which they so firmly believed.

Interconnect

COMPETITION

Mercedes-Benz in association with The Spectator is offering readers the chance to win a wonderful 2-night break including dinner at the 5-star Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds with the use of a new E-Class Saloon. To enter the competition, write an epigram on the theme 'Everything' and send it to Epigram Competition, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL or e-mail it to mercedes-benz@spectator.co.uk. Winners will be announced in the 7 November issue and the top three winning epigrams will be published on the Letters page of the subsequent three issues. Terms and conditions. Closing date for entries is 31 October 2002. Open to all UK residents aged 21 or over except employees of the Spectator, DaimlerChrysler UK and their agents, and Savoy Hotels.

Saturday

Susana Raby

PROPERTY SPECIAL:Property problems

Just as some men are attracted only to blondes with long legs, or buxom, curly-haired brunettes, so there are certain architectural features that make my heart beat faster and others that leave me cold. Bay windows can certainly be very handsome, and they let in plenty of light, but they don't carry the same emotional charge as a pair of floor-length windows. The ultimate adrenaline rush, for me, comes from two (or better still, three) sets of French doors on to a terrace with a view of tall, venerable trees beyond. But as with people, so with property: love at first sight can be a dangerous thing. A few years ago I fell in love with a barn in the Dordogne.

Sinclair McKay

PROPERTY SPECIAL:Literary London

Until recently, a lively sub-genre of English literature was that devoted to London's creepier, darker back streets. Peter Ackroyd took us on a grim tour of early 1980s (and early 1700s) Shoreditch and Limehouse in Hawksmoor; Iain Sinclair angrily traversed the weed-sprouting, rubbish-strewn streets of Hackney and Tilbury and what he called the 'sumplands' of Dagenham in Downriver. Angela Carter peeked through the yellowing net curtains of dowdy south London, while Michael Moorcock beckoned us to explore the gentle sadness of peeling suburban avenues. Go further back and you will find Patrick Hamilton's malign vision of Earls Court, Arthur Conan Doyle's all-pervading fogs, Dickens's appalling rookeries.

Peter Oborne

They went to ground

Peter Oborne exposes the interested parties who failed to march on Sunday ONE of the most remarkable things about Sunday's magnificent Countryside March was the superhuman effort shown by many people to get to London. This does not merely apply to the folk from Scotland and the north of England who rose hideously early in the morning to make long, boring coach journeys south. Not just to the disabled marchers who braved physical pain, the 97-year-old woman who insisted that she would get round if it was the last thing she did, or the pregnant woman who completed the march, though due to give birth the following day. People came from the ends of the earth.

John Laughland

A war for oil

Mikhail Khodorkovsky tells John Laughland that American control of Iraq will be good for Cadillacs but bad for Russia Opponents of the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq say that it will push up the oil price and thereby damage the world economy. This is the least of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's worries. Aged 39, Mr Khodorkovsky, is the chairman and CEO of Yukos Oil, Russia's second-largest oil company. He is convinced that the medium-term effect of a new Gulf war will be to drive the oil price down to levels which will radically rewrite the map of world oil production, and give the USA total control of supplies. From this, the war for American gas-guzzlers, Khodorkovsky thinks we will all suffer.

Andrew Gimson

Deutschland

Berlin Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was sober on Sunday night and drunk on Monday morning, and both conditions were entirely justified. When the polling booths closed and the first exit polls were published on German television at 6 p.m. on Sunday, the rival camps were so close that either of them might have ended up with a tiny majority but, as an evening of great confusion and excitement wore on, Mr Schroeder's conservative opponents seemed to move into the lead, which was what most of the German press reported the next morning.

David Prycejones

Nothing to lose but their chains

A war against Iraq might destabilise the Middle East, says David Pryce-Jones, but that is precisely what the region needs Iraq may soon be liberated. The Americans are building bases and runways in the Middle East, airlifting men and supplies, and passing the resolutions in Congress necessary to take military action. Regime change is what President Bush has set his heart on. Condoleezza Rice goes further: she calls for democracy, not only in Iraq but also in the wider Muslim world. From the reaction all over Europe, you might think that Washington was insisting on the sacrifice of the first-born.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Fighting talk from a dove

Peter Oborne talks to Charles Kennedy about his plans to put the Lib Dems ahead of the Tories NO politician has the opportunity that Charles Kennedy has today: he just might reconfigure the political landscape. With the Conservative party in a weak and semi-moribund state, uncertain of its own identity and still struggling to come to terms with the landslide defeat of 1997, it is by no means inconceivable that the Lib Dems could emerge as the main opposition party in Britain. Charles Kennedy could go down in history as the man who reversed the calamity which overtook the Liberal party after the first world war, when the party split and in due course subsided into a tiny rump.

Laura Gascoigne

A time for living dangerously

Why watercolours deserve their revival in popularity When the National Gallery ran its eye-tracking experiment last year into how we look at pictures, the works selected for the test were all oil paintings. Had they been watercolours, the results might have been quite different. Going round the Girtin show at Tate Britain recently, I noticed that people look at watercolours differently. Without the National Gallery's sophisticated surveillance equipment, I'm not in a position to comment on their eye movements, but I can report that they look harder and closer, as if their interest is not just in a picture's subject, but in how it's made. This may be partly because, on a mid-week afternoon in August, the gallery was packed with eager dabblers on the lookout for top watercolour tips.

Michael Crick

Football’s Alastair Campbell

Michael Crick says that Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson is not a crook, but he is a liar and a bully If he'd dithered for another day or two last winter, then Sir Alex would now be relaxing somewhere off the Azores or Madagascar, starting his retirement with the world cruise he's always promised Cathy, his long-suffering wife. Last February, Manchester United were within hours of signing a contract with the England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson to succeed Ferguson, who planned to retire in May. The plan was that Eriksson should take over at Old Trafford after this summer's World Cup. Then, suddenly, as lawyers perfected Eriksson's contract, Fergie changed his mind. He couldn't give up the football drug, and asked to stay another three years.

John Laughland

We will not surrender

John Laughland reports from Iraq on the determination of ordinary people to fight any attempt by the British and Americans to impose regime change Mosul, northern Iraq The ancient city of Mosul straddles the Tigris near the Turkish and Syrian borders, and just beneath the hills of Kurdistan. Churches and mosques jostle for space in its tiny biblical alleyways; Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Syrians, Turkmen, Jews and Yezidis all call it home. St Thomas the Apostle stopped here on the way to India; Agatha Christie lived here and was inspired to write Murder in Mesopotamia and They Came to Baghdad.

Saturday

Interconnect

Black Wednesday remembered

They got it wrong last time... It is the tenth anniversary of Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992, and, across the nation, there will be diverse commemoration of that astonishing moment when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Some may be brooding sorrowfully on the Tory party, which has not since recovered in the polls. Some may want to show a mark of respect to the myriad job losses, the 100,000 destroyed businesses, and the 1.75 million homes which were plunged into negative equity during the calamitous two years of Britain's membership. Here at The Spectator, we thought it right to remind you of all those who clamoured for the pound to join in October 1990, and who heroically pretended that the system was working.

Simon Heffer

Good people ready to break the law

Simon Heffer will personally flout the hunting ban, and other country folk have more radical plans to combat Mr Blair Earlier this summer I was discussing with a pillar of county society the effects of a ban on hunting. We were at a county showground, and he pointed to the ring where hounds parade each year and are awarded prizes. 'These ****s say they want to stop cruelty to animals. We will have no choice but to put the hounds down. They can't be domesticated. All they know to do is hunt. So immediately after the ban, we bring 50 couple of them here, to this ring, and shoot them. How will the antis feel about it then?