More from The Week

Saturday

The Spectator

McCain, please

Why have the US primaries been so gripping? Partly because they are suffused with an optimism and energy that is conspicuously lacking from domestic British politics; partly because the world cannot wait for the Bush era to reach its bleak conclusion; partly because the contest has been a rollercoaster ride, with a nail-biting finish still in prospect. But this year’s presidential race is more than an exercise in political theatre. Like it or not, America is also engaged in an existential war with fundamentalist Islam that affects all of us. It follows — although it is easily forgotten — that the 2008 race is, at heart, a wartime election.

Saturday

The Spectator

After Conway, heed Coulson

Here are some brute facts: the Conservative party still has fewer seats than Michael Foot won in the 1983 general election. To win an overall majority in the House of Commons, David Cameron requires a national swing of 7.1 per cent (compared to the 5.3 per cent achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1979). For all Gordon Brown’s travails, the most recent opinion polls suggest that the Tory lead is soft: a ComRes survey in Tuesday’s Independent put the Conservative party on 38 points, eight points ahead of Labour, but well short of the 45 point threshold at which an opposition can start to feel quietly confident. It is in this context that the Derek Conway scandal must be seen by all who long for a change of government.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 2 February 2008

There is no building so hideous that it is beyond the powers of any modern architect worth his salt to design something even worse. This important truth of the science of aesthetics was borne out recently when I visited Paris and went for the first time to the Musée du Quai Branly, on the banks of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Until then, I had not thought it possible to build a museum more ugly than the Centre Pompidou; but I was greatly mistaken. Moreover, it did not even need a British architect to do it: the French have found one all of their own. The vast but nevertheless claustrophobic museum is devoted to what might once have been called primitive art.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s reputation for economic competence has gone. The Tories should seize the chance

It was easy to forget during Gordon Brown’s trip to India and China that he has actually been Prime Minister since June. His speeches were filled with export targets and trade deals, barely distinguishable from the rhetoric he deployed as Chancellor. This is deliberate. Mr Brown makes no claim to be a suave statesman (a reality he inadvertently reinforced by stumbling over a red carpet in Delhi). Abroad, as at home, he bills himself as the hardworking guardian of prosperity. His entire premiership is based upon the supposedly sturdy pillar of economic stability. This is why the turmoil to which Mr Brown returned on Tuesday morning could be as damaging to him as the problems which greeted the tanned Jim Callaghan on his return from the Guadeloupe arms summit in 1979.

The Spectator

Not so good

Since the words ‘credit crunch’ entered the public lexicon last summer, many politicians and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic have maintained a state of blithe denial about the economic danger signals that were increasingly apparent. But this week, amid worldwide stock-market turbulence, some painful truths have been confirmed. In Washington, the Federal Reserve acknowledged the threat of a sharp downturn and possible recession in the US with an emergency interest rate cut of three quarters of a per cent. It was the biggest cut for almost 25 years, and it seems, for now, to have succeeded in its immediate aim of averting a Wall Street crash. But it was also seen as a panicky admission that the real state of the American economy is even sicker than was widely supposed.

Saturday

The Spectator

Change you can believe in

In an interview with The Spectator last September, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, advanced the following paradoxical political principle: ‘What we have tried to do is make sure people understand that you need experience to bring about change.’ To translate: in order to usher in the new, it helps to be old — or at least to have been round the political block. The thrilling start to the US presidential primary season has revolved around the (often infuriatingly vague) notion of ‘change’, and the question of who is best placed to implement it. Which of the candidates, in practice, truly personifies the clean break with the Bush years that the American electorate seems to crave?

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 12 January 2008

The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else? I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seems, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error. A friend of mine recently attended a conference on Sylvia Plath in Oxford.

Saturday

The Spectator

1828 and All That

The year 2008 marks the 180th anniversary of The Spectator. The original Spectator, founded by Addison and Steele, ran only briefly from 1711 to 1712, although its spirit lives on in our Coffee House blog. Today’s Spectator was founded by Robert Stephen Rintoul, in 1828, and we shall be inviting readers to a series of events this year to celebrate. In the year of this magazine’s foundation, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister; Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States; Goya, Schubert and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool died; and Jules Verne, Ibsen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tolstoy were born. Agitation for parliamentary reform became ever more insistent, paving the way for the 1832 Reform Act.

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 5 January 2008

It was part of the convenience of modern life that information about agents in the area should have been immediately accessible to me at the touch of a few keys on a keyboard. Shortly thereafter, however, a rather less pleasant aspect of modernity made itself manifest: most of the agents charged their callers for calling them. No doubt some will applaud this as evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit that has seized the whole nation. But it seems to me that this misses something about the modern British spirit. At first, I could not quite put my finger on what it was that it missed, and then it came to me in a flash of inspiration, in the shape of a single word that is not much heard nowadays, perhaps because it is too near the bone: spiv.

Saturday

The Spectator

Unto us a Child is Born

The awesome mystery of Christmas is contained in the dual nature of the infant Jesus: the knowledge of His almighty power, juxtaposed with the spectacle of His absolute vulnerability in the crib. At this season, we celebrate the birth of the Saviour. But we also ponder the helplessness of the newborn, and the gravity of responsibility that is placed on the shoulders of every parent. Whisked away by Mary and Joseph, Jesus escaped the horrific wrath of Herod: but many other children fell victim to the King’s insane jealousy. In spirit, theology and secular tradition, this is the season of childhood and family. Dickens captured this in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge is shown the Cratchits’ meagre feast by the Ghost of Christmas Present. ‘God Bless us every one!

Fraser Nelson

Now Gordon Brown has been found out, the Tories should think twice about copying him

Gordon Brown’s detractors have long argued that he deserves to be ranked not among Scotland’s economic geniuses but alongside its most notorious confidence tricksters. His great achievement as Chancellor was not to build a great economy, but to create the unshakeable impression that he had done so. He has succeeded, brilliantly, in claiming credit for the economic growth and lower interest rates which — in fact — were common to most developed economies over the same period. Yet he is no more directly responsible for these economic blessings than the conman Arthur Ferguson was for Big Ben (which he ‘sold’ for £1,000 in 1924). This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Saturday

The Spectator

The sense of an ending

‘Sleaze has been the dominant factor throughout,’ declared the opposition, ‘and sleaze has been the end issue. Nothing better encapsulates what people think of this government. Sleaze will be one of the things that brings this government down.’ The opposition in question was New Labour and the government was Conservative. A decade on, with poetic symmetry, the positions are reversed: it is the supposedly irreproachable Gordon Brown who presides over a party mired in allegations of evasion, lies and outright criminality. In his memoirs, John Major correctly identifies the lethal quality of the word ‘sleaze’: ‘it fed the public belief that the Conservative party as an institution had been in power too long, and had got into bad habits.

Anne Mcelvoy

The Labour party has ended up as the unloved child of the Blair–Brown divorce

Deep party feuds never really die: they just lie buried under the flimsy covering of the good times. For Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, such times have been brief indeed. My yoga teacher tells her wobbly pupils that the point of balance in a perfect headstand is the point just before we fall over. Mr Brown has discovered this goes for politics too. Not least among his many horrors in a parliamentary session overwhelmed by a building society crisis, carelessly lost confidential files, inaccurate data on foreign workers and the funding scandal from hell, is the return of negative comparisons with his predecessor. As soon as I heard people close to the PM saying at Labour conference, ‘Who really misses Blair now?’, I knew fate was being sorely tempted.

Saturday

The Spectator

Brown’s fatal flaws

As prophecies go, it had none of the ritual majesty of the Sybil of Cumae’s pronouncements, none of the blood-chilling qualities of Cassandra. But it has, in its own way, come to pass nonetheless. Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff to Tony Blair, once told our former editor that Gordon Brown’s political career would be a ‘Shakespearean tragedy’. And with every day that passes the tragic quality of Mr Brown’s premiership is underlined. A politician of formidable gifts, powerful intellect and great passions is, nevertheless, finding that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to make a success of the most demanding job in politics — as the events of the last two months have cruelly exposed.

Peter Oborne

At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party

‘Get me a Bishop. Get me a f—ing Bishop!’ Peter Mandelson, then Labour’s political strategist, yelled these words across the floor of Labour campaign headquarters at a rare moment of crisis before the 1997 general election. Inquiries were made, soundings taken in ecclesiastical and other circles. With surprising speed, lo and behold! there emerged out of pontifical obscurity the austere figure of Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford. The ecclesiastical potentate obligingly anathemised John Major and his works. Ever since then the Rt Revd Harries has been reliably on hand with spiritual solace for Labour party politicians in times of trouble.

Saturday

The Spectator

He’s incompetent. So sack him

It must come as something of a relief to Peter Mandelson that when Labour sources now refer to ‘the Peter Problem’ they mean Peter Hain, the beleaguered Work and Pensions Secretary. Mr Mandelson’s conduct came to be seen by many as an emblem of all that was wrong with the Blair era. The Hain saga, in contrast, symbolises what is wrong with the Brown era (assuming it lasts long enough to be called an ‘era’). Mr Hain’s failure to register £103,000 of donations to his disastrous deputy leadership campaign last year chimes with the impression of shambolic mismanagement that now clings to this government, from its handling of the Northern Rock debacle to the loss of 25 million benefit claimant records.

The Spectator

Black Tuesday

Just as some remote tribesmen fear that cameras and mirrors have the power to steal their souls, so the people of the modern world have come to fear that computers have the power to misuse and misdirect their most private data. Identity theft is a potent nightmare of the digital age, and it is with deep foreboding that we part with personal information even to departments of government that should, in a well-ordered democratic society, be the most secure of all repositories of it. For HM Revenue & Customs to allow the National Insurance number and bank account details of a single citizen to fall into unknown hands would be a serious failure.

Fraser Nelson

Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens

There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank account numbers and sort codes for every child benefit recipient, had been put on two computer discs which were sent from HM Revenue & Customs in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London a month ago, and lost in the post. The personal details of every parent in the land are on the loose. Despite attempts by the Chancellor to blame this on the ‘junior official’ who sent the data or the courier company, systemic problems are quickly becoming clear.

Saturday

The Spectator

The whole truth, please

The Prime Minister’s speech on foreign policy at the Mansion House this week was a classic instance of reassurance rhetoric: his intention to soothe Atlanticists on both sides of the ocean, worried by the studied distance Mr Brown adopted at Camp David in July and the mixed signals sent by his ministerial team. Tribute was paid to ‘the personal leadership of President Bush’ in the search for peace in the Middle East and the American alliance was reaffirmed as ‘our most important bilateral relationship’. Even Tony Blair was rehabilitated for the occasion, with a tribute to his ‘painstaking work’ in the Middle East. There were more than just warm words for Mr Blair, though.

Fraser Nelson

Here’s a Tory split on Europe you won’t have heard about

Oliver Letwin’s enemies thought they had seen the last of him at Blackpool. His idea of laying out a policy smorgasbord had almost sunk the party, they argued. Yes, there were some good ideas (mainly from Iain Duncan Smith) but having multi-millionaires like Zac Goldsmith proposing a Happy Planet Index and telling the shoppers not to use supermarket car parks was disastrous. Presenting contradictory policies to the public did not make the party look open-minded, it was argued, but downright schizophrenic. Once David Cameron fought his way out by deciding hard-headed policies for himself and announcing them at the Blackpool party conference, it was assumed he had learnt his lesson and would leave Mr Letwin to terrorise Rothschilds with his talk of ‘aroma’.