One of Britain’s best columnists, The Sun’s Jane Moore, backs our candidate today. “Electing him as Mayor would be outrageous,” Jane writes. “He should be PM and nothing less.” Her support is as important to the Project as Polly Toynbee’s opposition. More as we have it.
You’ve got to realise they would have done it. They would have gone right ahead and swept another priceless heirloom from the mantelpiece of history. They were revving up their bulldozers, ready to roar into the ancient and irreplaceable ecosystem. Another great tree would have been felled in the forest of knowledge, and the owl of Minerva would have fled in terror from her roost. Had it not been for a few romantic reactionaries, then the technicians who run our reductionist system of education — with the complaisance of the Labour government — would by now be halfway to the demolition of the ancient history A-Level.
It is one of the great mysteries of modern geopolitics. How the hell has Condoleezza Rice got away with it for so long? There she is, Secretary of State of the United States and one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is Condi Rice who leads on behalf of you, me, the entire Western world, in waging this deepening Cold War with Iran. She is the girl who threatens Ahmedinejad with Armageddon, or whatever our policy is. And yet if you read State of Denial by Bob Woodward (as you must) it is clear that she was the most stupefyingly incompetent National Security Adviser in the history of that office. She was warned, in some detail, about 9/11.
By the time we had been interviewing for three solid hours I was like a limp dishrag. I was wrung out with the hopefulness of it all. It was the talent, the energy, the sheer brilliance of these young people, all of them beaming ‘Pick me, pick me’ into my befuddled skull. We were only trying to hire a new researcher, and it was as though we were auditioning the next prime minister. They could write. They could talk. They could do anything. They had Grade 8 piccolo/flute and Grade 8 viola and awards for the top GCSE marks in the entire country. Their A-level results cascaded down the page like a suicidal scream. They were magazine editors, union presidents, champion mooters, and they had blues for everything from rugby to lacrosse.
Now if you were an average overworked overtaxed Spectator-reading parent of a university student, I think I know how you would feel about this lecturers’ strike. I think you’d be fit to be tied. You would be chomping the carpet and firing off letters to the editor about the Spartist whingers who were prejudicing your daughter’s future. You would be ringing up Radio Five phone-ins after midnight, and raving about how these degrees were life-defining moments, and how unthinkable it was that papers should go unmarked. You would find it incredible that the Labour government has said nothing in defence of the students. Exams are being scrubbed! Vital academic credentials are melting away!
Boris Johnson goes to Beijing on a mission to sell democracy, but finds his hosts — as wedded to authority as they have been for the last 4,000 years — politely declining his offer It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer question. ‘So, Mr Boris Johnson,’ she said, ‘have you changed your mind about anything?’ And I was forced to reply that, yes, I had. Darned right I had. I had completely changed my mind about the chances of democracy in China. Before flying to Beijing I had naively presumed that the place was not just exhibiting hysterical economic growth, but was about to enter a ferment of political change.
As this edition appears I will be back in Edinburgh for my latest bout of electioneering. The last time I appeared there was a massive crowd of students boiling away in a bar, and an alarming group at the back waving banners saying things like ‘Bog off, Boris’ and ‘No to top-up fees’. I scrambled on to a stool and tried to make a speech, but the din of the two opposing factions was so huge that I couldn’t hear myself speak. After a while I gave up and said (I think), ‘And now I am going to have a beer!’ As I stepped down, some swine snuck up behind me and poured a big cold pint of bitter on my head. I was dimly aware of the culprit vanishing into the crowd in a black T-shirt and with a blond pigtail.
I found myself in disgrace a while ago when I contrived to fly my family to a Greek airport called Preveza, only to discover on arrival that they didn’t have a hire car big enough for our purposes. It was about 11 p.m. and I was standing pathetically thinking about buses and looking at a map of the area when I saw that Preveza was really called Preveza Aktio. ‘Hey!’ I said to my wife. ‘It’s fantastic!’ ‘What is fantastic?’ she asked in the tones of someone still faintly hoping that her husband would produce a people carrier. ‘It’s Actium,’ I cried. ‘All my life I have wanted to see Actium!’ ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and I’m still waiting to see some action from you.
It is always nice to get back and find you haven’t been burgled. The locks were secure, the windows intact, and with a song in my heart I opened my bank statement. It all seemed pretty satisfactory, if a tiny bit emaciated, and for a second or two I let my eye run down the list of outgoings. Funny, I thought. What was this ‘payment to Egg’? I seemed to have been making all sorts of payments to something called Egg. In fact, Egg had received several grand from me. I looked closer, the beginnings of suspicion frosting my heart. Lastminute.com — £754. Che? Two big payments of more than £500 to a credit-card firm called Capital One. Hmmmmm. Another payment to Egg, of £1,000! Aaaargh.
If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families.
Let no one say that this election is going to be the same as the last. We are winning back what I call the buggy vote. That is the middle-class mums and dads pushing prams. I don’t know quite why, but I attach terrific political significance to the opinions of these representatives of ‘hard-working families’. There they are, ferrying their precious cargoes, our nation’s future, and they must be heeded. They have reached the age — thirties, forties — when they are the pivot of society, simultaneously required to have a care to their parents and their offspring. Last time, as I recorded in 2001, I found they were almost all going for Tony.
This election is a swindle. It is a fraud on the electorate. We are asked to vote for one man, Blair, when he has explicitly said that he will not serve a full five years, and the chances must therefore be that the Labour machine will try, at some point in the next few years, to insert Gordon Brown. That would be utterly outrageous, not just because he is a gloomadon-popping, interfering, high-taxing complicator of life, but mainly because he is a Scot, and government by a Scot is just not conceivable in the current constitutional context.
Baghdad As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly. It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous hope. I jogged by the twinkling Tigris. I ate out in restaurants — shoarma and chips, served with every sign of friendliness. I wandered around without a flak jacket and shoved my notebook under people’s noses, and said things like, ‘What do you think of George Bush, hmmm?’ And now look at the dear old place. We have been here for two years. We have spent something like £5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money, and the Americans have spent $400 billion.
This article first ran in the 3rd May 2003 issue of The Spectator Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I heard shouting and saw the Americans using their carbines like staves to push back some of the customers, who were evidently trying their luck. Just then a black sergeant near me started shouting at an Iraqi. 'You, I've told you to get away from there,' he said, swinging his gun round. The Iraqi appeared to be a phone technician, with pliers and a handset.
As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen. In a daze, I mount the stool, held for me by Di Grisselle, joint master, shove one foot in the stirrup and try to swing myself over. Bertha chooses that moment to reverse, and I begin my first day’s hunting, in the last week of that ancient custom, by slowly and dreamily falling to the concrete farmyard floor. So let us leave me there, between the stirrup and the ground, and review the reasons for this desperate act.
In the first interview since he delivered his report, Lord Butler tells Boris Johnson that Britain suffers from an overmighty executive bringing in ‘a huge number of extremely bad Bills’ If you, like me, had gone charging up the stairs of The Spectator last Tuesday afternoon, and if you had rounded the corner to see the noble profile of Lord Butler of Brockwell, silvery, craggy, radiating patience and integrity as he sat on the sofa, then it might suddenly have occurred to you to wonder — as I did — why this monument of discretion, who served as secretary of the Cabinet and head of the Home Civil Service under three prime ministers, from 1988 to 1998, and who is generally accounted the safest pair of hands in Whitehall, had come to this den of journalism and you.
Boris Johnson says that the end of Yasser Arafat — the man who brought so much suffering to his own people — could be the opportunity for lasting peace But why did he do it? I asked the dark and bony young man in the yarmulka, still clearing up the scene of the murders. We were standing at the blackened steel counter of Shimmi’s cheese and olive shop, where three people had yesterday been killed by a suicide bomber and 13 seriously injured. It is a testimony to the vibrancy of the Carmel market, Tel Aviv, that business had resumed at the neighbouring stalls within minutes of the detonation, as though an act of self-destruction and murder by a 16-year-old was as banal as a traffic accident.
Boris Johnson, at the Republican convention, says that Bush’s conservative credentials are not always convincing but his optimism is unfailingly inspiring New York Come off it, I am thinking to myself. The last time I saw Tuesday night’s Republican keynote speaker was only a week ago. I was lying comatose on a motel bed in North Carolina, flipping from channel to channel, and he arrived, starkers, in a Plexiglass bubble from space. As I recall, he then changed his batteries by carving a hole in his thorax, destroyed much of downtown Los Angeles with a runaway crane and narrowly failed to avert the annihilation of the earth.
Las Vegas Whatever else we import from American politics, please let us avoid the appalling new practice of requiring children to give testimonials on behalf of their parents. I was sitting with my 11-year-old daughter in our VIP suite in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, waiting for John Kerry to come on CNN, when my blood ran cold. Not one but two Kerry daughters were produced to give speeches in praise of Kerry the loving Pop. This is America, of course, where top politics has Hollywood production values, and both speeches were impeccably charming. One of the girls, Alexandra, told of the time when the Kerry hamster fell, in its cage, off a New England dock, and the weeping Kerry children watched it bubble to the depths.
It was our last day in Courchevel, and everyone was having a snowball fight by the lifts at 1850, when my friend Charlotte said in urgent tones, ‘You know you’ve been looking for Posh Spice?’ Too damn right I had. Le tout Courchevel had been hunting the maritally troubled superstar, who was rumoured to be somewhere on the slopes patching things up with ‘the most famous Englishman since Nelson’ (Rees-Mogg). One wife of a stupendously rich Goldman Sachs banker had pursued her so fast down Pralong, a blue run, that she had beaned herself with her own ski and needed four stitches. ‘Well, don’t look now,’ said Charlotte, ‘but she’s standing about six feet away over my left shoulder.’ I goggled and, by Jesus, there she was.