Essays

A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

04 November 2009
Peter Oborne

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945.

Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National...

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How my party was betrayed by KGB boot-lickers

04 November 2009
Gerald Kaufman

When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. As leader, Michael Foot was wedded to policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the European Economic Community. The strategy, if there was one, seemed to be to lose as many votes as possible.

The remarkable revelations published in the Chernyaev diaries make this attempted political suicide easier to understand. It is clear that key elements in the Labour party structure were determined to ingratiate themselves with Moscow — regardless of...

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It wouldn’t matter if all the bees died

31 October 2009
Rod Liddle

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball.

Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal...

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Did Al Farabi really invent sociology?

31 October 2009
James Hannam

As an author who craves all the publicity he can get for his work, I’m usually cock-a-hoop to receive invitations to pontificate on film. Even the lowliest producer can expect to have me eating out of her hand. But last week, when I received an email from a filmmaker who wanted to interview me for a programme about ‘the scientific evidence in the religious text of the Koran’, I thought I’d give it a miss.

The sort of apologetics which attempt to prove the inspiration of the scriptures by showing that they contain secret knowledge has been practiced by conservative Christians for...

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The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009

28 October 2009

The votes are in, and we now know which parliamentarian has won this year’s Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. Their name will be revealed at the Parliamentarian of the Year Awards lunch But here, first, we can announce which reader’s nomination most caught the judges’ collective eye. So congratulations, Sam Rice, whose impassioned support for Douglas Carswell has earned him a bottle of champagne and two tickets to the lunch at Claridges where the awards are announced.

Here is Sam’s nomination: ‘I would like to nominate Douglas Carswell MP for Parliamentarian of the Year. His dedication and clearheadedness during the expenses...

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Don’t believe in miracles

31 October 2009
Anthony Daniels

Irrationality, without which life cannot be lived, is profoundly irritating, especially in others. It is at its worst when those who are guilty of it try to sue those who, like Simon Singh, try to expose it. Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association after he wrote a book debunking several alternative ‘therapies’. A few weeks ago, thankfully, he was given leave to appeal but the affair nearly spelled victory for irrationality. Irrationality is also very bad when displayed by someone close to you.

My late mother suddenly suffered from a non-life-threatening but disfiguring skin condition of her scalp that...

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