Essays

How the Tories can still win in Europe

14 November 2009
Fraser Nelson

Anyone who believed last week’s talk of the death of Tory Euroscepticism should have booked a table at Bellamy’s restaurant in Mayfair on Monday. There, the No Turning Back group of Tories had gathered to discuss tactics, and how to continue the fight after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. They had also come to discuss what to make of David Cameron’s new European agenda. Was it sincere, or a decoy? Should they press for a referendum? And at what stage should they start rocking the boat of the Tory leadership?

The dinner table was divided. Half suspected that Mr...

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Sleepwalking into disaster in Afghanistan

14 November 2009
John C. Hulsman

I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward disaster in Afghanistan. The President, reminded by his domestic advisers of the fate of another domestically ambitious president, LBJ, has hesitated before going all-in to rescue the mission in Kabul. He is right to take his time before risking his presidency on a war whose outcome is clearly uncertain. But by all accounts, pressured by both his generals and the neoconservative opposition, Obama is about to make the fateful decision to go ahead...

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Why is everyone determined to be outraged all the time?

14 November 2009
Rod Liddle

There’s been a rather wonderful debate bubbling along at the Guardian, about the French minister Pierre Lellouche’s use of the word ‘autistic’ to describe the English Tories. Well, in fact that’s not quite what the debate has been about; everyone is agreed that Lellouche is beyond the pale. The debate has been about whether or not the Guardian was right to report what was said by the chap in a headline. Quite a lot of readers thought that it wasn’t. Elsa and John Wingad, for example, wrote: ‘We know that the use of “autistic” in your headline was a quote,...

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Kinnock and the Kremlin

14 November 2009
Pavel Stroilov

Labour leaders, past and present, will be wishing this week that Anatoly Chernyaev had not been such an assiduous diarist. Along with thousands of documents left in the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the diplomat’s personal writings had lain forgotten for more than 20 years. Last week, extracts in The Spectator cast light on Labour’s ‘special relationship’ with the Kremlin and the various officials who begged for its help to fight the Conservatives.

This week, we reveal more documents from Soviet archives which show that relations between Britain’s Labour party and the USSR went even further —...

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Listen up, Dave: to care is not to do

14 November 2009
David Frum

Political parties typically undergo a four-stage cycle after a major defeat. It goes something like this:

1. We didn’t really lose. (The other guys just happened to luck into an appealing candidate — but the people still really prefer us.)
2. OK, we lost — but only because the voters are idiots.
3. OK, we lost and maybe the voters are not idiots — but there is nothing we can do without betraying our sacred principles.
4. Hey, maybe there is something we can do.

The British Conservative party has reached Stage 4. The US Republican party is...

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The ‘bovver birds’ are back

14 November 2009
Sarah Standing

It was a beautiful balmy evening when my youngest daughter finished school last summer. The A-level results had just arrived, and she was happily ambling home from supper with two girlfriends. They were in no rush. They’re 18 and were about to spread their wings, leave London for the first time and head off towards various universities. They were finally ‘grown up’ — with parental curfew lifted, able to judge risks for themselves. And walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea, they had little reason to anticipate what was about to befall them.

Three girls approached them, asking the time....

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