Home > The Magazine > Features

Thursday 20 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

A terror so great we forgot it at once

Melanie Phillips

Wednesday, 6th December 2006

Dhiren Barot’s case faded because it revealed unbearable truths

Dhiren who? Mention Dhiren Barot to anyone and the chances are that you’ll be met with a blank look. At best, some might say, ‘Oh, wasn’t he that guy who, er, that trial recently, yeah, bit worrying....’ Thus the British have somehow failed to register the significance of the conviction last month of a man who was one of al-Qa’eda’s biggest fishes, guilty of the most devastating terrorist plot ever known in this country and one which would have made 9/11 look like a minor warm-up act.

This former airline ticket clerk plotted to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a series of synchronised atrocities in Britain and the US. He planned to blow up public buildings using gas cylinders in limousines, to mount a gas attack on the Heathrow Express rail shuttle, and to blow up the Tube under the Thames to rupture the walls keeping out the river. Police found in his notebooks details of how to construct a chemical laboratory, along with recipes for poisons and plans to use radiation to spread sickness, panic, chaos and death on a vast scale.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Melanie Phillips | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

When Flash Gordon met the man with a plan

Matthew d'Ancona

Matthew d’Ancona looks back at the political twists and turns that shaped 2008

So you want to be a minister…

Gerald Kaufman

Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Gorton and a former shadow foreign secretary, advises ambitious young MPs how to wriggle their way into power

Diary

Alex Salmond

The past year has certainly been interesting. Here are some of my highlights as well as some of the challenges that lie ahead:

Hold them to account

Iain Martin

Iain Martin fears that Members care too little about the erosion of Parliament’s authority

Parliamentarian of the Year Awards Recipients 2008

Awards Recipients 2008

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

Rod Liddle

The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

Fraser Nelson

After a week of clamorous competition between the parties over tax cuts, Fraser Nelson offers a guide to paying for them: a programme of spending cuts that would preserve core services but shave off the fat of the Brown years. All that is needed is political will

Obama has changed the world just by being elected

James Forsyth

James Forsyth looks back on an extraordinary contest and the victory of a man who, even before his inauguration, has had a transformative effect upon American politics

There is nothing magic about this Keynesian fad

Tim Congdon

Last week, The Spectator said that ‘Keynesianism is not the answer’. Here, Tim Congdon says the government’s economic recovery strategy is a sham based on outmoded leftist thinking

Welcome to the new austerity era, Mr Cameron

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader must not be tempted by a ‘safety first’ strategy at his conference in Birmingham. The global financial crisis has transformed the political context and left an opening for the Conservatives to promise true radicalism and to be proudly bold