Features

French farce | 21 April 2012

The first round of the French presidential election is a national carnival that seldom disappoints. If Sunday’s vote follows the opinion polls, only President Nicolas Sarkozy with 28 per cent of the vote and his Socialist party opponent François Hollande (a predicted 27 per cent) will remain in the ring. The country will then be

James Forsyth

Job scheme

Chris Grayling’s job is to make sure that British people can get jobs. But he faces a problem. Since the election, 90 per cent of the rise in employment is accounted for by foreign-born workers. As Employment Minister, Grayling is painfully aware that there is a very large difference between importing workers and creating jobs.

Rings of steel

Last August I was intrigued to learn that the cash-strapped Cornwall county council was spending hundreds of pounds advertising for a ‘project officer’ at £400 a week to assist in ‘the successful delivery of the Olympic Torch Relay in May 2012’. The lucky applicant’s job would be ‘to raise awareness of this event throughout Cornwall’,

To your health

Fredericksburg, Virginia The huge popularity of your TV show Doc Martin here in the US has nothing to do with the balmy Cornish setting. What really turns us on are the scenes in the Doc’s surgery, where no one ever pays a bill. Contrast that with the bedlam of an American doctor’s office. A panicky

Gove’s paradox

By any standards, the Education Secretary is good news for history. He knows the subject, he likes the subject, and his ‘English Baccalaureate’ is already producing a marked upturn in pupils studying the past. Sadly, Michael Gove is also a Conservative — and a deeply ideological one at that. He has a certain vision of

The tide turned

A couple of years ago, a rescue operation was recorded at a lifeboat station in Poole, Dorset. ‘The boat was launched at 13.35p.m. following a call that a man and two children were stranded on rocks in the vicinity of Lulworth Cove. The wind was south-south-west force three. Visibility good. We reached the scene at

Another country | 14 April 2012

London’s separateness from the rest of Britain becomes more pronounced every year London has always been different from the rest of the country. But in recent decades the differences have widened to the point that, economically and socially, the capital now has little in common with the rest of Britain. The city may be hosting

Fraser Nelson

Sweden’s secret recipe

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been

Plucking heartstrings

Why I’m proud to play the banjo The death last week of legendary banjo player Earl Scruggs was marked by generous obituaries. He fashioned a style of playing now copied worldwide. In 2004, his instrumental ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ — theme music for the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde — was chosen by the US Library

Please shut the gates

Eighty-five years ago the National Gardens Scheme was created and blighted gardens in the UK forever. And in this anniversary year we will be bored silly by the praises sung of it. Starting as a scheme to let everyone, even the hoi polloi, into posh gardens for a donation to charity, it now dominates the

Out of the east

If the test of the Arab Spring was its treatment of minorities, it has failed. Hopes that the region was poised to make the transition to liberal democracy have proved to be premature, trampled under the boots of the ethno-religious cleansers. The old-style corrupt despots have metastasised into even older-style Islamist xenophobes. The Arab world,

Ed West

Iraq’s Christian exodus

The Arabs once had a saying about the British: ‘Better to be their enemy, for that way they will try to buy you; for if you are their friend, they will most certainly sell you.’ For Iraq’s Christians it has proved to be sage advice. It is a lesson learned by a 25-year-old engineering student

Ross Clark

Cameron’s tragic flaw

The PM’s problem is not poshness, but impoliteness Premierships do not end in failure, as Enoch Powell once asserted, but in tragedy. They start with a beaming figure disappearing behind the door of No. 10 — even Edward Heath, immortalised now as the Incredible Sulk, entered with a radiant grin. And they end with a

A hymn to the organist

Some people swoon over film stars. I swoon over organists. Good organists, that is, not bad organists. Bad organists I refer to as ‘dominant males’, because the only two chords they play are the tonic and the dominant. Good organists are upholders of some of the highest musical expertise in the land. When you hear

Class system

When my wife said she thought we should educate our three children at comprehensive schools, it was with a degree of trepidation that I went along with her. I was thankful to save the several hundred thousand pounds it would probably have cost to send them to fee-paying schools, money which I at least showed

Was Chris for real?

I still don’t know whether I’ve been had I have been wondering what to do about Chris…. Well, I call him Chris, but the truth is that I’ve only met him once and I’d hardly say our brief acquaintance qualifies as friendship. How does one get oneself into these quandaries? Four weeks ago, I was

Lack of appeal

Here we go again. Like a macabre version of Groundhog Day, mass murderer Jeremy Bamber is making yet another bid for freedom. This nasty legal saga has been dragging on for almost 26 years, ever since Bamber was first found guilty of the savage massacre at his family’s farmhouse in rural Essex. By a majority