Features

Dead Jews aren’t news

British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross, but not the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror — even if they are British Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb

The Tories pick a winner

Less than six weeks ago a threadbare group of Conservative MPs, from what one might call the boarding-school wing of the party, assembled in a small, air-conditioned room in Portcullis House, Westminster. Not everyone was punctual. The Commons was deep in recess. The fifth Test against Australia was flickering on television sets around London SW1,

Why South Africa backs Mugabe

Tony Leon says the Zimbabwean leader’s histrionics appeal to the resentment and Soviet nostalgia of southern Africa’s elite Cape Town It was a proud moment for aviation in Zimbabwe. The country was suffering the worst fuel crisis in its history; hospitals were reverting to ox-drawn ambulances. But still the Zimbabwean air force managed to stage

The Tories need a genuine liberal

Vernon Bogdanor says that David Cameron is the only Conservative who can read the nation’s mood and respond to it In the 1960s Harold Wilson sought to make Labour the natural party of government. Tony Blair seems to have succeeded in doing so. The Conservatives have now been in opposition for eight years, their longest

Europe is costing us a bomb

The threat to our national security has seldom been greater. Not only are historic regiments being scrapped — or amalgamated — but the fundamental reorganisation of armed forces now under way is likely to undermine the special relationship with the United States, and thus a key element in our defence strategy. There is, of course,

Ross Clark

Death, drugs and red tape

Over the next few weekends, the gardens of 23 stately homes will be opened up to several thousand sponsored fun-runners who, demonstrating the typically huge generosity shown towards cancer charities by the British public, will raise £2.5 million for oncology research. Elsewhere, the stalls at village shows will heave with home-baked cakes, thousands will empty

Terror in Mogadishu

On a recent drive in downtown Mogadishu with ten heavily armed bodyguards, I passed the site of the old US embassy, and observed a melancholy scene that Britain and the USA might ponder if they decide to bale out of Iraq early. The embassy has been totally demolished, either out of hatred or because Mogadishu’s

Ross Clark

Guilty until proved innocent

Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max

The next Tory Prime Minister

On Monday morning, a tense young politician was rehearsing a speech. The performance was less than fluent; the delivery was far too fast. The youngster’s peace of mind did not benefit from his growing awareness that he was being overheard. A number of journalists had managed to slip into the hall. Twenty-eight hours later, the

Oiling up to the oligarchs

Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash A senior member of the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow once said that any mention of the word ‘oligarch’ had the average Russian reaching for a gun. That’s because much of the population is furious at the way

Stop bashing the UN

Question: what do the Taleban, Serb war criminals, al-Qa’eda, Rwandan genocidaires, the Ku Klux Klan, the Kach movement, the Japanese Red Army and the Janjaweed of Darfur have in common? Answer: two things actually. The obvious one, plus the fact that — like the Spectator columnist Mark Steyn — they all passionately abhor the United

A bastard? Me?

David Davis is the first prospective Tory leader to have been born in a council house to an unmarried mother. The bookies’ favourite to take over from Michael Howard, Davis, 56, is said by his supporters to have garnered the necessary qualities on his way to the top: determination, spirit, tenacity, a sense of social

Clarke’s advantage fades away

YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare on how the public would view the four candidates — if they were all better known Up to now, polls on the Conservative leadership have been flawed in a fundamental way: they have tried to gauge public reaction to a group of candidates, when one of them is much better known than

It could all come down to one speech

The annual party conference has been the occasion of the destruction of a Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, within very recent history. But more than 40 years have passed since a leader was last created at a conference. That was back in 1963, also in Blackpool. Representatives had already gathered when news came through that

Is torture always wrong?

The officers who pumped seven bullets into Jean Charles de Menezes as he sat in a Tube train in Stockwell station on 22 July believed he was a suicide-bomber about to detonate a bomb. They were wrong, and may now face trial for murder. Whether or not they are prosecuted, however, it is almost certain

RACE AND CULTURE: Whites need not apply

The ideology of multiculturalism is theoretically meant to build a more tolerant, inclusive Britain. But in practice it is a deeply racist concept, one that judges people by their ethnic origin and thereby promotes division in our society. The very basis of multiculturalism is a contradiction of the democratic principle that everyone should be treated

RACE AND CULTURE: ‘Schooling people to be strangers’

About halfway through our interview, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, lets out a snort of exasperation. It had been building up for quite a while, I think; every time I quoted some good old leftie shibboleth about race relations I sensed a hidden snort or a stifled guffaw. Eventually the

RACE AND CULTURE: ‘Israel’s actions affect our security’

The weeks since the death of Robin Cook have seen an unwholesome squabble concerning who will inherit the ‘legacy’ of the former foreign secretary. Chancellor Gordon Brown made an instant smash-and-grab raid, while allies of the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain have been furtively suggesting that he is the true inheritor. There is a respectable

Disability allowances

An insidious paradox lies at the heart of the modern thrust for disability rights. This agenda is supposed to promote equality and fair treatment, goals to which no one could object. Yet the official definition of disability is now so wide, so all-embracing, that it includes the feckless, the antisocial, even the criminal. In the