Birmingham At one o’clock in the morning of 9 June last year, two days before the local council elections, Police Sergeant John Rattenberry of Erdington police station, Birmingham, was called to investigate something strange going on inside a warehouse. Here’s what he witnessed, in his own words: ‘I entered the first floor of the warehouse
For most citizens of Iraq, the invasion meant the end of tyranny. For one group, however, it meant a new start: the country’s historic Christian community. When the war stopped, persecution by Islamists, held in check by Saddam, started. At a church in Basra I visited a month after the war ended, the women complained
This article first ran in the 3rd May 2003 issue of The Spectator Baghdad We could tell something was up as soon as we approached the petrol station. There was an American tank parked amid a big crowd of jerrycan-toting Iraqis. Unusually, the soldiers were down and walking around, guns at the ready. Then I
Alice Thomas Ellis, the novelist and former Spectator columnist who died last week, once took part in an earnest feminist questionnaire that asked her to name the most important event in women’s history. ‘The Annunciation,’ she replied. Alice — known to all her friends by her real name, Anna — bore the physical aspect of
You thought it was difficult to get into an NHS bed? Try getting out when the bureaucrats say no. In my own case you might have thought they would urge me to be gone, for I was a bad patient. Normally I have a high pain threshold, but that Monday as I came round from
For most people, to defend a blood-stained tyrant is perverse and shocking; to defend two seems like recklessness. Yet the causes of both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are what occupy Ramsey Clark, 78, as he crowns a political career that started with his appointment to the US government on the first day of the
Baghdad As the Puma chugs over Baghdad I look out over the machine gun and I have to admit I am full of a sudden wistfulness. I have been here before, almost two years ago exactly. It was a week after the end of the war, and in those days my feelings were of nervous
Richard Layard, the founder of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, is a brave man. The Labour peer and adviser to the government has written a book on happiness. Or to be more precise, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. This is big stuff. I mean, happiness is the whole point of life, right? Philosophers
Mukhtara, Lebanon With his bald pate, droopy moustache and sad, bleary eyes, Walid Jumblatt looks more circus clown than Pentagon pin-up. And if the warlord’s eccentric appearance were not enough to dismay White House officials, then his penchant for virulent leftist anti-Americanism would seem to place him firmly in their ‘against us’ category. As Lebanon’s
On Tuesday, half a million people were demonstrating in the streets of Beirut, chanting and waving flags. If you only gave the TV a quick glance, you probably assumed that they were protesting against the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In fact it was a rally organised by Hezbollah in support of Syria, but for almost
Yes, our man (Yushchenko) and our system (democracy) won in Ukraine, and once again good triumphed over bad. Yet this presentation, so characteristic of the Western media, misses the point about what the struggle is really about. If the issue was fair elections, there would have been an equal furore about the grossly rigged elections
Pope John Paul II’s recovery from his tracheotomy in the Gemelli Hospital in Rome will have delighted his well-wishers, but it may have come as a disappointment to the Pope himself. He would like to die in harness and, realising that he can no longer pull the barque of the Church with the same vigour
Sam Leith has been taking lessons in taxidermy, and he hasn’t had so much fun in ages ‘Now I’m going to show you what a scalpel handle is for,’ says Mike Gadd. I pick up the one nearest me, and start trying to affix the blade that I’ve so far been using pinched between finger
There is a new kind of class distinction in the dining car from King’s Cross to York. Most of us — hoi polloi, relatively speaking — observe the convention that once the fishcake starters are served, it is polite to talk to the strangers with whom we happen to be sharing a table; and there
Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you
Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That
Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most
It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most
As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen.
Mark Steyn says it’s time for limp, languid Tory toffs to join the fight for freedom New Hampshire On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: ‘We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell’ — in perfect harmony. To modify