Features

French farce

It is Hollywood’s most predictable script. ‘Dazzle foreign investors, force them to spend as much as possible and then drive them out once they’re broke.’ For the third time in a decade, the French are beating a humiliating retreat from Beverly Hills. This time the French national champion in question – Vivendi Universal, a once

It could be you

Do you suspect you soon may be going to lose your marbles? And are you over 65? Or do you suspect your elderly parents may be going to lose theirs? Is this loss of faculties likely to be a serious one? Then do not inquire in New Labour’s New Britain for whom the bell of

The first casualty of Pilger…

The Americans are making a hash of rebuilding Iraq, but one of the not so bad things they have done is to give Iraqis the freedom to scribble. On the wall outside the Baathist ministry of health the other day, a graffiti artist had scrawled in perfect English, ‘We need a health ministry free of

Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn’t really go for jazz

Ross Clark

Public scandal

To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of ‘Mondeo Man’, a hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however, who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour’s six years in office. It is Principal Project Delivery Officer Person.

Rod Liddle

Back to basic instincts

Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected [by love]; it is a species of insanity that assails them, and it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all the other countries put together.William Cobbett, 1829 What on earth is the Conservative party going to do about sexual intercourse? People

Clive Davis – full blogroll

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Chaos in Venice

A couple of vaporetto stops in the direction of the Lido, from near Piazza San Marco – fortified, perhaps, by a cold glass of wine and some lively light music from the immaculately dressed band outside Florians – and you are in the merciful shade of the public gardens, where some of the national pavilions

The year aliens became alien

Uncontrolled immigration? A burden on the taxpayer? Terrorists in our midst? The current immigration crisis echoes events of 100 years ago which led to the passage of Britain’s first piece of immigration law. From the 1880s onwards, increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews sought refuge from pogroms in their homelands. With its long tradition

Piano-player in a brothel

Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world – but rebelled against it Twenty years ago Malcolm Muggeridge, with a grimace of welcome, met me at Robertsbridge station, like many another. To reach the Sussex cottage that he shared with Kitty, his wife of

Dumb and dumber

At the end of January the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, declared that ‘Education for its own sake is a bit dodgy’. ‘The idea,’ he went on, ‘that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right. You need a relationship with the workplace.’ He also said that

Proles apart

I have found it – the land that Nineteen Eighty-Four forgot. When the book’s hero, Winston Smith, flees Big Brother and the party operatives, it is to ‘the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been St Pancras Station’ that he runs. On the eve of the centenary of Orwell’s

SPECTATORS FOR AFRICA | 21 June 2003

In any discussion about the justifications for the war in Iraq, there comes the Zimbabwe point. Yeah, says the sceptic, but what about Zimbabwe, eh? If we go to war to liberate the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam, why won’t we lift a finger to free the victims of Robert Mugabe? Is it a

Blunkett the authoritarian

That Lord Woolf, he has a bit of a cheek, doesn’t he? I don’t know if you caught his intervention in the Criminal Justice Bill debate the other night, but it was the usual stuff. He excoriated the politicians (David Blunkett) for trying to fetter the discretion of the judges. He was appalled, said the

Rod Liddle

Crippling burden

There is something a little reckless about having a go at the disabled lobby. I can happily question the zealousness and rectitude of the Commission for Racial Equality, Stonewall and any of a multitude of women’s groups, safe in the knowledge that I am not about to be rendered black, gay or female in the

Within the German pale

More Jews are moving to Germany than to any other country in the world, including Israel. This statement seldom fails to provoke gasps of astonishment among people whose knowledge of Germany is limited to the Holocaust. To them it seems a very strange and wonderful thing that the Jewish life which the Nazis tried with

It’s not the oil, stupid

These are tough times to be a Middle Eastern despot, so perhaps it is understandable if a few of them feel a little paranoid right now. Iraq is under foreign occupation, Iran is in open revolt, and Saudi Arabia is apparently under attack from British bootleggers who look surprisingly like friends of Osama bin Laden.

Osama bides his time

We have al-Qa’eda on the run,’ President Bush was reported to have said in April. In May, al-Qa’eda and its associated groups masterminded a week of bombings which left more than 100 people dead. It looked like a deliberate riposte to the President’s triumphant optimism. There were two explosions in Chechnya on 12 May, which