Paris

Thursday

Simon Jenkins

Letting terror win

There is nothing a government in a remotely free country can do to stop a suicide bomber in a crowded space. As a weapon, he has the precision of a drone missile. The only preventive task open to the police and security service is to penetrate and destroy a terrorist cell in advance. This means assiduous intelligence. It has clearly held the key to disarming some 50 ‘terror plots’ known to the police over the past decade. Every lesson in counter-terrorism warns against overreaction. But David Cameron seems oblivious to this truth. He appears to have no faith in the police to protect British citizens from terrorism. His reaction to

Jasper Rees

Bitter sweet

The French master film-maker Jacques Audiard has never been anywhere near Hollywood plot school. His films contain gathering menace — something somewhere is going to go horribly wrong — but where the menace will come from, and who will get hurt, is anyone’s guess. In his astonishing prison drama A Prophet the threat to its greenhorn French-Arab inmate comes from all quarters until he himself evolves into the threat. There are two almost unwatchable scenes in Rust and Bone: in one a marine-park trainer of orcas wakes up in hospital to discover she has lost both legs; in another a bareknuckle street fighter has to thump a hole through the

Thursday

Anna Picard

What’s love got to do with it?

The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens blast through the oily haze of muted violins. A tart touts for trade. There is no romance here: no first love, no new love, no true love. Just ordinary sadness and ordinary yearning: a marriage bruised beyond repair, a dead child kept alive in his father’s memory, and a futile and fatal affair. The first

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

A people horrible to behold

The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard, who lived in Paris for over 40 years, once wrote an affectionate portrait of his adopted home that opened with the defiant words, ‘Yes: I like it here.’ As a short review of the city it was perfect. Longer accounts that say less are published every year and must run by now into thousands of volumes. A glance at the map shows why Paris — ‘most sublime of cities’, as Luc Sante terms it — continues to attract such devotion. There is the twisting shape of the river, cutting the

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Hollande’s own emergency

The terrorist attacks of 13 November have had an enduring effect on people living in Paris and France’s other big cities. Hotel bookings and restaurant reservations are down, and some people will no longer go out in the evening. There have been several other minor terrorist outrages across the country since November, and tension — prompted by repeated government warnings — remains high. The campaign for the 2017 presidential elections will start in July, but François Hollande’s popularity, which soared after the Charlie Hebdo attacks a year ago, has been sliding again. Hollande’s polls rose slightly after he declared a state of emergency on 14 November. During a state of

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Wild at heart | 21 January 2016

At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. They constantly took photographs of the picture itself, and sometimes of themselves standing in front of it. No such attention was given to the other masterpieces of French painting hanging nearby, including many by Delacroix. This painting from 1830 — with its glamorous, bare-breasted personification of liberté, Tricolore in hand, followed by heroic representatives of the working and middle classes — has become an international shorthand for France itself. Whether or not this is a valid symbol of the country, it is a misleading guide to Delacroix’s own feelings

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France has become a religious battleground

The new year has not started well for France. On the last day of 2015 – the most traumatic year for the French in decades because of the twin attacks in Paris – president Francois Hollande warned the nation in his traditional New Year’s Eve address: ‘France is not done with terrorism… these tragic events will remain for ever etched in our memories, they shall never disappear. But despite the tragedy, France has not given in. Despite the tears, the country has remained upright.’ Hollande’s warning was borne out within 24 hours. On the first day of 2016 a lone motorist – inspired by Islamic State – drove at a

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The painter as poser

Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was Buffet’s original backer and boyfriend, later performing identical roles for Yves Saint-Laurent, turning the sensitive designer into a global ‘luxury brand’ and turning himself into one of France’s richest men with pistonnage to spare. Foulkes is the accomplished writer on style who, in this new book, aims to rehabilitate an artistic reputation which he feels has been dissed by the narrow prejudices of the art-historical establishment. To a degree, this is true. Because Buffet’s scratchy and splashy paintings are (mawkishly) ‘figurative’, he never satisfied the criteria of ‘relevance’ and ‘progress’

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Moving statues

One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche in the centre of Oxford for more than a century without, for the most part, attracting any attention at all. Now, of course, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is demanding that the sculpture — its subject having been posthumously found guilty of racism and imperialism — should be taken down from the façade of Oriel College. The controversy is a reminder of the fact, sometimes forgotten by the British, that public statues are intensely political. This was clear — until quite recently, at least — when one drove into the

Saturday

A A Gill

Despite terror and tragedy, the world remains a miraculous place

I was on Kangaroo Island, in the great Australian Southern Ocean, when I heard about the terrorist attack on Paris. It was Paul, an abalone diver, who passed on the brief story of atrocity as we bobbed in his chaotic old rubber boat beside black swans, piebald cormorants and piping oystercatchers in the silver morning chill. He was putting on his wetsuit and checking his air line, strapping on his weights before slipping over the side to collect urchins and purple-shelled king scallops. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible,’ he said, in a tone that implied I must be used to this sort of thing. ‘It’s why we live out here. Nothing

Thursday

Miriam Gross

Diary – 31 December 2015

Disappointingly, the recent film about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, does not include the thing about him which most struck me in Walter Isaacson’s biography: Jobs habitually parked in disabled parking bays. Naturally, this is something that I (in company with many drivers, I suspect) long to do whenever disabled spaces are the only available parking, especially when two or three of them are standing empty. But I don’t — even for a five-minute dash to Tesco. The fear of exposure stops me, as well perhaps as a smidgen of unselfishness. The fact that Steve Jobs unhesitatingly committed this minor offence reveals more about him — that he was unscrupulous, that he didn’t

Douglas Murray

Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam? | 31 December 2015

Written after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January and revised after the Paris attacks in November, Douglas Murray’s piece on politicians’ responses to Islamic terror attacks was The Spectator‘s third most read article of 2015: The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The political wisdom of people who don’t even know what a circle is

Why are liberals morons? I’m sure that this question has rattled around your mind before, perhaps when watching one of those fair and balanced debates between three ill-dressed but very liberal women that Newsnight puts on every evening, hosted by Kirsty Wark. You hear them tiptoeing through the -nether regions of some important political issue, carefully sidestepping the nub of the matter, obfuscating, denying the patently obvious even when it is staring them right in their smug faces, jabbering ineffectually about nothing in essence. How can these silly mares be this way, you may have asked yourself. How can they navigate their way through life on such slender mental resources?

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

France: #ToutsAuBistrot!

My word, I do like the French! That’s up there with things I thought I’d never say, like ‘Just the one, please.’ But after spending three days in Paris two weeks after the Islamist massacre, I have become their biggest fan. Yes, I’m fully aware that the Parisiennes aren’t the French –— but the pedants among you will please overlook the sweeping generalisation. I thought it was important, having read that France had already lost €2 million worth of business due to a wave of cancellations, to show support. When I read that Parisiennes were trending the hashtag ‘#ToutsAuBistrot’, it was a no-brainer. Unfortunately, we arrived on the first day

Saturday

Benny Peiser

Don’t worry: the Paris climate deal is non-binding – and, ergo, toothless

The Paris agreement is another acknowledgement of international reality. Further proof, if any was needed, that the developing world will not agree to any legally binding caps, never mind reductions of their CO2 emissions. As seasoned observers predicted, the Paris deal is based on a voluntary basis which allows nations to set their own voluntary CO2 targets and policies without any legally binding caps or international oversight. In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal removes all legal obligations for governments to cap or reduce CO2 emissions. This voluntary agreement also removes the mad rush into unrealistic decarbonisation policies that are both economically and politically unsustainable. (And this is, word-for-word, the same

Bjørn Lomborg

The Paris Climate deal addresses 1pc of the problem. How is that a victory?

The  Paris deal promises to keep temperature rises below 2°C. However, the actual promises made here will do almost nothing to achieve that. It is widely accepted that to keep temperature rises below 2°C, we have to reduce CO₂ emissions by 6,000Gt. The UNFCCC estimates that if every country makes every single promised Paris deal carbon cut by 2030 to the fullest extent possible and there is no carbon leakage, CO₂ emissions will be cut by 56 Gt by 2030. The maths is simple: in an implausibly optimistic best-case scenario, Paris leaves 99pc of the problem in place. To say that Paris will get us to “well below 2°C” is cynical posturing at best. It relies on wishful thinking. It’s

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

How Marine Le Pen is winning over the Muslim vote

‘Shock’ was the one-word headline on the front of Monday’s Le Figaro. France was bracing itself for a swing to the right in Sunday’s regional elections, but few imagined it would be quite as dramatic. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) polled nearly 30 per cent of the vote in the first round of voting, ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right Les Républicains and the ruling Socialist Party, who trailed in third with 23 per cent. As it stands, the FN are on course to take control of six regions after Sunday’s second round, although the predictions are they will triumph in no more than three due to tactical voting. Among those who

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 3 December 2015

Home The House of Commons voted on air strikes in Syria. Labour MPs had been allowed a free vote by their party amid much ill-feeling. Members of the shadow cabinet shouted at Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition, when he tried to insist that the formal Labour party policy should be to oppose air strikes. Mr Corbyn said: ‘We’re going to kill people in their homes by our bombs.’ Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, said: ‘Inaction has a cost in lives, too.’ Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered 13 women, was said to have been successfully treated for schizophrenia and was being considered for transfer from Broadmoor

Michael O'Connell-Davidson

Forget Syria: a weak Greece endangers us all

There is nothing waiting for people who leave school in Greece today. It does not matter how much young Greeks might be able to give to their nation, because their nation has little to give them in return. Over the weekend, The Times reported that young Greek women are selling sex for as low as €2. Some are even exchanging sessions for cheese pasties, because they cannot afford to eat. It’s not just young Greeks who are suffering. Pensioners are being squeezed by Greece’s creditors, and drugs thrive amongst the homeless in Athens. Election after election has only served to make the country’s political crisis worse, with the second general strike in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A different species of argument

Because I used to go to venues like Bataclan an awful lot myself, I’ve been dwelling a great deal on what the fans must have gone through that night. And the conclusion I’ve reached is how utterly random the whole business must have been: whether you survived or died was almost entirely dependent on being at the right or wrong bit at the right or wrong time. Even the band Eagles Of Death Metal, it turns out, only escaped by the skin of their teeth. The bassist barricaded himself into a room; the singer and guitarist escaped into the street and went briefly back to look for a missing girlfriend