The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008 The Buckinghamshire coroner has yet to hear the case of Kirk Stephenson, but Fleet Street already knows why he threw himself in front of an express train. He was the “first City suicide of the credit crunch” (the Mirror). His death ‘evokes memories of the 1929 Wall Street crash’ (the Mail). He had had it all, the £3.5m town house in Chelsea, the loving family and the fine wine and exotic holidays. Then the bull market crashed, shattering his dreams and illusions. His investment company, Olivant, revealed that it had bought £700m-worth of shares in the Swiss bank UBS. It deposited them with Lehman Brothers, which promptly went bust. So there you seemed to have it: a man cracking as unimaginable losses engulfed him....

The American Future and the pathetic fallacy in Standpoint......

The Observer, Sunday November 2 2008 The idea of intelligent fundamentalists, like the theory of intelligent design, does not stand up to 30 seconds’ scrutiny. I must, nevertheless, give credit to American evangelicals for showing belated glimmerings of sense. After decades of blindly endorsing evangelical politicians from the born-again Carter to the born-again Bush, they at last appear ready to look for more than religious dogma in a candidate. Richard Cizik, the Washington representative of the National Association of Evangelicals, has all but backed Obama. ‘I’m a conservative, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to vote that way,’ he announced. ‘I could disagree with Obama, and do, on same-sex marriage and abortion, but that doesn’t mean...

AMID the bureaucratic prose of his dreadful book The Blair Revolution, Peter Mandelson managed to articulate one noble thought. Writing in 1996, when the old Soviet empire lay in ruins, he declared that the European Union must move into central and eastern Europe to ’strengthen security, entrench democracy and ensure economic and social progress spread across the whole continent’. He could plausibly believe then that Tony Blair would be at the forefront of a new Europe, free and at peace. Now, his optimism seems a dream from another age. Putin’s autocratic regime of former KGB men and crony capitalist backers laments the loss of the empire of the tsars and commissars and gives every sign of wanting to take it back. After the war in Georgia, and with the recession...

RECESSIONS destroy ideologies as fast as they destroy jobs. Until six months ago, sensible men and women could suppose that Scotland might prosper as an independent country, that Labour’s light-touch regulation of the City benefited the whole nation and that Gordon Brown had abolished the business cycle. All busted flushes now, as worthless as Bradford & Bingley’s shares. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival the Times organised debates on ‘political correctness’. The respectable, liberal-minded audience was determined to see that once fashionable idea dumped into the dustbin of history as well. As I listened to their denunciations, I tried to understand what they meant by ‘political correctness’. It has been so tarnished by overuse that the...

The Observer, Sunday October 12 2008 At the TUC, the gossip among the comrades was all about the presence of David Threlfall on a demonstration against child poverty last week. Although you only have to glance at the FTSE100 to know that child (and adult) poverty will soon explode, the march was not well attended. Everyone who turned up was welcome, but old Labour protesters still wondered why one of the stars of Shameless had joined them in Trafalgar Square. If you haven’t seen it, you haven’t missed much. Shameless, along with Little Britain and The Jeremy Kyle Show, is 21st-century television’s prole porn. Whereas wealthy media executives once sought to investigate poverty or arouse anger against it in documentaries and dramas such as Cathy Come Home or Boys...

The Observer, Sunday October 5 2008 I wish my colleagues at the Conservative party conference had waited before writing that the financial crash would turn Labour from a party of exhausted politicians into the saviours of the country. When I was with the political hacks in the Birmingham ICC, it was easy enough to understand why they believed the Tories could not deal with the crisis. Indeed, as he swaggered to the stage in the home town of Neville Chamberlain, Boris Johnson gave us no indication that he understood that the nation was in crisis. He defended City bonuses and denounced the regulation of financial markets, roaring away as if it was 1998 rather than 2008. George Osborne and David Cameron at least proved they were living in the same decade as the rest of us. But their...

the last days of Labour, Her Majesty’s government conducts itself thus. Amid the screams and whoops of the conference bar, a member of the Prime Minister’s court whispers secrets to David Grossman of the BBC. Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, will go in the next reshuffle, he confides. Geoff Hoon is out too, and, oh, by the way, the Prime Minister doesn’t know what to do about Alistair Darling, even though he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Britain is in the middle of its greatest financial crisis since the Thirties. Should he stay, should he go? It’s all terribly difficult. A grateful Grossman broadcast his scoop. Hoon was sitting next to Jeremy Paxman in the Newsnight studio and bore the revelation that he was about to lose his job with stoic...

AS IT WAS, the doormen stopped the little boy getting into Sotheby’s, so no one shouted “But the emperor has no clothes!” as giddy buyers bid more than £100 million for the mass-­produced works of Damien Hirst. Indeed, there was only one tense moment at the auction. A pickled shark that had a guide price of £6 million was stuck around the £3 million mark. Think of that, a shark for just £3 million! Onlookers worried that the Hirst bubble had burst. But then a bidding war began, and a wave of applause swept the room when it finally went for £8.5 million. I can understand the relief. Last year, Hirst produced the perfect symbol of financial excess — a platinum skull encrusted with 8,000 diamonds. The kitsch piece looked like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie but...

In the fall issue of......

Nothing ranks higher in the demonology of the Labour movement than ‘the Tory press’. It printed the forged Zinoviev Letter, which won the 1924 election for the Tories with the false but subtle claim that Labour’s softness towards the Soviet Union was encouraging communists to plot a revolution in Britain. It so smeared Neil Kinnock, the hopeless John Major won the 1992 election. For almost a century, the Labour tradition held that if its leaders did not win or if left-wing arguments did not convince, it was not because the leaders were fallible or arguments weak but because the Tory press had convinced voters to ignore them. Although Labour people believed the Tory press capable of anything, they would never have believed that the agents of a Labour Prime Minister would...

Review in Front Page......

Britain isn’t America, and journalists can’t ask jurors what went through their minds in the jury room. This restriction is a pity, because the cries of despair coming from the Met and MI5 suggest that they would really like to know. The authorities are astonished that although three men were convicted of conspiracy to murder in the plane bomb plot trial, no defendant was convicted of targeting the aircraft. The police even had martyrdom videos in which, for instance, Umar Islam declares: “We are doing this in order to gain the pleasure of our Lord and Allah loves us to die and kill in his path.” There is likely to be a retrial, so I need to be careful what I say. I can, however, make the wider point that we as a society don’t understand radical Islam - and...

MY COLLEAGUES in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious...

Employment is falling, inflation rising, the pound collapsing, business confidence evaporating, the union’s striking and the banks busting. It’s so bad that the average price of a house in London has plummeted to £300,000. Three hundred thousand pounds! Think of that. And when you have thought about it you will realise that £300,000 is still way beyond the means of vast numbers of Londoners. You would still need an income – or joint income – of around £100,000 before you could think of taking out a sensible mortgage on an ordinary London home. If you can find a finance house to lend you the money, you will then find that, contrary to what you’ve read in the papers, the cost housing has not come down. Mortgage rates are far higher than a year ago. Deposits are larger...

The new issue of Democratiya is out now. Essential reading as......

From Standpoint......

IN The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has political prisoners in Stalin’s gulag tell a story about Moscow’s hellish Butyrka prison. One day, a young captain takes the emaciated inmates of cell 72 to a version of paradise. Barbers spray them with eau de Cologne, laundresses dress them in silk and chefs provide them with their first decent meal in years. When they go back, they find the authorities have painted their cell in bright colours. Previously forbidden books and packets of cigarettes are scattered around the room. In place of the four-gallon slop bucket is a gleaming toilet. The prisoners cannot understand their good fortune until the guards usher in a ‘Mrs R’, an American ‘lady of great shrewdness and progressive views’ who is clearly...

Anti-discrimination legislation once aimed to ensure that society treated citizens equally. By removing irrelevant criteria, the law allowed the victims of prejudice to receive the same rights as everyone else. When the Commission for Racial Equality investigated racism in the building industry, it said that a man’s skin colour was irrelevant to whether he would make a good worker. A black bricklayer should have the same opportunities as a white bricklayer. Today’s supporters of homosexual adoption say that the sexuality of a couple is irrelevant. If they can show they would make good parents, they should have the same rights to adopt as everyone else. The argument among economists about the gender pay gap is, at root, an argument about relevance as well. Are women paid...

Review in Standpoint......

IF YOU search on the net for ‘Jon Stewart’, ‘finance reform’ and ‘Obama’, you will find one of the most unintentionally funny sketches the US Comedy Central network has broadcast. Stewart dissects Barack Obama’s hypocrisy with his usual goggle-eyed relish. He shows that the Democrat had been all for the public funding of presidential candidates until he realised that his privately raised campaign donations would allow him to outspend John McCain. Stewart’s audience makes a far better spectacle than the comedian on the stage, however. They had roared when he mocked Bush, Clinton and McCain, but when he ridiculed Obama, a few tittered nervously and most sunk into a shocked silence. Ordinary political satire had become a kind of blasphemy....

I’ve a posting on the British left and the Muslim Brotherhood at Harry’s Place......

WHEN a governing party’s time is up, no one cares about the failings of the opposition. Ministers in John Major’s Tory administration used to bemoan the easy ride the media gave New Labour. Now it is Labour ministers’ turn to stare with disbelieving eyes at the free pass we give the Conservatives. Scandals which would once have led the news - the Tory energy spokesman’s links to Vitol, an oil company which cut deals with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic; the Conservative peers who still talk about ‘niggers in the woodpile’ - are passed over with an embarrassed cough. I know from the experience of writing critical pieces about the Blairites in 1997 that when the national mood swings, few readers want to hear about the faults of the government in...

I’ve written many times about how England’s libel laws are the last resort of the scoundrel. It’s not simply that the judiciary allowed Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell and George Galloway to collect damages, but that they have opened the doors of their court to Saudi billionaires and Ukranian oligharchs wishing to suppress criticism. Moneyed men facing legitimate investigation from all over the world love the English law because it places the burden of proof on the defendant and imposes enormous costs which push publishers into retracting. Now Harry’s Place, which readers ought to know has done more to expose the Islamist far right in Britain, is being sued by a front for Hamas. You may think it can’t claim for defamation because an...

Channel 4 News’s anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly More......

St Matthew’s warning that ‘unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away’ is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul. That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England’s universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process. Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every...

The best crime writers foresaw the disaster of Whitehall targets by creating heroes unlike any other fictional detectives. It is not the determination of Morse, Tennison, Frost and Rebus that marks them out - Holmes was as purposeful. Nor is the loneliness their obsessive devotion to work brings unusual. Inspector Morse never finds a woman who will stay with him and Inspector Frost only has curries for company at night, but they are not so different from Philip Marlowe. Modern British detectives stand out because they have to deal with managers like no other. Morse’s Chief Superintendent Strange and Frost’s Superintendent Mullett are not corrupt like so many police chiefs in American and Continental thrillers. They are good men by their own lights who would never take a...

From the new magazine Standpoint now available at the......

From Arena He has freed himself from the pressures of high office. He has talked over urgent problems with all the world’s elder statesman, including God. He is tanned and rested and still in his prime. Now he can lie back and enjoy that exquisite feeling of schadenfruede that infuses abandoned lovers when those who discarded them want them back. ‘I said you’d miss me when I was gone,’ he might purr. ‘And while I don’t like to say “I told you so”, I did, actually, tell you so.’ Opinion polls show that if Tony Blair were still its leader, Labour would have a chance of winning the next general election. As it is, Labour is stuck with Gordon Brown, whose popularity has fallen faster than any Prime Minister since Neville...

Never underestimate the resentment of the English middle class for the people who once called themselves their ‘betters’. It storms through English literature from Defoe via Dickens to Kingsley Amis who had Lucky Jim mutter under his breath: ‘You wordy old, turdy old scum, you griping old, piping old bum’ at the privileged and conceited Professor Welch. Admittedly Amis wrote Lucky Jim before he switched from left to right, but then middle-class resentment of what we used to call the establishment has always been as strong on the right as the left. Few socialist agitators could match the scorn of Margaret Thatcher for the Tory grandees she blamed for appeasing the unions in the Seventies as surely as their predecessors had appeased Hitler in the Thirties. When she...