21 Oct 2006

21 October 2006

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Washington All you need to know about the effectiveness of Labour’s official attacks on David Cameron is that Siôn Simon’s toe-curling spoof video doesn’t look so bad in comparison. Labour has so far failed to land a killer blow on Cameron, suggesting that the next election will be a genuine contest. There is, though, one issue that could resuscitate the Tory Wars, and set Cameroon against Cameroon. The issue isn’t Europe, crime, immigration or even tax.

Cameron is the heir to Heath

As David Cameron enjoys his Oedipal role in killing off any remnant of Thatcherism in today’s Conservative party, is he slowly revealing himself as the grandson Ted Heath never had? Mr Cameron seems happy with 1970s levels of taxation. He calls American policy against jihadi terrorism ‘simplistic’. He has apologised for Tory attacks on Nelson Mandela. As a hoodie-hugger he is soft on the causers of crime. The TUC had its stand at the Conservative conference and Mr Cameron is cultivating a relationship with Brendan Barber, the low-profile but very smart TUC general secretary.

It was almost World War III

Fifty years after the Hungarian uprising, David Rennie talks to Bela Kiraly, now 94, who was urged to call for Western help — a call that could all too easily have sparked nuclear warBudapestHalf a century ago Bela Kiraly was invited to start World War III. He said no, though the price was the enslavement of his native Hungary by Soviet invaders. Kiraly was military chief of the Hungarian revolution at the time. The invitation was made on 4 November 1956 by an American reporter, who had somehow tracked him down in the blood-soaked centre of Budapest.

Why would a priest want to read about murder?

Two great crime writers of our time — Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith — talk about the terrible allure of bad deeds and the dark side of EdinburghAMS: Let’s talk about Edinburgh first of all. We both write about the same place, but in different ways. John Rebus’s Edinburgh is a relatively bleak, dark place. Why do you focus on that side to the city?IR: I think of Edinburgh being a Jekyll-and-Hyde place — with an elegant, beautiful, rational new town and a higgledy-piggledy, slightly chaotic, half-buried old town.

How would you have felt, Madonna?

The superstar’s adoption case has shown the powerlessness of an entire African people faced with the might of a single American woman, says Melissa KiteImagine the scene. Florence Okosieme, wife of a wealthy tribal leader from Nigeria, touches down at Wayne County Airport, Detroit. A limousine awaits to whisk her through the grimy streets of ‘Murder City’ to the suburb of Pontiac, where a poor family awaits her help.

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