Andrew Gimson | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

This Kohlian abomination

This Kohlian abomination

In the year when East and West Germany were being reunited Günter Grass felt he must start keeping a diary. He was sure what was taking place was a dreadful mistake: At night I often toss and turn, haunted by images of a Germany that can no longer be mine. This Kohlian abomination: egomaniacal, bombastic, jovial, tough, condescending, domineering, feigning harmlessness. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was a power politician of genius. Although taken by surprise by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, he soon saw how to make himself the architect of reunification. Grass was dismayed to see how easily the Germans were led by this philistine. On visiting Karl-Marx-Stadt, an East German city which was soon to regain its proper name of Chemnitz, Grass records with disgust: Recently Kohl was here and asked the masses, in the style of Goebbels at the Berlin Sports Palace, ‘Do you want German unity? Do you want our prosperity?’ It does not get any more vulgar than that.

Conduct becoming

Conduct becoming

Conduct becoming

Every so often a programme appears which can be recommended even to people who hate television. Parade’s End (Friday, BBC1) is such a work. The awkward — one might think impossible — problem of shortening Ford Madox Ford’s 800-page masterpiece into five hours of television, without violating the spirit of the book or seeming to cram a quart into a pint pot, has been solved by getting Tom Stoppard to write the script. Stoppard’s less is not exactly more, but there is a certain liberation in being able to leave things out. Ford’s wit, penetration and eloquence are distilled into the five acts of a play, and some of his best lines echo all the clearer for being spoken in relative isolation. The drama’s hero, Christopher Tietjens, is a kind of English Hamlet: a man of brilliant intelligence, capable of decisive action, but too scrupulous to move with lethal force against the member of his family who has betrayed him.

Conduct becoming

Prophet of doom

Prophet of doom

Prophet of doom

Enoch Powell was defeated. He condemned Edward Heath for being the first prime minister in 300 years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country. But Heath was victorious: in 1972 he led the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, and in 1975 the British people ratified this decision by a majority of two to one in a referendum. Powell thought this was a disaster. As he put it in 1976, with characteristic lack of understatement: ‘It is the nation that is dying, it is dying politically — or rather, perhaps, it is committing suicide politically — and the mark of death upon it is that it has lost the will to live.

Prophet of doom

No time for bogus pieties

No time for bogus pieties

This is the shortest political memoir I have ever been sent for review. It is a marvel of concision: 27 years in the Commons set down in only 168 pages. Can any Spectator reader point to a briefer example of the genre? Yet I confess that I opened Confessions of a Eurosceptic with a degree of trepidation. David Heathcoat-Amory’s style owes nothing to that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He writes with patrician flatness. It would not occur to him to ingratiate himself with his readers by purporting to tell us everything about his inner life. Not that he dodges deep emotion: the four pages in which he recounts the suicide of his son, Matthew, are harrowing. In his account of the various political transactions in which he has been concerned, especially the defence of our democracy against the European Union, the facts are allowed to speak for themselves.

A safe pair of hands | 7 April 2012

A safe pair of hands | 7 April 2012

Michael Spicer is too honourable to be a brilliant diarist. As he himself says, ‘I eschew tittle-tattle or small talk.’ These diaries cannot be read, as Chips Channon’s or Alan Clark’s can be, because they offer a joyful cascade of indiscretions. When Clark dies in September 1999, Spicer writes of his fellow Tory MP: ‘We never really hit it off. I thought he was untrustworthy.’ Spicer’s father was a soldier, and these diaries read like the history of a regiment written by one of its most loyal officers. A few pages are devoted to Spicer’s hotheaded youth, in which he sets up Pest (‘Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism’) and calls for the resignation of Sir Alec Douglas-Home — a cry magnified by William Rees-Mogg.

Class system

Class system

Anglo-Saxon divide

Anglo-Saxon divide

Philip Oltermann has set himself an almost impossibly ambitious task. In 1996, when he was 15 years old, he moved from Hamburg to London, so he has close experience of both England and Germany. In due course it occurred to him, as a man of wide cultural sympathies, that he ought to be in a position to write an interesting book about Anglo-German relations.But how to structure such a work? Oltermann is too polite to say so, but a great part of the problem is that modern English readers are abysmally ignorant of Germany. This used not to be the case: before 1914, to be educated was to be able to read German. But today, with rare exceptions — Miriam Gross, Daniel Johnson, Timothy Garton Ash, Norman Stone — we know next to nothing about Germany, except for a detailed knowledge of the period 1933-45.

Fear and loathing in Baden-Wurttemberg

Fear and loathing in Baden-Wurttemberg

Stuttgart Everyone is frightened of the euro. So said the sweet old lady who runs the small hotel where I am staying. She and her husband are Germans who came to Stuttgart from Slovenia 50 years ago. They have worked ‘day and night’ to build up their modest fortune, and now they fear their savings will be destroyed.The old lady explained how people are trying to guard against losing everything: ‘Those who have money want to put it in property. We’d rather invest money in our own country than send it to Greece. We’re worried we’re going to have to pay for others. But what can the small man do? Other people don’t particularly like the Germans. They want the Germans to pay for everything. This currency splits people ever more.

The rival

The rival

The rival

Ken Livingstone’s attacks on Boris Johnson seem to conceal admirationHow does Ken Livingstone think he is going to beat Boris Johnson in the election for Mayor of London to be held next May? When I put this question to Ken, he launched into an almost admiring denunciation of his opponent: ‘He’s Britain’s Berlusconi. He just gets away with things nobody else could. And like Berlusconi he doesn’t really do the day job either.’At the risk of undermining my hard-won reputation for impartiality, I ventured to suggest that Boris works quite hard. But Ken accused Boris of not being a full-time mayor: ‘The fact he carried on the Telegraph column. The fact he took an awful long time off to write the book. I don’t know if you’ve read his book.

The rival

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

If David Cameron and his friends wish to know why they and their policies are so despised by some Conservatives of high intellect and principle, they should read Robin Harris. His book is a marvel of concision, lucidity and scholarship, with penetrating things to say about Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan and the rest. But much of its savour derives from Harris’s disgust — the word is not too strong — with the various forms of bogusness, including intellectual cowardice veiled by complacent politeness, which recur so often in the history of the Conservative party.Harris recognises the ‘note of genius’ in Disraeli, but scorns the pious, posthumous ascription to him of an overriding concern for social reform: ‘What really mattered to Disraeli in the course of his career were the monarchy, the landed interest and, above all, national prestige.

The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

Work in progress

Work in progress

Work in progress

At long last Johnson Studies is starting to take off. It had always been my hope, after publishing my own slim volume on Boris Johnson, that the baton could be passed to younger and fitter hands who would place the subject on a proper academic footing. Scholars from Balliol to Bangor would churn out papers and hold seminars on the symbolism of the Boris bike, or the duel between Boris and George Osborne for the Tory leadership. Very soon the American and Chinese universities would insist on getting involved, and would buy up some of the best people. A young man from the University of Hull came to interview me for his thesis on the Cult of Boris, his idea being that Boris was developing into a minor divinity, of the kind so often worshipped in the ancient world.

Work in progress

Professional jealousy

Professional jealousy

Few words now carry such tiresome connotations as ‘Eton’. Although the Prime Minister and some of his closest colleagues are Etonians, the British press considers it a dreadful disadvantage to have been educated there, especially if one wants to go into politics. This prejudice has seldom been challenged since Iain Macleod’s ‘magic circle’ article appeared in The Spectator on 17 January 1964. The philosopher Jonathan Barnes once told me that it was no advantage in the early Eighties to have been to Eton if you wanted to get into Balliol: ‘On the contrary, there was a pretty strong prejudice against public schools. I should say it was the college’s policy — powerfully urged by some tutors and implicitly accepted by most — that, other things being equal, a candidate from an “unfavoured background” should be preferred to one from a favoured background (anglice: prefer the rotten schools to the good).

White mischief

White mischief

Boris Johnson’s enemies are hoping for a final snow-downLondon woke to snow and people wondered whether this time Boris Johnson would show true grit. His enemies reckon there’s no business like snow business for catching him out. They trust he will be found wanting, as he was by the unexpected snowfall in February 2009, when the city ground to a halt. Many people treasure the belief that the Mayor of London is fundamentally incompetent, and are disconcerted to find that sometimes whole months go by without any real evidence that the Tories have, in the words of the immortal Polly Toynbee, ‘put up a clown to run a great global city’. The snow reached Scotland and the north of England first. On Monday, when it had already been freezing in London for several days but snow was not yet falling, I contacted City Hall to ask: ‘Is London ready for the snow?’ Back came the gung-ho reply: ‘You bet,’ together with a reassuring picture of the 27,000-tonne London Strategic Salt Reserve, at Cortina Drive, Thames Avenue, Dagenham.

The Tories’ history man

The Tories’ history man

The Tories’ history man

Andrew Gimson talks to Alistair Cooke, the godfather of the Cameroons, about Dave’s temperament and Hilton’s penchant for ponchosAs David Cameron solicits approval for deep spending cuts, he has assured the public: ‘We’re not doing this because we want to, we’re not driven by some theory or ideology.’ Cameron remains very anxious not to be taken for a closet Thatcherite, who beneath the cloak of necessity is pursuing ideological politics. If the Prime Minister wished to make a properly Tory case for cutting himself free from an outdated programme, he could do worse than turn to Alistair Cooke, who played a part in the political education of most of the Tory authors of the coalition government. When I visited Cooke at the end of last week, I found him in his library, which apart from a profusion of books about the politics of the last two centuries, is also adorned by about 50 likenesses of Disraeli, and between 20 and 30 of Lord Salisbury.

The Tories’ history man

The property bubble is waiting to burst

The property bubble is waiting to burst

The property bubble is waiting to burst

As a general rule, it is a mistake to go through life thinking about how much one’s house is worth. In the summer of 2002, when I bought my ‘lovely end of terrace period cottage providing compact character accommodation’ in Gospel Oak, London NW5, I assumed I had managed, with unerring incompetence, to buy at the very top of the boom. It seemed to me unimaginable that anyone would be willing to spend more than the grossly inflated sum of £385,000 which I had paid for my small, damp, jerry-built house.My imagination was defective: to my stupefaction, the property boom continued for another five years, until the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007. So instead of avoiding thinking about the value of my house because it was worth less than I had paid, I avoided thinking about it in order not to succumb to the smug illusion that I was several hundred thousand pounds richer.

The property bubble is waiting to burst

The political education of David Cameron

The political education of David Cameron

Eighty years ago this week, the institution in which David Cameron and his closest lieutenants learned their trade was born. The press is fascinated by his membership of the Bullingdon Club, but Cameron owes a thousand times more to the apprenticeship he served in the Conservative Research Department. How dreary those words sound, and how modest the press release on 17 November 1929 announcing the foundation of the new body: ‘In view of the growing complexity of the political aspect of modern industrial, Imperial and social problems, Mr Stanley Baldwin has decided to set up a special department charged with the task of organising and conducting research into these matters.’But the ambitions which lay behind CRD were anything but modest.

Cameron is not an enigma, he’s an Anglican

Cameron is not an enigma, he’s an Anglican

The reason why so many people cannot fathom David Cameron is that he is an Anglican. This gives him considerable (some would say contemptible) flexibility as far as dogma is concerned, while making him intent on upholding a strict (if unstated) code of behaviour.No wonder the Tory leader infuriates those in his own party who crave certainty. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed. Theirs is the predicament of Nigerian Christians who look to Canterbury for dogma, and find themselves fobbed off with liberalism.Robin Harris, who as director of the Conservative Research Department was Cameron’s first employer at Westminster, gave memorable expression to the sense of betrayal felt by such Tories when he said of the present leader: ‘I don’t think that in any shape or form he could be described as a Conservative in philosophical terms.

Boris for Prime Minister?

Boris for Prime Minister?

Boris Johnson’s first year as Mayor of London has proved something of a shock, especially to his own side. His enemies, including the Tory parliamentary leadership as well as the sort of people who toil on the Guardian’s comment pages, find they have underestimated him. It suited them to write him off as a clown who would soon make a complete mess of things, if by some fluke he were to defeat Ken Livingstone in the election held on 1 May last year.This belief in Mr Johnson’s ineptitude became unsustainable last October when he sacked Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Mayor did not, in theory, have the power to sack Sir Ian: that prerogative belonged to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.

Carry on, cardiologist

Carry on, cardiologist

On a Friday morning earlier this year I kept an appointment with Dr Mark Hamilton, a consultant physician and gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, to ask him about a bowel complaint. I was in two minds about whether my symptoms were significant enough to justify taking up Dr Hamilton’s time. It seemed to me that if I went to see him, I might be yielding to hypochondria, but if I did nothing, and I turned out to have the early stages of a still curable cancer, my wife would be furious. She speaks very highly of Dr Hamilton, who has treated her for ulcerative colitis. About a year ago she had a colonoscopy, and I formed the distinct impression that she would not be satisfied until I had undergone the same procedure.

King of the charm offensive

King of the charm offensive

There could scarcely be a more delightful way to remind oneself of the British and French statesmen who created the Entente Cordiale, signed on 8 April 1904, than to read this book. Ian Dunlop’s method of composition is unfashionable. It consists largely of the skilful selection of amusing passages from diplomatic memoirs and other works published during the last century, with no preference given to the latest research and certainly no attempt to make daring reassessments. This is history without the idea that we know better than those who made it; history where due respect is paid to the personalities involved, whose lives were set down in the ponderous volumes which gathered dust on our grandfathers’ shelves.

Cigarette lady

Cigarette lady

Lady Trumpington is on the warpath. At the age of 81, the author of the tremendous dictum ‘I’d rather be common than middle-class’ will deploy her formidable rhetorical powers to condemn a wretched piece of legislation. The ‘Bill to prohibit the smoking of tobacco by any person in Wales while in a public place’, as its long title runs, is now making its way through the House of Lords, and Lady Trumpington is one of the select band of peers who oppose it. For nearly 70 years she was herself a heavy smoker: ‘I started at the age of 11 and smoked 40 a day until two years ago. No doctor has ever gone at me, really, but I think a lot of them smoke anyway. I used to be a junior health minister [from 1985-87]. When I went on visits to hospitals and other such places I could just about last a couple of hours without a cigarette and then I’d say, “I’m sorry, I’ve simply got to have a fag,” and all the doctors and nurses would say “Thank God,” and out would come all the ashtrays.

The joys of inequality

The joys of inequality

It is time we gave the party some electric-shock treatment. The words are worthy of Stalin or Mao, but were spoken by nice, considerate Tony Blair soon after becoming Labour leader in 1994, when he was plotting with his creepy sidekick Philip Gould to ditch Clause 4. In recent months Mr Blair has used the university funding crisis to put several million more volts through his comrades. Like some sadistic psychiatrist, he has fastened his electrodes once again to the emaciated body of the Labour party, which is horribly contorted and enfeebled after eight and a half years of his treatment, but is still capable of feeling pain. Labour MPs emit blood-curdling shrieks of anguish as the Prime Minister tries to force his plan for university top-up fees on them, but that is their function.

Honour bound

Honour bound

The inanity of minuting these conversations! The madness of putting on paper derogatory remarks about such very distinguished people! These were among the chief exclamations made at the Christmas party held by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, where much of the conversation concerned the leak of a paper in which the merits and demerits of 38 candidates for honours were ruled upon with extraordinary frankness by a committee of top civil servants, including the great Sir Hayden Phillips (profiled in this magazine on 16 August). People's reputations were assessed in this Cabinet Office paper, which was meant to remain secret for ever, in a wonderfully dismissive way, as if they were being considered for membership of an old and self-satisfied London club with a very long waiting list, which in a way they were.

Hitler’s unbalanced Orangeman

Hitler’s unbalanced Orangeman

Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germanyby Peter MartlandThe National Archives, £19.99, pp. 308, ISBN 1903365171 Although I yield to no one in my admiration of Mary Kenny as a journalist, an uncomfortable doubt arose in my mind as I read the lengthy acknowledgments with which she prefaces her biography of Lord Haw-Haw. I feared she might be too kind and generous a person to get the measure of William Joyce, the cruel, brutal, vulgar, hate-filled propaganda director of the British Union of Fascists from 1934-37, who during the second world war became, as Lord Haw-Haw, the outstanding exponent of the Nazi cause in the English language. Kenny expresses her gratitude to the family of the late Quentin Joyce, who struggled unwearyingly but unavailingly to save his elder brother, William, from being hanged for high treason in January 1946.

Getting both socks on

Getting both socks on

Children, like dogs, need to be trained. After this promising start, Cassandra Jardine sets out to offer parents some practical advice on how to teach children ‘good habits from an early age’. Heaven knows such advice is needed, not least because, as Jardine remarks, ‘Many is the time when the children of delightful parents have left me speechless with irritation as they behave boorishly around our house.’ I had hoped, after reading her opening remarks, that Jardine was going to come down like a ton of bricks on modern parents and belabour us for spoiling our children rotten. She has it in her, I believe, to produce a reactionary masterpiece, which could be given at Christmas by long-suffering older members of the family to every sentimental, over-indulgent parent in the land.

Proper Tories will have reason to mourn the departure of Tony Blair

Proper Tories will have reason to mourn the departure of Tony Blair

We shall miss him when he is gone. It has become the fashion, both at Westminster and in what used to be known as Fleet Street, to assume that Tony Blair has entered the twilight of his premiership. One of the most promising of the younger Labour backbenchers, who would like a job in government but has failed to show the unremitting servility which would have enabled him to obtain one, remarked this week that ‘not having been promoted towards the end of the discredited Blair regime’ could well prove, in careerist terms, a blessing in disguise. Meanwhile the most highminded of the Guardian’s columnists had already detected, in Mr Blair, ‘a tipping point from leader-as-navigator to leader-as-man-of-self-pleasuring-hubris’.

A sad case of schadenfreude

A sad case of schadenfreude

Andrew Gimson says Gerhard Schr

Cat flap

Cat flap

We got word that our house in London was infested with fleas as we drove north on holiday in glorious weather through the borders into Scotland. Sid, who very kindly and conscientiously looks after our cats while we are away, sent a series of increasingly alarmed text messages, in which he informed us that he was suffering flea attacks of unbridled savagery on his ankles every time he went into the kitchen or sitting-room. He is not the kind of man to take that sort of thing lying down, and he requested an immediate transfer of funds so that he could buy a full suit of protective clothing and launch all-out chemical warfare.One imagines that a protective suit of the kind Sid required can be bought quite cheaply off one of our heroes returning from Iraq, but I am so mean that I decided, in-between admiring the sublime landscapes of the borders, that I would rather deal with the fleas myself when I got back home.

Charming wit or oily Welshman?

Charming wit or oily Welshman?

This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the saloon bar. But mention Sir Hayden Phillips to men of affairs, men of a certain consequence in our public life, men who are members of his club, Brooks's, and you will find that they laugh, or smile at least, and say what an amusing fellow he is, besides being a brilliant operator. There is something about the mere thought of Sir Hayden that cheers people up. But should you ask, with a journalist's impertinence, for some example of Sir Hayden's wit, or some fuller idea of the man's charm, your distinguished informant will first reassure himself that he is speaking 'off the record', then repeat what he has already said – 'amusing', 'brilliant', etc. – and end by giving you the telephone number of some other distinguished person who 'could give you a much better flavour than I can'.