Ian Birrell | The Spectator columnists & writers

Abolishing slavery was no cause for smugness

When the 13 colonies of the United States declared independence in 1776, the first country to recognise the new nation was France. Other leading European powers, such as Britain and Spain, acknowledged its arrival at the Treaty of Paris, two years after a decisive victory by American forces. Yet when Haiti asserted independence in 1804, it was ostracised by Britain, France, Spain and the US. During its first fragile years as a fledgling state, that self-declared guru of liberty Thomas Jefferson even imposed a rigid blockade while president. Washington then took more than half a century to recognise its Caribbean neighbour. The reason for such contrasting attitudes towards the first and second independent nations in the western hemisphere was simple.

America sees red: how fury prompted the slide into Trumpism

After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two daily papers published for the 16,400 citizens living in the West Virginia town of Clarksburg. Like many local reporters in those far-off days before the internet, he covered pretty much everything in his community, from boxing bouts and house fires to local politics and miners’ strikes. Later, working abroad in China and the Middle East, he would often check the paper’s website to keep up with events, observing from afar the drastic decline of both his own industry and the Appalachian state. West Virginia was a Democratic stronghold when Osnos was driving around its farms, mines and schools. But factories shut in the face of foreign competition, papers closed as advertising moved online, residents left faster than in any other state and problems such as obesity and opioid addiction mounted.

The scandal of OxyContin, the painkiller that caused untold pain

Last week I was staying in a cool hotel in the middle of San Francisco. When I walked out to find coffee in the morning, I came across a man with his trousers lowered as he injected himself in the groin. An older fellow nearby used the street as a toilet, adding to the human excrement on the pavement. A woman lay crashed out, hair matted over her face in the heat. Returning later in the day, passing the clusters of tents and people chasing dragons from foil, I was asked: ‘Do you want anything?’ These disturbing scenes of human despair were beside a smart shopping mall in the city with the most billionaires per capita on the planet. San Francisco saw almost three times as many people killed last year by fentanyl — the ultra-potent opioid many times stronger than heroin — than who died from Covid.

Sacrificing to the false god of gold

Deep in Peru’s Amazon rainforest sits a desolate zone, stretching for miles and pockmarked with chemical-tainted water that glistens orange and blue. This was the centre of the country’s illegal gold-mining operations, where tens of thousands of desperate people dug into the soil in search of a precious mineral that could make the difference between destitution and wealth. For every ounce found in the crime-infested badlands, nine tonnes of toxic waste are thought to be left behind in an environmental catastrophe that will contaminate the region for decades. No wonder Pope Francis, on a visit to the impoverished area, called gold ‘a false god’ when so much wreckage is left behind in its wake. Yet one tonne of this illegal metal left the nation each day, an informant told an amazed investigator almost a decade ago — the weight of a male walrus and worth about $40 million.

The courage of a madman: Maurice Wilson’s doomed assault on Everest

Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the finest high-altitude mountaineer in history. His list of astonishing achievements on dangerous ice-clad crags includes the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without use of oxygen. Yet as he sat exhausted at 26,000 feet with two days still to go on that pioneering ascent, he thought of an eccentric Englishman ‘tougher than I am’ who had set out before him with one crippled arm and no crampons, let alone knowledge of some basic climbing techniques. ‘Do I understand this madman so well because I am mad myself?’ he wondered. Now the writer Ed Caesar, similarly captivated by the crazed early assault on Everest by the Yorkshireman Maurice Wilson, has told the extraordinary story of this intrepid ‘madman’ in an engrossing biography.

Trump’s autocratic antics risk becoming the new normal

It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would have seemed unthinkable to have the leader of the free world bragging of being a ‘very stable genius’ on social media, then taunting the despotic ruler of a nuclear-armed nation as ‘Little Rocket Man’ and threatening annihilation of his country. Or for a United States president to lie so frequently and casually that the Washington Post counted more than 10,000 ‘fishy claims’ by the end of last April alone. But we have become inured to Trump’s self-obsessed boasts and infantile tantrums. We have become accustomed to the deceit, the disorder, the disruption and the daily outbursts on Twitter that pass for policy- making under the 45th presidency of the United States.

A dark journey into a fanatical underworld

Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt and destabilise our democracies. So the Austrian researcher invented five identities and joined a dozen secretive digital worlds of white nationalists, radical misogynists and jihadi women to explore their networks, their strategies and their recruitment techniques. This sobering book tells the tale of her journeys into a swampy underworld filled with fanatics and fantasists. Many of the people she came across seem like the saddest of losers. She joins a white nationalist dating site — motto ‘Love your race and procreate’ — where people admit they received ‘negative’ feedback on mainstream forums.

Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination was one of the century’s blackest farces

The story of Jamal Khashoggi’s death is well known. A prominent Saudi journalist, he walked into his nation’s consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 to obtain divorce papers permitting him to marry his fiancée Hatice Cengiz. Eighteen minutes later, he was drugged and then murdered by a hit squad sent from Riyadh. After another six minutes, a bone saw brought in by a forensic doctor was heard chopping up the body, although the parts were never found. The killers, all senior intelligence figures, returned home in private jets. This act of savagery, which showed stunning contempt for diplomatic norms, rightly sparked an international storm. Khashoggi, a well-known character in Arab circles, had started writing columns for the Washington Post from his new home in Virginia, and his criticism of the Saudi regime had become more vigorous.

How politicians failed to learn from the charity sex abuse scandal

When Tamsyn Barton was summoned before MPs last month to be quizzed on her suitability to run the official aid watchdog, she was asked about priorities in the post. She insisted she planned ‘to build back public trust in the effectiveness of aid,’ admitting support for the government’s £13.4bn spending spree was waning. This rising concern is unsurprising given a tide of sex abuse scandals, furores over fat cat pay, disclosures of dodgy behaviour and endless exposure of appalling waste. Sadly the core problem is a government policy that shows contempt for the public. Voters see politicians running an indebted economy who impose tax rises and spending cuts at home while squandering vast sums on vanity projects abroad.

Millions of shattered lives

The fateful day five years ago began like any other for the family. A pot of black tea with cardamon seeds sat on the table as Sara roused her youngest children and prepared them for school. But there were tiny clues. Leila, just turned 16 and wearing a floor-length dress, unusually offered to help. Her older sister Ayan appeared from her bedroom with a suitcase, which she said was being lent to a friend. Before they left, Leila whispered to each of her parents that she loved them. The pair did not return after school. Sara tried to call them, but their phones were switched off. She knew they were good girls, however; it was their brother, slipping away from his Somali heritage, that was her source of concern. But they were still not back when Sadiq, her husband, returned to their home near Oslo.

Every horror imaginable

The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being urged to convert to Islam with machetes pressed to their necks. They did their best to gabble words that sounded like the prayers they were being taught before one fighter noticed a captive with a swollen belly. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she insisted, spreading her hands over her belly in an instinctive reaction that only showed she was lying. The most senior of the armed men, who looked barely 20 years old, ordered her to lie down on the ground. ‘We don’t bring any Christian babies into the world here,’ he screamed. Then he stripped off the shaking woman’s clothes, slit open her stomach with his machete, ripped out the unborn baby and threw it in a field behind him.

Korean notebook

When I arrived in Seoul, I joked to my editor that I hoped this was not going to be like Ukraine. I went there for three days and ended up staying for five weeks because a war broke out. This time the threat of war is implied, rather than real, although a Korean conflict would be far more lethal and terrifying. Soon after arriving, I met Hwee-Rhak Park, a former army colonel who teaches strategy to young officers. We talked in his university office, high in suburban hills overlooking the smog and skyscrapers. He calmly told me how he had tried to persuade his children to leave and fully expects to die in one of the north’s hideous concentration camps. He believes that when Kim Jong-un develops nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, the south will be annexed with dire warnings against intervention to the White House.

A truly monstrous regiment

When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had terrorised people for decades across a big chunk of Africa turned out to be emaciated teenagers with dirty clothes who could hardly hold the big guns they carried. Some were unarmed children, barely ten years old. He felt sorry for them. ‘They could not have known anything else but living in the forest like wild animals.’ Soon he had joined their pack, a reluctant member of one of the world’s most notorious rebel groups. A bright boy who dreamed of becoming a teacher, George ended up a bodyguard to one of the world’s most bloodstained killers. He sought to avoid the massacres, murder and rape that were the trademarks of Joseph Kony’s army.

Getting away with murder

Cher Hughes loved the beauty, the white sand beaches and sun-kissed climate of the tropical islands of Bocas del Toro in Panama. So she sold her thriving sign business in Florida and spent the profits on creating a new life on the Caribbean archipelago. She and her husband built a beautiful home filled with fine furnishings on Darklands, a private island with coconut palm trees and a sheltered cove, while investing in a couple of rental units nearby. Hughes threw herself into her new life. She went into the jungle to find strange blooms for her vases and searched for armadillos in the moonlight. A blonde in her forties, she became a popular member of the largely American community of about 2,000 expats. The numbers were growing fast, swelled by baby boomers fed up with life in the States and seduced by lagoons and lobster cook-outs.

Trapped in hell

The mechanic, blinded in one eye by shrapnel, spent three days searching for his family in the destroyed buildings and broken streets of Darayya. Finally he found his father’s body in a farmhouse, alongside those of three boys, already starting to decay. ‘Can you tell me why they would kill an old man?’ he asked, before adding: ‘This is not my Syria. When I see the sorrow that happens in our towns, all I think is — this is not my Syria.’ Yet it is. Indeed, one mystery of the darkness that has descended on Syria is that so many gut-wrenching depravities could befall a place of such bewitching beauty, history and apparent tolerance. Even now, after so much blood spilt and so many lives destroyed, there seems something unreal about how demands for democracy ended up in such a sordid maelstrom of death, devastation and sectarian horrors.

The Tories are right to focus on prison reform - it’s a classic conservative issue

Many people were surprised when David Cameron placed prison reform at the heart of his party conference speech last week. His passionate words on the subject of state failure when it comes to incarceration put the issue firmly at the heart of his reawakened vision of compassionate conservatism. It is now at the core of the Conservative party’s bid to seize the centre ground after Labour’s refusal to accept the verdict of the voters. Hopefully this marks a significant moment, when the debate on crime and punishment shifts from the ‘sterile lock em up’ stance to a more rational and evidence-based approach focused on stopping people from reoffending. Bear in mind that half of inmates reoffend within a year of the prison gates closing behind them, so clearly the idea that prison works is an absurdity.

The murderous gangs who run the world

Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test — shoot dead a man tied to a chair — then moved into a nice house in Texas. Soon he was earning $500 a week for stakeouts and odd jobs, but the big money came from slitting the throats of the gang’s enemies, which paid a $50,000 bonus. Four years later he was arrested after 20 murders; his only remorse was over accidentally sparking a massacre that left him fearing his bosses might exact revenge on him. Such bloodstained stories of obscene violence in pursuit of obscene wealth fill the pages of the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s investigation into the cocaine trade. Children are chucked into wells, decapitated heads roll across dancefloors and faces are stitched on to footballs.

Crimean notebook: ‘They’ll have to break all my bones to make me a Russian citizen’

Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little as possible as they invade this holiday region in their unmarked uniforms and vehicles. It is remarkable how soon you get used to shouting questions at these heavily armed special forces soldiers while they pretend not to be Russians. They tend not to take the bait: the most you’ll get out of them is a curt ‘Nyet’. I wandered up to an officer who seemed to be in charge of seizing a Ukrainian naval base in the old Tartar capital of Bakhchisaray. He wore all black, his face hidden by a balaclava and his vest stuffed with nasty-looking weapons. ‘Can we talk?’ I asked. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions,’ he snapped, in what my interpreter said was a strong Russian accent.

Africa’s Afghanistan

For centuries, the people of Timbuktu have sought guidance from their Sufi saints. They took pride in the mausoleums of these medieval Muslim holy men, who spread their faith around the world from a city built on the profits of gold, salt and slaves. When I visited six years ago, a teenager showed me around, pointing out the shrines. As we stood by a monument to peace built in 1995 to mark the end of the last Tuareg uprising, with guns embedded in its concrete, I handed him a few coins. He gave them to children standing nearby. ‘My religion says we should share,’ he said. Today, the mood is different. Islamic extremists, who hold the shrines and tombs to be idolatrous, are tearing them apart with pickaxes, iron bars and shovels.

Big charity

The aid business has grown fat. It’s time there was proper scrutinySuch a simple question: should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his blog, and provoked a revealing bout of navel-gazing in the aid industry.The pool was shut, Mr Green disclosed, on the orders of the charity’s head office, which feared a scandal after an advert for a pool attendant appeared on its website. The post went viral, sparking a far bigger response than Mr Green’s usual musings on poverty. Some comments were satirical, such as the suggestion Oxfam open a golf course for staff in Kenya.

Another top ten albums of 2011 list

Picking my favourite albums this year reminded me of three things about the current state of music. First, the obvious point of how everything is driven by single tracks rather than albums, making the task harder each year. Second, how so much of the most interesting and innovative art is being made by women right now. And third, how the future of music is increasingly found in places such as Kinshasa and Johannesburg as much as in the traditional stomping grounds of London and Los Angeles. Anyway, here’s my list. And since any of these lists are an exercise in self-indulgence, can I cheat and give mentions in dispatches to Little Dragon, Metronomy, Nneka, Owiny Sigoma Band, SBTRKT & Toddla T? And also plug my favourite video of the year, Spoek Mathambo’s astonishing township house version of the Joy Division classic ‘She’s Lost Control’? Kinshasa Succursale — Baloji My pick of the year is another album created in Kinshasa.

The ongoing NHS scandal

Shock! Horror! Another report reveals the shameful care given to the elderly in British hospitals. People in the twilight of their life reduced to begging for food and rattling the bars of their beds in a desperate attempt to get the attention of medical staff paid to care for them. The findings came in reports of random inspections by the Care Quality Commission watchdog that found concerns in 55 of the 100 hospitals visited, with 20 of them — one in five — breaking the law in its levels of neglect. They found patients starved of food, denied water, spoken to rudely or simply ignored. It is sickening stuff. But what is so disgusting, so shameful, is that this is just the latest in a series of reports into the way our sacred National Health Service treats elderly and disabled patients.

Spotify Sunday: Shuffle...

Like many music fans, I could spend months pondering a playlist and coming up with dozens of variations. Since I assume I was invited to participate in Spotify Sunday as co-founder of Africa Express, I wondered whether to do an all-African list, but in the end decided to do a random shuffle of a few of my favourite things – much like the madness of an Africa Express show. Je T’aime – Staff Benda Bilili I first came across this band in Kinshasa, when a group of homeless paraplegics were carried on to the stage in a tiny club and left us all totally stunned. A breathtaking moment. Since then they have become global stars with their incredible rumba-driven grooves, overlaid with the virtuoso playing of Roger Landau and his homemade one-string electric lute.

Hell or high water

As his battered bomber hurtled towards the Pacific in May 1943, Louis Zamperini thought to himself that no one was going to survive the crash. If he had had the slightest inkling of what lay ahead of him, he readily admits that he might have preferred death, staying beneath the surface of the water rather than wrestling his way from the wreckage as it sank. Clambering into a life raft floating amid the blood and wreckage, he knew the odds were bad. Search planes were more likely to crash — just as his barely airworthy B-24 had — than rescue downed airmen. Only three of the crew survived — and one had a severe head injury, while the other was so traumatised that he wailed ‘We’re going to die’ until slapped, then scoffed their only food, a handful of chocolate bars, when night fell.

The making of the coalition

David Cameron was despondent on the evening of 10 May. Although the election result was pretty much as he had predicted privately, he feared that his ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ of coalition with the Liberal Democrats was about to be rejected in favour of a deal with Labour. When we talked that night he feared another spell in opposition, and he ended by suggesting I went into the office the next day since he would have time on his hands. But as we spoke, the Lib Dem negotiating team was reporting back to Nick Clegg on another disastrous set of discussions with Labour, ensuring that long-held hopes of the so-called ‘progressive alliance’ were shrivelling by the hour. Even Vince Cable accepted the reality of the situation.

That turbulent decade

On 2 January, 1980, a new decade was ushered in with a strike by steelworkers. It was their first national stoppage for half a century, and after three tense months they were rewarded with a 16 per cent pay rise. Once again, a strike seemed to pay off, with weak managers sacrificing long-term gain to avoid short-term pain, whatever the costs ultimately to their industry or to the economy.But then, in a clear sign that the Eighties were going to be rather different to the tortured decade that had preceded it, the Government sacked the chairman of British Steel. He was replaced by a tough Scottish-born banker from Wall Street called Ian MacGregor, who immediately began challenging the old order and slashing the workforce.

Caught in the crossfire

Maqbool Sheikh dreaded hearing a knock at the door of his home. For he was the most intimate witness to one of the world’s most enduring and forgotten conflicts, the struggle over Kashmir. As the only autopsy expert at the police hospital in Srinagar, it was his job to conduct post mortems on those shot, stabbed or blown to pieces — and the bodies arrived at the rate of around 1,000 a year.Each time, as he drove back to the mortuary, he wondered whether he would be confronted with the corpse of a child, a woman or another young man. The law required him to determine how each one died, and his judgment could affect how their families were treated — were they a terrorist, a police informer or simply another innocent bystander? His scalpels sought answers in the destroyed bodies of the dead.

The hell I share with David Cameron

My daughter suffered two seizures the other night. One was shortly after midnight, the other a couple of hours later. Having been away on business the previous night, it was my turn to get up to comfort her, to check that the fits were not life-threatening and, afterwards, to settle her back to sleep. Five hours later the alarm went off and, as my teenage son stomped into the shower, I popped back into her bedroom to check that she was still asleep — and still alive. This was a typical night in our house, and it was followed by a typical day of attempting to balance work and family while caring for a severely disabled child and engaging in a ceaseless battle with the bureaucracy of our public services. My wife endures a daily torrent of telephone calls and conversations with doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers and therapists, plus the whole allied panoply of respite carers and council staff.

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