5 Jul 2008

05 July 2008

In this issue

Featured articles

A very English coup — and the end of our national church

On the eve of the General Synod and the Lambeth Conference, Theo Hobson says that the sleeping giant of evangelical and orthodox Anglicanism has been awoken by liberal agitation and Rowan Williams’s failed leadership. The church is damaged beyond repairSome years ago a vicar gave a sermon in which he tried to explain the latest developments in the Anglican Communion to his congregation. Afterwards an old lady came up to him, a bit bemused.

Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlesslyAs shadow home secretary for five years, it became an office joke that, faced with difficult policy questions, I would demand ‘get me the evidence!’ I am a scientist by training and, while 69 per cent of the public believe I took a principled stance in resigning from Parliament, that decision was also based on a rigorous empirical assessment of the evidence.

How to get stabbed: you, too, can be knifed in a public place

Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing, people. From the pictures I’ve seen, if you’ve bought a cat skinner with which to stab somebody, you’ve bought the wrong tool for the job.

I was starstuck by David Cameron

It was a large thickish card. ‘180th anniversary of the Spectator’, to be celebrated at the Churchill Hotel in elegant Portman Square. It looked to be an event not to miss and I’m quite partial to a little schmoozing from the ‘Right’ since it is from within my domain on the Left that I have been the most scourged. This has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but I conclude that the Left is not quite so left as it would like to pretend it is.

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our libertiesOn 18 June 2008 the Law Lords gave judgment in the case of R. v. Davis. The defendant was charged with murder. The prosecution case was that he had shot and killed two men after an all-night party. There were three witnesses — and three only — who identified the defendant as the gunman.

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked on the presidential campaign and then moved to the White House where he rose to become White House press secretary, the public face of the administration.

A portrait of the artist as a tennis champion

Melissa Kite meets Martina Navratilova, nine times Wimbledon singles champion and now pioneer of ‘tennising’ — an artistic technique that creates Jackson Pollock-style patternsThe jet set are strolling across the manicured lawns of corporate Wimbledon. Glistening white marquees filled with champagne and canapés await them at the Fairway Village and Wimbledon Club, just over the road from the All England Club where the tennis championship is taking place.

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