23/07/2011
23 Jul 2011

23 July 2011

23 Jul 2011

23 July 2011

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Features
Anthony Browne
Plan overboard!

The euro crisis has prompted national parliaments across the continent to dump their Euro-federalist baggage It was the political equivalent of Mother Teresa announcing that she had converted to agnosticism. Bart De Wever, the leader of Belgium’s largest political party, was such a Euro-federalist zealot that a year ago he declared he wanted his country to ‘evaporate’ into the beloved EU. But that was so 2010. A few weeks ago he shared a platform with the Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, Europe’s most Eurosceptic head of state, and declared: ‘I am a Eurorealist.

Paul Wood
Can they take Tripoli?

Into battle with Libya’s middle-class rebel armyNafusa mountains, Libya‘My people, did you forget what you got from this tyrant Gaddafi? Only pain, death and humiliation!’ The commander of the Tripoli Brigade was rallying his men at a rebel base not far from the frontline in the western mountains. ‘Stand up, in his face, and say in one voice: No more!’ The Tripoli Brigade is a ‘special unit’ being prepared to storm the capital.

Victoria Lane
Give Charlie a break

The boy’s gone to jail. Isn’t that enough?I was watching the news on the evening of 10 December, some follow-up reports about the student protest the day before, and saw a clip of a young man wielding a mannequin’s leg — shod in a lady’s wedge-heeled boot — as he declared that he and the other protestors were ‘very angry’. He didn’t look that angry; actually he looked extremely placid and was obviously in a chemically altered state.

Rod Liddle
A pie in the face for the police from the dark side of public opinion

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. It is possible that it was not a person at all, but a phantasm, a creature from the dark side spontaneously brought into being by the national outpouring of hysteria and hyperbole, much as the chupacabras, or goat-sucker, will manifest himself in the peasant villages of South America when the locals are gripped by a grave but irrational fear of something.

Anne Applebaum
High noon

The American left is revelling in Rupert Murdoch’s British troubles – and it’s America that has the power to really hurt him Washington DC Let’s start, first, with the bare facts: a British newspaper has been found to have broken British law. The proprietor has closed the paper and apologised profusely. Some British policemen have resigned. Some British journalists have been arrested. While all of this is happening, wars are being fought in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Angela Huth
Duvets or blankets?

Some issues are ‘life-dividers’ – no compromise will ever workSheets and blankets: I have loved them always. The now ubiquitous duvet, current winner in the affections of sleepers, is to me the enemy. There is so much against it: its habit of preferring the other sleeper, and twisting over to his side. The draughts that sneak in from all directions. The inability to be either hot enough or cool enough, thus ensuring broken, bad-tempered nights.

Peter Paterson
Freedom in Wales

Peter Paterson, who died last week, was a political columnist for this magazine in 1970, and later a frequent contributor. This extract, from a piece published in The Spectator in 1983, describes his evacuation, in 1944, from Spurgeon’s Orphan Home, south London, to Cwmllynfell, South Wales: Our trainload of orphans had arrived in 1944 in Port Talbot, fugitives from the German V-2 rockets, our minders having been promised that we should all be kept together in some Welsh version of the institution from which we had been evacuated.

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