30/09/2006
30 Sep 2006

30 September 2006

30 Sep 2006

30 September 2006

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Features
Matthew Dancona
John McCain on David Cameron

In this exclusive interview, the Republican presidential front-runner tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is speaking at the Conservative conference, and says that Cameron has the youth, exuberance and determination to be a Tory JFKDavid Cameron was only one year and 17 days old on 26 October 1967, when John McCain was shot down in his A4 aircraft over Hanoi and taken prisoner by the Vietnamese. Almost four decades later, the two politicians have been brought together by a shared ambition to govern their respective countries — frontrunners to be prime minister and president — and a shared conservative purpose.

Simon Jenkins
Complete the Thatcher revolution

Simon Jenkins says that the Iron Lady’s work will not be complete without the devolution of power to local communities. Is the Tory leader ready to embrace this mission?The Tory party still has to come to terms with Margaret Thatcher. As she broods this week in Chester Square, the revolution associated with her name is still swamping British politics. Labour and Conservative front benches wrangle over the upheavals she initiated like crews clinging to the same wreckage.

Maurice Saatchi
Let us leave the ‘centre ground’

Maurice Saatchi says that the dull terrain of modern politics is the breeding ground of voter apathy and cynicism: the Tories must ‘climb the hill’ of idealism once moreAll proponents of ‘the centre ground’ in politics take satisfaction from analogy with the game of chess. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world chess champion, on whose scientific principles chess is now based, said it was always good, on principle, to take an opponent’s centre pawn.

Matt Ridley
The genetic code genius failed to kill faith

On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a credit-card debt left him by a profligate boyfriend; and Bob Wright’s book on the Almighty is still unpublished.

Clarke Hayes
A handshake with Clinton on the golf course

It was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tinIt was all there at the K Club last weekend — just what it had always said on the tin. The passion, the best golf and golfers in the world, a glorious setting, rain, sweat and tears, an emphatic triumph for Europe and, of course, the craic. I was on the front row of the barrier overlooking the 16th green on Sunday — where I had stood for four hours — and shook the hand of Bill Clinton as he walked to the scene of the denouement.

Rod Liddle
A miserable waste of space

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes.

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