Alec Russell | The Spectator columnists & writers

Fellow travellers: South Africa falls for China

Jacob Zuma is in Britain this week, paying lip service to the West. But, says Alec Russell, his vision for South Africa’s future is of ever closer ties with the emerging superpowerWhen Jacob Zuma addressed the banquet at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday night, he will have nodded at his host and saluted the Commonwealth. South Africa’s President is a stickler for traditional protocol. He also has warm memories of his flits through London when he was in exile under apartheid and the UK was a home from home for many in the ‘struggle’. Yet Zuma’s audiences should not be misled by his anecdotal after-dinner repertoire. The one-time herd boy turned freedom-fighter turned president may have a reputation for populism, vacillation and scandal.

Dinner at the club with the Zulu Mr Everyman

On a blustery southern winter’s night last year, Jacob Zuma hosted a small dinner in the Rand Club for a dozen sceptical guests. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the dark-panelled club in the centre of Johannesburg was in the old days the preserve of the white English-speaking business establishment. In the early years of majority rule, senior officials of the African National Congress were wary of admitting to membership, fearing headlines insinuating they had become the new ‘Randlords’, the old nickname for Rhodes and his peers. But 15 years into the new era the new guard are feeling rather surer of themselves. None other than the Rhodes Room, a private dining-room dominated by a life-size portrait of the old colonialist in shooting clothes, was selected as the venue for the coming man to set out his stall.

Was this the day McCain won the White House?

Lynchburg, VirginiaJohn McCain has definitely had happier days than last Saturday. As he mounted the podium at Virginia’s Liberty University, once memorably described by its founder, his long-time enemy, as a ‘bible boot camp’ he had a wistful, almost haunted expression. When it was his turn to address his audience of starry-eyed Christian students, there was none of the usual McCain passion and verve. ‘Let me just say that I wish you all well,’ he said. It was hardly the speech to send them out afire to change the world. Rather it was his host, the university’s founder and chancellor, the Revd Jerry Falwell, resplendent in academic robes, who was doing all the beaming — and no wonder.Six years ago when running against George W.