The wild life and times of Ariel Sharon

When Ariel Sharon slipped into a coma in January 2006, The Spectator was just beginning to rather like him. Days after his stroke, the magazine ran a piece arguing that Sharon’s legacy would be ‘not his military exploits but his final major political act: unilateral withdrawal from Gaza’. Douglas Davis described Gaza as a lawless gangland where terrorism was the major growth industry. Yasser Arafat had sown the seeds of anarchy and Mahmoud Abbas was too weak to do anything about it. ‘The terror war appears to be on the verge of entering a new, more dangerous, phase,’ he wrote. ‘Israelis have cause to be grateful that Sharon dragged them out when he did.’

Before 2006, The Spectator would have often made less comfortable reading for Ariel Sharon. Discussing the very same policy in 2004, the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman took a hard line. ‘Almost exactly two years ago in the House of Commons I described Ariel Sharon as a “war criminal”.