Russia

Friday

David Waywell

Does Elton John genuinely believe he can change Putin’s attitude to gays?

I’ve never been an Elton John fan. Never owned an album. Never added one of his tunes to my playlist of favourite tracks. Never really understood the appeal of pith helmets, spectacles, coat tails, and twitchy eyebrows. Yet it’s because I’m immune to his charm that it would be easy for me to mock Elton for falling for the scam arranged by two pranksters who convinced him that he was speaking with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. It would be easy but it would also be unfair because what happened to Elton wasn’t a prank. A prank contains some clue that gives the victim a chance to escape the net.

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Why I left

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeathoftheleft/media.mp3″ title=”Nick Cohen and Fraser Nelson discuss the death of the left” startat=32] Listen [/audioplayer]‘Tory, Tory, Tory. You’re a Tory.’ The level of hatred directed by the Corbyn left at Labour people who have fought Tories all their lives is as menacing as it is ridiculous. If you are a woman, you face misogyny. Kate Godfrey, the centrist Labour candidate in Stafford, told the Times she had received death threats and pornographic hate mail after challenging her local left. If you are a man, you are condemned in language not heard since the fall of Marxist Leninism. ‘This pathetic small-minded jealousy of the anti-democratic bourgeois shows them up for

Thursday

Imogen Russell Williams

Humour and horror for children

In the Californian town of San Bernadino, children are going missing; smiling faces grace a gallery of milk cartons. One September evening in 1969, Jim Sturges’s brother Jack rides under a bridge and never comes out. All that’s left is his Sportcrest bike, its front wheel spinning. Forty-five years later, 15-year-old Jim Junior lives in a state of reluctant siege. Traumatised by loss, his father has armour-clad their home, calling the cops if Jim gets home seconds after sunset. Jim has other problems, too; he and his friend Tub have caught the eye of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, the school bully. And now something nasty seems to be emerging from the sewers.

Thursday

Anna Aslanyan

Hurricane Lolita

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nostalgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from early-20th-century Russia, soon to be engulfed by revolution, to Europe at the start of the second world war. He planned a sequel to it, based on his American years, but Speak On, Memory was never written, partly because much of that experience had found an outlet in his novels. As Robert Roper argues in his literary biography, it was America that made Nabokov the master we now admire. Nabokov in America, a detailed account of the 20 years the writer spent there, revisits some of the less widely known facts

Thursday

Roger Alton

Champions of absurdity

Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in for gold. And silver and bronze too. Amid some low-key hoopla last week, the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing. Yes, that’s the same Beijing that staged the 2008 Olympics and in a couple of weeks will put on the World Athletics Championships. The 2022 bidding boiled down to a two-horse race between Almaty, Kazakhstan, which at least has some snow; and Beijing, which doesn’t. The previous front-runner, Oslo, withdrew its bid last autumn after all the main political parties rejected the funding plans for the Games. It

Owen Matthews

Putin and the polygamists

Homosexuality may not be tolerated in today’s Russia, nor political dissent. Polygamy, though, is a different matter. Ever since news broke this summer of a 57-year-old police chief in Chechnya bullying a 17-year-old local girl into becoming his second wife, Russian nationalists and Islamic leaders alike have been lining up to call for a man’s right to take more than one wife. Most vocal has been Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant 38-year-old president of Chechnya (part of the Russian Federation), who advocates polygamy as part of ‘traditional Muslim culture’. Veteran ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky has long held that polygamy is the solution for ‘Russia’s 10 million unmarried women’. And even Senator

Thursday

Peter Culshaw

Conspiracies, hookers and bombs – welcome to the Odessa Film Festival

Odessa, the pearl of the Black Sea, is one of the most charming port cities you can imagine, the centre of the city mainly 19th-century Italian and French architecture. Like a run-down Riviera, but with the exchange rate gone from 8 grivnas to the pound to 34, it’s fabulously cheap for visitors. At my favourite Azeri restaurant, which doesn’t sell wine, they offered to go to the supermarket and buy me a bottle of red. £1.50 for perfectly drinkable Ukrainian plonk. The rate has dived due to the unrest and war in the East of course. On the surface things are somewhat calmer than last year when a fire killed dozens

Thursday

Anna Aslanyan

Reality games

The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator, who pilots his hi-tech camera without leaving his room, propped up against cushions. The corpulent Damilola Karpov lives in Byzantion, or Big Byz, an ‘offglobe’ hovering over what’s left of the old world after the collapse of its superpowers and other apocalyptic events. Down below is a country called Urkaine (the apparent misspelling is a pun on a slang Russian word for ‘criminal’), populated by drunks and ruled by gangsters, its symbol a golden ‘spastika’, its economic goal ‘to catch up with and overtake Big Byz in terms of major

Monday

Ismene Brown

The self-taught French pianist who wowed the Tchaikovsky music competition

Vladimir Putin was sitting a few rows in front of me last Thursday evening in Moscow listening patiently to three hours of classical music without interval. I could not imagine David Cameron or HMQ doing the same – Britain’s Got Talent is more their cup of tea. But then classical music is as much a part of Russian politics as its attitude to neighbours and this was the winners’ gala of the monumental four-yearly Tchaikovsky music competition, which never ceases to be a political event. That was why I went, after all – to see how today’s politics would play on the choice of top prizes, whether Russia would sweep

Thursday

William Cook

Watching the next war

Late last month, on a windswept plain near the Polish town of Zagan, the defence ministers of Poland, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands joined the Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, to watch Nato’s response to Russia’s incursions into eastern Europe. The dramatic culmination of a week of military manoeuvres, Exercise Noble Jump was a spectacular show of force by Nato’s new VJTF brigade. More than 2,000 troops from nine countries fought a fierce mock-battle against irregular militia, with live ammunition. Huddled in the attendant press pack, struggling to insert my earplugs, this awesome demonstration felt like confirmation — if any were needed — that Europe stands on the brink of a

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The real theatre of war

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia was the second world war’s greatest event. The Asian theatre, much of it water, was seven times larger than the European theatre. America’s mobilisation was the most complex in history, Japan’s crimes among the most sadistic. Metaphysically, the atomic consummation altered our relationship to our habitat. Yet only three comprehensive, single-volume accounts of the war in Asia have appeared — until now the most recent being Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun in 1985. Hirohito’s War by Francis Pike sets a new standard: oceanic in scope, comprehensive in detail, subtle

Tuesday

Jonathan Foreman

Aid is no substitute for defence, and Michael Fallon knows it

It’s been obvious for a while that the Prime Minister is exasperated by the way American and other allied officials – including President Obama himself – keep expressing concern about Britain’s rapidly shrinking defence capabilities and the prospect of yet more defence cuts. David Cameron also dislikes being reminded that he lectured other Nato leaders about meeting the alliance’s minimum of spending 2 per cent GDP on defence, when by any honest calculation the UK is not going to meet that target. He hasn’t responded directly to the multiple warnings from Washington. This is presumably because overtly contradicting the President, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defence of the United States could

Thursday

Sean Mcglynn

The hardest man of all

From the unpromising and desperately unforgiving background that forged his iron will and boundless ambition, Temujin (as Genghis Khan was named at birth) rose to build an empire that was to range from Korea and China, through Afghanistan, Persia and Iraq and eventually to Hungary and Russia, constituting the largest contiguous land imperium in history. His was an extraordinary, epic story and Frank McLynn does it full justice in a vivid, page-turning biography. The author portrays well the extreme hardship of the nomadic life for Genghis as boy and man on the arid Mongolian steppe, where temperatures range between 100 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 43, and where ‘one can be

Saturday

Steerpike

Bilderberg security is stepped up to protect masters of the universe from journalists

This weekend the masters of the universe will gather at the annual Bilderberg conference. The secretive summit, which is being held in Austria, sees heads of banks and company CEOs mix with political heavyweights including the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, US pollster Jim Messina, George Osborne and… Ed Balls. No notes are taken, no media are invited to cover the event, and the outcome is never revealed which has led conspiracy theorists to go into overdrive. Theories range from plans for a New World Order to world domination by lizards. This year they have disclosed the topics they are planning to discuss: ‘Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, chemical weapons threats, current economic

Tuesday

Simon Barnes

Reforming Fifa will be an even more messy job than exposing it

There he was, doing his lovable leader act: the little father of all the world, humble and slightly dishevelled. The great suit was back before the world: but this time the clothes have no emperor. It was time for farewell. Sepp Blatter has resigned as president of Fifa. He was able to keep on for 17 years on a mixture of dazzling effrontery and the fact that so many people in Fifa were actually in favour of a corrupt system. It’s so much easier to deal with people when you can price their degree of self-interest with complete precision. Many, many people had been happy with the corrupt system of

Saturday

Ross Clark

Britain’s reaction to Fifa’s troubles makes us look like sore losers

How pleasing that the sleazebags at Fifa are finally getting their comeuppance. We have all known what has been going on for years: dodgy deals in hotels, backhanders to secure votes. Who could disagree with the judgement of Greg Dyke, chairman of the FA when he suggested: ‘There is no way of rebuilding trust in Fifa while Sepp Blatter is still there.’ If we won’t go, let’s boycott the World Cup until Fifa is governed like, er, our own upstanding football establishment. That’s the problem. Yes, of course Fifa is a fetid pit of corruption, but we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground, not with our own history of bungs, match-fixing scandals

Friday

Steerpike

Ben Harris-Quinney suspended from Conservative party

Earlier this month Ben Harris-Quinney stepped down as the chairman of the Bow Group, following internal frictions over the Conservative think tank’s partial Ukip endorsement ahead of the election. Now Harris-Quinney, who was elected as a Tory councillor earlier this month, has been suspended from the Conservative Party. In an email circulated to staff, a Conservative spokesman reveals the suspension is pending an investigation into the circumstances in which he joined the party ahead of running as a council candidate: ‘Ben Harris-Quinney has been suspended from the Party with immediate effect pending an urgent investigation by the Disciplinary Committee on behalf of the Board. The investigation will also cover the circumstances in which he was able

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 28 May 2015

Home A Bill to enable a referendum on whether voters wanted Britain to ‘remain’ in the European Union figured in the Queen’s Speech. Another Bill prohibited any rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020. Tenants of housing associations would be given the right to buy their homes. Provision for Scottish devolution was promised in fulfilment of the recommendations of the cross-party Smith Commission. A ‘powerhouse’ in the north was to come into being through cities being given powers over housing, transport, planning and policing. Laws on strikes would be tightened. Red tape for business would be reduced, and a new quango set up to invigilate late

Thursday

James Delingpole

Calling all British tourists – Ukraine needs you!

 Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not far from St Sophia cathedral (Delingpole tourist rating: total must-see). ‘What do you think?’ I shrug. ‘Partition, maybe.’ The man shrugs back. We agree that what Putin is doing in the east is appalling. But he’s not terribly enthused by what the Americans are doing either. ‘They want to arm us. But you know where the fighting will take place: here,’ he says, meaning Ukraine in general rather than Kiev in particular. ‘You could leave,’ I suggest. ‘Your English is good.’ (Unusually so. Communication is generally quite hard in Kiev

Monday

Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft travels to Russia to research his David Cameron biography

The British government’s relationship with Russia is somewhat frosty since David Cameron ordered 75 British soldiers to Ukraine earlier this year to help the country defend itself against Russia. With diplomatic relations at a low, Cameron may now have new reason for Russian woe. Word reaches Steerpike that Cameron’s unofficial biographers Lord Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott recently travelled to Moscow on a research trip. With Ashcroft’s polling services no longer required in the UK, the pair took their quest to discover Cameron’s secrets for their upcoming biography, Call me Dave, to the Duma: With Cameron already suspicious of ‘the Ashcroft book‘, which he has refused to collaborate with the authors on, this new twist may give him fresh reason to sweat. While