01 January 1999

Political morality: a child's guide

• 01 January 1999

"Daddy, that Mr Mandelson is a very wicked man, isn't he?" "Yes, my son, very wicked indeed. He's done wrong." "So many wrong things: he didn't speak out against dropping ...

14 Days

• 01 January 1999

Whelan and dealin' The greatest political upset so far for the government occurred two days before Christmas, when the trade and industry secretary, Peter Mandelson, and the paymaster-general, Geoffrey ...

The Journal of Lynton Charles, Deputy Minister without Portfolio

• 01 January 1999

Christmas Eve Never glad, confident morning again. What a falling off was there, from this to this. Oh fie. Posterity must excuse my emotion at the passing, politically, of one ...

In Moscow's Hungry Duck, everyone dances on the bar. Soon, you feel, there will be a cleansing, apocalyptic fire

• Jason Cowley
• 01 January 1999

I am in Moscow to attend the Russian Booker prize, which shares more than a passing resemblance to its British cousin - the shortlist is annually trashed, the judges traduced ...

An earthquake strikes new Labour

• Steve Richards
• 01 January 1999

Peter Mandelson was one of the few ministers who instinctively knew Blair's mind. His loss exposes the government's fragility, argues Steve Richards

We are still living through the Twelve Days of Christmas, aren't we? Soon, once the new year has passed and the last festive song has been sung, children will return ...

The politics of debt

• John Lloyd
• 01 January 1999

Peter Mandelson merely owed money to Geoffrey Robinson, but Tony Blair has heavier obligations. Will he carrying on paying, asks John Lloyd

Debt, and what to do with it, has long been the essence of practical politics. Debts to the party which promotes, to the voters who elect, to the ideology which ...

Turkey Shoot

• Bill Greenwell
• 01 January 1999

I was gutted just before Christmas,

And my fir stripped of stars and balloons;

My cavity, thin as an isthmus,

Was stuffed with old chestnuts and prunes.

They turned up ...

Saddam outfoxes the west again

• Charles Glass
• 01 January 1999

Why does the US persist in a policy that makes the Iraqi leader stronger, richer and more popular than ever, asks Charles Glass

A state of war exists between the United States and Iraq. American warplanes patrol the northern and southern skies, and Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries take futile pot-shots at them. The F-16s ...

Clinton: you ain't seen nothing yet

• Andrew Stephen
• 01 January 1999

I spent the week before Christmas in Hobe Sound, an inner citadel of Waspdom in Florida where many members of the Bush administration used to Christmas (if not the last ...

How I helped to arm the Iraqis

• Eric Jacobs
• 01 January 1999

Eric Jacobs wonders if we shouldn't be more careful about where we sell tanks

I was a teenage arms salesman. There! I have wanted to say that for years. It is far more satisfyingly outrageous than being a mere teenage sex maniac. Everybody is ...

Just another marketing opportunity

• David Hayes
• 01 January 1999

David Hayes finds few cups of kindness in Edinburgh's Hogmanay

Well into the 1950s, 25 December was a normal working day in Scotland; the important festival was Hogmanay, 31 December. The Scots tradition was to reflect quietly on the dying ...

Old wealth is always with us

• Giles MacDonagh
• 01 January 1999

The British aristocracy, judging by what happened in India, may be far from finished, thinks Giles MacDonagh

Half a century ago a newly independent India made its first assault on its powerful ruling families and their feudal nobles. In 1947 the princely states represented about a third ...

Keep out of this island: an editor's wife was beheaded

• Darcus Howe
• 01 January 1999

Once a year, at least, I review a couple of Caribbean weeklies, just to give you a feel of what is taking place in those countries from which so many ...

The New Statesman Profile - George Weidenfeld

• Quentin Letts
• 01 January 1999

He is a man with as many connections as a telephone sub-station - when you get to his parties, you have arrived

If he were a character in fiction, George Weidenfeld would work best as a baddie: the bulbous-eyed, mittel-European Herr Fixit who dabbles around power, enjoys the company of lithe-legged lovelies ...

Who wrecked the world economy?

• Christopher Huhne
• 01 January 1999

Christopher Huhne blames IMF errors for the troubles of 1998 and argues that, if 1999 is to be better, world leaders must get back to Keynesian basics

Whatever else the new year brings, it is unlikely to be economic contentment. Rarely has the world economy found itself in such a mess. If this was a business, the ...

1999 doesn't count: we must think about the millennium now - but watch out for a King of Terror from the sky

• Mary Riddell
• 01 January 1999

Despite the political meltdown of the past ten days, the smack of firm government remains intact. From the Home Office comes the news that new Labour is to ban imports ...

No Turks, please, we're German

• Alfred Rinaldi
• 01 January 1999

Gerhard Schroder's new citizenship law is provoking a backlash against immigrants

O tempora, o mores, as Enoch Powell might have lamented. There used to be a time when a British shadow cabinet minister was sacked if, like the Roman, he saw ...

Instant Expert Kit - Wim Duisenberg

• Duncan Parrish
• 01 January 1999

Sorry, I'm terrible with names . . .On New Year's Day, Wim Duisenberg will become one of the most powerful unelected men in the world: president of the new ...

The New Statesman Essay - A wrong turning on the Third Way?

• Samuel Brittan
• 01 January 1999

Samuel Brittan queries fashionable attacks on individualism

The distinguishing feature of Tony Blair's new Labour is that it has fully accepted competitive markets, private enterprise and the profit motive as the motor of the country's economy. It ...

Thinker's Corner

• 01 January 1999

Moral Evasions (Centre for Policy Studies, 0171-222 4488, £7.50) by David Selbourne, author of The Principle of Duty, offers not a timely homily about breaking new year's resolutions, but ...

A saint's patience is tried, and found wanting

• John Carlin
• 01 January 1999

Nelson Mandela believes that South Africa's whites have betrayed him. John Carlin reports

The little town of Rosendal is about 300 kilometres due south of Johannesburg, deep in the geographic centre of South Africa. It has a population of 2,000 and a highway ...

How to stop little children suffering

• Lindsey Mackie
• 01 January 1999
• 2 comments

There are more orphans in Romania now than in 1989. Lindsey Mackiereports

They've been hiding in lorries and decanting at Deal, causing anguish to Daily Mail readers: hundreds of Romanian refugees are landing on British shores. There are Roma, or gypsy, victims ...

This England

• 01 January 1999

The general's near neighbours seemed underwhelmed at the prospect of his arrival.

"There are supposed to be Russian underworld figures and members of the Hong Kong triads living around us ...

Time's up. Get your answers to the Sean French Christmas Quiz and start to live again

• Sean French
• 01 January 1999

I'm a bit constrained in what I can write this week. My solicitor has said that I am absolutely not allowed to write about moving house. This is not because ...

Nail your colours to your chest

• 01 January 1999

While I can only applaud Christina Lamb's call to liberate us from our Trappist attitudes to the Tube ("You must be mad to speak to me", 18 December), might not ...

The tyranny of sex

• 01 January 1999

Why is Cristina Odone (18 December) so obsessed with sex? She informs us that "yes, I admit it - I've been quoted as saying that, far from being a good ...

It was tax what lost it for Labour

• 01 January 1999

Francis Beckett ("The myth of John Smith the loser", 11 December) is right to say that the people in charge of Labour's campaign were the real architects of the Sheffield ...

Dogmatist in the manger

• 01 January 1999

If Anna Freeman (Letters, 11 December) means by agnosticism "believing that we cannot know whether God exists", then I agree that this is dogmatic, though no more so than a ...

Comedie francaise

• Jonathan Romney
• 01 January 1999

Sitcom is the latest in a newish wave of French films. Jonathan Romneytastes both vin ordinaire and vintage

The current issue of the French cineastes' bible, Cahiers du Cinema, features a naked girl lolling distractedly between the sheets. The title of the film is L'Ennui. It's all too ...

In praise of older men

• Richard Cook
• 01 January 1999

Rock

Guitarists have always attracted hero-worship, and it has helped the best of them survive what would otherwise be the inevitable fall at the end of a brief pop career. Robert ...

Leeway

• Andrew Billen
• 01 January 1999

Television

Cider with Rosie (ITV) was appropriately inebriate fare for the Christmas weekend. I had remembered the liquefied imagery of Laurie Lee's classic account of his country childhood but forgotten the ...

Thinking ahead

• David Thompson
• 01 January 1999

Modern Times

"We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making." H G Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899

Star Trek: Insurrection is ...

Melody maker

• Dermot Clinch
• 01 January 1999

Classical

To quote the first work Francis Poulenc wrote for publication, the Rapsodie Negre of 1917:

Honoloulou, poti lama!honoloulou honolouloukati moko, mosi bolouratakou sira, polama!

The lines, by ...

A nation of shopfitters

• Hugh Aldersey-Williams
• 01 January 1999

Design

Only five days till Twelfth Night. Then Captain Birdseye can go sling his hook. 'Twill no longer be the season to be Tango'd. I refer, of course, to this season's ...

Pot luck

• Andrew Brown
• 01 January 1999

Internet

The secret of a successful relationship with computers is to remember that they go better with drugs. Alcohol and computers don't mix at all: a loss of impulse control is ...

Bread and nutter

• Bee Wilson
• 01 January 1999

Food

A new heaven and a new earth; a new year and a new diet. In this week of sudden and short-lived faith in seaweed fasts and nutritional gurus, I thought ...

Dog daze

• Victoria Moore
• 01 January 1999

Drink

"Never mix, never worry," says my latest love, smugly quoting Edward Albee, as he watches me pour half a Red Stripe into my empty sherry glass. Yes, it is quite ...

Let us now praise the finger-wagging puritan

• Peter Wilby
• 01 January 1999

Media

On the Sunday before Christmas (and before the Day of the Resignations), Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, devoted his weekly Sunday Times column to the New Statesman. Harris is ...

Time to take this season by the throat in the neck

• Hunter Davies
• 01 January 1999

It's half way through the season, time to take socks. I'm sitting here, with the Christmas games over, and it's no clearer who will win the Premiership. Awfully crowded, innit, ...

British street and fashion culture is the envy of the world. But the grind of professionalism is killing maverick talent

• Elizabeth Young
• 01 January 1999

Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life Jane Mulvagh HarperCollins, 399pp, £19.99 The Ossie Clark Diaries Lady Henrietta Rous (editor) Bloomsbury, 397pp, £20

There is a famous encounter in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate. Cedric, a droll, flamboyantly camp social climber, visits the narrator, Fanny, a slightly dowdy young aristo married ...

A talent to offend

• Maurice Walsh
• 01 January 1999

Memoir: My Life and Themes Conor Cruise O'Brien Profile Books, 384pp, £20

Despite the international recognition that Conor Cruise O'Brien has won in his long career as diplomat, scholar, politician and journalist, there is a dimension to him that must surely escape ...

Penis envy

• Claire Rayner
• 01 January 1999

What do Women want? Erica Jong Bloomsbury, 256pp £16.99 In Search of an Impotent Man Gaby Hauptman Virago, 320pp, £9.99

Here are two shocking books. Not because they are lewd and rude; indeed, a great many serious readers today enjoy a little touch of Chaucer or Rabelais in the night, ...

Novel of the week

• Phil Whitaker
• 01 January 1999

Jack A M Homes Anchor, £6.99

When The End of Alice was published in 1997, A M Homes crossed over from the books pages into the news. Narrated by a male paedophile, the novel tapped into ...

Books of the century

• Stuart Burrows
• 01 January 1999

Stuart Burrows pays tribute to the polemical vigour of Edward Said

"The trouble with the Engenglish," stutters Whisky Sisodia in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, "is that their hiss-hiss-history happened overseas, so they do- do-don't know what it means." Only in ...

Competition - Win a bottle of champagne

• 01 January 1999

No 3558 Set by John Digby

We asked for revealing excerpts from the young lives of famous fictional characters.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Really excellent. Just what ...

In Durham's dales the landscape slowly re-greens

• Paul Barker
• 01 January 1999

The pub at Piercebridge has a grandfather clock that is, they say, the original of the one in the song: "The clock stopped, never to go again, when the old ...

It's great to see bookies handing over wedges of tenners - but they never come my way

• Laurie Taylor
• 01 January 1999

We don't have many Christmas traditions in my family. When my mother was alive she did her best to create one by consistently cooking a dinner of such awfulness that ...