Essays
19 May 2012
There is one crumb of comfort that Fleet Street can extract from the phone-hacking scandal: its own foibles still create a vastly bigger splash than do those of newer media. This week Facebook investors harangued the company’s chief executive for wearing a hoodie in meetings and Yahoo’s chief executive resigned after a shareholder questioned his claim to hold a computer science degree. But they hardly caused a ripple compared with the news that former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, her husband and five others are to be charged with perverting the course of justice.
The hacking inquiry has become...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
19 May 2012
Home
The Bank of England decided against more quantitative easing, after creating £325 billion in three years. Steve Hilton, the Downing Street director of strategy, left proposals for cuts of £25 billion from welfare spending as he headed off for an academic post in California. Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary said that business leaders were whingeing, and ‘large businesses are sitting on a pretty large pile of cash’. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.’ Unemployment fell by 45,000 to 2.63 million. Thousands of civil servants are to be asked to work from home...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
19 May 2012
James Forsyth
In the past few difficult months, the Cameroons have taken comfort from their belief that Ed Miliband will never be prime minister. After the local elections earlier this month, when Labour took far more Tory seats than expected, the silver lining for the government was the thought that Ed Miliband would now stay on as Labour leader until 2015.
When asked to justify their conviction that Miliband will never make it to Downing Street, the Cameroons offer three reasons. First, they reckon that the public just can’t see him as PM material. Second, they expect that the next election...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
19 May 2012
Faisal Islam
Just eight years ago, when Athens hosted the Olympic Games, the capital celebrated with an orgy of stadiums, hotels and other infrastructure purchased by what seemed, at the time, to be the fruits of a long economic boom. Today the Helliniko Olympic complex in Athens stands as a monument to this hubris, a decaying white elephant which costs £65 million a year just to maintain. Nearby is one of a handful of new clinics set up to cope with the effects of Greece’s extreme poverty.
Dr Giorgos Vihas, a volunteer cardiologist at the clinic, sometimes cannot believe the problems...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
19 May 2012
Breaking bad
A Ming vase sold for £550,000, having had a hole drilled in it to turn it into a table lamp. Without the hole it would have been worth four times as much. Owners of antiques work hard to keep them safe from thieves, but they are themselves often the problem.
— Last year the owner of a £14,000 Japanese porcelain vase reduced its value to £2,000 by chipping it while he packed it for BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.
— Last November the owner of a Qing vase took £200,000 off its value after she decided to chisel...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (0)
19 May 2012
John Simpson
The Today programme ended, and John Humphrys walked out of the studio yawning and stretching. The phone was ringing in the empty programme office, and he picked it up. A spin-doctor’s foul-mouthed rant about how rotten and biased and stupid the programme had been came pouring out of it. Humphrys asked after a couple of minutes, ‘Can I just make a point?’ ‘Yes?’ said the spin-doctor warily. ‘Fuck off,’ said Humphrys, and slammed the phone down.
Lord Reith wouldn’t have liked the language, but he would have approved of the instinct. And when Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on Monday that...
Continue reading...
Email to a friend |
Permalink
|
Comments (10)
