The Spectator: 8 December 2012
The great creep forward
It took Tony Blair about five years to work out what he wanted to do with his government and George Osborne appears to be on a similar, depressingly slow learning… Read more
8 December 2012
Home In his Autumn Statement, held nearer the winter solstice, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, confronted the need to extend austerity measures for reducing the deficit to 2018.… Read more
Susan Hill
Finding an outfit for a wedding is a doddle compared with finding one for an investiture and I wonder how sensible it was to buy my hat first. I love… Read more
Classical press regulation
Forget Leveson. If the press, always keen to be above the law, must remain free of state control (and it must), it cannot expect state protection. It must be prepared… Read more
8 December 2012
The North in need Sir: Neil O’Brien’s article on the North-South divide is welcome (‘The great divide’, 1 December). As a Geordie who spent much of his working life in… Read more
Osborne is the St Augustine Chancellor – he wants to balance the books, but not yet.
After months of squabbling and not-so-civil war, the coalition now appears to be functioning again. This is one immediate consequence of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. The Chancellor was allowed to… Read more
8 December 2012
You will have read in every news outlet that the baby whom the Duchess of Cambridge is bearing will be third in line to the throne if she is a… Read more
Is it grim up north? It’s too expensive to go and find out
My flight to Italy a couple of weeks back was held on the runway for a while because of some altercation back at the departure gate. After a while the… Read more
Even my mimsy leftist friends don’t care that prisoners can’t vote
I mean, honestly. What kind of mimsy, soggy-spined, weak-kneed, faffing, lentil-eating, self-loathing, lefty north London ninny gives a damn that prisoners don’t have the vote? Pretty much my entire social… Read more
Tony Hall’s successor, organic government and the great Lib Dem shale plot
Rending of raiment and gnashing of teeth at the Guardian. I’m told that the paper’s veteran editor, Alan Rusbridger, is tipped to take over at the Royal Opera House once… Read more
America’s hounding of BP no longer has much to do with Louisiana’s sad pelicans
BP continues to pay a full price for the Deepwater Horizon disaster — deservedly so, you might say, given that 11 rig workers died in the April 2010 explosion that… Read more
Export-only justice
In the last few years lawyers have begun to gush about the ‘Sumption effect’. They were not thinking of Jonathan Sumption QC’s fine legal mind — which was of such… Read more
Don’t watch The Hobbit
Once, I met Priscilla Tolkien, the daughter of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was at the Oxford Catholic chaplaincy, and she was giving a talk about her father. She was charming, something… Read more
The sick man of Africa
I dread attending meetings on Congo. At almost every one a Congolese will stand up and start to rail, then scream and weep. Some get very aggressive. The police were… Read more
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