Opening up Westminster's closed shop
7:03pm 
I was immensely proud to co-host an event at the House of Commons with Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow, to promote apprenticeships in parliament. The workaholic Mr Halfon came up with the idea of launching a Parliamentary Academy last year after taking on an apprentice in his own office. To me it seems the ideal way to get MPs to put their money where their collective mouth is, which is why my charity New Deal of the Mind has started a pilot scheme with four apprentices in and around Westminster in...
Last year I travelled with the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz and the experience had a profound effect. I had been warned it would, but having been a voracious reader of Holocaust memoirs and literature, I thought I was prepared for what I would see. Others have written more eloquently on this subject. Mark Ferguson, who was on the same trip as me wrote 
Until now I haven’t seen Matthew Norman as a radical figure in British journalism. But 
This has been a terrible week for the Labour leader – truly, bone-crunchingly awful. Inevitable comparisons have been made with the IDS era of the Tory wilderness years, but this is different because it is Labour. Conservative leaders are trophies, symbols of the best or worst the party can aspire to at any given time. But Labour leaders are expected to embody hopes and dreams: they are pragmatic Utopianism made flesh. If all political careers end in failure, then Labour leaders always fail better. Could Ed Miliband fail best of all? 
One thing you learn in life is that most people have no idea how they are perceived by others. This is particularly true in Britain, where we don’t generally feel it is polite to tell people what we think of them. Politicians and public figures therefore find themselves in the unusual position of having opinions about them shoved right in their faces. Maurice Glasman’s 
News of the antics of Aiden Burley and his friends at a 
