Good news for London

8:49am

Guido writes, quite rightly, about the renaissance in free market think tanks.

One of the liveliest and most infuential is, of course, Policy Exchange, and it's something of a coup for Boris Johnson to have lured its director, Anthony Browne, to be his policy director.

It's also very good news for London to have so able a man directing policy.

What a change from the Socialist Action cell which took charge under Livingstone.  
Incidentally, Guido writes:

Michael Gove's advocacy of the Swedish model of "free schools" may owe a little to another recent ASI report Open Access for UK Schools: What Britain can learn from Swedish Education Reform.

I'm sure that's correct, but I've been banging on about the Swedish model (and other similar schemes) for more than a decade and wrote a much earlier ASI paper in...

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What? Where?

8:34am

If ever proof was needed that I am a North London boy, it's this:

div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; } It has long been a favourite of the Queen and is a familiar haunt for that breed of the privileged young known as Sloane Rangers.

For the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, there was nowhere else to have their wedding list. But proof that no one is immune from the credit crunch came yesterday when it was announced that the holding company for the General Trading store in Chelsea had been placed into administration.

According to Sarah Vine:

The General Trading Company is - or was - to nice middle-class girls like me what the Liverpool branch of Selfridges is to WAGs: the centre of the shopping universe. All those marvellous (and completely useless) leather pigs, splendid ethnic lamps,

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O'Hagan, bile and idiots

8:14am

There's an excellent David Aaronovitch piece today about anti-Americanism. I'm particularly happy at his remarks about Andrew O'Hagan:

This week you could hear the author Andrew O'Hagan on Radio 4, reading from his collection of self-conscious essays, The Atlantic Ocean, in which - despite his own claims - every impact of American life on Britain is somehow configured negatively. He writes of an exported popular culture “born in the suburbs of America” and defined as “Spite as entertainment. Shouting as argument. Dysfunction as normality. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy.” This in the country that has sent Big Brother, Pop Idol, Wife Swap and Location, Location, Location over the Atlantic in the other direction, while taking delivery of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire.

I should admit that I am irked by O'Hagan's dismissal of the “idiots who supported that bad and stupid war (ie, Iraq)” and am

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Tee hee

3:37pm

Er, yes it is.

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Ouch

8:54am

What have Barack Obama and the Pope got in common?

They've both shafted Gordon Brown.

Sky reports that the visit to Israel of our woeful excuse for a PM has barely been noticed, as Israel waits excitedly for Barack Obama. And the same thing happened in April when Mr B's visit to the US was overshadowed by that of the Pope.

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