The Spectator's Notes
Charles Moore's reflections on the week
I wonder if Mr Conway has read William Cobbett’s autobiography, which is entitled The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament. Cobbett was just as boastful of his upward mobility as Mr Conway, but his purposes were different. Here he is, in his final illness, looking back: ‘I am once more in a farm. I might have been ...possessed of bags of public gold ...I trudge through the dirt, and I might have ridden in the ring at Hyde Park, with four horses to draw me along in a gilded carriage with a coachman before me and footmen behind me. What I might have been is hard to say; what I have been and what I am, all the world knows: I was a plough-boy and a private soldier, and I am a Member of the House of Commons sent thither by the free voice of a great community.’
Of course the Tory party is no longer the political wing of the Church of England, but wasn’t it unnecessarily pagan of it to hold its Black and White Ball this week, on Ash Wednesday?
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AppalledofLondon
February 7th, 2008 1:16pmI recently bought a digital box from John Lewis giving them my maiden name. My TV licence is in my married name. So now I've started receiving the menacing letters. I'm looking forward to torturing the inspector when he comes. Perhaps the trick is to give shops a rubbish name and/or rubbish address oi the TV licensing people can't learn to behave themselves.
Tim Worstall
February 8th, 2008 11:36am"He exclaims that ‘An MP is paid less than a sous-chef in the Commons’, as if this were a self-evident absurdity." It is an absurdity. Sous-chefs in London are paid £22k to £30k.