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Monday 13 October 2008

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Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

22nd August, 2007

Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right!

Diary

John Torode

22nd August, 2007

‘I’m not Jewish, but I love Israel, and I try to holiday there every year.’ An uncontentious remark, surely, but it produces Batemanesque horror around the scrubbed-pine dining tables of London’s chattering classes.

Leading article

22nd August, 2007

On Tuesday, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, claimed that, in the case of Philip Lawrence’s murderer, Learco Chindamo, ‘we were misled by the system’. That is true: it is monstrous that the 26-year-old Chindamo, who stabbed the head teacher to death in December 1995, will now escape deportation to Italy, the country of his birth.

Global Warning

Theodore Dalrymple

22nd August, 2007

The historian Sir Lewis Namier once said that in a drop of dew could be seen all the colours of the rainbow, presumably as a reply to those who accused him of writing more and more about less and less.

How Dear Bill became editor

John O'Sullivan

22nd August, 2007

In 1974 the Daily Telegraph was teetering on the edge of unaccustomed conflict. Maurice Green’s long and successful reign as editor was ending at the very moment when the paper’s editorship was rising in significance.

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

22nd August, 2007

Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang.

Leading article

15th August, 2007

As he contemplates the surf on his Breton holiday beach this weekend, David Cameron has an opportunity to reflect on how swiftly the tides of politics can change.

Diary

Jeff Randall

15th August, 2007

It was the call that never came. For three hours last week, I sat with my hand hovering over the phone. I had been told that Bill Kenwright would be getting in touch between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Yes, the Bill Kenwright, theatreland big shot and chairman of Everton FC.

Riviera notebook

Joan Collins

15th August, 2007

The shiny new ‘Vodka Palaces’ lie scattered across the bay of St Tropez like the discarded toys of a spoiled child.

Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

15th August, 2007

Do I grow cleverer with age, or does the world grow more stupid? Today, for example, I read what a police spokeswoman said after a man on a motorbike had been shot dead on the M40 motorway. The police, she said, were not treating it as a case of road rage; they were treating it as a case of murder.

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

15th August, 2007

I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday.

Leading article

8th August, 2007

Given the boost in the opinion polls enjoyed by Gordon Brown following the recent floods, a cynic might wonder whether the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey has been staged in order to give the Prime Minister an excuse to break off his holiday in Dorset and earn brownie points by taking control of a national crisis while David Cameron (who has since called off his own holiday) was lounging around on a Breton beach.

Diary

Tessa Keswick

8th August, 2007

What is up with the once superb Blue Guide that it fails to so much as mention beautiful Qinghai province, up in China’s northwest?

Politics

Fraser Nelson

8th August, 2007

Brown has handled the crises well, but let’s not forget he is to blame for many of them

Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

8th August, 2007

You — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I — can’t get away anywhere from crime and criminality.

The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore

8th August, 2007

We are paying now for the lack of a single, comprehensive inquiry into the great foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001.

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

8th August, 2007

The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects.

Leading article

1st August, 2007

Those who have exchanged fierce views on the invasion of Iraq have a fresh challenge this week: how to react to the UN resolution, tabled by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy with support from George W. Bush, to send 19,000 peacekeeping troops to the Darfur region of western Sudan.