The Week

Leading article

12th September, 2007

The long quest to find a purpose for the Lib Dems is the modern equivalent to the probably apocryphal story about the child asking his mother about Lord Randolph Churchill: ‘What is that man for?’

Diary

12th September, 2007

We took Alastair on holiday with us this year. Listened to his version of the Blair years in the car all the way to Biarritz — it was either him or French pop music.

Politics

12th September, 2007

There is just one consolation for Sir Menzies Campbell as he prepares for his second and probably last conference as Liberal Democrat leader: they will not come after him in Brighton.

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

12th September, 2007

Dave has moved into the building! He and his staff left the Commons office on Friday night and set up camp in The Thatcher Room!

Letters

12th September, 2007

Leading Article

5th September, 2007

The great paradox of the Tory party is that its predicament in recent years reflects not failure, but success.

Diary

5th September, 2007

A lifetime’s ambition is fulfilled as I get to hear and see Wagner in Bayreuth...

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody

5th September, 2007

V. exciting. Was in charge of note-taking and smoothies at our Emergency Treachery-Management Meeting.

Politics

5th September, 2007

The odd thing is that it is left-wingers, not Cameron, who have lurched to the right

Mind your language

5th September, 2007

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah.

Leading article

29th August, 2007

Tony Blair — remember him? — was better at diagnosis than cure. ‘I think most
people would say that in virtually every aspect of their life things are better than they were 30 or 40 years ago,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph in November 2005.

Global warning

29th August, 2007

He who would read newspapers must expect to spend his days in the darkest despair, for they contain nothing but war, murder and medical advice.

Diary

29th August, 2007

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane.

Mind your language

29th August, 2007

A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs
which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue.

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

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

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

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

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.