Housing Minister Mark Prisk’s brave request for a grilling from Coffee House readers generated a very enthusiastic response. Here are the minister’s answers to your questions. House Prices Q: What will the Government be doing to rebalance things back towards private buyers and away from the BTL speculators that have driven the market up to such
Yes, yes, yes, speculating about the 2016 Presidential election before Barack Obama has even begun his second term is a silly business. But so what? Silly things can be fun things. So Jonathan Bernstein attempts to answer a good question: if Hillary runs, would she knock most of her erstwhile rivals out of the race
Kofi Annan is discussing his extraordinary career with William Shawcross this evening, but for those Spectator readers who weren’t able to get tickets, he has also spoken to JP O’Malley about about growing up in Ghana, why he believes governments have to recognise terrorists, and why talking to tyrants sometimes actually saves lives. How did growing
Barack Obama’s response to the horror of Sandy Hook was entirely predictable, largely unobjectionable and most unlikely to make much of a difference to very much at all. Politics as usual, then. If the President had the air of a man dusting off a long-closed folder marked “Standard Democratic proposals for gun control” then, well,
As well as confusing Hansard with talk of ‘big fairies’, Labour’s Jim Sheridan has no fewer than 101 written questions for answer today on how many contracts a number of government departments have awarded to a series of companies known to be taking part in tax avoidance schemes. He also asks for details of how
In a week where the inner workings of Whitehall have rarely been out of the news, Tim Loughton’s evidence to the Education Select Committee has made a particular splash. As Isabel reported yesterday, Loughton criticised the way the department was run and claimed that the children and families agenda ‘was a declining priority’ in his
It’s all very well everyone having fun at the expense of the hapless Hansard reporter who sent a note to a Scottish MP querying whether he’d called the SNP ‘big fairies’. He might well have done. Stranger things have been uttered in the Chamber of the House of Commons. ‘Big fearties’ for a start. I
By this stage in the run-up to his Europe speech, the Prime Minister must be tempted to sit in a darkened room with his fingers in his ears shouting loudly if anyone else tries to give him more advice on Britain’s relationship with the EU. Today brings another wave of advice: some from friendly faces,
Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway, and see what you think. (You might want to keep hold of the receipt.) The thought concerns something in The Ghost by Robert Harris. The
On this week’s View from 22 podcast, the Spectator’s assistant editor Freddy Gray discusses his cover feature on Barack Obama, who he argues is becoming the pacific-centric president. Although America has given us the impression they are angry with a potential EU withdrawal, Freddy concludes that Uncle Sam is just not that into us. When
The following essay was shortlisted for the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. It follows the publication of the winning entry, by Tara Isabella Burton, and the runner-up, by Steven McGregor. The remaining shortlist entries will appear on the website in the coming days. I knew next to nothing about the desert – nothing about its geology, its geography,
David Cameron should have given his big Europe speech a year ago. Having just threatened to veto a new EU treaty, he had proved that he was prepared to aggressively defend Britain’s interests, and he had reassured those in his party who worried he wasn’t really serious about Euroscepticism. An address delivered at that point,
On Monday, as Barack Obama is sworn in again as President, his allies in the West will ask themselves the same nervous question they posed four years ago: how much does he care about us? The British, in particular, are worried. War looms in Mali, yet Washington seems happy to let the French take charge,
‘You can’t talk about what might have been,’ says Tom Courtenay, reflecting on an acting career that blazed like a meteor the moment he left drama school and is now in its sixth decade. ‘The things you might have done, the films you might have made. I just didn’t feel comfortable with the world of
Here she comes again. Back at the top of the news, draped in the robes of the righteous, embraced by those who sanctify all things traditional: the ‘full-time mother’. As usual, she is the undeserved victim of something or other; in this instance, it’s the incoherent shake-up of the child benefit system, leading to headlines
Like half of London, I gave the new year a surly greeting. It was time to diet. There are two sorts of diets. First, the ones that may work for girls. Breakfast, part of a lettuce leaf. Lunch, the leftovers from breakfast. Supper, some cottage cheese with watercress. Second, boys’ diets, which all concentrate on
Some people think that Southwold, that tranquil seaside town in Suffolk, is hopelessly middle class. So what? I love it. I like staying in the Swan hotel, with its great gilt swan on the outside, eating from the adventurous menu in the Crown, walking on the eccentric pier, admiring the strand of beach huts, and
To understand the Jimmy Savile affair, you had to be there. By ‘there’ I mean the late 1970s. At the time my school on the Welsh borders had its own very minor provincial sex-pest. I think every school did. Ours was known as ‘the 50p man’. Periodically he would approach a straggler on a cross–country
My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed
When John Kelly was transported from Tipperary to Tasmania in 1841, for stealing pigs, he couldn’t have imagined that 170 years later there’d be an exhibition of paintings of one of his offspring at Dublin’s plush Museum of Modern Art (until 27 January). Yet here he is, Ned, the 19th-century Oz-born bushranger and cop-killer, as
