Politics

At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started lining up at three, getting ready for a six o’clock start. In Edinburgh, hardy shoppers braved flurries of morning snow to make sure they were first in line for Boxing Day bargains. Whatever else is happening at the close of this year, British shoppers are as indefatigable as ever in their determination to keep spending. Surely it wasn’t meant to be like this? In the wake of the vote to leave the EU back in June, mainstream economists were unanimous in their view that we would be in a recession

I’m standing in milady’s boudoir, a room which would have delighted Liberace. Here, nothing is de trop and everything is geared towards lavish indulgence. Two enormous freestanding baths face the window, giving exhibitionists a heaven-sent opportunity to disport in the altogether. The upstairs bed could comfortably accommodate four adults. Portraits of Ada Lovelace — who has given her name to the suite — festoon the staircase, and a half bottle of Taittinger champagne begs ‘Drink me’ in an ice bucket. It’s somewhat strange to think that amid this bling lies a sad and brutal history. The small coastal town of Seaham in County Durham, contains the house in which Lord

Going to spend Christmas with relatives you don’t really like? Well, you can thank God you only have to see them once a year rather than living as an extended family. Or more precisely you can thank the Catholic Church, without whom you’d all still be in the same house as your uncles and aunties and marrying your cousin. It is reasonably well known that the medieval Church’s ban on cousin marriage helped to make western Europe less clannish; but according to an interesting new paper from Nottingham University, by doing this the Catholic Church actually laid the foundations of democracy. The author, Jonathan F Schulz, argues: ‘The role of

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 8: Daniel Hannan’s piece from June, in which he argues why voting ‘Leave’ is the right decision For me, as for so many people, it’s a heart versus head issue. I’m emotionally drawn to Europe. I speak French and Spanish and have lived and worked all over the Continent. I’ve made many friends among the Brussels functionaries. Lots of them, naturally, are committed Euro-federalists. Yet they are also decent neighbours, loyal companions and generous hosts. I feel twinges of unease about disappointing them, especially the anglophiles. But, in the end, the head must rule the heart.

The Copeland by-election will be a fascinating test of whether Brexit can open up more votes for the Tories in the north – the topic of my Daily Telegraph column today. Labour is slowly abandoning its working class voters, with their unfashionable views on human rights and immigration. This was happening under Ed Miliband, and the forces wresting traditional Labour voters away from the Labour Party were laid out in detail by a strikingly prescient report by the Fabian Society entitled ‘Revolt on the Left‘. It identified the various groups of voters moving away from Labour: typically the low-waged and less prosperous pensioners. Those in work tended to resent those

Most commentators have been over-hasty in ridiculing Sajid Javid’s proposal of an oath of allegiance to British values, to be sworn by those holding public office. It’s an opportunity to go right back to basics and ask a huge and naïve-sounding question. What is our public creed? What do we as a society hold in common? Some sneer that there is nothing particularly British about respect for the law, tolerance, human rights. True enough, but the alternative is to call them ‘Western values’ which is more contentious, more clash-of-civilisations-ey. Those who rubbish any attempt to articulate such values make the mistake of implying that such values are just natural, shared

For anyone old enough to remember the 70s, the strikes that have broken out in the past few weeks are a reminder of the industrial strife that was a regular feature of life back then. As a child at the time, power cuts and picket lines seemed quite fun. They were not so amusing, of course, for the adults. Today’s union activism might not quite add up to a winter of discontent, but it is certainly a Christmas of irritation. It’s easy to blame it all on the swaggering rabble-rouser union leaders who have crawled out of the woodwork. But those union barons are tapping into a deep sense of

The hunt continues for the man thought to be responsible for the attack on Berlin’s Christmas market. But despite the urgency of the situation, the Sun says Germany – and the EU – continue to get their priorities all wrong. After all, the paper says, their ‘first duty’ should be keeping ‘their people safe’. Instead, the Sun says, they have released a photo of the wanted man with his eyes censored to protect his privacy. And the European Court isn’t doing much more to help keep people safe, according to the paper. Its ruling against the so-called ‘snoopers’ charter’ yesterday means that security services will lose out on a vital weapon in