Politics

Now that I think about it, Simon Heffer’s broadside against Caledonia-dire-and-rotten, missed one obvious target. Sure, Alastair Darling is a much-ridiculed, much-villified Chancellor of the Exchequer but so too was the last-but-one Scottish Chancellor. Remember Norman Lamont? He may have represented an English constituency but that only emphasised how far he’d travelled from his Shetland roots. Just as Darling is presiding – if that’s the applicable term – over the current financial apocalypse, so “Peerie Norrie” was the bluffer in charge during the last economic debacle: Black Wednesday. I think it unfair, however, to blame Scotland writ large for this sorry duo. Not when there’s a smaller, handier target. Both

Under the headline “Scots have brought Britain to its knees” Simon “John Wilkes” Heffer began his Telegraph column on Saturday like this: As Scots the world over prepare to celebrate tomorrow their third best poet (after Henrysoun and Dunbar, of course) by eating sheep’s intestines filled with what always seems to be gravel, it is appropriate that there should be stunning new evidence of the vast contribution their little nation continues to make to Britain. As recession is declared official, the pound sinks, the stock market totters, banks wobble and misery abounds, let’s salute the Scotsmen who did it. That, mind you, was just the warm-up for a blast of

Daniel Yates provides a British soldier’s view of Operation Cast Lead. Fraser Nelson says Harman’s cunning plan could hit her own side, and wonders whether the green brigade will enjoy this recession.  James Forsyth claims that nationalising the banks would just create new problems, and asks: how bad will this get? Peter Hoskin thinks that “cash for amendments” threatens to damage Parliament’s reputation further, and wonders whether someone will devise an early warning system that won’t be ignored. Alex Massie submits a defence of lobbyists. Melanie Phillips reviews Barack Obama’s first week in office. And Clive Davis gives his thoughts on the BBC, Gaza and the LSE.

If the bankers start saying sorry, then we’ll have to forgive them. It’s much too soon I’m not sure I can deal with contrition from bankers. I thought it was what I wanted, but I now think I was wrong. ‘The first stage is to fess up,’ said Stephen Hester, the new RBS chief executive, around about the time everything was going properly tits-up on Monday. And it felt, strangely, like we were about to be robbed. Again. At first, I just thought I was angry about the ‘fess’. There are some men who can say ‘fess up’ instead of ‘own up’ or ‘confess’ and not look like berks. Not

The Prime Minister’s latest measures to shore up the banking sector will not be his last, says Martin Vander Weyer. But the market is losing patience with the government’s interventions There is a passage in The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell’s novel about the Indian Mutiny, in which the defenders of the British residency, having exhausted conventional munitions, load their remaining cannon with anything sharp-edged that comes to hand. In a scene of surreal carnage, a last wave of mutinous sepoys are then mown down by a volley of fish knives, sugar tongs and marble fragments chipped from an allegorical statue called ‘The Spirit of Science’ — which had hitherto

Perhaps George Osborne regularly serves meatloaf at the powerbroking soirées he hosts at his west London house. But when this detail about the food served at his lunch with David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke was briefed to the press it did seem a bit odd. Perhaps the shadow chancellor suspected Kenneth Clarke would want something more substantial than guinea fowl and polenta. Perhaps Mr Osborne and his fellow strategists were keenly aware that this meal would inevitably take its place in Tory history: the moment when the two young modernisers sealed the deal with the old bruiser. The choice of meatloaf was apparently meant to send out an unambiguous message