Politics

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

The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few bothered to study the message itself. I have done so. Not only (as Roman Catholic spokesmen protested at the time) does the Pope never in fact mention homosexuality, it is far from clear he meant his remarks to be interpreted in any such light. Study the remarks themselves, for they present a picture troubling in

David Cameron has long been keen for his shadow Cabinet to exude greater empathy with recession-struck Britain — and he has inadvertently succeeded in one important regard. Most are now fearful of losing their jobs. The coming reshuffle is being spoken of like a vicious redundancy plan that could claim any scalp at random. Frontbenchers anxiously read and decode newspaper stories — particularly for the latest word on Ken Clarke’s potential return and what that might mean. The suspense is agonising. Reshuffle speculation is normally a media game. This time, few shadow ministers have been able to wish each other happy new year without then discussing for whom, precisely, it

It is human nature that some of the most red-blooded capitalists, who during the good times used to froth at the mouth at the thought of any kind of public expenditure, are among those now shouting loudest for help from the taxpayer. The most vociferous criticism of Lord Mandelson’s plan to guarantee loans for small businesses revolves around the assertion that it does not go far enough, promising £20 billion worth of capital compared with a similar, £50 billion scheme proposed by the Conservatives last month. There has been rather less complaint about the principle of bailing out private businesses and what it means for the future of enterprise. We