World

The Article 50 case has at last woken people up to the power of the Supreme Court. On Monday, at Policy Exchange, I appeared on a panel which included the former Supreme Court judge Lord Hope. He seems a dear and distinguished man, so I felt for him when he complained that current ‘vicious’ press attacks on the judges had gone ‘far too far’. When judges gave lectures these days, their words were ‘picked over’, their sentences ‘taken out of context’. Although he is right that judges should be treated courteously, I was stunned by Lord Hope’s failure to realise that the rudeness they have recently encountered is the inevitable

It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel Defence Forces, and Amos, a former child prodigy and paratrooper — meet at the end of the 1960s, and sparks immediately begin to fly. They spend countless hours locked in rooms together at Hebrew University and elsewhere, and eventually co-write a series of papers that will revolutionise the field, and lead to the surviving partner being awarded the Nobel prize in economics. Not, however, before this extraordinary partnership has itself fallen apart, like a love affair, in regret and mutual recrimination. Our heroes are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, celebrated

Forgive me if I sound a touch complacent at the news that Francois Hollande has fallen on his sword. In announcing on Thursday night that he won’t be seeking re-election in the spring, Holland has become the first president in the 58-year history of the Fifth Republic to make such a decision. It was the right one. The wrong one was made by all those millions of French men and women four and a half years ago who gave Hollande their vote. I remember well the evening of 6 May. I went out for supper with a friend and on the metro home I passed through Solferino, the station closest

Golden boy, Luigi Di Maio, is the 30-year-old, slickly dressed leader of the Parliamentary Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), Italy’s insurgent political party that is polling ahead of the incumbent Democrats with a smorgasbord of National Socialist-style policies, plucked from the manifestos of the left and right. And just like everyone else in M5S, Di Maio doesn’t like journalists.   This dislike of journalists is not merely the perfectly reasonable loathing that one develops towards the mainstream media (MSM) if one is a vegan, who doesn’t believe in vaccinations, but who does believe that airplane contrails are evidence of government-funded chemical spraying of the population (M5S member beliefs at one

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at

Of all the government departments, it’s the Department for International Trade that manages to find itself in the firing line the most often. Whether it’s a turf war between the department and the rest of Whitehall or reports of Liam Fox instructing civil servants to read his book, it’s safe to say the department has not had the easiest ride. So, Mr S was intrigued to see that they are now recruiting for a ‘Head of Media’. The lucky candidate will also need to provide personal press advice to Fox — presumably this will involve telling him not to drink copious amounts of champagne on the terrace and making sure he surrounds

Since Netflix released The Crown, much praise has been heaped on the network for the royal drama. In fact, the series — a dramatisation of the Queen’s early years — has proved so impressive that several critics have suggested the future of quality drama lies online rather than with broadcasters like the BBC. So, with that in mind, Mr S was intrigued to learn of a BBC article on the series that the corporation have been pushing of late. In a piece titled ‘Did the Queen stop Princess Margaret marrying Peter Townsend?’ for the BBC magazine, Paul Reynolds — the former BBC Court correspondent — argues that the ‘lavish’ drama ‘perpetuates the myth’ that Princess

Those in charge of civilisation have been quick to compare Donald Trump to Silvio ‘bunga bunga’ Berlusconi as part of their crusade to deliver us from evil. The similarities between the Yankie and the Latino – despite the racial chasm that divides them – are just too good to be true. Both are dodgy tycoons, sex criminals, and filthy fascists. Both have dangerous levels of respect for Vladimir Putin. This, at any rate, is the message put out by those who tell us that we live in an era of post-truth but which we know is in fact the era of home-truth. In the case of Berlusconi, those responsible have not –