Politics

Has the Prime Minister been too naïve in cooking up plans to tackle unadulterated online access to porn? Today’s Daily Mail is totally ecstatic at the proposals, but fails to take into account how difficult regulating the Internet can be. Unless David Cameron decides to go for the totalitarian Great Firewall of China approach — which filters every tiny piece of traffic, known as packets — the proposals will have a similar effect to alcohol prohibition. Porngraphy will go even deeper underground; into the encrypted untraceable bowels of the web which are nigh impossible to infiltrate. Some of Cameron’s proposals are not entirely useless. Opt-in filters for Internet providers will work much like Google SafeSearch already

That senior Tories are urging David Cameron to break up the Coalition early so the Conservatives can fight the election unencumbered by those pesky Lib Dems is hardly going to dent the Prime Minister’s chillaxing this summer: his party is in a good shape and the timing of Graham Brady and Bernard Jenkin’s intervention in the Sunday Telegraph suggests they are genuinely trying to be helpful rather than cause internal party strife to damage the Prime Minister. All the indications from the top are that both Tories and Lib Dems want to go all the way with this Coalition, and those who might benefit from an early split, such as

Is Britain addicted to immigration? I argued so in my Telegraph column yesterday and Radio 4’s Today programme held a discussion about it this morning and asked me on (22 mins in, here). You can say that that immigration has worked wonders for the economy – without it, we’d have a pathetic 2 per cent more people in work than in 1997. As things stand, our workforce has expanded by 11 per cent. We’d actually notice the number British people emigrating (the exodus has doubled to 400 a day under Cameron) so the ever-growing growing debt pile would be shouldered by a shrinking workforce. David Cameron would have no jobs

Alan Turing was one of the reasons why Britain won the Second World War. His mathematical and computing skills were vital to cracking the Enigma code. Yet, Turing committed suicide less than 10 years after the end of the war. A conviction for gross indecency for private, consensual gay sex followed by a sentence of chemical castration had taken its toll. Today, the House of Lords debates Lord Sharkey’s bill to grant Turing a statutory pardon. In The Times yesterday, Matthew Ridley argued that rather than a pardon, which would imply that Turing’s actions were criminal, the government should put him on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. But I think the

Next time I’m in a sauna I’m going to say: ‘It’s like a school sports hall on prize day in here.’ As the mothers fanned their faces with the programmes, one of the other fathers, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to Uruguay, leaned forward and whispered: ‘Rookie error, mate. Should have worn a white shirt.’ He was right. I was wearing a blue one, which meant I couldn’t take off my linen jacket. My interest in hearing from the headmaster about the school’s successes on the sporting field began to wane after the first three hours. I’m pleased for the Under 11Bs hockey team and all they achieved back in February,

Cigs and booze. These issues dominated PMQs today. Ed Miliband tried to portray the PM as a puppet of ‘Big Tobacco’ whose decision not to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes was influenced by his electoral guru, Lynton Crosby. Had the PM ever ‘had a conversation’ with Crosby about fag packets? Shifty Cameron dodged sideways and declared that Crosby never ‘lobbied me about anything’. ‘Weasel words,’ said Miliband, looking triumphant. He quoted a Tory GP, Sarah Wollaston, who labelled the decision ‘a day of shame’ for the government. Up popped the lady herself from the backbenches. Dr Wollaston begged the PM to re-think his decision against ‘minimum unit pricing’, which she