Society

Why study history? It’s a question which often gets asked, and the historian R. G. Collingwood’s answer – that history should enable us to ‘see more clearly into the situation in which we are compelled to act’- is one of the best responses. The idea that the study of the past should be applicable to the present has directed the career of Niall Ferguson, who was recently bemoaning the degradation of the subject. Discussing the current focus on race, class and gender in history faculties in a recent speech, Ferguson argued that undergraduates are being robbed of the chance to study events of real significance. Faced with a list of politicised options,

Another election that catches my business eye is the one for mayor of Greater Manchester. The winner will have a powerbase with huge potential: a city-region of 2.7 million people, an enterprise culture that has evolved over two centuries, an outstanding university science base, strong flows of inward investment, Europe’s largest industrial estate at Trafford Park, a global sports brand at Old Trafford, and a world-class airport. Yes, it also has problems of ‘entrenched worklessness’, NHS overstretch and underperforming schools — and nine of its ten local authorities are Labour-controlled. But that’s no reason to award the mayor’s job to yet another socialist opportunist. I refer of course to Liverpool-born

Each year, this column has the melancholy duty of reminding the public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, made in Brazil in March 2009, that there were only 100 months left to prevent ‘irretrievable climate collapse’. Those 100 months will have elapsed at the end of next month, so it looks as if we are all doomed. The general election on 8 June will therefore be pretty pointless. It is noticeable, however, that the Prince has not, in recent years, repeated his exact dating of the catastrophe, muttering, in 2015, that it might be 35 years. Even more striking was his co-authorship, at the beginning of this year, of the

A French friend tells me that Emmanuel Macron represents the ‘Uber-isation’ of politics. I suppose that makes Le Pen the spokesman for the black cab interest. I want to live in a country which manages a modus vivendi between these two schools of thought. If life is all Uber, it will be freer and cheaper, but also more ignorant and grotty. If life is all black cabs, prices will be too high and cabbies will revert to the surlier service they used to give in the 20th century. Perhaps such peaceful coexistence is an impossible dream. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes, which appears in this week’s Spectator

Coming out of a celebratory dinner at a Montparnasse brasserie after topping the poll in the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday, Emmanuel Macron had a brief brush with the press. A reporter asked: ‘Is this your Fouquet moment? This referred to a notoriously showy celebration by Nicolas Sarkozy at Fouquet’s restaurant after his own victory in 2007. The 39-year-old centrist was visibly cross. He simply wanted to thank his secretaries, security officers, politicians and writers, he said. Then came the dig. ‘If you don’t understand that,’ he said, ‘you understand nothing about life. I have no lessons to learn from the petit milieu Parisien.’ This dismissive

Considering that their party is expected to win by a landslide, the Tory spin doctors sound unusually panicked. They are keen to point out that the polls aren’t always right, and the pollsters are still trying to correct what they got wrong at the last general election. They insist that national voting tells you little about what will happen in the key marginal seats. These are normally the pleas of a party that is failing, and trying to persuade voters that it is still in the race. But Labour isn’t doing a good job of spinning its own prospects — so the Tories are doing it for them. This is