FIRST, the ‘starter’ solution at 10 Down, can be linked with the other unclued lights, with it also appearing twice in ‘First things first’. First prize P.E. Berridge, Gosberton, Lincolnshire Runners-up John C. Edwards, Ightham, Kent; Professor Colin Ratledge, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
Last night Channel 4 broadcast a programme by Trevor Phillips, in which he worried about the integration of British Muslims. He suggested that we should switch to a policy of ‘active integration’. The night before, at the same time of 10pm, Channel 4 broadcast a programme in which the merits of having sex with a complete stranger were discussed. Some people find it very liberating, a sexpert explained, as a thrilled audience of thickos tittered. Yes I know – I wrote about Sex Box last week – one more strike and I’m officially volunteering to be the new Mary Whitehouse. My point is that sensationalist TV is guilty of falsifying who
Today’s starter for ten: how does this photograph make you feel? Does it make you angry? Does it do more than that? Perhaps your are the kind of person who feels this a truly shameful photograph. Perhaps, if this is the case, you need to get out more. Perhaps you also need a holiday from politics. Now, of course, a referendum – being a binary Yes/No question – is a divisive business. That does not require you to abandon all sense of perspective. If the sight of the Prime Minister in the company of Paddy Ashdown and Neil Kinnock leaves you frothing with disbelief you probably should, as the Irish put it, cop
Since the start of April, anyone buying a home with a granny flat could have found themselves hit by an inflated stamp duty bill. They would have been caught up in the government’s move to get landlords and those who own second homes to contribute more to the Treasury’s coffers by way of a 3 per cent stamp duty surcharge. The planned rate varied between 3 per cent and 15 per cent of the sale price, depending on the property’s value. For example, a property with an annexe – the proper name for a granny flat – with an overall sale price of £500,000 would incur a new stamp duty
A ‘climate of uncertainty’ is consolidating across Britain’s housing market thanks to the impact of new stamp duty changes, the EU referendum and the forthcoming devolved elections, according to a leading industry body. For the first time since 2008, expectations for house sales have dipped into negative territory, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said. Nearly 40 per cent of surveyors told RICS they expect London property prices to fall over the next three months. Meanwhile, the Council of Mortgage Lenders reported yesterday that home-owners borrowed £8.7 billion for house purchases in February, up 4 per cent month-on-month and 21 per cent year-on-year. They took out 48,000 loans. First-time buyers borrowed £3.4 billion, up 21 per cent on February
Growing up in my Mum’s house, Wogan was king. Throughout the 1980s leading lights like Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Sammy Davis Jr sat on his sofa and – vicariously – in our living room in Tottenham too. As well as its historic duty to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, the principle of universality has always been at the very heart of what the BBC stands for. Our most cherished cultural institution is at its root a universal service that must reflect all of Britain by virtue of the simple fact that it is funded by all Britons. In a multi-platform, digital age where more content is available than ever before
As part of Sadiq Khan’s London mayoral bid, the Labour candidate has rallied against foreign investors buying up London property. In December, Khan told the Evening Standard that it was time to stop new homes going to ‘overseas investors’ instead of Londoners: ‘Ambitious young Londoners are rightly fed up with seeing thousands of new homes each year sold off to overseas investors – many of whom will never live in them – years before they are actually built. They’re sick of not being given a chance in our broken housing market. Building new homes for Londoners must come ahead of offering investment opportunities for overseas millionaires.’ So given Khan’s call for
Call this a scandal? A few years ago, it wouldn’t have made the cut. If any reporter had taken the David Cameron tax ‘scoop’ into the now-defunct News of the World, he would have been laughed out of the building. ‘OK, just run it by me again. The Prime Minister’s dad was a stockbroker, right? Daddy Cameron operated this fund in Panama, or somewhere, and Dave had a few shares in it. Then before Dave became Prime Minister, he sold the shares and made a profit of 19 grand, after paying full capital gains tax in Britain. Where’s the story?’ ‘But boss…’ ‘Don’t you “But boss” me. I’m trying to
Mark Pardoe MW, the wine-buying director of Berry Bros. & Rudd, has a touching fondness for The Spectator. Either that or his maths is terrible. He shows me some excellent wines, all of which I love. I narrow them down to six and ask whether he might see his way to knocking a few quid off. I suggest a figure and he quadruples it — the discount, that is, not the price. I’m not a great haggler but I thought the way it worked was for the customer to ask for the world and the merchant to give away peanuts, not the other way around. Anyway, the result is that
It’s 8.57 on a Friday evening and I’m at home, waiting for an obscure American radio talk show to come online. For the next hour I’ll be answering listeners’ love queries with the aid of my Tarot-reading skills, and out of respect to all the lovesick Americans out there I’ve made a real effort to stay sober. Which is quite an achievement because, downstairs, my friends are slugging it out over the EU referendum. Nobody understands what they’re talking about, as usual, but I’m feeling left out. So I lay three cards on the table and ask the Tarot: ‘Who’s going to win?’ Do read on… The radio show’s a
Well here’s a thing: we’ve just had the first English bloke to win the Masters. Sure, an Englishman has won it before, but not a proper English bloke with a tattoo and the easy patter you’d expect from the man who comes to fix your dishwasher. And there were five Englishmen in the top 14 at Augusta, not to mention a certain Northern Irishman. No one likes a jingoist, but as David Coleman might have said, it’s really quite remarkable. I absolutely love Danny Willett. He’s the ordinary guy from Rotherham, the son of a vicar and a maths teacher, who has just won the biggest prize in golf. He’s
Last week we reached the beginning of the end of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio — the ‘great reformer’ of the Catholic church who, it appears, has been unable to deliver the reforms that he himself favours. This despite being Pope. On Friday, he published a 200-page ‘exhortation’ entitled Amoris Laetitia, ‘The Joy of Love’ (or ‘The Joy of Sex’, as English-speaking Catholics of a certain vintage immediately christened it). This was Francis’s long-awaited response to two Vatican synods on the family, in 2014 and last year, which descended into Anglican-style bickering between liberals and conservatives. At the heart of the disputes lay the question of whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics could
Like millions of non-Americans hooked on the US election, I’m backing someone even though I don’t have a vote. I love Cruz and I’m not ashamed to say it. I’m not talking about the oleaginous Ted, but Caroline, his seven-year-old daughter. Caroline is that rare thing in politics — an actual human being. Her eyes glaze over in campaign videos as she’s forced to deliver a succession of facile lines. She ruins coordinated photocalls by making bunny ears behind her dad’s head and refusing to hug him for the cameras. She slumps, listening to endless mind-numbing speeches at never-ending rallies, very obviously bored out of her mind. She is the antithesis
How clean are you? I ask not as a mother confessor. I’m not interested in the state of your soul. What I want to know is: how clean is your sock drawer? Your fridge? Your gut? These are the pressing questions of the new cult of clean. Its apostles urge us to divest ourselves of worldly possessions, to renounce ‘dirty’ food and alcohol and to dress in monkish grey or bleached white. Our sins are these: we have bought too much tat, eaten to filthy excess and stuffed our wardrobes with cheap, disposable rubbish. The clean cultist says no more. Everything must go. The most high and holy of the
From ‘Observing: an average day’, The Spectator, 15 April 1916: 5.10 a.m. The signaller on duty at the telephone has just said cheerfully, ‘5.30, Sir.’ I agree, and ask him if the wires are all right. They are! 5.50 a.m. Unroll the mufflers round my head and the blankets and kick off the sandbags. Then get off the bed sideways into the water. 8.30 a.m. They have begun. Four ‘whizz-bangs’ have just burst very prettily over a communication trench to our right. Then silence again. 10.25 a.m. We have just had a little excitement. I suddenly saw a German — a rare thing — through the telescope. 2.15 p.m. They are shelling
In a way the headline to my fellow columnist Dominic Lawson’s Sunday Times commentary on 12 April said it all. ‘Join the pitchfork wavers on tax, Mr Cameron, and you end up skewered.’ The column had something of an 18th-century ring to it, conjuring in my mind’s eye an elegant London dinner party, with men-about-town in powdered wigs twitching back the heavy damask curtains to sneak worried glances at a riot outside: an unruly and enraged mob rampaging up the street. But Dominic had a powerful argument. It was, he suggested, noblemen like David Cameron and George Osborne who had unwittingly energised the rabble. Dominic had warned his readers of
There are few more beautiful places in this world than Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas. I know this because, right now, I am staring down the sub-tropical Punakha valley, gazing at an untouched rural landscape where singing women hoe the sunlit chilli fields. It’s glorious. And gloriously devoid of tourists. Though apparently Prince William and Kate are coming here in the next couple of weeks. I hope they don’t lower the tone. This unusual absence of tourists is down to a government policy. Back in the 1980s (when perhaps two dozen outsiders made it into Bhutan every year) the authorities in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon looked at the
In Competition No. 2943 you were invited to submit a review of a well-known work of literature that has been written by a comically inappropriate reviewer. Honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone and John O’Byrne, who let Donald Trump loose on The Odyssey and Brave New World. Jane Moth and Frank Upton also caught my eye. The winners take £25; the bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. As far as one can see, Mr Kafka’s preliminary disquisition on jurisprudence, entitled The Trial, is a masterly collocation of facts and opinions, skilfully edited together, with all the administrative detail very finely observed, and the ipso facto very well distinguished from the
For weeks, Westminster has been full of rumours about the private life of a certain cabinet member. It was said he had started to visit a dominatrix in Earl’s Court but ended up falling in love with her and taking her to official functions. Like a Westminster remake of the film Pretty Woman, in fact, but with the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, playing the part of Richard Gere. There was much comment in Parliament about this, and jokes about what London is coming to if an MP has to travel all the way to Earl’s Court for such services, when they used to be available a stone’s throw away from
As someone who still entertains hope of becoming a member of Parliament one day, I’d better come clean about my own tax affairs. It’s a torrid tale, as you’d expect, but rather than wait for my political opponents to winkle the story out of me bit by bit, I thought I’d get it all out in the open. I blame the Cub Scouts for starting me on the wrong path. As a boy of eight, I was an eager participant in bob-a-job week, which involved going from door to door on my street offering to do odd jobs. I turned all the money over to my Cub pack, but I