Society

Owning houses and cars can sometimes seem like throwing money into a black hole. And there’s little respite – new research has found that car insurance premiums rose by an average of 12 per cent over the past year. MoneySuperMarket, the price comparison site, looked at year-on-year quarterly car insurance premiums to identify overall and regional price fluctuations. The average premium paid in the first quarter of 2016 was £478, up from £428 in the same period in 2015 – a stinging £50 hike. Drivers in Tonbridge saw premiums rise by almost a quarter (23 per cent – or £75). Drivers in Dartford, Worcester and Wolverhampton also experienced hefty year-on-year increases,

The Spectator’s weekly podcast, presented by Isabel Hardman, has been going for a couple of years now and is established as the best podcast produced by any magazine. But we’ve also been doing a Coffee House podcast, called Coffee House shots, which is shorter reactions to stories in the news (subscribe with iTunes here, or here’s our RSS feed for use with other apps). When Iain Duncan Smith resigned at 9pm on a Friday, we had a Coffee House shots podcast up by 9.30pm: the idea is rough, but quick analysis on the day’s events. If you subscribe via Downcast or iTunes, it will be waiting for you on your mobile. Here’s

It’s a useful rule of thumb that any business which reduces its name to its initials is heading for trouble. Having gone that way under Goodwin, RBS almost doubled down last year by becoming the lower-case ‘rbs’, before apparently thinking better of it. British Petroleum became ‘BP’ after its 1998 merger with Amoco, tried to claim a greener image by suggesting that the B might stand for ‘Beyond’, and has never really been stable since. ‘British’, like Scottish, was evidently an unsuitable tag for a global player. Likewise BG, the former exploration arm of British Gas, was an unhappy ship for years before its recent takeover by the robustly unabbreviated

When I got an email from the Evening Standard’s education correspondent at 06.29am yesterday I had no idea that my life was about to turn to shit. She had just read an interview I’d done for a magazine called Schools Week in which, among other things, I said that I was standing down as chief executive of the group of free schools I’ve helped set up. She wanted to talk to me about why I’d made this decision. At that point, I made a terrible mistake. I asked if I could send her an email explaining why I was stepping down rather than talk to her in person. The reason

One of the starkest trends in recessionary Britain is the ever expanding army of the self-employed. Among the staggering 4.4 million people who work for themselves are 166,000 taxi drivers, 140,000 carpenters and joiners and 123,000 farmers, as well as more prosperous lawyers and computer contractors. These workers have few perks: no paid holidays or sickness cover. They make up one seventh of the workforce but, also, sadly, according to the Department for Work and Pensions 22 per cent of them have no pension. My own family experience bears this out. I am one of the youngest in a family of seven children: four siblings are self-employed, but only one

Last week we saw the reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen taking a leaf from Alekhine’s book to destroy eccentric opening play by the Swedish grandmaster Nils Grandelius. This week we see Alekhine himself in action, launching a sacrificial maelstrom which destroys his hapless opponent. Alekhine once wrote, ‘It is especially with respect to the original opening of this game that people often speak of a “hypermodern technique”, a “neo-romantic school” etc. The question is in reality much simpler. Black has given himself over to several eccentricities in the opening which, without the reaction of his opponent, would in the end give him a good game.’ He was actually referring to the