Society

A City insider at last month’s Mansion House dinner told me the Financial Conduct Authority had become ‘a bit of an embarrassment’ — or rather, that was my bowdlerisation of what he actually whispered. So it comes as no surprise that FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley has resigned, having been told by the Chancellor that his contract would not be renewed. A former London Stock Exchange director and Hong Kong securities regulator, Wheatley has a knack of making enemies: Hong Kong investors, unhappy with his handling of alleged misselling of Lehman Brothers ‘minibonds’, once burned a funeral effigy of him outside his office. London bankers didn’t quite go that far, but

David Cameron is right to speak against religious extremism, even if it claims not to support violence. But what exactly is religious extremism? He defined it in opposition to British values, meaning democracy and the rule of law and so on. Maybe this is clear enough. But I think the matter can be clarified further. I think it should be defined in this way. Religious extremism idealises religious unity as the basis of good politics, and denigrates pluralism, liberal values, ‘secularism’ (in the political sense). In other words, it is theocratic religion. ‘Theocracy’ is an old-fashioned word, but I think we need to use it a lot more. It gets

From ‘The Struggle in the East‘, The Spectator, 24 July 1915: Even if the Germans take Warsaw and practically the whole of the Polish salient, and are not too badly punished by the Russian armies during the operation, they will have to begin the painful and dangerous task of invading Russia. No doubt in theory this is not a necessity. The Germans could go into winter quarters in Poland and stave off Russian attacks. That, however, we venture to say—though the proof would take too long to give on the present occasion—will turn out an impossible task. Germany will have to go forward into Russia as long as the Russian

Last year John Bercow proudly boasted during an interview with Roger Federer on Radio 4 that he had watched 65 of the tennis ace’s matches that year. An impressive feat perhaps, but also one that led taxpayers to ask how exactly the Speaker had found time to watch 65 Federer matches alongside his work duties. Michael Fabricant went on to accuse Bercow of behaving like royalty over the number of sports freebies he took. Not that the Speaker has let the criticism get to him. In fact, Bercow appears to be doing his very best to keep up his sports attendance record for the year 2015. The Speaker has so far racked up

Imagine if a Ukip politician wrote about being on an aeroplane that was ‘heaving’ with black people. Imagine if he described becoming suspicious of them, and assuming, on the basis of no evidence, just a hunch, that they must be flying overseas to get up to no good. Imagine if he complained to British police about this ‘heaving’ group of dark-skinned air travellers, and the police agreed to interrogate them upon their return to Britain. There would be outrage. We’d see this as racialised suspicion. In which case, why has there been no outrage, not so much as a raised eyebrow, over what the Lib Dem Baroness Jenny Tonge did at the

I should declare an interest – because I work for the Sun. But even so, I cannot quite see what the Royal family’s objections are. It does no harm to remind the nation that Edward VIII had a sort of juvenile admiration for Hitler and that the Windsors are, in general, to the right of a fish-knife. I found the photographs historically fascinating. Nobody, surely, would blame Liz at the age of six or seven for joining in the Nazi salute urged on her by the future King. One of my own sons, when he was the same age, once asked me about the Nazis. So I told him, and

Reassuringly, not even anti-monarchists are making mischief out of today’s pictures of an eight-year-old Queen being shown by her uncle how to make a Nazi salute. It’s a striking picture, but as everyone knows, it simply did not mean then what it means now. It was taken in 1933, when the full horrors of Nazism had not begun. It’s possible that the eight-year-old Queen was not following the rapidly-changing events in Germany very carefully. Hitlerism – with its uniforms, goose-stepping and other weird gestures – was seen by most Brits as a strange phase that Germany would soon grow out of. Hitler’s antics were looked upon with fascination and horror, but

Given the kerfuffle caused by the recent publication of Craig Raine’s ‘Gatwick’ in the London Review of Books, I thought it might be interesting to invite competitors to compose their own poem about an encounter in an airport. Raine’s poem brought the Twitter bullies out in force to broadcast their disgust at an elderly poet sharing his lustful thoughts about young women. Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s submission imagines a scenario in which one of them wreaks her revenge: ‘We’ll see whose arse is large next time he comes/ To my desk in the airport. I’ve got chums/ With latex gloves and penetrating ways,/ Prepared to hold and search for many days.’ Others

From ‘Phantom Gold’, The Spectator, 17 July 1915: There is something about the sight of golden coins which excites the imagination. Was it for economic nations alone that the world settled upon gold as the universal token? What delight children take in counters made to represent sovereigns—small children who have certainly never possessed a real twenty shillings. They know the round yellow shams have no value, they do not think about spending them seriously, but they love to play with them nevertheless. There are analogous games which we all play with phantom counters from time to time. The counters represent nothing that we have, or have lost, or even expect