Society

Since I was a child, pretty much everybody I have ever met has asked me if I want to be a politician. The answer has always been no. Once, at university, I dimly remember giving this answer with so much vigour and conviction that I was escorted from the room, and the guy I’d given it to — an almost perfect stranger — came back to find me the next day, to apologise for asking in the first place. Even these days, the phrase ‘follow in your father’s footsteps’ drifting across the table at a dinner party can cause my wife to shoot me a warning look. My point here

Though the NHS made a welcome change from endless bickering about energy bills at today’s PMQs, the exchanges were just as unedifying. There is very little gain in the sort of fact war that David Cameron and Ed Miliband tried to indulge in, as there is no killer fact that can silence an opponent on the NHS. Instead, the exchanges descended very quickly into ‘let me give the right honourable gentleman the facts about the NHS under this government’, ‘we have a Prime Minister too clueless to know the facts’ and ‘once again, the right honourable gentleman is just wrong on the facts’. Each man used his own ‘simple facts’

TV pranksters Don’t Panic accosted the prime minister, and presented him with a ‘Bullingdon Year Book’. Watch how he reacts… a flash of gauche temper reminiscent of his predecessor.

Does addiction actually exist? It’s an issue we’ve examined before at The Spectator and I’m delighted to announce it will be the topic of our next debate. On the 21 November at the Royal Institution in London, we’ll be looking at whether addiction is really a disease or simply a form of behaviour we need to find a way of controlling. We’ve gathered an expert panel who will be tackling this question, all of whom have strong personal experiences to back up their positions. Arguing for the motion will be regular Spectator contributor, Daily Telegraph columnist and recovering alcoholic Damian Thompson. His book The Fix examines how addiction is taking over our lives.

Today the National Theatre hosts a gala performance, screened on BBC2 at 9pm, to celebrate fifty years since its launch as a company in 1963. You can view the full programme here – I’d wanted to be cynical about a Greatest Hits parade, but reading the cast list, it simply looks astounding. But it’s not the fiftieth birthday of Denys Lasdun’s building on the South Bank – that robotic monstrosity, suggestive of an early design for Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, if Bay’s anthropomorphic tanks could ever rear onto hind legs while made of concrete. When the building was finally complete in 1977, Auberon Waugh told The Spectator’s readers that the

It’s been a while since we had a nice big fat NHS row, but those who enjoy watching Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt fight over the ‘party of the NHS’ crown can rest assured that there’s a really bitter one coming up this autumn. NHS England has spent the past few months consulting on a change to the way clinical commissioning groups are funded that could end the current arrangement where more money per capita is spent on patients in deprived areas. The formula currently being considered would make the number of elderly people in an area a more important factor in the size of the grant that each CCG