Society

A decade ago I wrote here about the way financial advisers are paid. I told you how, instead of giving you a bill, your adviser is allowed to sell you investment products in exchange for a commission from the product provider plus a cut of your assets every year for as long as you continue to hold those products. So if you buy an investment fund from an independent financial adviser (IFA), he will receive a payment up front and then another payment every year,  whether you ever have the good fortune to come across him again or not. All these payments will come out of your money — you

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin today admitted that he held himself responsible for the West Coast rail franchise fiasco, as he appeared in front of MPs to explain what had gone wrong. Describing the mistakes as ‘very regrettable and indeed very serious’, McLoughlin told the Transport Committee that both bidders and taxpayers have ‘a right to expect better’ from the department. The initial findings of the Laidlaw Report, McLoughlin’s independent report into the fiasco, were released on Monday — findings which the Transport Committee Chair, Labour MP Louise Ellman, today described as ‘a damning indictment of the department.’ In the report, Laidlaw revealed that the DfT knew that the bidding process was

‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken or burnt. It can fall down stairs or in to deep water. The excoriation of adult skin differs to that of a child’s. Ridgeway begins with not a character but a body, and as the bodies amass – sometimes sexualised as well as pulverised – the novel itself begins to come apart, and everything in it. Hawthorn and Child are detectives in North London, tasked with finding a crime boss named Mishazzo and solving the shooting with which the novel

And still it goes on and on. Apparently Jimmy Savile was banned from Children In Need because it was thought he was a bit creepy. Did he try to touch up Pudsey, or something? I think we are getting ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy here. Savile was unspeakably ghastly. He was unspeakably ghastly before these latest allegations and he’s – probably, almost certainly – even worse now. But are we really going to exact revenge on pop stars who may have fondled a fourteen year old girl forty years ago? Were there any of those glam rock stars – Gilbert O’Sullivan excepted – who didn’t fondle fourteen year old girls?

In my Observer column today, I talk about the scourging of Britain’s failed elite. To give readers an idea of how many institutions are in the dock, I quote an extract from Piers Morgan’s diaries from the summer of 2004. Because I have more space, I can give you the full ghastly detail here – what lucky people you are. Morgan’s managers had just fired him from the editorship of the Mirror for running pictures of British soldiers pissing on Iraqi detainees, which a fool could have told him were crude fakes. There is a risk that when the pictures are seen in the Middle East they will endanger men and

Have elected police commissioners become the new political piñata? This week, the upcoming elections have taken a battering most notably from former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. In an interview with Sky News, Blair irresponsibly encouraged the public to boycott the elections, citing his concerns over centralising police power in a single individual — much like his old role. But as we stated in this week’s leader, Blair’s denial may not be a bad thing for those who want to see radical change in the policing: ‘Ian Blair perfectly embodies what has gone wrong with policing in England. He is marinated in political correctness…now retired and ennobled, he sees

EDF’s announcement that it is raising gas and electricity bills by nearly 11 per cent will increase pressure on the government in two ways. The first is that these sorts of hikes in the cost of living mean that while ministers have been cheered by recent pleasing statistics on growth, jobs and inflation, voters might not feel as though things are going so well for them. If their own experience of the economy is one where their rent, shopping bills and energy bills are soaring while their wages are frozen, then they may not feel quite as sympathetic to the government as official statistics suggest they should. The second is

In contemporary high-class tournament play both adjournments and early draws have been banned. This is partly due to the accessibility of computer analysis and partly to the realisation that well-remunerated grandmasters have an obligation to entertain. As a result, more and more games are being decided in seemingly level endgames which in former times might have been abandoned as draws. Carlsen is a particular exponent of this attritional warfare. If it pays to study the endgame, then Akiba Rubinstein is your man, possibly the greatest endgame artist of all time. Rubinstein was active from around 1907 to 1930, during which period all of the great names succumbed at one time