Society

Look, I know that the expenses mess needs sorting swiftly and decisively – I’ve been saying as much for the past few weeks.  But there’s still a sense that things are now moving a little too quickly.  Under the correct interpretation that “this is about more than expenses,” polticians have rushed from discussing second home allowances to setting out their plans for tweaking the electoral system.  Even today, there have been concurrent debates about whether there should be fixed-term parliaments and whether voters should be able to recall their political representatives.  All thought-provoking stuff, but it’s getting hard to keep up. This isn’t so much of a problem if it

As sun breaks through last night’s cloud and the beautiful Wye valley is once again bathed in dazzling sunshine, Tuesday morning seems a good moment to take stock of what was a triumphant, record-breaking bank holiday at the Hay Festival. As ever, the opening-weekend programme contained a plethora of luminaries from the worlds of books, politics, economics, history, music, science, film and art, but this year there was also a particularly rare visitor to the Brecon Beacons: the sun! In stark contrast to the storms and mud of recent years, giddy festival-goers (of whom there were more here this weekend alone than at the entire festival last year) swapped wellies

One of the major forces driving the public’s reaction to the expenses scandal has been the feeling that we, the voters, simply don’t know what our elected representatives are up to. But this goes well beyond claims for moats, bathplugs and so on. We the electorate actually know very little about what our MPs do. If an MP isn’t in the front rank, their actions go pretty much unreported. Sure, the really determined can read Hansard to find out what their MP is doing. But it is still sometime hard to determine what precisely is going on in that house on the river. If the performance of Parliament and that of

If M had Miss Moneypenny, General Mike Hayden had Cindy. Both were attractive and of a certain age and both were excellent guardians of the gate. While Miss Moneypenny never caused M any trouble at all,Cindy is turning out to be a focus of a major row between Hayden, the head of the CIA and the National Security Agency during the Bush Presidency, and government lawyers. The trouble has arisen because Hayden is writing his version of a tell all book which is going to set out his story of how, after the terrorists attacked on 9/11, he persuaded the White House to unleash the full force of NSA’s eavesdroppers

Until I read Andrew Sparrow’s story in The Guardian today, I’d missed this quote from David Cameron on Andrew Marr: “You know they’ve given power to the judges, on the one hand, and Europe on the other and the whole thing, frankly, is not in my control. That’s what people, I think, are angry about. They want more control over their politics and their politicians.” I think this is an absolutely crucial point. People’s anger about expenses has been so great not just because MPs were playing the system and diddling the public purse but because people don’t think MPs do anything anymore. As one Tory said to me on