Society

Minette Marrin, the columnist with whom I most often agree, put it best in the Sunday Telegraph last week. Couldn’t we just have fudged this gay adoption/Catholic objection thing, she asked? She herself, she said, supported the new anti-discrimination rules to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is objecting; she thought their objections wrong-headed. But she wondered whether both sides might have found a classic British compromise, or — to be frank — a fudge. It’s what I’ve wondered from the start. Life (and career) finds roles for us all, and one part of my job description has become ‘Tory gay’. Another is ‘insistent non-believer’. I am therefore duty-bound to fight

Councils the length and breadth of Britain are smelling the money Red Ken is making and talking of introducing congestion-charging schemes. Interest groups are starting to complain at the introduction of yet another tax on motoring. But there are better models than Ken’s, which could bring real benefits. Charging for road use is hardly a new idea. Beginning in 1663, a series of Private Acts of Parliament gradually transferred responsibility for highways from parishes to private Turnpike Trusts, which collected tolls and invested in roads. Over two centuries, about 10,000 miles of highways were thus privatised. Economic historian Dan Bogart has shown that Turnpike Trusts led to major improvements in

We’re barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, one-time bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now hugely successful US money manager, is off on a favourite tack — mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager whose views I have alluded to in a recent newspaper column. ‘I’m going to start with an ad hominem remark,’ he announces down the line from Boston, his adopted home, where he has built from scratch a global fund management business that looks after more than $140 billion of other people’s money. The pundit in