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Friday

Mary Dejevsky

The problem with scrapping leasehold

Like most non-renting flat-dwellers, I call myself a home-owner or owner-occupier, but that isn’t quite true. I don’t own my flat; I am a leaseholder. What I bought was the right to occupy it for however many years are left on the lease – and as the lease runs down, the flat is worth less and less. Conversely, this is why, if you were so minded, you could find a prime London flat for a (relative) pittance if the lease has only a few years to run, and why long leases generally come with a premium. The government describes this system as feudal – in the rights it gives to

Wednesday

William Cash

The dark side of World Book Day

What began in 1998 with Tony Blair standing in the Globe Theatre to announce a new celebration of books has morphed into something much bigger. Along with Black History Month or World History Day, tomorrow’s World Book Day is now a full member of the woke calendar. This calendar has grown – largely thanks to the UN, which spends millions inventing such initiatives – into a global non-profit industry. In March alone, we have Zero Discrimination Day, World Wildlife Day, and World Day for Glaciers. As an author of several books, I’m all for celebrating reading, poetry and especially book buying. This World Book Day, I’m quite proud of my

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why the left hates Gail’s

Is there any more evil influence on the world than Gail’s the bakery? It has thrown thousands of poor people out of their homes by gentrifying their neighbourhoods; it has destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of hard-working owners of independent coffee shops by drawing away business; it has scorned the poor by throwing away its old sandwiches rather than give them to the homeless; and it allegedly supplied a box of pastries to the White House for tea last Friday, which so poisoned the atmosphere between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump that it could quite possibly lead to world war three. OK, I made the last one up. But as

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How Armando Iannucci lost his edge

The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a crass piece of TV trickery. ‘Armando Iannucci is not an easy man to pin down,’ said Yentob, as if his quarry were a master criminal or an international terrorist. ‘For ten years, I’ve been trying to talk to one of Britain’s greatest comic talents.’ Iannucci, in his heyday, would have enjoyed dissecting this sort of bombastic hyperbole. This week, he connived in the hoax. Yentob ran through Iannucci’s CV. He was raised by affluent Glaswegians (plenty of colour photographs suggesting a comfortable income), and

Julia Hamilton

A pensioner’s guide to being broke

I’m a broke pensioner – quite a jolly one – not like those people Age Concern show wrapped in blankets, the caption informing viewers that she daren’t put the heating on. I’m not like those pathetic old people, I tell myself (untruthfully). I do put the heating on but, like the poor old dears in shabby armchairs, I worry about how I’m going to pay my heating bill – especially now Labour has taken away my wonderful winter fuel allowance. Being broke at 68 is humiliating. But it is also only to be expected, given how little money I’ve managed to make in my quite long life. Sometimes I get

Tuesday

Flora Watkins

Nurses shouldn’t have tattoos

Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once either indicators of prison gang allegiances or the preserve of thrash metal bands and their fans. Although perhaps the most heavily inked man in rock is Travis Barker, drummer of pop-punk crossover tarts Blink-182. His whole head is tattooed, as is Kerry King’s of Slayer, who also has ‘God Hates Us All’ down his left

Zoe Strimpel

Is Kate Moss… basic?

Could it be? Could the world’s sexiest, coolest woman be turning… basic? It has come to feel as if that effervescent, mercurial quality that kept her aloof from the cut and thrust of the celebrity rabble – the endorsement-chasers, the tell-all-interview mongers – has evaporated. Kate Moss is turning into the very thing she had always been at pains to shun. Moss once called an EasyJet pilot a ‘basic bitch’ after being escorted off the plane for swigging vodka from her carry-on after Sadie Frost’s 50th birthday. Now she is becoming a basic bitch (to say nothing of her daughter Lila, whose bare nipples at London Fashion Week have been

Alexander Larman

In defence of Jack Vettriano

The death of the painter Jack Vettriano at the age of 73 is sure to delight at least one art critic: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Jones has consistently attacked the creator of The Singing Butler, Britain’s best-selling single image, as ‘brainless’ and ‘not even an artist’. He derided his work as ‘a crass male fantasy that might have come straight out of Money by Martin Amis.’ Nor is he alone. The Daily Telegraph sneered that Vettriano was ‘the Jeffrey Archer of the art world’, and the director of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art refused to include his work in the collection, saying, ‘I’d be more than happy to say