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Should homebuyers have to pay a higher rate of stamp duty if the property they are buying has a low energy rating? After all, motorists already pay a higher rate of road tax if they are buying a new car with high fuel consumption. The stamp duty idea has been advanced by a trade body called the Energy Efficiency Infrastructure Group, which takes the example of a two bedroom end-of-terrace property with an agreed sale price of £250,000. At present, the buyers would pay stamp duty of £2500 (or zero if they were first time buyers). Under the new system they would pay £847 if the property had an energy

How cowardly of the BBC to axe Michael Vaughan from Test Match Special for the winter Ashes series on the basis of two words – ‘you lot’ – he might or might not have said more than twelve years ago.  Is this really how the BBC wants to play this? Anyone can make accusations of any type against someone famous that can’t be proved either way and then sit back and watch their life implode? If so then what’s to stop me, for example, from using this space to recall that in 2003 BBC Director General Tim Davie told me something deeply transgressive about, say, the trans community?  Davie might

I never realised Lanzarote was such a weird place. During an extended Camino de Santiago pilgrimage to escape UK lockdowns, various pilgrims I met urged me to visit the splendours of the Canary Islands as a natural sequel to the splendours of the Iberian Peninsula we traversed. But Lanzarote was rarely mentioned. As soon as you land at the north easternmost of the eight main Canary Islands you quickly appreciate there’s much more to it than cheap bars, piña coladas and the often-derided Brits Abroad vibe. Looming over the airport—whose runway must be a contender for one of the world’s greatest, though more of that later—is a landscape of volcanic mountains

With all of our institutions now firmly under the iron fist of progressivism it was only a matter of time before social justice mission creep slipped under the doormat and into the home. You can only promulgate the idea that we live under a tyrannical patriarchy for so long before young people take notice and begin to lose trust in the whole idea of intimate relationships with the opposite sex. Fourth wave feminism has shifted its focus from the work place to male/female relationships and a growing underclass of men is turning its back on women by joining poisonous underground groups such as INCELS and Men Going their Own Way (MGTOW).

There is something uniquely soul-destroying about British theme parks. The effusive, American cheer of Disney Land somehow fails to translate in Blighty where no amount of sugary pastel scenery, singing flowers and glockenspiel music can distract from the bad weather. Indeed, if Peppa Pig World really does embody ‘the power of UK creativity’, as Boris suggested in his CBI speech, we really are in more trouble than I thought. Maybe the PM got lucky with the weather during his visit to Peppa Pig World last weekend. But, for the rest of us, it’s hard not see an hour-long queue in the drizzle for Peppa’s Big Balloon Ride as anything other than a particularly cruel form of parental

The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, 40-years-old this month, is not merely great. It may be the greatest pop song ever. Pop is an open invitation. It creates, as Don’t You Want Me did in the bleak midwinter of 1981/82, a warm glow of collective experience. This is the wellspring of any profundity we attribute to it. That’s true of all pop’s grand arias, such as She Loves You, West End Girls, Dancing Queen, Reach Out And I’ll Be There, Billy Jean or Hit Me Baby One More Time. Whereas River Deep Mountain High is deliberately epic (no bad thing), Don’t You Want Me is greater still by its

If you’re a lover of Pinot Noir and fine red burgundy you’re doubtless in a bit of a stew. You’re worried that although the about-to-be-launched 2020 vintage is an absolute cracker, the amount of Pinot produced was down by around 40 per cent and there ain’t going to be enough to go round. You’re also fretting that since the recently-harvested 2021 vintage was cursed with frost, hail, rain, disease and just about everything else, only miniscule amounts of Pinot were produced. The quality – amazingly – is high, but you’ll be darn lucky to get your hands on any. Rarely, if ever, blended (except to make champagne and other fine

It feels good to say that you own a Peloton bike. After months of peering into those enigmatic Apple-style Peloton stores which came into being unsurprisingly in the more affluent areas of London (Knightsbridge, Marylebone and Oxford Street), my wife and I decided to bite the bullet and buy into the Peloton dream. Like many lockdown fitness devotees, a cancellation of our Central London gym memberships unlocked some disposable income which meant we could afford it. Only just though. When delivery day finally came, I realised just how heavy the bloody thing is. Peloton had sent what looked like its two oldest employees to haul it up the stairs and into our second bedroom.

What gift is good enough for the Queen? A crop of French Perigord black truffles (worth £150-£200 per 100g) is no bad choice – as Prince Philip discovered after 12 years of fruitless attempts to coax the mushroom into growing on the Queen’s Sandringham estate. Aside from making the Duke of Edinburgh reportedly the first person to cultivate black truffles from English soil, the success also fulfilled a decades-long obsession he had developed with the elusive fungi. His love affair with these ‘black diamonds’ is said to have begun in the 60s after the Duke was taken on a truffle-hunting excursion in Italy by his uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma. ‘We were

Britain’s legendary red phone boxes are in the news again. Of course they’re a symbol of the country’s past (about 2000 of them are officially listed buildings) – but what makes them really great is their capacity for reinvention. The story this week was about Ofcom preventing BT from closing down many of the nation’s 21,000 phone boxes. A box will now be saved if it meets one of several criteria, such as being located at an accident or suicide hotspot, or if more than 52 calls have been made from it over the past 12 months. But everyone knows what the long-term trend will be in a country where