In the 2005 general election this magazine supported the Conservatives, with one exception — we urged voters in Medway not to vote for a deeply unimpressive Tory candidate by the name of Mark Reckless. Our then political editor, Peter Oborne, went so far as to write a pamphlet in support of the Labour rival, Bob Marshall
Home The last British combat troops turned over Camp Bastion in Helmand to Afghan forces and withdrew from Afghanistan after 13 years and 453 deaths. Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, spoke of ‘whole towns and communities being swamped by huge numbers of migrants’. He later withdrew the word ‘swamped’, but David Blunkett, a former Labour
To the British embassy in Paris for a colloquium on ‘Napoleon and Wellington in War and Peace’ organised by our ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, to mark the bicentenary of the purchase of the embassy from Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister. (According to the historian of the house, Tim Knox, Pauline would warm her feet on the
For all Nigel Farage’s appealing bluster, he is never going to be in a position to get us out of Europe or, indeed, achieve anything at all. He is, in other words, pointless. The sole consequence of his emergence on to the political scene will be that the next election stands a good chance of
What’s special about Rochester What is special about Rochester and Strood? — Rochester has the second oldest cathedral and school in Britain, after Canterbury. — Medway, the unitary authority area in which the constituency is situated, has one of the highest rates of private home-ownership in Britain, with 92 per cent of homes in private
From ‘A Probationer’s Diary’, by a Red Cross volunteer, from The Spectator, 31 October 1914: Friday. The wounded are coming to-morrow. Twenty of them. They are to be drafts from a military hospital, and will be convalescent. Such a flutter in the dovecote, with a cleaning of sinks and of brass, and a preparation of dressings,
Italy’s to-do list Sir: You would expect a long letter of rebuttal by a piqued senior diplomat in response to the many barbs that Nicholas Farrell packed into his piece about Italy (‘The dying man of Europe’, 25 October). Among the most painful ones were that Italy is ‘almost doomed’ and parts of it are
