It is a weird business when stories combine, even if they only do so in the mind of the commentator. On our screens, Tony Blair is about to fret about Jesus, making him look like a loony again. In Oxford, David Irving and Nick Griffin are cast, preposterously, as defenders of free speech. And in
It is undeniably enjoyable to see Gordon Brown squirming about the £600,000 his party will have to pay back to David Abrahams, the man of many aliases. If Peter Watt, the resigning general secretary of the Labour party, really, as he claims, saw something devious about the practice of taking money under other names only
Does anyone actually resign anymore? Nowadays a resignation is regarded not as a final act but as a temporary career break and that’s bad for business. Paul Gray – the former head of HM Revenue and Customs who ‘resigned’ two weeks ago after someone in his department posted the names, addresses and bank details of
One thing history teaches is the transience and futility of power, and the ultimate impotence of those who exercise it. That is the lesson of the current King Tut exhibition. No group of sovereigns ever enjoyed the illusion of power more than the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, especially those of the 18th and 19th
I met Vincent Cable recently at a dinner party with a mixture of City and business bigwigs: a few FTSE-100 bosses, a smattering of hedge-fund tycoons, the odd private-equity baron. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman was the only politician at the table and the debate inevitably focused on financial worries: the credit crunch, Northern Rock,
For a solvent mortgage lender to require emergency government support on a huge scale suggests that all is not well in our financial markets. This understatement matches the gorgeously hubristic claim from ‘Chuck’ Prince of Citigroup, America’s largest bank, in July, that ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and
Edie G. Lush explains why we’re rarely asked to pay for online news and entertainment these days Amid the shockwaves caused by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, one significant policy shift attracted relatively little attention. When the ink finally dries on the deal, one of Murdoch’s first moves
First there was the news of passengers rescued from lifeboats in Antarctica as their cruise ship went down after hitting an iceberg. Then Tim Price, our guest Investment columnist this week, reminded me of ex-Citigroup chief Chuck Prince’s observation about dancing as long as the music keeps playing. Then at a wedding on Saturday, a
Is it time for a reassessment of Sir Richard Branson? Chosen by the Treasury as the ‘preferred bidder’ for Northern Rock, he’s back where he craves to be and so often manages to put himself: in the headlines. And like every time he grabs the nation’s attention, two quite different caricatures of him have been
