The foreign news pages read increasingly like some terrible satire on western military decline. Two years ago French and British forces, with the help of the US Navy, managed to help Libyan rebels topple Colonel Gaddafi. This year, the French needed British support to go to war against some tribesmen in Mali. It was a
Home Moody’s reduced Britain’s credit rating from AAA to AA1. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it.’ Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the bank of England, was outvoted on its Monetary Policy Committee when he proposed more quantitative
Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army, with Griff Rhys Jones, is on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday, 7th July. I have spent a week with old, old men, interviewing veterans who served with the West African regiments in Burma in the 1940s. It’s for a television programme about my father’s war. The young men
So many people’s reputation is under threat these days — from bankers to cardinals to the Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard — that one imagines reputation management agencies, online or otherwise, are doing terrific business. The ancients got there more than two millennia ago. Greeks regularly expressed their desire to be virtuous in terms of
Political joke The Five Star Movement, led by comedian Beppe Grillo, won 26% of the vote in the Italian general election. Comedian John O’Farrell competed as Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election. Some other comedians who have won office: — Jon Gnarr won Reykjavik’s mayoral election in 2010 with 35% of the vote, on a
Healing the world Sir: We most warmly commend the courage of Professor Meirion Thomas (‘The next NHS scandal’, 23 February) in lifting the lid on the appalling abuse of the NHS by foreign visitors. It has been going on for years but has been covered up by the culture of fear that has pervaded that
