Vanity thy name is Nikki Bedi. I’ve just been for one of my biannual visits to my ‘derm’ Dr Nick Lowe. The Times recently called him Dr Botox. I’ve been his patient for 13 years; the first seven in Santa Monica, where my skin had begun to resemble a chamois leather. Years of sun worship
Monday Dear me! Why does everyone take what we say so literally? When Dave declared that he wanted to end Punch and Judy Politics he was speaking metaphorically. He didn’t mean he was literally going to stop shouting abuse at Gordon. That would be silly. We need to hold the government to account. The British
Boris Johnson has vowed as mayor to emulate his hero Pericles, turning London into ‘an education to Britain’ as Athens was (Pericles claimed) to Greece. In one sense this will be difficult since the mayor has limited responsibilities, mainly transport and police, none of which feature in any known Periclean policy document. But if Mr
Over lunch about a year ago, I tried to tease out the intentions of someone tipped as a possible successor to Gordon Brown. He was feigning optimism and loyalty to the anointed leader-in-waiting, so I advanced some hypothetical scenarios involving various MPs being run over by buses. So would he maybe… ‘Me? God, no,’ he
In its 6 October 2007 edition, The Spectator reported on Israel’s air-strike on Syria exactly a month before. We noted that the 6 September raid ‘may have saved the world from a devastating threat’ and revealed that a senior British ministerial source had told us that: ‘If people had known how close we came to
Big names at last Tuesday’s Intelligence Squared debate. Our beaming chairman Adam Boulton called on Will Self to propose the motion that America has lost its moral authority. In his sharp black suit, Self glared at us like an undertaker whose hearse has just failed its MOT and rattled through the sins of ‘the paternalistic
Call that a crisis? Sir: Ian Hay Davison (‘How to rescue a bank’, 19 April) is right that the Northern Rock episode was far from unprecedented. But there is much more to say. The difficulties of a number of relatively minor institutions in the early 1990s, including National Mortgage Bank (to which he refers), were
