It is the fate of all new prime ministers to be compared with their recent predecessors. Theresa May has already been accused of being the heir to the micro-managing Gordon Brown. Her allies, meanwhile, see a new Margaret Thatcher, an uncompromising Boadicea destined to retrieve sovereignty from Europe. But perhaps a more fitting model for
Now is the time of year to take down the Christmas decorations from your front window and put up, in their place, the anti-immigration posters. Please display them prominently and make sure the message on each is suitably strident. It behoves all of us to do this, as quickly as possible, even — perhaps especially
A flash of the future, over the holidays, that felt like a flash of the past. It happened on Christmas Day, just after lunch, when my father-in-law gave me a virtual reality headset. It looks like a pair of ski goggles. They used to be fearsomely expensive, but recently some bright spark came up with
The headline business story of the holiday season was the latest bailout of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. This is Italy’s third largest bank and, according to recent ECB ‘stress tests’, Europe’s weakest — regarded by pessimists both as a potential catalyst for systemic collapse and a symptom of deeper Italian problems that could
‘Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,’ remarked the journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, ‘is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.’ He was right, but the fault lies not with the newspapers. The problem arises from the idea of news. ‘News’
‘My deep concern is that because of changed ways that news is now gathered, collated, packaged, delivered and displayed, the country can often find itself in… the tyrannical grip of the massed media… which could seriously threaten the political health of the United Kingdom as a Parliamentary democracy.’ This is from a letter I have
