There can be little doubt that Britain is edging towards intervening in Syria. President Bashar Assad’s bloody ruthlessness seems to be paying off: his forces are retaking former rebel strongholds (the strategic town of Qusair was reclaimed this week) and the more he believes he can win, the less likely he is to negotiate. From
Home Patrick Mercer MP resigned the Conservative whip after being filmed in discussion with a fake Fijian firm that paid him £4,000 to ask parliamentary questions; he was in fact being investigated by BBC’s Panorama and the Daily Telegraph. Lord Cunningham and Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate were suspended by the Labour party after the Sunday
This was the best kind of week. It started with a three-hour road trip with my manager/surrogate father/shrink/bodyguard to Monmouth to record album no. 5. Glenn Gould (whom I worship with the fervour of a pre-teen Belieber) talked about the ‘womb-like security of the recording studio’. Which was why, in a somewhat pussy move, he
Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin. We entered the EU voluntarily, but as
Spy society High on the agenda when Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping meet in California will be US accusations that China is stealing US intellectual property. Yet the industrial revolution in the US was based on a piece of industrial espionage. — Samuel Slater, who became known as the father of the US
Why Ukip aren’t extremists Sir: I don’t wish to be rude to Matthew Parris (‘Why Ukip is a party of extremists’, 1 June), but he should think carefully before labelling civilised citizens as extremists. It’s a silly word to use given what real extremists get up to these days, but the important point is that
