The world does not hold its breath during US-Russia summits as it did in the days of Kennedy and Khrushchev or Reagan and Gorbachev. But they are still important moments of (mostly choreographed) dialogue. Without Moscow’s co-operation, Barack Obama will find it far harder to make progress in Afghanistan or in his diplomatic strategy to
The shadow chancellor George Osborne has been lunching privately with the textiles magnate Richard Caring, the Labour-supporting businessman who got caught up in the cash for peerages investigation. It is less than a year since Osborne demonstrated a catastrophic failure of judgment by being lured onto a yacht owned by the disreputable Russian oligarch Oleg
Monday How dare Gordon and Sarah hold lasagne suppers! It is absolutely outrageous. It just shows the breathtaking arrogance of this Prime Minister that he thinks he can steal a groundbreaking idea like that and get away with it. Of course we are seeking legal advice. Dave definitely holds the patent, morally speaking, it’s just
The debate over the 10p tax controversy on Tuesday was more like a requiem for the Labour party than a rebellion. MPs spoke mournfully about how — yet again — their government would hit the poorest hardest. Gordon Brown had used the 2007 Budget to trick newspapers into reporting that he had lowered the basic rate of
Our guide to the top 50 political scandals concludes in this issue, and seems already to have brought great pleasure and amusement to readers. As David Selbourne observes on page 18, parliament is presently suffering from a terrible dose of swine flu, symptomatic of a much wider malaise in the polity. Revisiting the great scandals
Moore’s TV dinner Sir: While I have been generally supportive of Charles Moore’s quest to impose a degree of financial proportionality on what the BBC pays Jonathan Ross, and of his ‘scheme’ to withhold payment for his TV licence until the matter is satisfactorily addressed, I am dismayed to read that he is doing so
