Monday I couldn’t say this out loud in the office, but our people certainly do a better class of expenses fiddle. There was something awfully depressing about all those Labour claims for dry rot, porn, bath plugs, nappies and Kit-Kats from the vending machine at B&Q. Fancy selling your soul for that?! The fact that
To an ancient Greek, nothing was more precious than honour (tîmê). To an ancient Greek, nothing was more precious than honour (tîmê). The root of this word was financial — what you were worth. And what you were worth was judged not by your own values (note ‘value’), as by other people’s assessment of you.
This week, the nation beholds Parliament with a collective contempt unrivalled in living memory. We need a modern-day Trollope to do justice to this wave of revulsion, triggered by the remarkable revelations in the Telegraph. Gilbert Burnet, the great ecclesiastical and political historian of his time, wrote of the corrupt MPs elected in 1710 that
At a moment of such alarming disconnection between the political class and the electorate, it is cheering to be reminded that not every part of our constitution is faltering, or at odds with the grain of public opinion. On Tuesday, the Prince of Wales addressed the Royal Institute of British Architects, 25 years after his
A charted course Sir: Charles Moore has lost his bearings and entered ‘terra incognita’ in his recent exploration of the Royal Geographical Society’s remit and work in the 21st century (The Spectator’s Notes, 9 May). To be clear, the society stays true, today as over its 170-year history, to its founding charter to ‘advance geographical
