OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilised men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part
I’ve been on two cruises before: one was fun, the other misery. The misery one was a late August cruise from Dover to Iceland via Shetland, Orkney and Faroe. The weather was unseasonably chilly, the North Sea rough. The ship pitched and rolled through fog for days on end. At Shetland we went ashore and
The ‘I’m Voting For Chuka’ posters in my rich neighbours’ front windows pushed me over the edge. There is nothing so likely to galvanise one’s inner Tory than the sight of the biggest, poshest houses in the neighbourhood displaying left-wing conceitedness. ‘Of course they’re voting Labour, they’re the only ones who can afford to,’ said
Back on political duty with CNN in election week, I came across a dead rat in Downing Street. It had to be an omen, but had the rodent been leaving or arriving when he met his fate, presumably in the jaws of the lean-looking fox who loped across the No. 10 doorstep shortly afterwards? Perhaps
On election day I was in Puglia in the ‘heel’ of Italy, where interest in British politics could hardly be lower. One local news website that I consulted appeared to give higher priority to the fact that Italian penis-enlargement operations had increased by 20 per cent during the past year than to the electoral bombshell
After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.
If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end you will have heard some of the England players being interviewed afterwards. They uniformly referred to their coach, the now departed Peter Moores, as ‘Mooresie’. And therein you feel lies a few of the problems
Q. I have a friend who can be shy and inhibited. Recently, he was invited to stay on a Caribbean island by a generous and rich host, so wanted to take the host and his wife and the other members of the house party out to dinner. The host suggested a beach restaurant which, despite
Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head,
I was interested by the widespread annoyance at the use of progressive by the lefty parties before the election. Irritation is not the essence of a love of language (philology), but it is a symptom. The suspicion here was that socialism is so pejorative that a euphemism was being sought. It is true that when
