Monday Busy busy. Dave is adamant that foreign policy cannot be reduced to soundbites, so of course, as Jed explained, we need a range of soundbites to convey this. ‘We will give solid not slavish support to the US’; ‘We will not come up with grand schemes to remake the world’ (Nigel says this is
I was very naughty when young. I stole from my schoolmates’ pockets as they played games. I stole from Woolworth’s. And probably more places. As responsibility entered my maturing soul, I tried to make amends. I advertised for those at school whom I might have made poorer and paid back many times the amount to
Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero
‘Things need to be different than what they currently are,’ Derek Simpson, the general secretary of the trade union Amicus, said on the Today programme last week. This is a proposition around which the whole country can unite. But there Mr Simpson’s status as national spokesman begins and ends. The former communist is one of
No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership. Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves
Third degree at Heathrow From Andrew HamiltonSir: In my experience the overzealous and politically correct airport security in America (High Life, 2 September) is being replicated in this country. At Heathrow security recently, off to see my son in Shanghai, I couldn’t resist asking the body-searcher whether or not I resembled a Muslim terrorist (I
