MONDAY I don’t know why everyone is getting so worked up about our lovely green taxes. If they read the small print, they would see that what Gids takes away with one hand, he is quite literally going to give us back with the other. Every penny that he takes taxing your holiday flights (if
As a freelance journalist, I spend far too much time ensconced in my festering paper mountain of an office, tapping away on subjects as vital to the world as the size 00 ‘debate’ and the imminent reunion of The Police. It’s always nice to get out, so a visit to the opening of ArtFutures was
Primary school pupils in Clackmannanshire, taught to philosophise ‘like Socrates’, have evidently demonstrated dramatic improvements in IQ and other tests. But since the philosophy they are taught is all about working together to seek answers to problems — a worthy aim, of course — it is not at all clear how Socratic they are actually
In his film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes Winston Churchill’s famous warning in 1936. Admonishing those who were ‘only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent’, Churchill declared: ‘The era of procrastination, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is
David Cameron has never quite understood why so many of his Conservative colleagues are so keen on America. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he was bemused to watch close political friends applauding the Prime Minister’s alliance with the White House and, with it, the Iraq war. He still refers to them as ‘you
Paterson’s pranks Sir: Could I, as the person who unwittingly provoked Jennifer Paterson’s outburst in the Spectator kitchen, say exactly what happened? I was not, as Simon Courtauld writes (‘Who wants to buy our old office?’, 10 March), ‘a junior member of staff’, but the magazine’s advertising director. The kitchen was opposite my office and
