When the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Steve Hilton, quits Downing Street in May, he’ll leave behind what he believes to be a mechanism to solve the Conservatives’ biggest electoral problem, which is their failure to win urban seats. On 3 May, ten of England’s largest cities will vote on whether to join London in having
I find myself at a bit of a loss this week, for which apologies. I had hoped to write something inappropriate and threatening about Iran. Or, if not that, then contrasted in a less than sensitive manner the amount of press coverage afforded to that appalling murder of Afghan civilians by a soldier with the
Oh dear. It turns out I’m in favour of the marginalisation of religion in public life. People talk about this as though it’s a bad thing. But I’ve had a decent think about what I’m in favour of and — hmm, bit of a surprise —it’s definitely that. Take gay marriage. Support it, don’t support
With gay marriage will come gay divorce. If you look at civil partnership dissolutions, the numbers have multiplied more than ten times in four years, though this rate of increase will presumably level off. (The level is still much lower than that of heterosexual marriage.) What will be the grounds for gay divorce? The only
I wrote here in November that ‘history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot’, and the FSA, in its grindingly slow, bureacratic way, is finally about to catch up with them. The regulator has at last issued a ‘Final Notice’ to the Bank of Scotland arm of HBOS to
