I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very
It’s a remarkable stroke of luck for a columnist, but I have no views whatsoever on the euro. It’s not deliberate, this, just a function of my age. Most columnists seem to have started forming their euro views some time prior to 1992, and I simply wasn’t that sort of 14-year-old. ‘Do you worry about
My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks
David Cameron must sometimes wonder if the gods are against his modernising project. Events have forced him back on to the traditional Tory territory of Europe and the economy. This is not how the Cameroons expected it to be in the early days of his leadership. Then he defined himself not by his position on
A Spectator footnote on David Cameron’s adventure in Brussels last week. In 1990, Nick Ridley gave a famous, prescient, ill-tempered interview to the paper in which he condemned the single currency as a ‘German racket’. He had to resign, and Mrs Thatcher’s fall was not long in coming. Last week, Ridley’s nephew, the Northern Ireland
A consolation of the financial crisis is that it is producing a bumper crop of fiction, the best of which will be read long after all the hefty works of investigative non-fiction have been forgotten. Last year I praised Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, and my Christmas reading this year will include Justin Cartwright’s
I am very fond of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, because I once saw Mr and Mrs Bibi Netanyahu breakfasting there, and they had a moody teenage son who skulked, and Bibi was powerless over the skulking. It is not brown like the Savoy and, unlike the Dorchester, it has never mistaken me for a
