When Conservative leaders come to address the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, they are required to stand outside Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons until the rest of the agenda is completed. When Conservative leaders come to address the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, they are required to stand outside Committee Room 14
Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the
I’ve always wondered about the strike-rate of men who, in that fine media phrase, ‘aren’t safe in taxis’. I’ve always wondered about the strike-rate of men who, in that fine media phrase, ‘aren’t safe in taxis’. It must be pretty high, you’d have thought, otherwise we’d tend to hear about them before they, for example,
In the 1983 comedy Trading Places, two unscrupulous commodity brokers wagered that they could take a vagrant off the street and turn him into a successful trader. The film was a hit, symbolic of a more innocent age when interference in ordinary people’s livelihoods by gambling financiers was the exception rather than the rule. What
Like sinister Siamese twins, the words ‘pension’ and ‘scandal’ seem to have become joined at the hip. So perhaps it is no surprise that some very good news — perhaps the coalition’s most important extension of choice during its first year — was largely ignored by the media last month. Most people these days are
A beginner’s guide to investing in commodities The arrival on the London Stock Exchange of the Swiss-based mining and commodities behemoth Glencore, valued at £40 billion, has provided a rare insight into the mysteries of the natural resources world. This remains a relatively little understood sector even though the first commodities trades can be traced
In search of the next ‘trade of the decade’ Imagine you were sitting in St Paul’s at the 1981 royal wedding, waiting for the mismatched bridal couple to arrive and idly speculating about the best way to save up for a wedding present for their first-born, a generation hence. The odds are you would not
Another tale of the Great Seducer and my tip for the woman to succeed him When I was young I knew a man whose opening gambit with any pretty girl was, ‘Hello, shall we go straight to bed?’ He reckoned one in 20 said yes, so if he asked the question 20 times a day,
