Gstaad It’s party time here. From the richest billionaires down to those impoverished souls with only a few million to their name, the joint is jumpin’. Last week one tycoon converted his mega chalet into a nightclub and the music boomed away all night. Everyone who attended turned into Beethoven after one hour, which
To begin with it was mice. The house was overrun with them. She saw them out of the corner of her eye shooting across the room. Then they became bolder. Instead of running away they ran towards her, menacing her. So she set traps and laid poison. I’d come home and open a linen drawer
‘Is it for your daughter?’ said the sales assistant as I pointed to an expensive skincare product. She had glided over to me looking concerned as I stood in the pristine shop dressed in muddy boots and quilted coat, a woolly pompom hat on my head and not a scrap of make-up on my face
The first thing to note is that it’s not about policy. The not-so secret seven MPs who left the Labour party this morning have not changed their policy preferences. They have not become Tories. Nor have they even become liberals. They could, with little difficulty, endorse much of the Labour party’s 2017 manifesto without compromising
At last, having kept pretty shtum about it for the past few years, the virtue-signalling set has mustered up some sympathy for women caught up in the horrific Isis vortex. Unfortunately, though, their sympathy isn’t for the Yazidi women who were burned alive after refusing to become sex slaves for Isis jihadists. Or the Kurdish
Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without
I was 17 when the Labour party last split, in January 1981, and for a variety of reasons got quite caught up in the moment. It was partly because my father, the author of the 1945 Labour manifesto, was close to the Gang of Four — the original band of defectors — and was one
And so we say farewell to the round of 16 in the FA Cup, traditionally a viscerally thrilling process that embodies what we romantics like to think of as the glory of the Cup. With eight matches over four days, there was a lot of dross that all felt much worse for being spread so
Q. I have given up drink except on certain occasions when it would be really rude to refuse. What’s the best way of telling kind hosts at parties that you’re not drinking, without causing their faces to drop with disappointment? I’ve tried accepting a glass and then not drinking it, but that means a wasted
A serious restaurant for serious times: the Ledbury in Notting Hill. It’s a good time to do it, as the dreams of the Notting Hill set crumple to dust and Jacob Rees-Mogg rides out in his stupid hats. It has sat in its former pub on Ledbury Road since 2005. It won — and has
My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In 20 years’ time that sentence may seem normal. To me it seems at best whimsical, perhaps arch. There’s a lot of interrogating at the moment, quite apart from the traditional kind by unpleasant policemen. Jay
