Even now, months after he was forced to resign, Boris Johnson has a potency that no other British politician can match. Everything he says still catches the attention of Westminster and the media. Like Donald Trump, he enrages his enemies so much that they can seem obsessed. And rumours of a Boris restoration will not
Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in
I was brought up on Dan Quayle jokes. You know the ones – like the gag that the then vice-president had turned up in Latin America and apologised for not speaking Latin. Thankfully vice-presidents are no longer a laughing stock. Today we have Kamala Harris. Anyway, probably the most memorable line about Quayle was that
In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring
You’ll recall that I’ve railed for years against zero interest rates, which transplanted a cancerous marrow into the very bones of the financial system. Originally a novel emergency expedience to shore up a fiscal skeleton riddled with osteoporosis in 2008, effectively free money was allowed to persist for an improbable 14 years. Not to forget,
Obviously it is not the fault of Ofsted that a headteacher, Ruth Perry, killed herself after her school, formerly rated ‘outstanding’, was downgraded to ‘inadequate’ by its inspectors. Suicide is, by definition, the decision of the person committing it. It is also true that second-rate schools and teaching unions detest inspections precisely because they keep
If G-SIBs were a gentlemen’s club rather than a category invented by the Basel-based Financial Stability Board, Credit Suisse would have been kicked down the front steps months ago. G-SIBs are the 30 ‘global systemically important banks’ and even within that list, Credit Suisse counted among those with the lowest ‘required levels of addition capital
