Next week, when Keir Starmer appears on stage at Labour conference in Brighton, it will be the first time he has spoken to a packed crowd of party members since he became leader. Covid restrictions meant his inaugural leader’s speech at party conference in September 2020 was delivered to an empty hall and shared via
Two weeks have passed and somehow James Conway is still in a job. He is the director of the English Touring Opera, despite having fired 14 of its musicians because they were born with the wrong colour of skin. These middle- to late-career musicians were presented with a letter from James informing them that henceforth
‘One day,’ she writes, ‘we had the Minister for Northern Ireland for the night. He arrived wearing a kilt, which must have made the evening memorable for our German guests.’ Writing here (I should explain) is the widow of Sir Julian Bullard, then ambassador in Bonn, the West German capital. ‘Harry [the butler] beckoned to
This last weekend I attended the memorial service for my father, who died in July. This isn’t a bid for sympathy. Everyone’s father dies; most of us expect to suffer our bereavements in private; you didn’t know him. But in a larger sense, this is a bid for sympathy. That is, sympathy for us all.
Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, has begun this academic year by announcing it will be his last in the post. Professor Toope says, no doubt truthfully, that he wants to see more of his Canadian family, dissevered from him by Covid. But I think it reasonable to relate his departure to wider issues. When
Will my bath water still be hot by Christmas? That’s not a question I’d normally feel a need to share with you, but shortly after this morning’s ablutions I read that Bulb Energy — the UK’s sixth-biggest energy supplier with 1.7 million customers, including me — ‘is seeking a bailout to stay afloat amid surging
