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Why I’m standing to be a local councillor

It was a strange place for the red mist to descend. A railway car park in the snooty Surrey town of Weybridge. I was putting my £3.50 into the ticket machine when I spotted a notice from Elmbridge Borough Council which told those of us who had the temerity to pay for our parking spot

My dream for Turkey, by Boris’s great-grandfather

Norman Stone on the dramatic life and death of Ali Kemal, one-time interior minister of Turkey and our mayoral candidate’s forebear Boris Johnson is one eighth Turkish. His great-grandfather (there is, if you abstract the fez and the moustache, a family resemblance) was a well-known writer, Ali Kemal (1868–1922) who came, because of his politics,

Joking apart: why Boris is the man for the job

Boris Johnson has confounded his critics, says Matthew d’Ancona. The contest will go to the wire, but our man has proved himself to be both shrewd enough and serious enough to take charge ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next Mayor of London…’ A January dinner at the Dorchester in honour of Boris Johnson, and

Obama needs to knock Hillary out — and quick

Hillary Clinton did not have to wait until 3 a.m. for the call telling her that she had won the Pennsylvania primary. Within an hour of the polls closing, the news networks had declared her the winner and by the end of the night she had secured a double-digit lead, handily beating the spread set

The truth is that the house price crash is, overall, good news

If you take that excellent map showing negative equity ‘hot-spots’ produced by George Bridges for The Spectator a couple of weeks back, and overlay it across a map of cancer ‘hot-spots’ for the UK, you will find that those baleful dark areas, the bad places on each map, tally almost exactly. You might have expected

The Beeb behaved like a Da Vinci Code villain

The last time Opus Dei was portrayed as a murderous, self-flagellating, power-hungry secret society of monstrous hypocrites was — you may remember — in The Da Vinci Code, first in the novel, then in the film starring Tom Hanks. Millions read the book, millions saw the film, millions decided that we were the personification of