The idea that ‘loyalty is the Conservative party’s secret weapon’ was always dubious. Benjamin Disraeli, for instance, made his name attacking a sitting Conservative prime minister. This, though, did not stop him becoming arguably the party’s most celebrated leader. But in recent years, the ‘loyalty’ adage has become a joke — one that has taunted
What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken
A man in New Zealand has just been sent to prison for three months for watching cartoons of pixies, elves and trolls enjoying sexual intercourse. I don’t know, from the court report, if this was inter-species fairy-folk sex, i.e. if it was a nasty scene of one of those enormous, wart-festooned Norse Huldrefolk applying himself
I’ve no particular beef with the French, gruesomely tortured beef as it would no doubt be, but I’m a little tired of being told we ought to follow their example with our children. Elizabeth Truss, the normally quite sensible education minister, is the latest culprit. She believes that Britain’s nurseries are chaotic, noisy places. Children
The first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher was published on Tuesday. Since Lady Thatcher had stipulated that the book could appear only after her death, we were, in principle, ready. But it is still a huge undertaking to finish correcting a 900-page book on a Tuesday (the day before the funeral), and get
Economists should always leave themselves a margin for error. When challenged that free-market policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s led straight from boom to bust, Milton Friedman argued that problems arose not when politicians applied his prescriptions too dogmatically, but because they only ever did so half-heartedly. John Maynard Keynes, the
