Columnists

Columns

James Forsyth

No one wants to fight a national campaign. This will be the least general election in years

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-snp-threat-to-westminster/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the not-very-general election” startat=780] Listen [/audioplayer]There’s normally an easy way to tell which party is losing a general election campaign. Whenever one side starts telling you to ignore the national polls and look at what is happening in certain key seats, it is a sure sign that

Oh joy! Sean Penn has tried to crack a joke

What a pleasure it is to see the Hollywood actor Sean Penn neck deep in PC ordure. The rodentine thespian was handing out an award at the Oscars to his friend the Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, for his film Birdman. ‘Who gave this sonofabitch a green card?’ Penn quipped about his mate — at

Two shops. Two philosophies. Which side are you on?

Are you Lush or are you Aldi? Me, I’m Aldi all the way. So much so that when someone — usually my daughter — tries to drag me anywhere near one of Lush’s painfully ubiquitous high street cosmetics shops, I respond a bit like the Antichrist does in the ‘it’s just a church, Damien’ scene

Any other business

How Labour’s 50p tax trick has ended up helping George Osborne

Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention than the employment and wage-growth numbers a week earlier, underlining my belief that voters care a lot less (or indeed not at all) about the intangible ‘fiscal deficit’ and its implications than they do about