Had the public been asked, before Monday morning, to identify two MPs who stood for honesty and decency, the names Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind would have been prominent among their replies. Both have served as foreign secretary, Straw also as home secretary and justice secretary. Neither seemed unduly driven by personal ambition, nor
Home Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign secretary, resigned as chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee and promised not to stand for Parliament in May after he and Jack Straw, the former Labour foreign secretary, were suspended from their parties. This followed their being separately secretly filmed apparently offering their services for payment
It’ll be a Skype interview, says the producer from Greek television, and not live. In TV-speak that usually means not urgent and not important, but I’ve become vaguely interesting to Greeks because of the ‘Moscovici draft’ — a doomed attempt to resolve the crisis, leaked to me amid denials of its existence. The interview goes
Ancients would have been astonished that parties never debate against each other in open, public forum except on the telly before general elections — and even then they do their best to resist. The reason is that politicians understand ‘debate’ only in terms of internal parliamentary procedures where the outcomes are entirely predictable. The result is
Golden league Some MPs who earn Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s rate of £5,000 a day: — Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury): £3,333 for four hours work as deputy chairman of Woburn Energy. — Greg Barker (Bexhill and Battle): £20,000 for 30 hours providing advice to Ras Al Khaimah Development LLC. — Henry Bellingham (NW Norfolk): £7,500 for
From The Spectator, 27 February 1915: Observers of birds have been much interested by the evidence, which seems to be fairly satisfactory, that pheasants in as remote a part of England as Westmorland were disturbed by the firing in the North Sea on the day of Sir David Beatty’s action and showed many signs of excitement.
The presence of a church Sir: The challenge for the Church of England and the wider community is to ensure that our village churches are a blessing and not a burden (‘It takes a village’, 21 February). The Church of England has approximately 16,000 churches, three-quarters of which are listed by English Heritage. Most of
