James Forsyth reviews the week in politics There is one promise that David Cameron makes regularly that even the shadow Cabinet doesn’t believe he intends to keep: that he is going to end the era of ‘sofa government’ and bring back ‘Cabinet government’. Their experience over the past four years has taught them that real
You know what I don’t believe in? Engineering. Shameless pseudo-science. You want to watch out for those so-called ‘engineers’. See that bridge that fell down in Cumbria the other day? Lordy, they’ll be cashing in on that. Up they’ll pop with their ‘stress points’ and ‘foundations’ and other such insider-ish, clubby mumbo-jumbo. As though any
‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the
Ross Clark says it’s not so much the Prince of Wales who has put the mockers on this controversial Qatari-backed development, but the grim economics of the credit crunch Gordon Brown is well known for his bad timing in selling off half the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market in 1999. But
Richard Northedge says the FTSE’s dismal performance since the millennium will deter a generation of investors The familiar fallback for fund managers when shares falter is that investment is for the long term. But how long is long? December marks the tenth anniversary of a stockmarket peak that has never been seen again. Money invested
Matthew Lynn marks the 20th anniversary of the peak of the Nikkei and asks whether we’ve learned any lessons Twenty years ago this month, as we’ve been reminded by countless documentaries, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Eastern Europe was convulsed by the revolutions from which communism never recovered. But much further east, something else
