The Week

Leading article

Sacred cows

The cow has had it too easy for too long. For years we humans have been jetting across the world, guiltily clutching complimentary snacks, shamed by the feeling that every minute of our flight was damaging our planet’s fragile climate. Our bovine friends, meanwhile, have been openly flatulent, emitting devastating global warming gases without fear

A victory for Bufton-Tufton

The perfect political U-turn is so subtle that it goes almost entirely unnoticed, as David Cameron demonstrated this week. He realised, well before the press, that a full-scale revolt was brewing in the Conservative party over his ill-conceived plan for all-women shortlists. So he abandoned the plan on Tuesday, but he did so using the

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week – 31 October 2009

Mr Gordon Brown is prepared to campaign actively for Mr Tony Blair, whom he replaced as Prime Minister, to be the first permanent president of the European Council of the European Union, Downing Street said. Mr David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had said earlier that Mr Blair would be a good candidate because ‘we need

Diary

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 31 October 2009

Monday Some v awkward people are deliberately misunderstanding what Dave said about women- only shortlists. We feel we must remind these people that troublemaking is fundamentally unConservative and that any further attempts to disrupt Compassionate Cameronian principles of compliance with the party line and non-resistance to the stated policy of the leadership will be met

Diary – 31 October 2009

On tour one develops air-conditioning paranoia. (I’ve just returned from a two-month Pet Shop Boys’ tour of North and South America, from Montreal to Lima.) You approach your latest hotel room with dread. How noisy is the air-conditioning? Can you turn it off? Is your room on the top floor directly under the main air-conditioning

Ancient and modern

Ancient & Modern | 31 October 2009

Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’?  Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’? In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, this

Letters

Letters | 31 October 2009

Squeezing out democracy Sir: Melanie Phillips did a first-rate job in pinning down the Islamofascist ‘elephant in the room’ (‘The clash of uncivilisations’, 24 October). There was, however, one area not touched on: how the Islamists and the BNP are really two sides of the same coin. I live six miles from the BNP heartland