Easter day The late date of Easter this year has rekindled one of Britain’s lengthiest political debates: the implementation, or rather non-implementation, of the Easter Act 1928. The act was to fix the date of Easter on the Sunday following the second Saturday in April — meaning that it would wander between 9 and 15
Prince of cars It was revealed that Audi has been enticing royal customers with 60 per cent discounts. It is not the first car company to target royalty to build its image. — In 1898 the Daimler Motor Company of Coventry offered the Prince of Wales the use of five cars on a visit to
Intern affairs — Nick Clegg called for internships to be made available to students from poor backgrounds, although it was then revealed that the young Clegg was himself parachuted into an internship at a bank thanks to a phone call from his dad. — The word ‘internship’ first entered public consciousness in Britain after the
Flowering wilderness A Bangor university study has claimed that Antarctica has become greener as the climate in the Western Peninsula has warmed. While most of Antarctica is under permanent snow and ice, one per cent of the continent’s surface area is warm enough in the summer for the snow to melt and expose two species
Night shift The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, says the corporation may cut the £150 million a year it spends on night-time programming, with the ‘theoretical possibility’ that insomniac viewers might be left with a black screen. — Although it is now taken for granted, 24-hour television is a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until
Midsomer and Soham The producer of ITV’s murder-mystery series Midsomer Murders was suspended after saying he didn’t want black characters on the show because it was ‘the last bastion of Englishness’. While many English villages still reflect Midsomer in their colour, it is over 200 years since a black man first settled in the English
The first bureaucrat David Cameron described bureaucrats in the Civil Service as ‘the enemy within’ and vowed to get their backs off business. It has been a very long battle. The term ‘bureaucracy’ was coined by the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759). Son of a wealthy merchant in St Malo, Vincent
University challenge An analysis of university applications has suggested that 30,000 students had committed plagiarism when writing personal statements on their forms. An earlier trawl through applications found: 175 applicants were inspired to apply for medicine by an infirm grandfather 234 had developed an interest in medicine after ‘burning a hole in my pyjamas aged
Gay marriage The government has proposed to allow gay couples the full rights of marriage. The first country to do this was the Netherlands in 2001, but the world’s first gay ‘wedding’ is often reported as that between 74-year-old Axel Lundahl-Madsen and 67-year-old Eigil Eskildsen in Copenhagen City Hall on 1 October 1989, the day on which
Whose cultures? David Cameron declared multiculturalism a failure last week. But where does the idea come from? — In the late 1960s the Canadian government set up a Royal Commission into ‘Bilingualism and Biculturalism’ to unite the English- and French-speaking parts of the country. It suggested a policy to champion other ethnic groups, too. Prime
Long-serving leaders Hosni Mubarak entered Egypt’s crisis as one of the world’s longest-serving political leaders. Here are five others: Leader
No such thing as society The government’s ‘Big Society’ project is partly inspired by a desire to undo the damage created by a remark made by Mrs Thatcher in an interview with Woman’s Own on 31 October 1987. Here are some extracts from the transcript: ‘I think we have gone through a period when too
A collector’s item — The Lord Chamberlain ruled that there would be no official commemorative tea towel for the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. Some manufacturers are going to produce them regardless. But will they be a good investment? Consider the four Charles and Diana tea towels were for sale on eBay last
Prison regimes A riot at Ford Open Prison in Sussex raised questions as to the regime in jails. This is some of what prisoners can expect: — Category A (Whitemoor, Cambs): work opportunities in recycling, laundry and restoring computers for schools in Africa. Courses in thinking skills and anger management. Gym, sports hall and Astroturf.
Their year — 2010 was the International Year of Biodiversity and the Nurse (both according to the UN); and the Year of the Seafarer (International Maritime Organisation), the Lung (Forum of International Respiratory Societies) and the Tiger (China). — 2011 will be the International Year of Forests (UN) and Chemistry (UNESCO), the European Year of
Model towns Celebration, the town in Florida founded by Disney in the 1990s, has suffered its first murder and a suicide. Model towns have had mixed fortunes. —New Lanark, near Glasgow, was built by industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen as a model for utopian socialism. It narrowly escaped demolition in the 1960s and is
Happy talk David Cameron wants to measure our happiness alongside GDP. The first measure of happiness — the Gross National Happiness index — was instigated by the former king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in 1972. — Heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings, it contained questions which might not strike many Britons as being important to
Having it so good Lord Young was forced to resign as an adviser to David Cameron after claiming that people in Britain ‘had never had it so good’. The phrase is associated with Harold Macmillan, who used it in 1957, but he was echoing the 1952 US presidential election slogan of the Democrat Adlai Stevenson:
Trouble with stags In addition to next year’s royal wedding, Prince William will have to organise the royal stag party. William got into trouble in 2008 for flying a Chinook helicopter from Lincolnshire to his cousin Peter Phillips’s stag party on the Isle of Wight — at a cost of £8,716 to the public purse.
Radical cheek Phil Woolas, the first MP for 99 years to have his election to Parliament overturned, has fewer supporters than the Radical MP John Wilkes, who managed to have his election overturned four times in the Middlesex election fiasco of 1768. —Wilkes was first barred from the House of Commons in 1763 after going