What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than President Assad — 72,000 is the latest estimate, from the House of Commons health select committee. Perhaps it is at last time to sit down and negotiate with them, much though this will stick in
I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution
His party may be struggling to reach double digits in the polls, but Nick Clegg is entitled to feel smug as he heads to Glasgow for this year’s Lib Dem conference. This gathering, the penultimate one before the general election, has long been circled in Westminster diaries as the moment when a challenge to his
The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater
The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion. ‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers.
I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz this week accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’, so for all I know, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury might be an absolute riot. Although actually, writing that, it occurs to me that maybe I have and she was just too boring
It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves.
The political conference season may be lacking in party activists nowadays, but it has lost none of its importance to the party leaders. For David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, the next four weeks are a chance to position themselves for the final, full parliamentary year before the general election. Clegg needs to get
After David Cameron’s decision to seek parliamentary approval for air strikes against Syria, two lobbies came charging in, banners aloft. Now their attention has moved to Barack Obama’s decision to seek approval from the US Congress. Though on opposite sides of the argument, these two groups have something in common, and it depresses me. Both
They’re getting the rebuttals in early, have you noticed that? You might call them a pre-emptive strikes. Here’s William Hague, speaking to BBC Radio 4 about those chemical attacks in Syria… ‘To believe that anybody else had done it, you would have to believe that the opposition in Syria would use, on a large scale,
I’m now half way through Atlas Shrugged and I’m loving almost every moment. But Ayn Rand isn’t someone you read for pleasure, I’m beginning to realise. She’s someone you read so you can underline sentences and scrawl in the margins ‘Yes’, ‘God that is so TRUE!’ and ‘YES!!!’ For example, at the heart of the
For a long time my view of the Imperial Capital — as, like other Scots, I am still prone to considering London — was borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s description of its riverside: ‘It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that
Conservatives have been returning to their Westminster offices this week to find the wind behind them. Something suddenly seems to be going right: there’s good news on the economy, jobs and immigration and Labour seems to be in gentle meltdown. The idea of an outright majority in a 2015 election suddenly seems a lot more
How can it be that we’re two weeks on, and there’s still been no media witch hunt to identify the (I choose my words carefully) cretinous meathead who decided to threaten Ecuador with the storming of their London embassy if it didn’t expel Julian Assange? Has there been a more shaming diplomatic fiasco for Britain
Do you share the very real pain of the disability lobby groups about George Galloway MP referring to someone with whom he was arguing as a window-licker? Maybe you do. I have never heard the term used except as a mild admonition to someone who had just done or said something stupid. For others, it
It wasn’t hard to tell the Republican establishment from the Tea Party activists at this year’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. The different uniforms illustrated the unresolved tensions that run through American conservatism. In the convention hall, the regular Republicans often looked dressed for dinner at eight — smart jackets and pearls. A boy
Sometimes only a cliché will do, especially when the subject is the Australian Labor party. Labor is holed beneath the water line and is sinking fast. No one, not even its newly reinstated skipper, Kevin Rudd, is capable of keeping the boat afloat as the nation heads for a general election on 7 September. In
I returned last week from a short break in the Balkans; travelling by train in Serbia, walking from village to village over the mountains of northern Albania, an evening in a big Albanian town, a couple of journeys in Montenegro and a very short time in Croatia… so only a taste; nothing that makes me
It’s senseless to ask how things are going to end, because things as a general rule don’t. They rumble on, they morph, and yesterday’s drama becomes tomorrow’s eyebrow-raising justification for thinking that people used to be inexplicable idiots. Nonetheless, I read these stories of house prices rising again and I cannot help but wonder. How
So farewell then £80,000 salary, £150,000 expense account, secretary, team of assistants, constituency office, first-class travel, immunity from prosecution, Brussels blowouts, ludicrous pension and all the other perks I’d been so looking forward to enjoying from May next year onwards. Ukip has decided that it doesn’t, after all, want to have me as one of