‘Here, Wolf,’ says the Fawn to me, showing me a saucer. ‘Look at this! This is the new place where you put your mouth things. See! See the saucer? Look at the saucer! See the saucer! This saucer will now live by your bed. This is the place where from now on you put your
It is very lucky for the BBC that Channel 4 exists. Whatever imbecilic, supposedly attention-grabbing trash the BBC commissions, there will always be its commercial rival around to commission something still more imbecilic, still more trashy. Such as — if you remember — ‘Wank Week’, a series exploring the manifest delights of masturbation. Having gained sufficient exposure with
The coalition parties have governed together for more than three years now, but they remain culturally very different beasts. When the Liberal Democrats held an away day last week, it was at a conference centre in Milton Keynes — picked, in the words of one Lib Dem, ‘because there are no distractions there’. The Tories
On Monday night, a Tory donor spent £90,000 on a bust of David Cameron at the party’s summer ball. It was an encouraging sign that there are still Conservatives prepared to lavish money and praise on the Prime Minister, and a reminder that the Tories will be able to run an extremely well- funded campaign
Why is Christianity so unhelpful on the very ethical dilemma that most concerns ordinary people in our everyday lives? Why does Jesus have nothing helpful to say about the ranking of obligations? Last weekend, digging a huge hole in the ground to receive a gargantuan granite trough I’ve just bought, I was about four feet
The PM was keeping his enemies close at a Tory fundraiser last week at Old Billingsgate Market. Dave exchanged uneasy smiles with his deadliest rival, Boris, who was seated on the same table as him. And something else seemed slightly fishy at the former herring exchange. Guests noticed that there were rather fewer tables than
From which of the actors engaged in the thoroughly entertaining case of Edward Snowden has come the biggest spewing-out of cant, do you reckon? Edward himself? The Guardian? Or the Yanks or -Chinese? Edward was a fairly low-level CIA technical contractor in Hawaii when he released to the world details of his government’s clandestine electronic
The other day, George Osborne was walking with his wife across the courtyard of the Royal Academy. In the evening sunshine, the Chancellor spotted another Tory MP in the opposite corner. The MP was on his mobile: a wave would have seen courtesies observed. But Osborne, who was dressed for dinner, strode over and waited
Wouldn’t it be nice just once in a while to have a war in the -Middle East that wasn’t predicated on outright duplicitous nonsense? Just occasionally? There are, after all, any number of sincere reasons one could advance for intervention now in Syria. (If one thought that was a good idea, which as it happens
Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the
A few weeks ago I drove to Market Harborough for my test as a potential Ukip candidate. The process was very thorough. There was a media interview section, where one of my examiners did a bravura impersonation of a tricksy local radio presenter (he even did the traffic bulletin beforehand). Then came a test on
By the time the G8 is next held in this country, the United Kingdom may well have left the European Union. In the next eight years, the question of whether Britain is in or out will be settled. We know that if David Cameron is Prime Minister after the next election, that decision will be
Some politicians don’t read their own manifestos. And some don’t even read the names of their own parties. When it comes to academy schools, the Lib Dems are struggling to comprehend ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’. A Suffolk school earmarked for closure was rescued by campaigning parents who invited a commercial operator — International English Schools UK
Gweru on the central Highveld of Zimbabwe used to be called Gwelo when I was there as a boy but seemed otherwise largely unchanged when we passed through a couple of weeks ago. Sleepy, laid-back: a petrol station, a few stores and a scattering of offices and little townships of bungalows on the main tarred
There’s an Islamic school in Birmingham which is very highly regarded. It’s called Darul Uloom — the same name as the school in Chislehurst which was recently the subject of an arson attack. In fact, that’s how I stumbled across it. Anyway, Darul Uloom in Birmingham is a good school not only academically, but also for
Tory MPs were in buoyant mood as they dashed off to the 7 p.m. vote on Monday night. They shouted out hearty greetings to each other, slapped backs and had a spring in their step. They were buzzing in the way a fielding team does just after the fast bowler has hit a star batsman a
Just because the environmentalists have been proved so epically wrong about global warming doesn’t mean they’re right about everything else. Ocean acidification, overpopulation, species loss… you’re going to hear a lot about dire and urgent threats like these in the coming months as the greenies establish a fallback position after the collapse of their climate
It’s sleaze time again in Westminster. A few good stings by the broadcasters and the press and we see his lordship ‘Nuclear’ Jack Cunningham coining it by asking for £12,000 per month to make use of his extensive contacts and also his ability to get a table on the terrace of the Lords. £12,000 a
This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine
‘The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it,’ wrote P.J. O’Rourke in 1991. He might well say the same thing about the Conservatives in 2013. The much-trumpeted reform of the benefit system, the Universal Credit scheme, had a warning sign slapped on it last week
