Would you rather this country was led by a man who is out of touch, arrogant and smug or someone who is out of his depth, weak and out of touch? That, according to the voters themselves, is the choice they’ll have to make at the next election. It is an illustration of just how
Labour activists are quietly amused that Mrs Thatcher’s death may lead to a library being built in her honour. ‘Tricky one for the Tories,’ says a top Labour figure. ‘Presumably David Cameron will open it. And Eric Pickles will close it.’ In Tory circles, meanwhile, the jokes are all about a future Cameron library. Built in a
It kicked off a bit at Wembley last Saturday evening, during the semi-final of the FA Cup between Millwall, of south-east London, and Wigan, of somewhere in the north-west of England. A gentleman sitting a couple of rows behind me requested of a chap standing in the gangway that he perhaps ought to sit down.
It must be a couple of years since, spooked by the banking crisis and walking past the Savoy hotel on the Strand, I remembered a clever but impetuous Polish friend’s advice to buy bullion — silver or gold — and his mention that there was a respectable dealer in the Savoy arcade. And as I
Margaret Thatcher’s death has inevitably prompted intense reflection among Tories about what lessons the party should learn from her time in office. ‘We must finish the job’ is the refrain on the lips of Thatcherite ministers, and there are more of those today than there were a year ago. The experience of office has had
There’s nothing more irritating then being asked to apologise for something you haven’t done. No, wait, there is: when the person demanding the apology is one of the friends you admire most in the world — and when the alleged victim of your non-existent crime is one of the people you most despise. The friend’s
I’m afraid we have to use Nelson Mandela as an example once again. He is proving very useful in his dotage, old Nels, as a comparison for stuff. A sort of benchmark. So, when the BBC’s Eddie Mair kebabed Boris Johnson and called him a ‘pretty nasty piece of work’, it seemed to me relevant
So. As of last week, punching a goth is a political act in Greater Manchester, but not in Derbyshire. Sussex is still making its mind up. Odd, yes; funny, no. As you might have read, those police forces who now define assaults on goths as hate crimes have taken this decision in direct response, pretty
Ten Downing Street has been an odd place these past few days. The prime ministerial portraits that line the main staircase have been taken down and the furniture covered in dust sheets, as the authorities take advantage of David Cameron’s absence to spring clean. But the process has reminded those who work there of the
Chat, chat, chat. Every member of the Cabinet enjoys a good old chin-wag with their ministerial driver. Except one. Dave appears to have taken a vow of silence. For three years the PM has stoutly refused to offer a syllable of conversation from the back of his bullet-proof limo. I’m told that a sweepstake has opened
I’ve often thought that British football needed a good dose of fascism — and now at last it has exactly this, in the form of the combative and somewhat eccentric Italian chap Paolo Di Canio. He has been installed as the manager of Sunderland, and all hell has broken loose. Di Canio has described himself as
Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership
Downing Street aides nervously run through the symptoms: a flat economy, poor press, leadership mutterings. Then they say, ‘It’s just mid-term blues, isn’t it?’ A second later, they add nervously, ‘It’s nothing more serious than that, is it?’ The truth is, nobody can be certain. There’s no reliable way of distinguishing mid-term blues from something
I’m trying to imagine the BBC’s Eddie Mair interviewing Nelson Mandela, the elderly African squirming uncomfortably in his seat as Mair, like one of the late Eugene Terre’Blanche’s famous Dobermans, snarls ever more menacingly, foam dripping from his bared gums. ‘So, in 1961, with several others, you founded a vicious terrorist movement, Spear of the
‘A conduit for pissed-off protest voters.’ ‘Farage’s Falange.’ ‘Fascists in blazers.’ These are some of the things friends have said about Ukip recently and I don’t want to embarrass them by naming names, for the last thing I’d wish on a mate is the queasy feeling I had this morning after a particularly bizarre anxiety
Last time I was here (two weeks ago; how’ve you been?) I briefly mentioned Bitcoin, an emerging internet currency I didn’t understand at all but via which I had nonetheless made a bit of money (£57). Since then, I’ve been reading up and the whole thing has gone supernova, largely thanks to the extent that
A few years ago George Osborne would have bristled at the idea that one of his budgets wouldn’t be the biggest event of the political week. His ability to conjure rabbits out of hats had already prevented electoral defeat for the Tories once (his 2007 inheritance tax pledge, now consigned to history, scared Gordon Brown
Westminster’s top amateur prize-fighter, Eric Joyce, may face assault charges after his latest unscheduled bout in the House of Commons. The Falkirk MP had to be restrained last week after an alleged unseemly set-to at the Sports and Social Club. Ex-soldier Joyce first revealed his flair for pugilism in February 2012 when he ‘went berserk’
I had forgotten about Cyprus. I suppose it was lodged somewhere near the back of my mind as a cheap British Mediterranean satrapy usefully divided into two: a southern bit, where our chavs went on holiday, and a northern bit where our criminals hide out from the filth. I was dimly aware that we had
Chesterfield is a medium-sized town just off the M1, near what were once the coalfields of north-eastern Derbyshire. Not without history (and a lovely old market square) and not without character (a church with a splendidly warped spire, positively Van Goghian, is its most famous feature), the town is nevertheless an unassuming, formerly industrial north