I suppose it is largely our fault that most politicians are mentally ill. We eviscerate them daily and one assumes that some of the poison eventually seeps through and begins to affect their central nervous systems. Being held up to ridicule for their incompetences, being dependent for their livelihoods upon the whims of idiots, and
My father once told me that tolerance was a great and precious British virtue, and that we shouldn’t waste it on homosexuals. Even at the time this struck me as a somewhat illiberal and unkind point of view to which I privately objected. It was easier though, back then, to hold such ‘homophobic’ beliefs because
What’s wrong with editing your own Wikipedia entry, anyway? I’ve never touched mine, but only because I’m scared people would find out, which would be bad, although for reasons which elude me. I don’t even know why I’ve got a Wikipedia entry, actually. It was built in 2005, at 1.12a.m., by somebody who appears to
There’s an intensity to politics this autumn. The government is churning out as many announcements in a week as it used to in a month. Ed Miliband’s staff are striding around the Palace of Westminster as if they have somewhere to be in hurry. The reason for this burst of activity is that all sides
They’re building a wind farm, six turbines the height of Salisbury cathedral spire, on the hilltop half a mile from your home. Would you say, on balance, that this will increase or decrease the value of your property? Hmm. Tough one. Let’s try and work it out by carefully weighing up the pros and cons.
The despoilation of the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to the French border in north-eastern Spain is well known. To meet the demand for package holiday resorts in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the Catalan tourist and construction industries deployed untold quantities of reinforced concrete to dispiriting effect. Vast swaths of the Costa Brava and
I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in
David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers
I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in
David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers
David Cameron has always nurtured a deep dislike of reshuffles, and the last week won’t have helped. The result might strengthen the government; but the process was as ghastly as the Prime Minister expected. He sought to be gentlemanly about things, publicising the promoted while granting the demoted privacy. Even so, I understand, three ministers
They say that moving house is the third most traumatic thing after death and divorce and they’re right about that, I reckon. For the past few weeks and months I’ve been treating our London house not like the beloved home where I’ve spent 12 happy years but more like an anonymous shell where I just
Here’s a mystery which has been keeping me awake at night recently. Why do people who live on islands, and even more so very small islands, tend to be grotesquely overweight? I stumbled across this strange apparent correlation the other evening, while sporcling. This is what I do in my spare moments these days, in
‘Nice people, with nice habits/ they keep rabbits/ but got no money at all,’ sang the popular duo Flanagan and Allen in my father’s day. I can still remember Dad playing it on our gramophone in the early 1950s. My family liked these sentiments; secretly we rather hoped they applied to us. But I write
Let us talk about politicians dancing. Specifically, let us talk about Boris Johnson and David Cameron dancing to the Spice Girls at the Olympic closing ceremony. Graceful, elegant, debonair, all of these things it was not. Cameron clapped, strangled by his tie, like a man whose sober country church has been taken over for a
Washington, DC If you read only the British press, you might get the impression that Mitt Romney couldn’t have found a more extreme running mate than Paul Ryan. The new vice presidential nominee is a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House budget committee, in which capacity he has pushed for gradual but significant cuts in
There are some things to be said in favour of the planet Mars. Its atmosphere contains almost no oxygen, the temperature in winter reaches minus 143˚C, it is exceptionally arid and dusty, and any human travelling to the place would receive sufficient solar radiation to be lit up like a Russian dissident. My problem with
Military commanders, announced last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, ‘have warned the Prime Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’. What the newspaper calls ‘senior sources’ have been singing and I don’t doubt the burden of their song is as reported. The same briefing
The London 2012 Olympics, seen from a distance of more than a thousand miles, is a peculiar, shimmering thing. Our capital city dominates the news every night but, for reasons which I cannot explain, the Croatians are not exultant about the fact that we have won lots of gold medals at rowing and stuff. It
‘But Dad, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We can’t miss out. We can’t… .’ ‘No, Son, it will be a complete ruddy waste of time and money. We’re too poor. Even if we tried to get tickets we’d only get really crap ones like Albania versus Belarus in the women’s football. Anyway it’ll be crowded and