You know things really are difficult in the coalition when neither side is badmouthing the other. These days, when those around David Cameron and Nick Clegg bite their tongues, it tends to be because one jibe might bring down the coalition. Since 24 July, everyone has been on best behaviour. Over dinner that evening, Cameron
It is an odd summer in Westminster. The political big beasts have stayed around because of the Olympics. Government ministers have international schmoozing to do; and in any case, like their senior shadows, they would not want to risk being seen scrambling back from abroad in the event of a national emergency. They are not,
In the end, after sniping and carping and moaning for months about how ghastly the Olympics was going to be, I thought the opening ceremony rather wonderful and therefore felt ashamed of myself for having been so aloof. I had not expected such a breadth of vision, nor such beauty, nor indeed the copious room
Back in 2006, I broke a great story in the Times about Tony Blair’s tie. Yep, that’s me, always the heavyweight. But it was good stuff. What we’d noticed — me and Simon from the picture desk — was that whenever Blair felt particularly under pressure, he’d pop out the next day in his special Olympic
The next few weeks should be a good time to be Prime Minister. Unusually for this decade, anti-politics will not be the mood of the moment. Instead, the nation will indulge in an Olympic holiday from austerity. Every time the Prime Minister congratulates a British medal winner, his words will be eagerly reported. He will
Every speech day at Boy’s prep school for the last five summers I’ve watched the Year Eight leavers and their parents troop off to the dining room for their final farewell lunch with the headmaster and staff. This year it was our turn and I didn’t enjoy it one bit. In fact, I was so
I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming
There is something a little dispiriting about the furore over the Olympic women’s beach volleyball competition. Howls of anguish have greeted the suggestion that if our weather does its usual business in August, and rains, the nubile young women will feel inclined to dress in the manner of the Saudi women’s team, i.e. swathe themselves
Why would you be a Lib Dem? That’s a rhetorical question, obviously, because I think we all know that the bulk of well-meaning, ineffectual perverts actually read the New Statesman. But still, imagine you were one. What’s it all for? And, more to the point, why are you still in government? I keep asking this
John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of
From the moment I arrived in Bakewell, Derbyshire, as a carpet-bagger politician nearly a quarter of a century ago, I knew I’d never leave. The attractions of the county and its sweet green hills and dales only grew. And in the end, though I had meant the Peaks to be just rungs on my ladder
With this government, it is not ‘crisis, what crisis?’ but ‘crisis, which crisis?’ We now have a coalition emergency prompted by the fact that Lords reform has been dumped in the long grass despite being in the programme for government. We have a Tory party crisis occasioned by the biggest rebellion of David Cameron’s leadership
At the Spectator party this year I met a girl I hadn’t seen since Oxford. We exchanged pleasantries. She was looking good and she’d done really well for herself, which made me very happy for her. But then she mentioned that before her latest plum posting she’d been working in the ‘private sector’ for Shell.
I have been racking my brains to come up with new and imaginative ways of taunting the lower orders about their hilarious lack of wealth recently. Nothing I have come up with, however, quite beats the decision to let Sir Martin Sorrell — one of Britain’s richest people, and a brave and stoic defender of
How weird are Scientologists? Other than the bright-eyed young men in sharp suits on Tottenham Court Road — who have somehow spotted my glaring personality problems at a distance and are adamant that I ought to step inside and identify them in more detail — I’ve never knowingly met one, so I don’t really know.
Have you seen much on the BBC news about the persecution and indeed murder of Syria’s Christian population by the liberal-minded and agreeable rebel forces who are not at all Islamist maniacs allied to al-Qa’eda? Nope, me neither. There was a short report in April about the Christians fearing that they might be ‘caught in
Like many of the best thrillers the Heath Caper affair involves sex, spies and blackmail, and an array of possible resolutions that are all eminently plausible yet cannot all be true. Or can they? I have something of a personal window into the worlds this story touches. It is an old story, that has just
After covering the Spanish bailout, I fly from Madrid to Athens. In the taxi rank at Athens airport, iPhone wedged between ear and shoulder, I realise I have crossed both borders without showing my passport. Welcome to Schengenland — how long will it last? Reuters has just published a leak of EU contingency plans for
I write this freshly back from a reactionary weekend in the Scottish Borders, where I was made a godfather in a christening and did not have to renounce Satan. Which was a relief. It’s not that I have any objection to renouncing Satan per se. It’s not like we’re on speaking terms. It’s just that
I suppose we shall have to take Lord Leveson’s word for it that he didn’t threaten to resign from his exciting inquiry. He says he didn’t, and that will have to be good enough for the likes of me. If I was an old school journalist worth his salt, I’d have hacked his lordship’s phone