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Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’.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
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