To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police
Oxfordshire The Westminster pundits have all been obsessing over Andrew Feldman’s alleged ‘swivel-eyed loons’ comment about the Tory party’s grass roots. But what about the ‘loons’ themselves? Few in SW1 bothered to ask, so I spent a day in David Cameron’s back yard, hunting them down to find out what they really think of the
The first thing you see after leaving the baggage carousel at Toronto’s Pearson airport is an enormous photograph of Mayor Rob Ford. In it, the former high school football coach grins in his blingy regalia, teeth yellowed, one eye squinting in a semi-wink. His scalp is flushed and shiny through a receding blond hairline and
You know Inferno, the new Dan Brown novel, the one that’s had such fabulously bad reviews? Well, it’s not really about Dante’s Inferno at all. What it’s really about — spoiler alert — is that old bogey: global population explosion. For the baddie, a genetic scientist called Bertrand Zobrist, the big threat to humanity is the inexorable
With the Dow Jones scaling new heights, and other markets not far behind, investors face a dilemma. Is this a time to buy? Or, for those who have suddenly found themselves sitting on a profit for the first time in a decade, is it time to sell? This is the question that faces most investors
‘The central bankers have won,’ a senior City stockbroker said to me this week with an air of resignation. ‘There’s no point fighting them. Investors are doing as they’re told.’ And, wow, how they’re doing as they’re told. Thanks to central bank money-printing, cash is sloshing around the global financial system in desperate search of
When can a famine taste pretty good? The answer is when you are eating the cattle which have just died of thirst. And that’s where we are today in the investment market. The famine is a lack of income — cash held in a completely safe bank, or in short-term government securities, earns almost nothing.
Well, there are two ways. You can own a chunk of a successful spread-betting firm or you can be a spread-better and get things right. Miraculously, I have managed to do both. I shall come back to that. First, let me tell you how it works. How many runs will England make in the first
It’s not often you see Tory MPs celebrating anything, but on Monday a bunch of them were packed into an office high in Portcullis House to toast the rehabilitation of Nadine Dorries. Last autumn the Mid-Bedfordshire MP was suspended from the party after appearing on the reality TV show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out
Shortly before the Conservative party conference last year, the head of the Fresh Start Group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs went in to see the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The group had heard that David Cameron might make his big Europe speech at the gathering and its head, Andrea Leadsom, wanted to set out what
Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army
It’s Monday lunchtime, downstairs in the Spectator office, and Boris Johnson is trying to flog a bus to a Frenchwoman. ‘What about the new Routemaster? It’s absolutely great, yup, fantastic, yup. Hey, they could be really good for Paris,’ he says. She smiles and says nothing. ‘Well what about bendy-buses then?’ he carries on. ‘We’ve
Syria is sliding rapidly into chaos. The supply of weapons to the opposition could only make matters worse, yet the Prime Minister seems to be -contemplating it. We have misjudged the situation from the start. From the early days of the crisis, two years ago, we rode to the rescue with our rhetoric. We were all
I decided to become a hospital visitor last year, after being a patient and finding myself in something more like a factory than an old-fashioned ward. A terror of infection in 2011 (there were 2,053 deaths involving Clostridium difficile) has ended the cosy world of side tables covered in flowers and cards. Concerns about data
I like to tease my friend Wei about being a tiger mother. She once told me of an incident where her daughter Shu was making an artwork for a friend as a birthday present. Shu doodled for a few minutes, then showed her mother a sketch of a funny face. ‘I told her to knuckle
Not long ago Cyril Ramaphosa, probably South Africa’s future president and ANC leader, attempted to buy a buffalo. It was at an auction for hunters and game ranchers. He bid £1.3 million and, incredibly, lost out to another tycoon. At the same event he still managed to spend another million pounds on game species for
Seeing Julie Burchill sitting at the back of the restaurant near Victoria Station, I feel a surge of affection. Chin up, sunglasses on, lips fixed in a pout, she is presenting her usual defiant face to the world. In the past, I’ve always thought of her as being like a screen goddess from Hollywood’s golden
The scandal of official reluctance to develop Britain’s shale gas potential is at last beginning to surface. It may prove to be the dress rehearsal for the ultimate drama — the inexorable collapse of our whole energy strategy. Most of us have by now heard about the US shale gas revolution. In little more than
Last week, the European Commission voted to ban three pesticides which are said to harm bees. Everyone loves bees, so perhaps we should all be rejoicing? Well, I’m afraid my reaction was not joy, but to think: here we go again, this is bound to mean more dead bees. It’s inevitable: whether it’s a ban,
You do not need to have read the book or even seen a film adaptation to feel a thrill at the word ‘Gatsby’. More than a novel, a film or a character, ‘Gatsby’ is an aspiration. The golden age of jazz, cocktails and evening dress, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is one of those works which