Features

Natural born cheaters

Daisy was my first midwife at the London hospital where, upon finding out I was pregnant, I’d planned to have a ­straightforward, perfectly average birth with lots of euphoria-inducing drugs and expert medical attention. That, of course, was before I knew anything about the NHS and its methods. My 12-week appointment was arranged through my

Ross Clark

The Tory delusion

Many a Conservative MP will spend the summer dreaming happily about what the party should do in office once it has freed itself from the shackles of coalition. Few even consider the painful truth — that the coalition party most likely to survive the next election is not the Conservatives but the Lib Dems. Imagine

The pain in Spain

Spain was always going to be where the doom of the euro would be determined. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus amount, together, to less than 5 per cent of the EU’s economy. They can be rescued without emptying the bailout fund. Alternatively, their defaults can be managed as controlled explosions. Spain is in a different

Mad money

Daniel Kahneman is a very modest man — amazingly so for someone who has won the Nobel prize in economics. When I met him in the lobby of a London hotel, he never used his very great intelligence in the way that some very distinguished economists do, to bully or to intimidate. ‘But then I

Big is beautiful

Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a

Berlusconi bounces back

As I for one predicted, the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi last November in a palace coup orchestrated by Europe’s bores has made no difference. Italy may well be governed by a dour former economics professor, Eurocrat and international adviser to Goldman Sachs, Mario Monti, but Italy is still in a total mess. So I greeted

This sheltered isle

This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested

The unmaking of the President

When an earthquake hit Washington DC last August, it seemed a freakish event. But in retrospect the damage caused to national symbols such as the Washington Monument seems to have been a portent of the literal collapse of America. The monument will be enshrouded in scaffolding until at least 2014. Even if the cenotaph were

A matter of taste

With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the

A good run

I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course

America’s third way

For Americans who can’t stand Barack Obama but don’t want to vote for Mitt Romney, November’s presidential elections look bleak. There are other candidates, however, none more obvious than Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico and the Libertarian party nominee. A greying triathlete who once climbed Mount Everest, he may not have a

What Federer isn’t

This summer, like so many others in the past decade, belongs to Roger Federer. By reclaiming the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, after giving Andy Murray a set start, the peerless Swiss revealed what true greatness looks like in sporting togs. Seven times a Wimbledon champion, 17 times a winner of Grand Slam events: his

Friedman’s century

Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month. As well as being one of the great economists, if not the greatest economist, of the 20th century, he was also what the Americans call a public intellectual. He was a regular on PBS, the American equivalent of the BBC, writing and presenting Free To Choose, a ten-part series

Nick Cohen

Censorship Olympics

The guards would not let me walk round the Olympic park. ‘We’re in lockdown because of a security alert,’ one explained. The rain fell. The overbearing policing intimidated. ‘London is going to host the Paralympics and the paramilitary Olympics,’ I muttered with unpatriotic grumpiness, as I retreated to the bright lights and piped music of

Joining the conspiracy

You just can’t win with a ­conspiracy theorist. For him or her, the long-established association of conspiracy theory with paranoia goes to show that there is a secret plot to conceal the truth and discredit truth-tellers. However, as Joseph Heller put it, ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ And, in any

Kindles for kids

‘How do we get children reading?’ the minister asked me, just a week after Michael Gove had got them reciting poetry, more or less by making it illegal for them not to. This was his number two, Nick Gibb, who had invited me to the Ministry of Education for a 40-minute chat. I’m not sure

Dear boss…

Dear Director General Many congratulations on getting the best job in world broadcasting. Enjoy it as much as you can, while you can; in my 46 years at the Beeb, few directors-general have left as they would have chosen. Several were forced out before their time was up — usually as the result of bad