A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking Hyde Park. The flat had been the scene of much recent political activity, used as a den by Gordon Brown who would invite his allies around and plot his personal
Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt: the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and repression Among the first-class passengers who flew into Ingushetia’s Magas airport from Moscow on the afternoon of 31 August were two grey-haired men in suits. The pair
But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount. Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’ The decline of the British education system has been my gain, I’m only partly ashamed to confess. As somebody who has published a jokey book about
Looking every inch the Brit that he isn’t, American playwright Christopher Shinn takes a bite of a sandwich in a Shepherd’s Bush rehearsal room on a rainy summer afternoon and confesses that, although grateful, he still finds it ‘a mystery’ that it should have been London’s theatrical community, rather than New York’s, that made his
Isn’t it about time Muslim terrorists rethought their strategy of recording glorious martyrdom videos, in advance of failing to blow anything up? Wouldn’t it be a bit less embarrassing for all concerned? Time after time we see these imbeciles on our television news promising all sorts of mayhem and misery, the righteous and cleansing fires
At a Google conference in Rhodes, Matthew d’Ancona finds himself part of a bid to break the world record for Zorba dancing — and to relive one of the greatest scenes in cinema ‘Teach me to dance. Will you?’ Few scenes in cinema have the emotional poignancy and magic of the last moments of Zorba
The PM’s claim to have created three million British jobs is a grave deceit, says Fraser Nelson. Strip out immigrants from the picture, and Labour has barely dented the problem of British worklessness. Over to you, Mr Cameron If there were to be a British Statue of Liberty, it should be erected at Victoria coach
Rod Liddle says that the appointment of an inexperienced, gun-toting formerbeauty queen as his running mate may well be John McCain’s undoing Ah, just when you pro-Republican monkeys were beginning to think that John McCain was looking a pretty good bet, he goes and chooses a backwoods polar-bear-strangling Britney Spears manqué as a running mate
One of life’s difficulties, I have found, is that it keeps throwing up questions to which there is no indubitably correct answer. This means that the exercise of judgment is perennially necessary: and there is hardly a moment’s respite from this burdensome imperative. Alas, where there is judgment there is error, or the possibility of
Islamabad On the wall above Asif Ali Zardari’s dining table in Islamabad is a framed copy of a letter. The handwriting is small and neat and it looks nothing special but he frequently grabs it from the wall to show to visitors. For on this piece of paper rests the remarkable rise of the man
Because I spoke to him on the phone, not in person, you’ll have to share my mental picture of William P. Young. There he is in a hotel room in Texas: 53, balding, with bright eyes and a greying goatee. He’s ironing as he talks (he says so), his sleeves rolled up (I reckon), with
Free and open to everyone, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 will eclipse the London Games, says Robert Hardman — an unforgettable tribute to the monarch Millions gathered on the streets; people of every generation from every background joining in the fun; all the corners of the kingdom united in one thoroughly British occasion… 2012
Ross Clark says that far from keeping our streets safer or cleaner, the government’s new force of amateur policemen are ignoring the worst offenders and pursuing law-abiding innocents instead Political brands are constantly changing. For years Liberal Democrats were the party of the environment; now the Conservatives appear to have taken that title. For decades,
One of Senator Barack Obama’s persistent themes, since the drawn-out US presidential campaign began in the snows of 2007, has been the need for parents to turn off the television, put away video games, and spend more time reading to and talking with their children. Although no candidate would be dumb enough to call potential
O’ar Pali says it isn’t easy being on planes next to strangers all the time — and you quickly find there are a series of character types, dying to tell you about themselves Perhaps it goes with the territory: if you have decided to live your life between two countries you must accept the consequences.
Hello, hello, he’s back again. Although not necessarily — as the words of his 1972 hit had it — ‘on the right track’. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, from the
We only had a few seconds left to get ready. There were 91,000 people in the stadium and (allegedly) about 1.5 billion watching apathetically at home. I advanced to the little plastic sign on the red carpet saying ‘Mayor of London’, and as we waited to be called to the centre of the arena I
In January, I met a friend of mine to discuss his impending departure from Washington DC. He was moving to Chicago to join Senator Barack Obama’s budding presidential campaign. At the time, it was hard not to have an instinctive sympathy for Obama, not least because the Clinton campaign had by that point attracted many
Rod Liddle says that the stunningly tasteless announcement of Jade Goody’s cervical cancer on Indian Big Brother marks a new low. But that won’t stop TV bosses saying it is a public service Here’s a notable first for television — a contestant on a Big Brother programme was told, in front of a television audience,
When, back in 2005, Michael Howard said, ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’, his words sounded less like a statement of the obvious than a plea for the political and media classes to cut him some slack. They didn’t, of course. The then Conservative leader was roundly chided for playing the race card, accused