In a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just around the corner from Euston Station, Roy Dotrice is doing a reading as John Aubrey under the watchful eye of the director Patrick Garland. The bitchy 17th-century writer and antiquarian is a character that both men have come to know very well over years. The relationship began in
If the Democrats vote with their heads on Super Tuesday — 5 February— Barack Obama will survive the Clinton assault and go on to become the party candidate in November. He already appeals strongly to Independents and Republicans. In Iowa, Obama won 44 per cent of the Republicans who shifted registration to take part in
This week we have been bombarded with statistics about how the smoking ban, introduced exactly six months ago, has not remotely damaged the pub trade, but has resulted in millions upon millions of people giving up smoking — so that cancer is now a thing of the past. The shovel-faced government minister Dawn Primarolo will
For the last few days they have been putting the flags and bunting up in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in preparation for the nationwide celebrations which will mark the Lunar New Year or Tet. Forty years ago, on the night of 30–31 January 1968, the Liberation Army, as it is
Forty years ago I met a leading industrialist who had just returned from a visit to India, very depressed. He could see no future for a people who seemed to him fatalistically resigned to antimaterialism, mass poverty and the backward, corrupt, bureaucratically hamstrung state of their economy. ‘The problem with India,’ he said despairingly, ‘is
I am always struck, interviewing the planet’s most beautiful women, by the disconnection between their difficult love lives and dazzling looks. Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Elle Macpherson, Helena Christensen, Emmanuelle Béart, Inés Sastre, Diane Kruger, Sienna Miller — in my decade as an interviewer I have met dozens of these stars and supermodels, and almost
Motion: Britain should have a referendum on the EU treaty. Chair: Andrew Neil For the motion: Neil O’Brien Andrew Roberts Rt Hon Lord Lamont of Lerwick Against the motion : Sir Stephen Wall Vernon Bogdanor CBE David Aaronovitch. It was like an eclipse. Wednesday’s debate on the EU referendum exactly coincided with a
Theodore Dalrymple issues a global warning Thank goodness I retired in time from the National Health Service: it has cut down enormously the number of forms I have to fill in. The latest proto-genocidal form sent out to employees by my erstwhile employers was called ‘a data cleanse’, though it soon became known as ‘an
As the US presidential race gathers steam, Westminster is abuzz. Like the Derby Trials, MPs across the political spectrum are watching their horses anxiously. Some are seasoned observers. They know the trainers and even the thoroughbreds themselves. Others are more recent spectators, but with no less passion. The outcome of the presidential election matters in
There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved
Call me old-fashioned, as Dame Edna says, but I don’t fancy spending my remaining years in semi-darkness because this poxy government has performed yet another knee-jerk reaction and decreed that all incandescent light bulbs will be phased out, whether we like it or not. A warning bulletin from Defra informs us that should we be
Iran was in the cross hairs last Tuesday. At the Intelligence Squared debate the mellifluously worded motion, ‘It’s better to bomb Iran than risk Iran getting the bomb,’ was proposed by Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, a distinguished Italian political scientist. He argued that letting Tehran acquire nukes would create turmoil in the Middle East — and
Allister Heath says that Brown’s poll tax on Britain’s 114,000 non-domiciled residents will drive away talent when our economy most needs it. Shame the Tories would do the same You would have thought that with the economy weakening, the stock market sliding, house prices tanking and Northern Rock’s botched rescue a daily humiliation, Gordon Brown
Do you feel safe? Every time you go to the airport do you worry that you might be blown up by Islamist militants? Do you avoid using public transport, or frequenting louche nightclubs, for fear of being targeted by fanatical suicide bombers? While the 7 July bomb attacks against London’s transportation system in 2005 have
In the week of the World Economic Forum Rani Singh talks to Angel Gurría, head of the OECD, who has sharp words on capitalist ‘schizophrenia’ and a coded warning for Gordon ‘Because of the miners’ strike we were all asked to have only one light bulb on. My wife and I had to take baths
Both Brown and Cameron face separate backbench mutinies as the revived EU Constitution — now called the Lisbon Treaty — comes before the Commons, says Fraser Nelson. Which of them will end up looking like John Major in the ghastly Maastricht era? Only one thought has consoled Gordon Brown throughout the horrors of the European
Gordon Brown might be overstating his case when he ignores his Thatcherite inheritance and a benign global economic environment, and takes sole credit for Britain’s rather good economic performance during his tenure at No. 11. But, asked whether they are better off now than a decade ago, most Britons would have to agree that in
It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to
Rod Liddle says that the notion of ‘compulsory donations’ is oxymoronic and the pinnacle of the medical profession’s zeal to get its hands on our corpses The question is, I suppose, hypothetical in my case. Or beyond even hypothetical. They are not going to want the liver of someone who opens a bottle of Rioja
Kirkcaldy High School vs Eton, Highland Scot vs Newbury toff, Edinburgh University vs Oxford. If you are choosing between Gordon Brown and David Cameron that’s what the next election may come down to. Or is there another factor? No one ever mentions birth order. Mr Brown is the classic case. With a younger brother, as