Rod Liddle says the Commons vote securing the 24-week limit is no more than a craven politician’s fudge, designed to postpone the day when the law of the land finally catches up with the indisputable findings of science An awful lot of people we know are being laid off at the moment, or finding their
Lloyd Evans reports on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event No debate this month at Intelligence Squared. Instead Gore Vidal is interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. The 800-strong crowd start to applaud even before Vidal reaches the rostrum. White-haired, frail and wheelchair-bound, he is modestly dressed in a dark suit but he exudes a dangerous
Joan Collins lives an actor’s life Channel surfing on a rainy afternoon, I zeroed in on an old black-and-white movie that looked quite interesting, and with a wonderful cast too — Stanley Baker, Gloria Grahame, Laurence Harvey, Robert Morley, Margaret Leighton, John Ireland, Freda Jackson and Richard Basehart — a veritable Who’s Who of wonderful 1950s
Fraser Nelson says that the 38-year-old Work and Pensions Secretary is the best candidate to succeed Gordon Brown. Already surging ahead at his department, he has the gift of sounding like an ordinary human being — and he understands the Cameron Conservative party These days, it is scarcely possible to talk politics with a member
Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic Instinct Greta Scacchi is lying in bed beside Laurence Olivier. His head is resting against her shoulder. Suddenly it feels damp. She looks at the old man
I had hoped to bring you a little more fine detail about Cherie Blair’s menstrual cycle this week — I had provisional charts mapped out and so on. But at the last moment I came over a little queasy. Obviously all of us need to know precisely when she is ovulating, in case we should
In 1993, my wife Jenny and I bought a small, beautiful, mid-century modern architectural house in the hills of Silver Lake, an enclave of East Los Angeles. We became aware that the previous owners, Dr Herbert and Mrs Freda Alexander, had lived for the previous 15 years with an awful family secret: their daughter Phyllis,
James Forsyth says that Hillary’s disappointment in Tuesday’s primaries is matched by the decline in Obama’s image, as the sheen of the wunderkind fades and doubts multiply Barack Obama entered the arena on Tuesday night to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Rising’. But a more appropriate song would have been ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’
David Cameron talks to Fraser Nelson about his local election triumphs, admits that he is not going to ‘agree on everything’ with the new Mayor of London, and says Boris should join the queue to become PM after him The victorious David Cameron is being driven towards Buckingham Palace, the adrenaline of election success still
Only the most venerable and knowledgeable London cab driver has heard of Belsize Circus, a roundabout near the slums of Kilburn Heights where I have my lodgings. During the second world war many bombs fell nearby but, as was the case with most of London, the worst damage by far was wrought after the war
Theo Hobson meets Gene Robinson, the only openly gay Anglican bishop, who says that homosexuals are more open to the Christian ‘message of radical change’ I am sitting in St Mary’s church, Putney, home of right-on Anglicanism. Bishop Gene Robinson — the gay American whose election nearly split the Anglican church — is seeking reassurance
To Liverpool to chair the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce, stout yeomen of the country’s small- to medium-sized businesses. I’ll let the train take the strain, I thought, and burnish my green credentials, even though I planned to travel on a Sunday, which meant the normal two-and-a-half-hour trip would take an extra
Stanley Johnson is adjusting to his new constitutional position in the life of London: not least deciding which clubs to avoid at lunchtime in order to dodge Boris’s journalist foes Last July, soon after Boris had announced he would be a candidate for the post of mayor of London, the editor of The Spectator very
In the dark early hours of 12 November 1970 a tropical cyclone swung in from the Indian Ocean and made its way, to devastating effect, up the course of the world’s largest delta — the confluence of two huge river courses, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — in what was then East Pakistan. The delta
Irwin Stelzer admires the Schools Secretary, and so regrets that his admissions policy prevents schools from taking account of a pupil’s prospects of success. Bad news all round Seemingly alone among my acquaintances, I see virtues in Ed Balls. He certainly is not media-friendly, partly because he has the Brownian habit of trying to bury
What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?
When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill seeks to end the child’s right to a father figure, writes John Patten, ignoring all sound research in its obsession with ‘discrimination’ ‘Down with Clause 14(2)(b)’ is hardly a snappy slogan. It is not even as succinct as ‘Abolish Clause 28 now!’, the phrase that so resonated back in
Venetia Thompson, until recently a broker, says that the feminist Fawcett Society should not campaign to outlaw City outings to strip joints: they are harmless after-hour crèches It appears that women’s rights activists have hijacked the credit crunch. There could be no better time for the Fawcett Society, led by their director, Katherine Rake, to
Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for