Xmas all grown ups sa is the season for the kiddies but this do not prevent them from taking a tot or 2 from the bot and having, it may seme, a beter time than us. For children in fact Xmas is often a bit of a strane wot with pretending that everything is a
London is the first city of humiliation: London does it better than anywhere else. I should know, its latest victim. First my divorce — you would think, what with war in Korea and the death of King George — that the Times would have more newsworthy events to report than my decree absolute from my
There is conspiring in the corridors once again in Westminster. Who could replace Gordon, they ask. Labour’s problem is that the young pretenders are too young and the idea of caretaker leader seems slightly ridiculous, it would look absurd for the government to change Prime Minister twice in the same Parliament. So, Brown will solider
Spare a moment for a story in which Gordon Brown is the good guy. Not as exciting as tales of the money trail from David Abrahams to the Labour party’s coffers; nor as bloodcurdling as tales of crimes committed by untold numbers of illegal immigrants; nor as nervous-making as the possibility of identity theft from
The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish succession,
In a fortnight the Queen will set a remarkable record. On 21 December, she will overtake Queen Victoria (81 years and 243 days) to become the oldest British monarch in history. Do not expect any fanfares, not from royal quarters at any rate. The Queen will be at Sandringham and there will be no official
So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers — Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement — had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to
It’s summer and the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees have begun to bloom, but they’re little comfort to Zimbabweans in the middle of a dire economic crisis. You can tell it’s bad here because even the death of Ian Smith last month did not arouse much hostile comment. The domestic consensus is that Mugabe
Tony Blair’s coming conversion to the Catholic faith will not be welcomed by all Catholics. There are many in the Vatican, and the Catholic church in this country, who wonder how a politician with his voting record can be admitted to the church. ‘My First Confession’ would be a great title for Tony Blair’s memoirs.
As one of the Marxists named in James Delingpole’s recent Spectator article (3 November) on his alleged conversion to the commie cause, I really should be angrier about reckless, risk-hungry, overambitious bankers. Yet I find myself in the curious position today of thinking capitalism isn’t risk-hungry enough, certainly in areas where it matters: developing the
Kiev Well, this was a fine one — the story of my fellow Yank Robert Fletcher, who’d been making a living hiring himself out in Ukraine, where I live, as a ‘millionaire mentor’ — that is, someone who could teach strivers from Sumy and Dniprodzerzhinsk how to get rich, for a reported fee of about
Here is a little paradox. For 30 years during the Troubles you have been taking the Belfast to Stranraer ferry. No one asked you for identification: you just bought your ticket and off you went, even though it is quite possible that among your fellow passengers on one of those journeys was a terrorist smuggling
Last Tuesday at nightfall, as the servants of democracy fled SW1, a young Somali woman stood spotlit on a stage in Westminster. Behind her was the illuminated logo for the Centre for Social Cohesion: a white hand reaching down across England to help a brown one up; in front, an audience of some of Britain’s
In these times of green awareness, waste management has become an increasingly fashionable issue for the public sector, always keen to find new excuses for bureaucratic intervention. The South East England Development Agency (Seeda), one of the many quangos created by Labour over the past decade, has certainly latched on to this cause in a
Tarnow, Poland (maybe) I’m hungry, stuck here with a tube of flavoured pork fat, a bottle of bison grass vodka and 400 cut-price English cigarettes. This is the sleeper train from Krakow to Bucharest, via Budapest, at the bad, cold hour of midnight — and there’s no dining car. Just pork fat and vodka for
There is a new French ambassador arriving in London this week. He is Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, known as — what else? — MGM in Quai d’Orsay. It is fashionable to downplay the role of the ambassador in the modern world. Has not instant communication made the profession of diplomacy redundant? When the president of France and
As Robert Lindsay demonstrated unforgettably as Wolfie, leader of the Tooting Popular Front in Citizen Smith, anyone who shouts ‘Power to the People!’ can end up looking a prize idiot. So let me throw caution to the wind and say that this is precisely what the web, new media and mobile technology offer us, if
The motion: Britain Doesn’t Need Trident Harrowing stuff. Helena Kennedy QC began by invoking the memory of Hiroshima. ‘Peeling skin, melting eyeballs. People on pavements vomiting and waiting for death.’ Though she made the pacifist argument Lady Kennedy wasn’t suggesting that to scrap Trident was ‘some wild left-wing peacenik plan’. She cited conservative figures like
In 1864 a Talmudist named Jacob Saphir arrived at Cairo. He made his way to the district confusingly named ‘Babylon’ after a Roman fort. There he visited the ancient Synagogue of Ben Ezra, and after complex negotiations he gained access to the Geniza, or treasury. The keepers provided him with a ladder and he climbed
Now we know. Until now, we Americans have been wondering whether we were witnessing from the new boy on the foreign policy stage a cock-up or a considered change in Britain’s policy towards the United States. When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American
