You’d be surprised how many champions Sir Ian Blair has. Ken Livingstone thinks he’s terrific. So does his Oxford contemporary and namesake, Tony Blair. The Guardian has devoted a huge amount of space to telling us what a good job he is doing. According to one of its columnists, the clamour against the Metropolitan Police
Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and wrote the first charter of human rights, must be spinning in his grave. Once the world’s most advanced civilisation, Iran is yet again descending into barbarism under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rabid fanatic who took power in a rigged
Sir Richard Sykes of Imperial College tells Martin Vander Weyer that Britain’s world-class scientists hold the key to future economic success Approaching Imperial College through the long tunnel from South Kensington station, I recalled that the last time I met the College’s rector, Sir Richard Sykes, he was chief executive of Glaxo, the drugs group,
Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan In a dusty clearing on the outskirts of Helmand’s capital, the US army’s Provincial Reconstruction Team had set up a mobile aid station. As we approached, a Humvee gunner swung his machine-gun towards us and shouted angrily, ‘Get back, get back!’ We were clad in shalwar-kameez and sporting scrubby beards. We may
Washington In the 48 hours before George W. Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday, the presenter for ABC news was blown up in his flatbed truck by a roadside device near Baghdad, Martin Luther King Jr’s widow died, former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay went on
Julian Manyon on why the Palestinians voted for Hamas — and why the terrorists will not be transformed into politicians by the realities of power Jerusalem Fundamentalists of any stripe are not to my taste but the leading ideologues of Hamas have a grisly fascination. Mild-mannered, often well-educated, including doctors and scientists in their ranks,
Here are a few reasons why the Football Association should have sacked the manager of England, Sven-Goran Eriksson. 1. Allowing England to lose to one of the worst teams in the world, Northern Ireland, in a crucial World Cup qualifying game. 2. Spending what seems to have been most of his free time attempting to
Sholto Byrnes talks to Chris Huhne, second favourite in the Lib Dem race, about coalitions, privacy and the Austro–Hungarian empire Until a couple of weeks ago, the name of Chris Huhne was known only to the most dedicated followers of politics, and a few economists. Now the MP for Eastleigh, who won his seat last
After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be
William Cash meets a Devon farmer who keeps the family’s gruesome family heirloom — Hitler’s red telephone — in his safe A week before Christmas the Grampian microphone that Sir Winston Churchill used to make his VE Day speech in Westminster Chapel went under the hammer at a specialist sale of historical documents at Ludlow
When the Twin Towers collapsed, I read nothing sane upon the subject in any newspaper until Michael Wharton, as Peter Simple, filed the following to the Telegraph: ‘Only a stony-hearted fanatic could have been unmoved by the massacre in America. Yet for us feudal landlords and clerical reactionaries, cranks, conspiracy theorists and Luddite peasants, the
Everybody loves the Poles. Everybody loves reliable plumbers and natural-born nannies. Only Andrzej Tutkaj, of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, is sceptical about the benefits of the march from East to West. I spoke to Mr Tutkaj on the telephone this week and asked him how all the new Poles were faring in
Europe is one of the most divisive issues in British politics. But on one thing most Europhiles and Eurosceptics agree: that enlargement, letting those benighted former communist countries into the warm democracy-enhancing embrace of Brussels, was a good thing. Just about all respectable, right-thinking people feel that the UK should congratulate itself for opening its
Two elderly men and a woman sit on a jagged rock beside a limpid pool of water in the green hills of the Lake District. They are Indians, wearing shalwar-kameezes beneath layers of cardigans, coats and scarves; the men wear white Muslim topi caps. On the next page of Visits to National Parks — a
The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere
Washington Observers of American politics would do well to learn how to pronounce the name of a former Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. The first syllable should be enunciated not, as is common, like the stomach muscle, but rather like the nickname of the 16th American president, Honest Abe. Of course, Abramoff was dishonest. And this
Last November the Iranian people were privileged to watch perhaps the year’s most bizarre presidential home video, in which the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described how a divine glow of light had played around him as he delivered his first address to the United Nations. ‘I felt it,’ the President recalled. ‘All of
When it comes to sex, Britain now seems to be gripped by a dangerous form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there is mounting panic over the issue of paedophilia, where a media-driven climate of hysteria means that even the mere allegation of child abuse can be enough to destroy careers and wreck lives. Yet,
Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series
Douglas Davis says that Ariel Sharon’s wisest decision was his last one — to pull out of the anarchic terrorist hothouse of Gaza As the dominating presence of Ariel Sharon recedes from the public stage, his lasting legacy is likely to be not his military exploits but his final major political act: unilateral withdrawal from