I feel like Job. Everything of significance is being stripped from me. In August my flat in west London was badly flooded; on 25 September I lost my job; on Monday lunch-time, 25 October, my beloved cat Stan, apparently terrified at the sight and sound of me knocking in a fence post, took off and
On the night of All Saints, 1954, a young honeymooning couple of French school teachers, dedicated to their work among underprivileged children, were dragged off a bus in the Aurès Mountains of Algeria and shot down. Their murder by the newly created FLN (National Liberation Front) marked the beginning of organised revolt against the French
Adrian Blomfield went to Baghdad as a strong believer in regime change. Now he thinks that Bush has messed up in Iraq — and should be booted out of the White House Nairobi The other day, shortly after returning from a longish stint in Iraq on behalf of the Daily Telegraph, I had dinner with
I meet Joan Collins at Waterstone’s in Harrods, where she is signing copies of her latest novel, Misfortune’s Daughters. There she is, behind a big table and, although it pains me to say it, she is very much starting to look her age, the poor clapped-out old thing. And her fan base is not what
Simon Heffer on the insidious new taboos that govern society — and how those who break them risk their careers and credibility It is hard to imagine that at the time when Britain entered what is now called the European Union, in 1973, there would have been such a fuss about the religious beliefs of
The winning article in the 2004 Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize. There were more than 60 entries from a total of eight countries. The runners-up were Horatio Clare, Simon Matthew Kingston, Joanna Kavenna, Bertie Cairns and Barnabas William Erskine Campbell. In the Jollibee burger bar, Kuya Virgo held out his hands. Cradled in each palm was
I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned
The word ‘hate’ should be used cautiously, but most British people seem to hate George W. Bush. The Spectator’s YouGov poll this week — see panel opposite — suggests that only 11 per cent of British voters and about 13 per cent of MPs would welcome a Republican victory in the presidential election. A convincing
I must admit that the first arts event in which I participated on arriving in Australia was entirely by chance. Sitting in the sun on the restaurant terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, looking at the ferries bustling in and out of Circular Quay, I picked up a small printed notice that
The Human Rights Act has seemed to many to be an innocent adaptation of principles already contained within our common law, and indeed affirmed by statute once before, in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Seen in this way, the Act is no more than an affirmation of an ancient principle of our jurisdiction, which
Earlier this month Turkey’s bid to join the European Union crept past the tipping point from possibility to probability. The European Commission recommended that accession negotiations be opened with Ankara, and the outgoing enlargement commissioner Günter Verheugen announced that ‘no further obstacles remain’ on Turkey’s path. The news sent the Turkish press into frenzies of
If there was one reason above any other for the British electorate’s flight to socialism in 1945, it was surely the means test. In some ways the national government’s grudging state charity of the Depression years was worse than nothing. For his ha’p’orth of black pudding, the 1930s welfare claimant had first to surrender his
Raphael, affirmed Sir Joshua Reynolds, ‘stands in general foremost of the first painters’. In other words, he was the best artist who ever lived. When Reynolds wrote this — in the second half of the 18th century — Raphael’s reputation had remained on that peak for centuries. He was the ideal, the model for students
Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore
Rachel Johnson meets Ukip’s pin-up boy and finds to her horror that she likes him In order to interview Robert Kilroy-Silk, the orthodontically perfect public face of Ukip, it is first necessary to talk to his people. But his people, it turns out, are his wife Jan. ‘So,’ Jan growls in what the BBC calls
Since his sudden emergence in the 1990s Tony Blair has easily eclipsed three successive Conservative leaders: John Major, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. No prime minister for a century has dominated his opponents in such an emphatic way and for so long. The 2004 party conference season has changed this landscape. It is now
The last thing we need now is a Tory recovery. Proper conservatives should dread such a thing as much as Labour’s serious faction dreaded victory in the March 1983 Darlington by-election. They longed for the most crushing defeat possible, because it would have provided the pretext for a well-planned putsch against the doomed romantic party
Britain’s pre-eminent conservative philosopher is rather muddy. I’ve seen him in London, tidy in yellow corduroy. In Wiltshire Roger Scruton is green and brown. Sundey Hill Farm, where he lives with his wife and their two young children, is a ‘rural consultancy’, a ‘meta-farm’ whose services include ‘log-cutting’ and ‘logic-chopping’. Scruton complains that he is
When the remaining flotsam of 20 or so Conservative MPs wash up on dry land after the next general election, they may do well to consider why it was that during this Parliament, every time the credibility of Prime Minister Tony Blair sank further into the depths, the credibility of their own party sank with
As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I’ve had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are the trickiest to answer. Most of my acquaintances have been extraordinarily encouraging about my decision to relinquish a journalistic