This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the saloon bar. But mention Sir Hayden Phillips to men of affairs, men of a certain consequence in our public life, men who are members of his club, Brooks’s, and you will find that they laugh, or smile at least, and say
It started with some junk mail. I threw it out: I gave no consideration to the fact that it was addressed to a Miss Phyllis Henshaw. I put it down to some glitch in the address-sharing industry. But then the telephone calls started. The first one was from a business I’d always been rather unhealthily
I remember Wales: the early start from a sleeping Liverpool, the changes of trains and freezing waiting-rooms at polysyllabic stations, the endless trek across the permanent Sunday that was Anglesey in the 1950s. None of this was supposed to be fun. There were family connections stretching back over 100 years to a fiercely biblical great-grandfather,
It is not just the reputation of ministers and their bagmen that is taking a bashing at the Hutton inquiry. So is the reputation of Britain’s intelligence services. British Intelligence has been subverted. The nation’s front line of defence has been catastrophically damaged by New Labour’s spin machine. The tawdry ethics of Robert Maxwell’s Daily
We spent part of the last two weeks – as has become a family custom – mooching round Siena. And although, like Venice, the place can absorb a huge number of visitors before becoming unpleasantly crowded, we were by no means the only ones. That’s because, of course, Siena is just about perfect – an
Whenever I have a patient who belongs to the first generation of Jamaican immigrants, I cannot help but ask myself what England has done to the Jamaicans. How has such a charming and humorous community been turned into the sullen, resentful people that so many of their children (or grandchildren) seem to be today –
Is the taxpayer about to stump up another £16 million for the Duchess of Northumberland’s pet project, Alnwick Garden? Mary Keen investigates To him that hath shall be given, and to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland hath been given quite a lot. We are talking public funding here. The £11.5m Lottery sum awarded to
In more tranquil times, before the Gilligan storm broke over his head, the BBC’s admirable and honourable director of news, Richard Sambrook, contributed a foreword to one of the corporation’s periodic attempts to remind its journalists of their responsibilities towards the English language. ‘Clear storytelling and language,’ Sambrook wrote, ‘is at the heart of good
Nairobi One evening in the Kenyan capital late last year, my friend Sean Culligan endured an experience that, in several instructive ways, can be compared and contrasted with that of the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin. Sean is a mild-mannered man who, after retiring from the British military, settled in East Africa. He works for a
Since it is always helpful to blame the government for most things, it might be some consolation to those of us who sat shellshocked at Lord’s last weekend, and watched South Africa obliterate England, to reflect on how politics has brought about the decline of English cricket. Such an analysis will bring no short-term comfort
Miss Busby’s room – room five – had a westerly facing seaview. Latterly, if it was shaping up to be a particularly beautiful one, and there was nothing on telly, I’d go and sit with her and watch the sunset. We’d sit side by side in a pair of her comfortable high-backed antique chairs and
If the Archbishop of Canterbury does not crown our next monarch, then who will? The president of Europe? A multi-faith collective? Nobody at all? In which case, what sort of country will we then be and where will ultimate authority and legitimacy come from? Perhaps the prior question is why there should now be serious
In the past, great benefactors to the visual arts have generally doubled as tastemakers. Their success, as the US critic Jed Perl recently noted, is often best judged by the extent to which their avidities become what the culture takes for granted. But how does taste, which is private, become public in this way? It’s
Simon Nixon says that we must build more motorways – and scrap railway lines Perhaps the most important discovery I have made over the last few years is that the way to stay sane in Britain is never to use public transport. The Department of Health tells us to eat five portions of fruit a
A n early-morning phone call the other day alerted me to the news that my midday appointment in New Delhi had been ‘pre-poned’. Could I ‘do the needful’, the voice said, and ‘get my skates on’. A few months ago, I received an invitation from an Indian ministry. First they sent a fax giving me
Something strange is happening when a left-wing government publicly accuses the BBC, riddled with institutionalised political correctness, of – can you think of a more wounding insult? – a ‘Powellite anti-immigration agenda’. The Pope publicly denouncing one of his cardinals as a Satanist would hardly be more surprising. It is not just cats of the
Tony Woodley, the new head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, intends to make sure that Tony Blair suffers. His plan is to call a meeting of top union guns and instigate a new form of entryism that will select left-wing, union-friendly parliamentary candidates. After this, he will concentrate on ousting Blair from the
Lady Thatcher so disliked British Airways’s ethnic tailfins that she famously took out a paper napkin and covered up the tail of a model plane on the BA stand at a Tory party conference. Should she be passing a model of a BA plane in the next few days, she’ll want a tablecloth to cover
Shakespeare is all things to all people. The greatest writer we have, he was subtle to the extent of ambivalence. As a man he was sexually fluid, politically ambidextrous and not prepared to commit himself on anything, least of all religion. It’s sometimes said that the son of a provincial glove-maker could not have had
The British tourism industry appears to be gripped by a form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are told that holidaying in Britain has never been more fashionable, with hotels and resorts enjoying a boom this summer. ‘Suddenly our seaside towns are the places to be. Santorini is out. Scarborough is in,’ gushed the