London

With Katharine Viner guaranteed a final round interview to be the next Guardian editor-in-chief after winning a staff ballot, rumours are circulating that her former colleague Ian Katz is the other horse left in the race. Hot goss: final two in race for Guardian editorship are now @iankatz1000 and @KathViner, insider tells me. — Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) March 13, 2015 Katz left his role as deputy editor of the Guardian to join the BBC as Newsnight editor in 2013. At the time, it was reported that he had grown tired of waiting for Alan Rusbridger to step down as editor. If it is the case that Katz is in the final two, his interview with the

In my Yorkshire town of Helmsley the NatWest branch, originally an outpost of Beckett & Co of Leeds, has closed down — collateral damage of its crippled parent RBS’s continuing struggle for viability. Our branch of the Australian-owned Yorkshire Bank, descendant of the West Riding Penny Savings institution, became an antique shop some time ago. HSBC, formerly Midland, is now a hairdressing salon. When they arrived a century ago, all three were ‘challenger banks’ of their day. But now they have gone, no challengers have ridden in to replace them — unless we count Handelsbanken, the progressively old-fashioned Swedish retail bank that has a thriving franchise down the road at

Gulp. But what about England? That’s one of the questions to be asked in the aftermath of the latest Scottish spending and revenue figures, published today. The figures do not lie. Even when North Sea oil figures are taken into account – a geographic accident that, while welcome, remains an unearned accident – England (as a whole) subsidises other parts of the United Kingdom. This is a good thing. This is the way it is supposed to be. But – double gulp – shouldn’t Scotland be subsidising other parts of the UK too? Identifiable spending per capita in Scotland is a bit higher than in Wales, London and north-eastern England,

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-snp-threat-to-westminster/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Jenkins vs James Forsyth on the housebuilding myth” startat=1215] Listen [/audioplayer]There is no such thing as the English countryside. There is my countryside, your countryside and everyone else’s. Most people fight just for theirs. When David Cameron told the BBC’s Countryfile he would defend the countryside ‘as I would my own family’, many of its defenders wondered which one he meant. In the past five years a national asset that public opinion ranks with the royal family, Shakespeare and the NHS, has slid into trench warfare. Parish churches fill with protest groups. Websites seethe with fury. Planning lawyers have never been busier. The culprit has been planning