Vw

I am currently in Brittany with the family, having made the 11-hour drive from London on Monday. It sounds like quite a lot of effort for a few days’ holiday, but my friend Wendy Steavenson invited us to stay and that so rarely happens when you’ve got four children that we felt we couldn’t turn her down. No doubt Wendy will regret this after 24 hours, as nearly all our previous hosts have. The journey wasn’t as much of an ordeal as it sounds since Caroline did the driving and I sat in the back and read Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. It’s a highly readable, 351-page polemical essay

Do any of us honestly have any idea how serious the Hillary Clinton email scandal was? I haven’t got a clue. Her actions could have been a neglectful oversight or a heinous criminal act. We don’t know. Clinton was an avid BlackBerry user and, on becoming secretary of state, claimed she didn’t know how to handle email on the desktop computer the government provided. When the National Security Agency was unable to find a secure way of sending classified information via her BlackBerry, Hillary simply continued using it, along with the old email address and server she had used while out of office. She never had an @state.gov email address:

Home The all-party Foreign Affairs Committee urged David Cameron, the Prime Minister, not to press ahead with a Commons vote on British air strikes against Islamic State positions in Syria. At its conference, Scottish Labour adopted a policy of opposition to Trident renewal, though Kezia Dugdale, its leader, remained in favour, while the Labour party in the United Kingdom as a whole favoured retaining the nuclear deterrent, though its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, opposes it. Britain was smothered in fog, except in Wales, where temperatures on 1 November reached a record 22˚C. A man had his ear bitten off in a pub in Aberystwyth on Halloween. Shaker Aamer, a Saudi citizen

Not that I was much of a boy racer, but the sexiest car I ever owned was a 1982 Volkswagen Scirocco with the lines of a paper dart and the cornering of a cheetah. I once drove it overnight from the City to Tuscany with a blind date who barely uttered a word, en route or afterwards. In an era when British factories could make nothing better than a laughable Allegro or a downmarket Escort, everyone coveted a German car — the top choice for twenty-somethings being the VW Golf convertible (Sciroccos were rarer) whose quality came as a revelation after years of broken fanbelts and burst radiators on unreliable

Home In a speech at the Shanghai stock exchange, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a feasibility study into the trading of Chinese and British shares in both countries. At least half of all British banknotes in circulation are held overseas or used in the black market, a Bank of England report suggested. The political impasse in Northern Ireland continued. Sir David Willcocks, the director of choirs, died, aged 95. Brian Sewell, the art critic, died aged 84. Jackie Collins, the author of titillating blockbusters, died aged 77. An outbreak of highly drug-resistant gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England, from Oldham to Scunthorpe. Lord Ashcroft, who