Tick
‘I want you to tick all the boxes’
The Spectator
Thursday
Aliens
‘It’s Zok here from the “human abduction team”. Do we have disabled access facilities?’
Burka
‘Men — they’re all the same.’
Unicorns
‘I make it 8.36.’
Smoking 7
‘Anti-smoking propaganda has really hardened.’
Multitask
‘And verily I say to you, go forth and multitask.’
Outside 2
‘I do wish you wouldn’t look at the outside world — you know it only upsets you.’
Tramps 4
‘Night, night. Sleep tight.’
Clowns 2
‘I’m bravely taking a make-up-free selfie.’
Pensioner
‘Dad, can I borrow the pension pot for the weekend?’
Dec
‘I’m in for assaulting Ant, but it’s a case of mistaken identity — I thought it was Dec.’
Osborne
‘We’ll start with a pub and a bingo hall.’
Jobless
‘Congratulations! It’s a jobless young person.’
Booty
Eurovision 2
‘There’s only one sanction Putin will respond to – we must throw Russia out of the Eurovision Song Contest immediately.’
Spectator letters: Bereaved parents against press regulation, and a defence of Tony Benn
Why we need a free press Sir: As bereaved parents and (to borrow from some signatories of last week’s advertisement) victims of public authority abuse we wholly oppose adoption of the politically endorsed Royal Charter of Press Regulation. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Christopher, our mentally ill son, had been denied his
The not-so-great escapes
Escapology This week marked the 70th anniversary of the Great Escape, when 76 Allied servicemen tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III prisoner of war camp in Poland. Fifty of them were executed on recapture. How successful were escape attempts? — At least 483 Allied servicemen escaped German camps. Only 12 reached home turf, including three
Portrait of the week | 27 March 2014
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved and who bought a family house’ and that this would be addressed in the Conservative manifesto. Two opinion polls after the Budget, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday and by YouGov for the Sunday
Putin’s aggression is the price of western weakness
One cannot legislate for a quiet world. When a former Princeton University college professor was elected president of the United States, he joked before his inauguration that ‘it would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs’. That was Woodrow Wilson, speaking in March 1913. Similarly, the Hawaiian-born
